RNCs Comey Attacks Are Right out of the Dictators Playbook

RNC’s Comey Attacks Are Right out of the Dictators’ Playbook
The former FBI director feared the backlash that would come if he didn’t reveal the Hillary probe. Well, he revealed it all right—and it still didn’t save him from the backlash.
Michael Tomasky
04.17.18 5:20 AM ET


When wtf moments happen at the pace they have in the age of Trump, it gets tough to sort out which outrages really matter.

When we do encounter a stand-out moment, we need to take notice. And I say we’re in one now. When future historians write the dystopian timeline of how we lost the republic under Trump, they’ll make special note of this current campaign by the Republican National Committee to smear James Comey.

If you haven’t gone to http://lyincomey.com, I suggest you do so. No; scratch that. You don’t need to. Don’t give them the traffic.

Just ponder what it means that the RNC has now gone into full Trump mode—everyone who deals with him gets dragged down to his level eventually, or drags themselves down voluntarily—in attacking a lifelong Republican and lifelong prosecutor who has spent his career doing what Republicans used to want G-men like Comey to do: put the bad guys in jail.

This is straight-up caudillismo—unquestioning subservience to the strong man, of the sort heretofore seen in places like Nicaragua under the Somozas or the Philippines under Marcos. It’s not that I wouldn’t expect the RNC to defend Trump. I would. It’s the way they’re doing it. The abject genuflection, even to the point of adopting his way of speaking (Lyin’ Comey). In its obvious effort to please the big man, stay on his good side, it has that whiff of totalitarian quaking about it, like the men who wrote the headlines at Pravda back in the 1930s, choosing each verb with the greatest care lest they run afoul of Uncle Joe.

There is no American precedent for this level of tremulous psycho-submission. There is precedent for knife-fighting, sure. That’s politics. When Richard Nixon was president and the Watergate screws were beginning to tighten, the RNC remained 100 percent loyal to Nixon.

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