Two Dead Canaries in the Coal Mine
If you're inclined to downplay the termination of FBI Director James Comey, reasoning that he was a flawed leader, or that President Trump was legally entitled to fire him, or that many of the Democrats objecting to his termination previously criticized him, or that liberals are so freaked out by the president that their latest freakout cannot be taken seriously, a civil libertarian like me is unlikely to change your mind.
Long before Donald Trump decided to run for president, when Barack Obama had almost a full term left and Hillary Clinton seemed like his likeliest successor, I argued in “All the Infrastructure a Tyrant Would Need, Courtesy of Bush and Obama,” that “we're counting on having angels in office and making ourselves vulnerable to devils. Bush and Obama have built infrastructure any devil would lust after.”
I listed the numerous policies and precedents that warranted great concern.
And yet, I wrote, “The American people have no idea who the president will be in 2017. Nor do we know who'll sit on key Senate oversight committees, who will head the various national-security agencies, or whether the moral character of the people doing so, individually or in aggregate, will more closely resemble George Washington, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, John Yoo, or Vladimir Putin.”
Today, the president of the United States, Donald Trump,.” Elected officials failed to take action.
