Are James Comey's sudden babblings about how pop-tart singer Taylor Swift was his guide to life a sign that he knows he's legally up to his neck in alligators? Or is he just a weirdo? Seems both arguments have some truth. ack
In case you haven't seen it, he wrote this sort of thing on his Substack, via GatewayPundit:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to my Substack. Last week’s cold turns out to have been COVID—quite a flashback. Donald Trump is still President and still humiliating America on a national stage, standing next to Vladimir Putin. It’s like a dream—a bad dream you can’t wake up from. But I don’t want to talk about that bad dream this week. I want to talk about a truly inspirational public figure named Taylor Swift.
Had enough? It gets worse:
Of course, I watched her podcast interview with the Kelsey Brothers. Of course, I watched the whole thing, although on YouTube, Patrice and I got kicked off for the last 15 minutes and finished it on her phone. But I watched it. You see, Taylor Swift and I go way back. I went to my first concert of hers 15 years ago. I’ve been to a second, and I have helped financially support the attendance of a lot of family members at others. I’m in a family Swiftie group chat. I know all her music, and I listen to it on my headphones when I cut the grass. So yes, I have a favorite of hers—although honestly, for me, it’s a tie between All Too Well, 10 Minute Version and Exile featuring Bon Iver.
Taylor Swift has grown up with my family and provided us a soundtrack, really, as we’ve grown ourselves and learned and adapted and dealt with adversity and celebration. She had songs for all of it. I suspect that’s something that millions of Americans have also experienced in their families. I think that’s because Taylor Swift produces great art, but also because she models something.
At every stage of her career, she’s shown a certain way of being that resonated with my kids and also felt right to me as a parent. She’s still doing that as a grown-up. Like a lot of you, I struggle with how to stand up to bullies without letting their meanness infect me and change me. You may have seen that the governor of California has been generating a lot of attention lately by posting on social media in a satirical way where he mocks Donald Trump and his all-caps megalomania and his absurdity. I find it very funny—hilarious even sometimes. But I’ve got to be honest, it also leaves me with a strange feeling at times, because I don’t want us to become like Trump and his followers. There are far more decent, honest, kind people in America than there are mean jerks.
Now, don’t get me wrong—we have our jerks, millions of them, you may have noticed. In particular, there’s a stunning coarseness and ugliness in the Republican Party today. It’s upsetting, but it’s also a minority of America. On the whole, we aren’t like that, and we don’t like that. I think that’s a big part of the reason so few Americans support Donald Trump when they have to see him up close, and why Republicans are so worried about what’s coming for them next year.
And to be clear, I am not an advocate for weakness. Of course, we need to stand up to jerks and defend what matters. But I think we have to try to do that without becoming like them, which is what makes me think about Taylor Swift. She’s made clear that she sees Donald Trump for what he is. And last year, she urged Americans not to make the serious mistake of electing him. Of course, we’re now living with the consequences of that mistake.
But while our elderly, makeup-covered President is posting about whether Taylor Swift is still hot and declaring that he can’t stand her, what’s she doing? Living her best life, producing great music, and—as she urged all of us to do during the podcast—not giving the jerks power over her mind.
This guy is someone's dad? I have yet to hear of another dad as buffoonish and immature as this one. Dads can be slobs, dads can be cranky, dads can be car-crazy, dads can leave the toilet seat up form a man-cave and drink beer. But they sure as heck don't babble like teenybopper Barbie dolls about a lightweight pop sensation who likes to sing about her bad choices in men. Just he does. That must have been some household the Comey kids grew up in.
But never mind the gross household. This was America's premier lawman, the director of the FBI. successor to J. Edgar Hoover and the inheritor of a long legacy of successes. This guy ran an agency of 35,000 highly trained agents, the elite of the elite of law enforcement, with offices around the globe, wieldin immense power.
Colin Powell once said he was a fan of ABBA, so bad taste in music among the swamp set is not uncommon. But Powell never gushed the way Comey does. Powell seemed to understand that the Swedish pop group made music he liked and beyond that, there was no need to comment.
Comey, though, is a different story. This jackass shouldn't have been near law enforcement, any law enforcement, at any time in his disgraceful career.
Yet here he is, at the age of 64, telling us how important Taylor Swift is to his philosophy of life as if we'd really like to know that.
Maybe he cynically thinks a certain segment of the public would like to know that -- the kind of low-information women who might turn up on his jury now that he's likely to be held to account for his criminal acts against President Trump during his first administration. Thomas Lifson, our founder at AT, made that observation.
But there are some nuances here.
Comey has indeed been obsessed with the pop princess for years and years. In 2018, he babbled to an adoring press at NPR about his love for the pop princess and her canned 'music' as well as other pop-culture dreck:
Instead, he loves the emotional TV drama, “This Is Us,” which he calls his “favorite program,” and said he cries after nearly every episode “like a baby.” “It’s just so good,” he said.
Comey said he also listens to Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar, whom his kids like. He also favors Beyonce, recounting to the NewsHour an FBI briefing he once received on a counterintelligence case called “Sandcastles.”
“They always have weird code names,” he said. “It was ‘Sandcastles,’ and so I said ‘Beyonce!’ And I was the only one in the room who had any idea what I was talking about. People were like ‘What?’ I said, ‘We built sandcastles’… Honest to God, I sung like that.”
Now there's a man's man. Ready to vomit?
He always was a weirdo, completely out of touch with reality.
In 2018, Politico's senior media writer, Jack Schafer, had this to say about Comey:
Having used both his book, A Higher Loyalty, and his interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos to portray himself as the defender of truth, the paragon of integrity, the embodiment of ethical values and principles and as someone guided by a steady moral compass, former FBI Director James Comey has drenched the public discourse with the stink of sanctimony. Not to mention his heavy yammering about leadership, the likely topic he’ll be lecturing on at $60,000 a speech on the stemwinding circuit for the next couple of years.
As a former U.S. attorney, deputy attorney general, corporate attorney, hedge-funder and FBI director, you’d imagine that Comey had viewed himself through life’s mirror often enough to realize that overdressing himself in the vestments of truth and honor might backfire. But there he goes in the book and interview, posturing like the deacon of justice he obviously thinks he is.
One thing that is a pattern though, is his tendency to pop off on foolish topics like these whenever the long arm of the law seems to be looking for him.
In 2018, I found this piece I wrote about his pattern of doing weird stuff, like jumping jacks or wearing an FBI gay pride t-shirt always coinciding with his own legal hot water:
He always posts something weird when he's on the political hot seat and desires to deflect attention. Most of the Twitter responders to that one at the time suggested that since he likes jumping, maybe he ought to get fitted for an orange prison jumpsuit.
... and ...
When he gets weird he posts weird things. And based on what we can tell, it's a coordinate with some detail about his being in political trouble. In the end, he always winds up looking just strange.
That might be what's going on here. He's weird enough as it is. But when legal trouble beckons for him, he likes to put his weirdness out there for all to 'admire.'
That's some bizarre ego, making himself a clown and laughingstock as lawmen breathe down his neck as they are now with his role in the Hillary Clinton email scandal, the failure to prosecute the Clinton Foundation for its pay-to-play scandal, the Russia collusion conniving, the leaks to the press and other bad behavior. He must be letting it all hang out now that the heat is on. What a strange specimen.
Image: X screen shot