RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) “Walking,” a lecture, 1851

In “The Sound of Music,” Julie Andrews sings, “The hills are alive with the sound of music.” Just as truthfully, but less poetically, one could say that from Mud River Swamp, comes the cacophony of an untutored symphony – “In all swamps, the hum of mosquitoes drowns this modern hum of society,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in his Journal. Like all swamps, the Mud River Swamp abounds with nature in its roughly twenty acres. The evensong of peepers is a harbinger of spring. Every so often, during late winter nights, come the howl of coyotes and the hoots of the Eastern Screech Owl. On spring mornings, we wake to the song of the Catbird. But it is during spring, summer and early fall days when the swamp comes audibly alive. (It is at night when beavers build, skunks hunt and predators prey, but they do so discreetly.) With daylight comes the voices of birds, insects and frogs, comprising an undisciplined, but intoxicating, orchestra. Flutes and Clarinets compete with Violins and Cellos, only to be interrupted by French Horns and the clash of Cymbals. Combined, they produce a sound that would make Beethoven wince; but, to one who is musically challenged, there is magic in the variety of sounds.

The word “swamp” is often spoken with a sneer. We think of the one in Washington that needs draining, or the demeaning term “swamp Yankees,” which refers to tight-fisted New Englanders. For others, the word conjures thoughts of slime, unpleasant smells, places difficult to penetrate and land that has no commercial value. But it was from swamps that life sprang. Water represents life’s genesis. From the Old Testament, we learn of the importance of the Tigris-Euphrates wetlands, and of the Fertile Crescent, which curves north and west from the Persian Gulf, through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, to the Nile Valley. It was from this part of the world that human history was first recorded.

Thoreau, an admirer of swamps, wrote: “I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village.” He added, “…hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.” In his most famous work, Walden, he acknowledges swamps’ critical role in nature mankind’s dependence: “Without the wetland, the world would fall apart. The wetland feeds and holds together the skeleton of the body of nature.”

“A swamp,” noted David Carroll in his 1999 book, Swampwalker’s Journal, “is a wetland forest of tall trees, living or dead, standing in still-water pools or in drifting floods of water, or rising from seasonally saturated earth.” All swamps, whether coastal or inland, have in common sufficient water and poor drainage. We see many dead trees in swamps – a boon for woodpeckers whose homes bedeck their trunks. They are fit for insects, like ants, that feed on the tissues that connect roots to the crown. It is the oxygen-depleted water of swamps that causes the roots of most trees to die. An exception is the Alder. In his book, The Secret Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben noted this phenomenon: “Their secret [Alders] is a system of air ducts inside their roots. These [ducts] transport oxygen to the tiniest tips, a bit like divers who are connected to the surface via a breathing tube.” Swamps are transition areas that provide natural and valuable ecological services, like flood control, water purification and carbon storage; they serve as wildlife habitats. Coastal swamps are spawning areas for fish. The largest swamp in the world is the Pantanal floodplain of the Amazon River, which lies mostly in Brazil, but also reaches into Bolivia and Paraguay. It encompasses 70,000 square miles, roughly the size of North Dakota. In the United States, the Atchafalaya Swamp, at the lower end of the Mississippi, is the U.S.’s largest swamp. Most famous of our swamps is the Everglades, a six thousand square mile system that comprises the slow-flowing “River of Grass,” which has its origin in the Kissimmee River near Orlando and empties into the Straits of Florida, which connect the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean.

My swamp, to inaccurately use the possessive, is the Mud River Swamp.[1] It consists of about twenty acres, located within Essex Meadows’ one hundred acres. The Mud River is no more than a trickle when it descends from the Preserve, a thousand-acre property of protected forest that abuts Essex Meadows. The twenty-foot drop over a hundred-feet is grandiloquently called a cascade. The stream then relaxes, as it gently meanders and widens out, among Willows and Alders, Skunk Cabbage and mosses that comprise the Mud River Swamp.

The Mud River heads east and then north where it intersects with the Fall River, about two miles away. The Fall River wends east another mile or so, until it enters the Connecticut at North Cove in Essex. At its headwaters, I watch the brook slip over the rocks in the cascade, knowing that its waters will mix with those of the Connecticut, a river that runs four-hundred miles from the Canadian border. I think of the beavers that build their dams, to give themselves a home, and I wonder at the fish that swim in it. I rejoice in the birds whose songs mingle with the sound of trickling waters and the deer that drink from them, and I am thankful for the otters and muskrats that play along their banks.

Water is where life began. Bill Nye, the science guy, says that in our search for alien life, “the presence of water is key.” In his Journal quoted above, David Carroll writes: “Although I know of the oceanic origins of life on earth, it is in swamps and marshes that I feel my keenest sense of life’s past, my sharpest intimations of life’s journey in time, and my own moment within the ongoing.” Swamps are ancient, something P.G. Wodehouse knew. He had Bertie Wooster muse in The Inimitable Jeeves, “…on the occasions when Aunt is calling to Aunt, like mastodons bellowing across medieval swamps…”

There is death in swamps. There has to be. Life is symbiotic. Many living creatures live off the flesh of another. And, unlike one or two of my grandchildren, others happily dine on vegetables, like grasses, plants and berries. The coyote, the largest predator that has been known to feed in our swamp, eats muskrats, otters, ducks, snakes, frogs, turtles and even a beaver. His victims, in turn, eat smaller creatures, like minnows, worms and insects. There is a symbiosis to nature. Even the smallest creature deserves our attention and concern, as Shakespeare reminded us in Measure for Measure:

“The poor beetle, which we tread upon,

In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great,

As when a giant dies.”

My swamp is a way-place for migrating birds, as well as home for dozens of avian species who build nests within its trees and bulrushes. On a recent bird walk, on a chilly day in May, we identified thirty species, either by sight or sound. And that did not include a Mallard Drake that I often watch protecting his nesting hen. We did not see the Red-tailed hawk I often see searching for mice or chipmunks, nor did we sight the owl we sometimes hear at night. We did, though, see or hear Red-winged Blackbirds, Yellow Warblers, Downey Woodpeckers and Cedar Waxwings, among others.

Swamps are like our cities. Thousands of species and millions of individuals live within their borders. Most of the sounds we hear are either mating calls or warnings to intruders. Violence and murder are common in swamps, perhaps more so than in cities. But greed, hatred, jealousy or revenge are never the motives. The death of one means sustenance to another. Thoreau saw that, and he inverted Christian orthodoxy, claiming that in the midst of death we are in life.

“Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.”

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) “Walking,” a lecture, 1851

In “The Sound of Music,” Julie Andrews sings, “The hills are alive with the sound of music.” Just as truthfully, but less poetically, one could say that from Mud River Swamp, comes the cacophony of an untutored symphony – “In all swamps, the hum of mosquitoes drowns this modern hum of society,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in his Journal. Like all swamps, the Mud River Swamp abounds with nature in its roughly twenty acres. The evensong of peepers is a harbinger of spring. Every so often, during late winter nights, come the howl of coyotes and the hoots of the Eastern Screech Owl. On spring mornings, we wake to the song of the Catbird. But it is during spring, summer and early fall days when the swamp comes audibly alive. (It is at night when beavers build, skunks hunt and predators prey, but they do so discreetly.) With daylight comes the voices of birds, insects and frogs, comprising an undisciplined, but intoxicating, orchestra. Flutes and Clarinets compete with Violins and Cellos, only to be interrupted by French Horns and the clash of Cymbals. Combined, they produce a sound that would make Beethoven wince; but, to one who is musically challenged, there is magic in the variety of sounds.

The word “swamp” is often spoken with a sneer. We think of the one in Washington that needs draining, or the demeaning term “swamp Yankees,” which refers to tight-fisted New Englanders. For others, the word conjures thoughts of slime, unpleasant smells, places difficult to penetrate and land that has no commercial value. But it was from swamps that life sprang. Water represents life’s genesis. From the Old Testament, we learn of the importance of the Tigris-Euphrates wetlands, and of the Fertile Crescent, which curves north and west from the Persian Gulf, through Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, to the Nile Valley. It was from this part of the world that human history was first recorded.

Thoreau, an admirer of swamps, wrote: “I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village.” He added, “…hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.” In his most famous work, Walden, he acknowledges swamps’ critical role in nature mankind’s dependence: “Without the wetland, the world would fall apart. The wetland feeds and holds together the skeleton of the body of nature.”

“A swamp,” noted David Carroll in his 1999 book, Swampwalker’s Journal, “is a wetland forest of tall trees, living or dead, standing in still-water pools or in drifting floods of water, or rising from seasonally saturated earth.” All swamps, whether coastal or inland, have in common sufficient water and poor drainage. We see many dead trees in swamps – a boon for woodpeckers whose homes bedeck their trunks. They are fit for insects, like ants, that feed on the tissues that connect roots to the crown. It is the oxygen-depleted water of swamps that causes the roots of most trees to die. An exception is the Alder. In his book, The Secret Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben noted this phenomenon: “Their secret [Alders] is a system of air ducts inside their roots. These [ducts] transport oxygen to the tiniest tips, a bit like divers who are connected to the surface via a breathing tube.” Swamps are transition areas that provide natural and valuable ecological services, like flood control, water purification and carbon storage; they serve as wildlife habitats. Coastal swamps are spawning areas for fish. The largest swamp in the world is the Pantanal floodplain of the Amazon River, which lies mostly in Brazil, but also reaches into Bolivia and Paraguay. It encompasses 70,000 square miles, roughly the size of North Dakota. In the United States, the Atchafalaya Swamp, at the lower end of the Mississippi, is the U.S.’s largest swamp. Most famous of our swamps is the Everglades, a six thousand square mile system that comprises the slow-flowing “River of Grass,” which has its origin in the Kissimmee River near Orlando and empties into the Straits of Florida, which connect the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic Ocean.

Here is a great quote from Daryl McCann Violent Co-Existence in the Middle East ****

Read the whole superb column which ends with the following:

“When civilised people sit down to make deals with professional killers, as occurred at the time of the Oslo Accords, there is always the danger of well-intentioned peacemakers losing their sense of right and wrong. Treating Yasser Arafat’s henchmen as terrorists-cum-statesmen has not brought concord but—if we are honest about the past quarter-century—quite the opposite. Enabling the PLO to build a “terrorist kleptocracy” in the West Bank—and maybe we should start calling it Judea and Samaria—has done nobody any favours, apart from the PLO’s leading cadres. The Oslo Accords are well past their use-by date. It is time for international diplomats, mediators and intermediaries to do a lot more “thinking out of the box”.”

MANILA—Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law in the southern island of Mindanao following fighting between the army and an Islamic State-linked militant group.

The declaration, in effect for 60 days, follows a battle between government troops and militants from the armed rebel Maute group, which took place in a small southern city on Tuesday.

Fighters from the group clashed with the country’s police and army after gunmen seized several buildings in Marawi, including the city jail and a hospital, subsequently setting them on fire and parading the black Islamic State flag through the city streets.

Martial law marks an escalation in a longstanding battle between authorities in the Philippines and several heavily armed Islamist groups in the southern provinces, whose jungle strongholds and deep community links in predominantly Muslim areas have made them hard to defeat despite years of efforts.

In a separate incident in Marawi on Tuesday, police and army units exchanged fire with gunmen while seeking to serve an arrest warrant on Isnilon Hapilon, a militant seen as a senior leader of the Abu Sayyaf Group, another Islamist organization that has declared allegiance to Islamic State.

Presidential spokesman Ernesto Abella said during a news briefing in Moscow, where Mr. Duterte is in the middle of a four-day official visit, that the martial law was possible “on the grounds of existence of rebellion because of what is happening in Mindanao.” He didn’t give details about what conditions martial law would include.

The declaration is likely to be controversial in the Philippines, where martial law is remembered by many for its adoption by former dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who was ousted by popular revolt in 1986 after a 21-year rule. Mr. Duterte floated the idea of martial law several times in the past, mostly in the context of justifying additional powers for police to continue a bloody antinarcotics campaign. CONTINUE AT SITE

In April, a defiant group of self-identified “apostates” convened in downtown Portland to revel in the joys of brew culture, bacon burgers, and atheism. Nine ex-Muslims from several states in the region gathered for a local meeting of the Ex-Muslims of North America.

EXMNA is a nonprofit that provides support to individuals who have left Islam. Some of its members have faced disownership and death threats from family members for renouncing their religion.

Chapter gatherings across the United States and Canada are closed-group meetings for safety reasons. Individuals who wish to join the organization go through a screening process to authenticate their identities, explained Sarah Haider, who co-founded EXMNA in 2013. “Unfortunately, it is not paranoia that requires us to be careful,” Haider said. “In the Muslim world, we are openly persecuted and regularly meet grisly ends. In the Western world we are safer, but even here open meetings can be a big risk.”

In traditional interpretations of Islam, apostasy — the act of leaving one’s religion — is punishable by death or imprisonment. Across the globe, apostasy from Islam remains a capital offense in 13 Muslim-majority countries.

Haider, who immigrated from Pakistan as a child, said that the unique experiences of ex-Muslims often leave them beyond the reach of typical secular or atheist support groups. “We have specific needs in terms of security and privacy,” Haider said. “Some ex-Muslims have more to fear from their local Muslim communities and families than others, so EXMNA provides a space for those who do not feel safe attending any public event.”

Sarah Haider is scheduled to speak at Portland State University on May 26. “Yazid” (not his real name), a PSU alumnus, organized the local chapter meeting. He explained that a pub setting was intentional. “It’s actually symbolic,” he said. “A bar represents all the things that were haram [forbidden] to us when we were Muslim.”

The vast majority of Muslims view the consumption of alcohol or pork as deeply haram. In Saudi Arabia, where Yazid is from, drinking or producing alcohol is punishable with fines, lashings, and imprisonment.

Underneath the laughter and lighthearted chatter of the evening laid a somber reality: Each person, though a freethinker, had a religious identity or family to return to at the end of the night.

“Shadi” is a 39-year-old immigrant from Egypt. He became an atheist about a year ago, but his wife only recently found out. “She begs me to pretend to pray in front of the children,” he said with a mournful look.

This was the first time he had seen so many ex-Muslims together, as it was for nearly everyone at the event.

“Amina” is a 27-year-old graduate student from East Africa. She held on to her boyfriend’s arm while they ate a slice of banana cream pie. “I haven’t told my family about him yet,” she said with an uneasy smile. Amina’s green-eyed American boyfriend spoke with a soft southern drawl. He stands in stark contrast to the type of man her family expects her to marry, she lamented.

Across all schools of jurisprudence in both Shiite and Sunni Islam, marriage between a Muslim woman and non-Muslim male is prohibited. Muslim men are permitted to marry non-Muslim women, but their children are traditionally assigned their father’s faith.

Main Characters-

1.A woman – let’s call her Carola, who lost a national election who colludes with the media and an octogenarian Hungarian gray eminence to bring down the legally elected President. Her henchman is her husband with whom she ran a corrupt foundation that enriched them and cemented relations with the world’s tyrants in exchange for big bucks.

2. Editors of two major print publications, and a senior correspondent at a television news channel who agree to peddle half truths and fake news to stoke up scandals which hint of corruption, obstruction of justice, and leaking of “classified information” to foreign antagonists. They rig polling to suggest that even his own party is abandoning the besieged President.

3.A mole in the White House who leaks information on meetings to the above through a friend in the previous administration.

4. Two harridans in Congress from California who begin the murmurings of “impeachment” and the 25th Amendment to remove the president.

5. A young DNC staffer who is the source of the WikiLeaks exposure of the woman WikiLeaks exposure of Carola’s emails. He is tragically killed by being shot in the back. Nothing is stolen, but the local police take his laptop, and declare this a robbery. The media ignore this story.

6.A special prosecutor is chosen-a poker face former official. Will he conduct and impartial investigation?

End of Season 1 of House of Curs

Political violence by leftists is on the rise – not only in the United States, but in Iceland as well, it appears. Robert Spencer, who has devoted his life to combating the global jihad, was poisoned by a political antagonist, it appears. Writing in Front Page Magazine, he reports on his brush with assassination:

Last Thursday, I gave a lecture on the jihad threat at the Grand Hotel in Reykjavik, Iceland. Shortly thereafter, a young Icelandic Leftist registered his disapproval of what I said by poisoning me.

It happened after the event, when my security chief, the organizers of the event, and Jihad Watch writer Christine Williams, who had also been invited to speak, went with me to a local restaurant to celebrate the success of the evening.

At this crowded Reykjavik establishment, I was quickly recognized. A young Icelander called me by name, shook my hand, and said he was a big fan. Shortly after that, another citizen of that famously genteel and courteous land also called me by name, shook my hand, and said “[F—] you.”

We took that marvelous Icelandic greeting as a cue to leave. But the damage had already been done. About fifteen minutes later, when I got back in my hotel room, I began to feel numbness in my face, hands, and feet. I began trembling and vomiting. My heart was racing dangerously. I spent the night in a Reykjavik hospital.

What had happened quickly became clear, and was soon confirmed by a hospital test: one of these local Icelanders who had approached me (probably the one who said he was a big fan, as he was much closer to me than the “[F—] you” guy) had dropped drugs into my drink. I wasn’t and am not on any other medication, and so there wasn’t any other explanation of how these things had gotten into my bloodstream.

For several days thereafter I was ill, but I did get to Reykjavik’s police station and gave them a bigger case than they have seen in good awhile. The police official with whom I spoke took immediate steps to identify and locate the principal suspects and obtain the restaurant’s surveillance video.

Iceland is a small country. Everyone knows everyone else. And so as it happened, I was quickly able to discover the identity, phone number, and Facebook page of the primary suspect, the young man who claimed he was a “big fan.” I don’t intend to call him. Icelandic police will be contacting him soon enough, if they haven’t done so already.

You can expect our American mainstream media to completely ignore this horrifying tale of an attempted political assassination.

In “Bonfire of the Vanities,” Tom Wolfe satirized the tendency of prosecutors and the media to label every black child victimized by crime an honor student He must be smiling at the legacy that tendency has spawned which can be seen in the title of this piece. It is a portion of a NYT headline for an article about an ex-con who recently graduated and is pictured smiling and shaking hands with another graduate, both in the full regalia of cap and gown. (Walking the Long Road From Isolated in Prison to Magna Cum Laude, Katharine Q Seelye, NYT 5/14/17). Kyle Gathers, now 31, has spent the better part of ten years in prison, two in isolation, for drug-dealing and shootings. Since being released, he enrolled in a program at the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology, specializing in heating, ventilation and air-conditioning technology; it is this program to which the title refers.

In googling such programs, I discovered that they vary from two to four semesters for which students earn a certificate or technical certificate. It is laudable that Mr. Gathers seems to have turned his life around and is now qualified to get a bona fide job and become a law-abiding member of society. It is ludicrous to apply the honorific of magna cum laude to this endeavor. It is universally accepted that students must have a GPA between 3.8 – 3.9 and be in the top 3- 5% of their graduating class in order to qualify for this honor. Until recently, this was reserved for students who completed a B.A. , B.S. or equivalent degree. Now it is used for students who complete two semesters of a technical course and perhaps soon it will apply to those who get certified as cosmeticians, hairdressers, manicurists and health care aides.

Even though achieving members of society have been told to check their privilege, we don’t call every college graduate “doctor” just as we don’t use the terms “Officer, senator, justice or maestro” indiscriminately. By buying in to the charade that students who complete a non-academic program are deserving of the ceremonial trappings of academe, we devalue the achievement of those who have earned those merit badges the hard way – appropriately. The tradition of wearing caps and gowns dates back to 12th century early European universities in which clerics, who were the scholars of that time, wore their robes for warmth in unheated buildings. The caps, known as mortarboards, reputedly derive from the birettas worn by scholarly clerics to signify their intelligence and superior accomplishment. In succeeding centuries, this garb became popular for other educated people down into the 21rst century But since both the clothing and the honorifics are symbols of academic scholarship, they don’t belong in completion ceremonies for technical certification. The sombrero is a Spanish hat adapted in the 15th century from those worn by Mongolian horsemen for several previous centuries. Yet wearing one on Halloween has been deemed an act of cultural appropriation by today’s snowflakes and their academic leadership. Their voices have not been raised to protest the use of clothing and terminology traditionally reserved for high scholarship in ceremonies for technical certification. This is not only cultural appropriation – it is more specifically fraudulent misrepresentation.

Last night after binging on”Fauda” a terrific Israeli series on terrorism and counter-terrorism, I reluctantly turned on the news….CNN to be exact, and Anderson Cooper to be more exact. The news, as everyone not settled down in Mars knows by now is that the Washington Post and the New York Times issued reports that President Trump gave “highly classified” information to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak in the Oval Office the day after firing Federal Bureau of Investigation Director James Comey. General McMaster, the National Security adviser said” I was in the room, it did not happen.”

General McMaster’s denial was streamed in the news feed under the blathering of the CNN panel which agreed that McMaster’s denial proved that the story was true. Huh??? They then went on to speculate that Trump’s conversation with the Russians endangered lives. What a leap.

When the media dust-up settles we will know the truth, but the way CNN reports it, I prefer the fiction in Fauda to the fiction on CNN which passes as journalism. rsk

This occurred three years after World War Two ended. When it was over one in every three Jews in the world were killed. Today, Israel, with a population of 8,304,088 (.11% pof the planet’s population) is a thriving democracy with advanced and state of the arts scientific and medical institution which makes outsize contributions to the health, safety and welfare of the entire world. Happy Birthday to Israel- a miracle nation.rsk

The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel

ACCORDINGLY WE, MEMBERS OF THE PEOPLE’S COUNCIL, REPRESENTATIVES OF THE JEWISH COMMUNITY OF ERETZ-ISRAEL AND OF THE ZIONIST MOVEMENT, ARE HERE ASSEMBLED ON THE DAY OF THE TERMINATION OF THE BRITISH MANDATE OVER ERETZ-ISRAEL AND, BY VIRTUE OF OUR NATURAL AND HISTORIC RIGHT AND ON THE STRENGTH OF THE RESOLUTION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY, HEREBY DECLARE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A JEWISH STATE IN ERETZ-ISRAEL, TO BE KNOWN AS THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

WE DECLARE that, with effect from the moment of the termination of the Mandate being tonight, the eve of Sabbath, the 6th Iyar, 5708 (15th May, 1948), until the establishment of the elected, regular authorities of the State in accordance with the Constitution which shall be adopted by the Elected Constituent Assembly not later than the 1st October 1948, the People’s Council shall act as a Provisional Council of State, and its executive organ, the People’s Administration, shall be the Provisional Government of the Jewish State, to be called “Israel”.

Thomas Paine, a founding father of our nation ( 1737-1809) famously wrote: ” These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

The leftist media and their acolytes are now shrieking about President (not theirs) Donald Trump and his firing of James Comey. More troubling is the number of “summer and sunshine” Republicans who are wringing their hands and speaking in hushed tones of impeachment. I don’t deride their patriotism but marvel at their buckling knees.

Donald Trump makes it easy for the them. He twitters and sputters, and he is often crude with a tin ear for public relations, but he has broken no law….and James Comey deserved to be fired.

Tom Bailey writes in Spiked online http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/comey-hero-of-the-resistance-please/19810#.WRbggcYpCUk

Before the firing, however, Democrats were condemning Comey, and even calling for his head. A few days before the presidential election, Comey wrote a letter to Congress saying the FBI would reopen its investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. Back then, Schumer said he’d lost confidence in Comey. Democratic lawmakers were outraged by his actions. Democrat representative Steve Cohen even called for him to resign.

Comey’s decision to reopen the Clinton investigation gave him top billing on the Democrat establishment’s list of extenuating circumstances that cost it the election. He was the man who cost Clinton her crown. Clinton herself partly blamed him for her loss.

He was a Trumpist in a federal windbreaker jacket, people suggested. Some even said the FBI itself was politically compromised and out to get the Clintons. As a writer for the liberal magazine Mother Jones argued, ‘The FBI is full of middle-aged white guys’ with an anti-Clinton bent, due to their listening to ‘lots of Rush Limbaugh’.

Now, post-firing, as if he were entering the federal witness protection programme, Comey is viewed entirely differently; he’s becoming an almost legendary figure. He’s no longer a Trump stooge – he’s a fallen member of the #Resistance. He’s been reimagined as the man who was about to bring down Trump.”