by
Andrew Mitrovica
Andrew Mitrovica is an award-winning investigative reporter and journalism instructor.
Too many so-called "progressives" still don't get it.
There they were on Twitter and in instant coffee-quick columns - joined by their titular intellectual leader, David Frum (yes, him) - mimicking Dylan Thomas' verses to rage against the dying of the light while Donald "Nero" Trump plays the proverbial fiddle as the Constitution and the lingering shreds of the rule of law turn to ashes.
This latest spasm of cable-TV-stoked hysteria was triggered by Trump's jarring decision late Tuesday afternoon to sack the ripe-for-the-sacking FBI director, James Comey.
Donald Trump's loyal minions insisted that Comey had to go because the cocky G-man had suddenly and conveniently earned an F over his handling of Hillary Clinton's curious handling of her emails. On cue and in unison, "progressives" shouted "cover-up" and crowed that a constitutional "crisis" was afoot after Saint Comey got the boot.
You'll recall - since they apparently forgot - that days earlier many of these same "progressives" were sticking their rhetorical knives gleefully into the hapless and now unemployed FBI director after his snide remark that he was rendered "mildly nauseous" by the suggestion that his late-day election intervention had tilted the tight presidential race in Trump's favour.
If you're trying to keep score, among weathervane progressives Comey has gone from devil to saint to devil and back to saint over the past eight months. It's a dizziness-inducing career trajectory, isn't it?
Revisiting a willowy ghost
Still, in the wake of Comey's departure, progressives are also, once again, revisiting the willowy ghost of Richard Nixon and, drum roll, Watergate - the facile, all-purpose shorthand for a potentially combustible and politically fatal scandal.
The ultimate intent, I suspect, of resurrecting these familiar tropes in the context of Comey's abrupt dismissal is to suggest that Trump has committed an impeachable offence in order, ironically, to stave off impeachment.
This is a self-defeating delusion that has not only gripped progressives like a coiled snake but reveals how they remain blissfully wedded to their cockeyed faith in - for want of a better term - American "democracy".
Here's the usually restrained CNN legal analyst, Jeffery Toobin, channeling his fellow progressives' angst in a fit of anguished hyperbole. "It is a grotesque abuse of power by the president of the United States", Toobin told the ever mesmerised-looking, Wolf Blitzer. "This is the kind of thing that goes on in non-democracies."
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