A Man of Duty

[Naga_Fireball]

He stands straight as an arrow,
With the weight of all the world on his shoulders.

He looks toward the rising sun,
And his eyes do not close against its brilliance.

At his back bay all the demons of hell,
But he stands his ground and points the way home.

A tattered and smoldering flag hangs above his head;
He renders a lonely salute regardless of who sees it.

The earth around him falls away into darkness,
But he stands firmly upon the Constitution.

The man of duty has built his house upon the rock,
and the fool has built his house upon the sand.

Like Noah, carrying his beams through a gauntlet of laughter,
His honest toil is the strangest sight in the land,
He does not permit his surroundings to define the man --
He betters his world in any way he can.

Others fear and others falter,
Others mock and try to halt her,
But steadily he stands,
Holding Freedom's hand.

The man of duty sees us through,
A shepherding hand to point to truth.
Shadows rise but cannot fight
His simple, pure, and wholesome light.

[Naga_Fireball]

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Sunday Review

OPINION
What We’re Losing in James Comey

James Comey testifying on Capitol Hill this month.
GABRIELLA DEMCZUK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By BENJAMIN WITTES
MAY 13, 2017

WASHINGTON — By the time he was fired on Tuesday, James Comey was not a popular man. But it is not an accident that many people have quickly gone from braying for his blood to fretting about how our country will get along without him: Who will lead the F.B.I.? Who will stand up to President Trump? Whom can we count on to tell us the truth, without fear or favor, about the Trump campaign’s possible connections to Russia?

The reason for the sudden shift is not just horror at Mr. Trump’s behavior, though the thuggishness of the firing and its seeming connection to the Russia matter are horrifying. The other reason has to do with Mr. Comey himself, specifically with three characteristics that made him a most unusual figure in Washington. Put simply, we’re scared about losing — and we are already missing — the very things we hate about him.

Full disclosure: James Comey is a friend. I won’t pretend to neutrality about him. He is a highly honorable and decent person, and I have no doubt that he made the many judgments for which people loathe him in good faith. My purpose here is not to relitigate the merits of his handling of the Clinton email investigation or any other controversial judgment.

My purpose is, rather, to identify some salient attributes of the man that both infuriate people and simultaneously make his abrupt removal so scary.

First, Mr. Comey is without subtext. He’s the only truly subtextless man I’ve met working in senior levels of government in Washington. If you want to know why he’s doing something, you just ask him — in an open congressional hearing, in a news conference, in the Q. and A. at a speech at a college. If it’s appropriate to talk about it, he’ll tell you. He doesn’t lie. He doesn’t answer cagily. And, remarkably for a Washington figure, he explains his thinking. He answers questions about it. He releases documents.

When someone behaves this way in the run-up to a presidential election on a politically sensitive matter, like Hillary Clinton’s private email server, in a fashion that departs from normal Justice Department policy, it drives people crazy for good reason. But this is the same attribute on which those of us concerned about the Russia connections have been counting. We want an investigation that’s going to give us answers and that’s going to show its work. We want progress reports and details, and we want them sooner rather than later. In the world of President Trump, we really want people who aren’t going to lie. We want people who can sit in front of a congressional committee for hours and, however mad they may make us, never give us reason to doubt that they are telling the truth as they see it.