It’s Friday, April 20th, 2018…but before we begin, in the best tradition of the uncounted two-faced, flip-flopping, lying Liberals who preceded him, James Comey was for Andrew McCabe…

…before he was against him:

“The McCabe case illustrates what an organization committed to the truth looks like. I ordered that investigation. The inspector general found that he lied, and there are severe consequences in the Justice Department for lying as there should be throughout the government.”

This coming from a creature of the swamp who wouldn’t know the truth if it came up and bit him in his brains.  Contrary to Comey’s contention, seems to us the only consequence for lying while employed by the the DOJ, FBI or any other federal bureaucracy is a lucrative book deal and an extended tour on the talk-show circuit.

Meanwhile, the legacy of James Comey and those he slavishly served lives on:

Two Florida deputies killed in apparent ambush at restaurant

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, since we’re on the subject of the biggest disgrace to the FBI since John Connolly, Robert Hanssen, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page and Andrew McCabe, writing at the WSJ, Holman Jenkins details…

The Comey Coverup

Vladimir Putin knows more about the 2016 outcome than the American people do.

“In his memoir, James Comey cites a “development still unknown to the American public to this day.” This mysterious development, he says, was central to his decision to intervene publicly in the Hillary Clinton email case.

Now this is strange because the big mystery was apparently disclosed in a flurry of reporting by the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN a year ago. His insistence in his book that the secret is likely to remain classified for decades also seems a bit hilarious when so much of the story was spontaneously declassified by anonymous leakers last spring, likely including Mr. Comey or people working for him.

…We need answers before we’ll have an honest account of the 2016 election. Which U.S. agency provided the intelligence to the FBI? Was Mr. Comey advised it might be fake? Or did the FBI, whose province is domestic investigation, only discover it was likely fake after questioning the U.S. citizens named in the intercept? Is Mr. Comey sure U.S. intelligence officials were playing straight with him? With whom did he discuss his idea to intervene? Did they encourage him to do so?

That Mr. Comey helped elect Mr. Trump makes it especially ironic that his early publicity tour has been so much devoted to bad-mouthing Mr. Trump’s character. Mr. Trump’s flaws are old news—he’s been bad-mouthed for decades by writers (far) more knowledgeable and insightful than Mr. Comey. Millions of voters preferred him to the establishment alternatives anyway. This is the real news that continues to stick in the craw of Mr. Comey and many others.

Which brings us to a final mystery: The press, after a few days of furious reporting in 2017, dropped the story. It almost reminds one of the impromptu urge, after the JFK assassination, to shift the discussion to “right wing” opposition in Dallas from Oswald’s Soviet connections. Except then World War III was in the offing and the Russians had no hand in the assassination, whereas today’s dynamic is nearly the opposite. The media dwells obsessively on low-budget, trivial Russian pranks in our election while ignoring the implications of Mr. Comey’s actions. The story line the press emphasizes justifies the existence and magnifies the importance of the U.S. intelligence community. The story line it ignores suggests that community is in need of a housecleaning.

Vladimir Putin is right about one thing: Washington has gone insane. Being right, by the way, is perfectly consistent with Mr. Putin having supplied the fodder. Still, it’s bracing to consider that Mr. Putin knows the full story and the American public doesn’t. The agencies that we rely on to fight our intelligence wars either fell for or knowingly exploited fake Russian info. They clumsily meddled in the election and produced the opposite of their intended result. And much of what has followed, including Mr. Comey’s book, has the distinct odor of a coverup.“

Which, as we’ve noted innumerable times before, in keeping with the odor naturally emanating from the swamp in which he swam, Comey and anything connected with him…

In a related item, NRO‘s Andy McCarthy records…

“In yesterday’s column, I contended that it was outrageous for federal district judge Kimba Wood to direct that talk-radio and Fox News host Sean Hannity be publicly identified as Michael Cohen’s third client. Cohen, whose law practice is, shall we say, less than thriving, is under criminal investigation by the FBI and federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York (SDNY). He claims only three clients. The other two, President Trump and GOP fundraiser Elliott Broidy, acknowledge retaining Cohen. Hannity denies ever having had a formal attorney-client relationship with him.

The court’s order that Hannity’s name be disclosed in open court violated longstanding, judicially endorsed standards against identifying uncharged persons in legal proceedings attendant to criminal investigations.

…Perhaps you think this is poetic justice for Hannity, who is not above using flimsy evidence to lambaste political opponents and Trump critics. But as a very wise federal judge once admonished me, courts “don’t do poetic justice, they do prosaic justice” — the routine, workaday adherence to the principles and standards on which the rule of law depends.

Under that kind of justice, courts protect uncharged people from being identified in public proceedings in connection with criminal investigations. The failure of the court and the government lawyers to enforce that standard just adds fuel to the fiery contention that, where President Trump is involved, investigations are driven by politics, not law enforcement.“

Nor, for that matter, the rule of law.

As Jim Freeman notes at Best of the Web:

“The press corps gave a collective cheer this week when federal Judge Kimba Wood forced the public disclosure that Sean Hannity is a client of Michael Cohen, or at least considered to be a client by Mr. Cohen’s attorneys. When they’re done celebrating, perhaps a few media folk will reflect on how they would feel about such treatment for anyone not named Hannity.

…A senior attorney at a large financial institution observes that if the Hannity treatment were being applied to someone else, national and state bar associations “would be raising hell.”

Perhaps a vigorous free press ought to be doing the same.“

Unfortunately for America, being the mere mouthpieces of the DNC, the MSM is neither.

Here’s the juice: the glee which greeted Kimba Wood’s injudicious (if not unconstitutional) ruling demonstrates The Left in general, and its MSM representatives in particular, are operating under a sinister variation of Martin Niemöller’s admonition:

First they came for the Conservatives, and I did not speak out – because I wasn’t a Conservative…besides, Conservatives are greedy, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, planet-destroying bastages, and I hate them.

We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again: without any doubt or hesitation, were Progressives able to place Conservatives in “reeducation” camps today, without fear of reprisal or resistance, we’d all be slowly dying under the slogan…

And we for one are not willing to go gentle into THAT good night; rather we will rage against the dying of the light…of sanity and reasoned sight!

Since we’re on the twisted mental gymnastics which constitutes Liberal thinking, also courtesy of NRO, Kyle Smith observes how…

“We can all easily imagine circumstances in which a manager of a coffee shop or restaurant might properly call the police to ask them to remove loiterers. These are places of business. There’s nothing wrong in principle with calling the cops on non-customers who are taking up space. And there’s nothing wrong with police asking people to leave private property where they aren’t welcome, given that trespassing is a crime. When such people refuse, that’s unfortunate, but what can the police do but arrest them?

On the other hand, calling the police on two men in a Starbucks because they’re black would be very, very wrong, even outrageous. At a glance, what happened at that Philadelphia coffee shop last Thursday looks like racism. But there’s little context. Does the manager also routinely call the police on white people who loiter in the shop? If a white manager called the police on two white guys hanging around a coffee shop, it wouldn’t make the news, much less become a national obsession. Was the manager new on the job and unfamiliar with the generally lax policy at Starbucks when it comes to allowing nonpaying customers to hang out? Did the manager have some reason we don’t know about for disliking the two men?

…We know racism exists, it inflames our sense of injustice, and so we’re eager to punish it. But it can be frustratingly difficult to prove (other than only Whites can be guilty of it) that a given incident is an example of it. Firing any employee who demonstrates race bias would seem to be a fair punishment and would also serve as a warning to other staffers that racism won’t be tolerated. But at this point we don’t even know whether that Starbucks manager was fired. (“We can confirm that she is no longer at that store” is all the company had to say about the unidentified worker.) On the other hand, if Starbucks has found reason to believe that the employee isn’t prejudiced, firing her would appear to be unwarranted. But how would someone demonstrate that anyway? It’s hard to see into someone’s heart.

A glance at social media reveals little interest in thinking through such subtleties. The incident is making people unhinged. When the “racism” circuits in our brain get activated, we stop thinking clearly. We go out looking for someone to chastise, and one low-level staffer isn’t enough. We want a larger target suited to the strength of the frenzy. It affects our judgment the way being drunk does. This is your brain. This is your brain on race. At “a protest outside a Starbucks at the typically tranquil corner of 18th and Spruce Streets,” reported the Philadelphia Inquirer, “a woman poured a cup of (non-Starbucks) coffee out onto the sidewalk.”

Only via frazzled, race-drunk thinking can a (possibly) racist act on the part of one out of 238,000 Starbucks employees somehow become the fault of the whole company. Starbucks as a corporation is comparable to a midsize city: larger than Richmond, Va. Would you boycott Richmond because one person there had committed murder, much less because one person there was shown to be a racist? Unless it turns out that Starbucks’s training materials include the admonition, “Call the cops on any black people in your store who don’t buy anything,” I doubt the company as a whole is to blame…”

We’re only slightly less a fan of Starbucks than we are of Sean Hannity; yet our strong aversion to both Starbucks’ coffee and its politics still would never lead us to conclude they as a corporation were racist.  In fact, quite the opposite.

Then again, we’re a Conservative, thus by definition accustomed to reasoned thinking born of common sense; ergo, not a knee-jerk, over-emotional Progressive prone to prolonged flights of irrational fancy and transference.

Which brings us to The Lighter Side:

Finally, we’ll call it a week with this report from Todd Starnes reporting the latest manifestation of Progressive Derangement Syndrome:

It’s time to make a shocking confession about Chick-fil-A

In recent days, The New Yorker has made some downright scurrilous accusations about Chick-fil-A, the unofficial chicken of our Lord. The magazine warned that the beloved fast food restaurant was waging a “guerrilla insurgency” upon Gotham’s citizenry – plotting to evangelize the city by luring the masses with plump, juicy chicken breasts tucked between hot, buttered buns.

“The brand’s arrival here feels like an infiltration, in no small part because of its pervasive Christian traditionalism,” lamented Dan Piepenbring in an essay titled “Chick-fil-A’s Creepy Infiltration of New York City.” Piepenbring seemed terribly disturbed by the news that a fourth outpost of the family-owned chain had recently opened – as if the Chick-fil-A Cows were about to stampede through the East Village.

And like any progressive journalist, he offered up the obligatory Chick-fil-A is “anti-gay” smear. Untrue, of course, but whatever. “The restaurant’s corporate purpose still begins with the words ‘to glorify God,’ and that proselytism thrums below the surface of the Fulton Street restaurant, which has the ersatz homespun ambiance of a megachurch,” he wrote.

And he was especially wary of the famed Chick-fil-A Cows. “If the restaurant is a megachurch, the Cows are its ultimate evangelists,” Piepenbring declared.

Well, praise the Lord and drink some sweet tea! “Its politics, its décor, and its commercial-evangelical messaging are infected with this suburban piety,” he wrote.

Well, America – the time has come for you to know the truth. The New Yorker caught us red-handed. The jig is up.

The truth is months ago a covert team of specially trained Southern Christians crossed the Mason-Dixon Line along with a herd of grammatically-challenged bovines. Our mission was to convert the Yankee heathens with gracious Southern hospitality and delicious chicken sandwiches.

And our plan would’ve worked had it not been for those meddling members of the Mainstream Media. After about a week of eating fried chicken and drinking sweet tea, New Yorkers had become so much more pleasant and docile. Brooklynites had even started waving at tourists with all five fingers instead of one. Now, that is the power of the Gospel Bird.

So let not your heart be troubled, America – because glory, glory hallelujah – the War of Poultry Aggression rages on.

Only in the minds of the politically-challenged!

Magoo