With James Comey’s blatantly partisan attempts to influence the election on behalf of the Republican nominee, one has to wonder: What the fuck is a Republican doing heading up the FBI? Let’s go back to 2013 and find out:
1. Republicans are more likely to confirm a Republican [...]
2. Comey very dramatically pushed back against Bush's wiretapping program
3. The Justice Department could use a little reining in [...]
Well, "one can't help but to be curious about the timing of the nomination," says Benjamin Brophy at The American Spectator. This is the hardest moment of the Obama presidency, and "the nomination of a Republican to such a prominent position could indeed be an effort to draw attention away from his troubles as well as reinforce the myth that he is a bipartisan champion."
Reason number 2 is debatable. He did push back against the biggest excesses of Alberto Gonzales’ warrantless spying program, but he is no civil libertarian champ. But it’s reasons 1 and 3 that are most relevant: by portraying himself as a “bipartisan champion”, President Barack Obama hoped to get brownie points from the GOP, as well as grease Comey’s confirmation. Neither ever happened.
As happened with virtually everything Obama tried doing, Republicans tried filibustering Comey’s nomination. They didn’t give a damn that he was a Bush Republican, or that Obama was giving the GOP a gift. Republicans have single-mindedly reacted to everything Obama has done by attempting to tarnish and destroy it. Giving them the FBI wasn’t going to change that.
And the public certainly wasn’t going to give Obama kudos, because 1) they have no idea who Comey is or his party affiliation, and 2) even if they did, Obama was always going to be judged on his accomplishments and failures, not his personnel decisions.
Yet Democrat after Democrat has succumbed to nominating Republicans to key national security posts, such as Obama’s extension of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, fresh off his stellar credentials as George F’n Bush’s Secretary of Defense, only to follow him up with another Republican, Chuck Hagel.
Obama also nominated Republicans to Secretary of the Air Force, Secretary of the Army, Chairman of the Fed, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Secretary of Veterans Affairs.
Bill Clinton nominated Republicans to head both the Fed and the Pentagon. If you really want to nominate Republicans to create the veneer of bipartisanship, nominate them to shit like “Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities,” or the “American Battle Monuments Commission.”
Instead, Democrats reinforce the idea that we need big Republican daddies in key positions of national security to “protect us” from weak Democratic policies.
Now normally, that just means undermining the message of Democratic competence and superior foreign policy stewardships. But now, we’ve given the keys of our nation’s chief investigative agency to a rank partisan who is actively using his perch to undermine American democracy. In fact, he’s being so blatant about it, that even Republicans are feeling squeamish about it.
So Dear President Hillary Clinton, being on the receiving end of Obama’s poor decision to nominate a Republican to such an important post … can you please put an end to this practice? Pretty please?