If former FBI honcho James Comey’s Twitter feed is anything to judge him by, perhaps President Trump was right to can him—on the basis of his grating social media persona alone.
Some people use Twitter to catch up on news, others to waste time cracking jokes. Not the onetime top law enforcement professional though. No, Comey’s Twitter feed is full of treacly, Hallmark-card sentiments, pulled apparently from a well-thumbed copy of Bartlett’s.
“ ‘Applause is the spur of noble minds, the end and aim of weak ones.’—Edmund Burke (1730-1797),” he tweeted on December 8. “ ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!’ This country’s greatness and true genius lies in its diversity.” That was January 11’s tweet. (Shockingly, he has yet to tweet the “fake Tocqueville” line that “America is great because America is good.”) On December 15, Comey hit a baby boomer grand slam, invoking both the greatest moral voice of our times . . . and Martin Luther King Jr: “ ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’—Bruce Springsteen tonight, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr.”
For sheer self-regard, nothing has yet topped, or is likely ever to top, Comey’s December 3 tweet: “ ‘I want the American people to know this truth: The FBI is honest. The FBI is strong. And the FBI is, and always will be, independent.’ Me (June 8, 2017).”
