There’s a reason you ought not let a two-year-old handle a .44 Magnum, and it’s the same reason you shouldn’t place a jamoke like Rep. James Comer, R-Tompkinsville, or Frankfort or DC, or wherever he’s hanging his hat these days, in any position of authority.
Like most congressional representatives Kentucky has dispatched to Washington in recent times, Comer has exhibited the governmental acumen of Goober Pyle. For a brief moment in time, Comer actually provided a glimmer of hope that he wasn’t going to be just another babbling MAGA moron, having produced critically needed postal reform legislation that actually attracted bipartisan support.
Sadly, everything he did before and since is less reminiscent of Daniel Webster than it is of Junior Samples.
Now our boy, who increasingly views himself as a big shot on the DC scene, making himself available to every right-wing microphone within a hundred yards of his constantly moving mouth, is raising the specter of impeachment, not the legitimate sort directed at the target of his undying admiration – former President Donald J. Trump – but at the current office-holder, President Biden, and he’s looking to use Biden’s son, Hunter, as a convenient instrument to bring him down.
Comer is not a serious person. His threats and dares are of a type proffered by a little boy in an adult world. Sadly, should Republicans, as expected, regain control of the House this November, he likely will be installed in a position, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, where he can do further damage to an already wounded nation.
Comer is hounding Hunter Biden like Javert pursuing Valjean, accusing the president’s son of a grab bag of crimes, ranging from influence peddling to failing to register as a foreign agent, as a result of his overseas business dealings with China, Ukraine and perhaps other nations. In Comer’s defense, some of those concerns are well taken and deserving of a probe. It is no secret, as Hunter Biden himself has acknowledged, that he is the subject of an FBI investigation. This week, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-IA, sent a letter to the Justice Department, the FBI and the U.S. attorney for Delaware asserting that a whistleblower divulged that the FBI possesses “significant, impactful and voluminous evidence with respect to potential criminal conduct by Hunter Biden and James Biden,” the president’s brother.
Given Grassley’s information, it should be obvious to one and all, the FBI is on the case.
Tut-tut, not according to our boy Jamie. The FBI is not working on Comer’s timetable, leading him to ask on Newsmax, “for those of us who have been on top of this Hunter Biden investigation…(the question) is where’s the FBI in all this?”
Now, as anyone who has seen as few as two episodes of Law and Order, or any other cop show for that matter, the FBI isn’t exactly forthcoming about ongoing investigations. In this instance, involving international business transactions, tax records and other data, it’s not going to get done yesterday. Comer further said it’s “sickening” that Hunter Biden has received better treatment from the FBI than Trump, without acknowledging that Trump hasn’t been indicted for anything (as yet) either, despite mountains of evidence of wrong doing, ranging from hoarding top secret documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate to inspiring the Jan. 6 insurrection.
If Comer’s bluster had just ended there it could be written off as typical political hoo-ha. But the boy is so full of himself he couldn’t stop. Now catch this:
“…we’re investigating Hunter Biden because we believe he’s a national security threat and we fear he compromised Joe Biden. A lot of the bad policies, the energy policy, the foreign policy, that Joe Biden has enacted that put America last, we believe this was done because he’s compromised because of his family’s shady business dealings with our adversaries.”
Comer enjoyed his horse manure sandwich so much that he took a second helping in that Newsmax interview.
“So, the question is where has the FBI been all along on the Hunter Biden situation,” he repeated for dazzling effect. “Is it because it implicates Joe Biden and if so that’s a problem. That is one of the biggest problems that out country can imagine right now. If the reason the FBI hasn’t moved on Hunter Biden is because it directly implicates Joe Biden, then we’ve got a huge problem here on our hands.”
Jeepers, Jamie, could this lead to impeachment?
“It could,” he said.
Comer makes good use of the always reliable weasel word “if” in this particular harangue, giving him room to defame the president without providing anything of substance. He’s playing that old Republican game, turning policy differences on energy, foreign relations or what have you, into suggestions of treason, that Biden is betraying his nation in order to help his son put a few bucks in his pocket without providing a scintilla of hard evidence.
And Hunter Biden as a security threat? To whom? What top secret information does he maintain to turn the tide in China’s favor? Is his old man whispering in his ear? Slipping him notes with the nuclear code? Hunter Biden could indeed be engaged in some shady international deals. The FBI is investigating. But there’s no reason to believe he has access to the sort of information that, unlike Trump, would lead to the nation’s downfall.
Comer knows all this but, hey, the narrative reads much better with all the bull thrown in.
This incident harkens back to late 1978 and early 1979. A fellow named Billy Carter, brother of then-President Jimmy Carter, was what used to be described as a good-‘ol-boy, one who was more interested in guzzling beer – Billy Beer, produced by the Falls City Brewing Co. of Louisville, was named for him – and hanging out at his garage in Plains, GA., than giving a hot damn about American foreign or domestic policy.
Billy, who, like many of us, needed beer money, visited Libya on a few occasions, and received a “loan’’ of $220,000 – perhaps more – from the government of Muammar Gaddafi, ostensibly for his participation in some oil deal.
Libya was not on particularly good terms with the U.S. at the time, so the questionable relationship drew attention since Billy wasn’t registered as a foreign agent. The whole schlemiel was characterized as Billygate.
Soon thereafter, Carter lost his re-election bid and was replaced by Republican Ronald Reagan. Billy eventually registered as a foreign agent and no charges were ever filed even though the Justice Department was turned over to the GOP.
Imagine that.
Should he manage to step up as chairman, it won’t mark the first time the House Committee on Oversight and Reform was helmed by a doofus. That honor belongs to former Rep. Dan Burton, an Indiana Republican. And folks, this guy was a real piece of work.
Burton was obsessed with the 1994 suicide of Vince Foster, a deputy White House counsel for President Bill Clinton, convinced that Clinton and/or First Lady Hilary Clinton had him murdered because of the Whitewater land deal, an issue way too complicated to explain here.
Anyway, Burton conducted his own investigation, which included firing a pistol into a watermelon, or perhaps it was a pumpkin or cantaloupe, serving as a substitute for Foster’s head, in an effort to show Foster’s demise wasn’t suicide.
This was before Burton assumed the chairmanship of the panel Jamie hopes to lead, which was then called Government Affairs. In 1998, Burton released a transcript of prison tapes involving former Associate Attorney General Web Hubbell, who had been imprisoned after he admitted to mail fraud and tax evasion.
The transcript appeared to implicate the Clintons in Hubbell’s wrongdoing. But it soon became clear, as committee Democrats pointed out, that key statements made by Hubbell that essentially cleared the president and first lady of any transgression had been edited out. Burton further failed to include transcripts of Hubbell phone conversations that established the Clintons were not involved.
Even then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-GA, called the Burton investigation a “circus.”
Burton appears to be the chairman Comer would like to emulate. He has, as a coda to all this told The New York Times that he would love for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-GA, a QAnon sympathizer whose views are likened to a “cancer” by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, of Louisville, to serve on his House Committee on Investigations and Oversight.
Greene, Comer said, would bring “energy and a strong interest in partnering with us in our efforts to rein in the unaccountable Swamp and to hold the Biden Administration accountable for its many self-inflicted crises that it has unleashed on the American people.”
You bet, Jamie. You bet.