No Shame

Some news makes you angry. You try not to be, but you get there. You say “ignore it” – good before, good after. Still, injustice rankles those who value fairness. In my opinion, two Democrats – FBI politicos Peter Strzok and Lisa Page – symbolize what ails us, no shame.

A famous Roman comic, Plautus, lived and wrote about two centuries before Christ. His work illustrates how some things never change. He was good with farce and offered pointed observations. Among his many lively lines, “I regard that man as lost, who has lost his sense of shame.”

To recollect what we too soon forget, Strzok was “a longtime FBI agent who was removed from the Russia investigation over anti-Trump text messages,” later “fired by the agency.”  He was on the “nothing to see” Clinton inquiry. Page, his secret lover, was an FBI lawyer, also anti-Trump.

Between the two, they hoped to “stop” Trump in 2016, using the FBI’s considerable power to play politics. In case Trump did win, they aimed to put their money on the “Russia Collusion” story – a series of false allegations, false assumptions, and false reports – as “insurance.”

Messaging wildly in 2016, these two government employees, sworn to be non-partisans in their jobs, racked up an impressive pile of anti-Trump texts. If the two had been just simpering, self-righteous, latte-sipping secret lovers, no one would care. But they were senior FBI personnel.

Their texts are too extensive to recount, but included calling Trump a “disaster,” “idiot,” “loathsome” and a “menace,” while swearing to stop him, to upend an election, Page noting “the American presidential election, and thus the state of the world, actually hangs in the balance.”

Like so much of the poison that passes for political dialogue these days, they reinforced each other’s fears and prejudices, edging toward what the FBI – if poorly conceived – calls “hate crime.” They were both animated by personal and professional hostility to Trump, fanned it.

Mid-2016, Page wrote Strzok: Trump’s “not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” Strzok responded: “No. No, he won’t. We’ll stop it.” And so these two clandestine actors, self-styled cloak-and-dagger saviors of democracy, set about to “stop” Trump.

Their behavior appears to have helped nobble the Clinton server probe, another feather in their political cap since an internal Justice probe found an “appearance of impropriety” in their behavior – but never mind. We were told to ignore the little dog and curtain, Clinton cleared.

All this would be bad enough, compounded by no charges against either of them nor against Hillary Clinton and her server-smashing cohort; no accountability for FBI director James Comey’s missteps; no assignment of responsibility for falsehoods, campaign-financed defamations, hundreds of millions in wasted money to erode Donald Trump’s first term.

Now, we come to this moment, the truth ever harder to find, one presidential candidate politically convicted on patently fake charges, the other seeming to pocket tens of millions in foreign bribes – a genuine alternative universe to “good government,” replete with dishonesty and disgrace.

At this moment, what is the latest news? What makes normal people mad? What do you have to know – which will animate your voting, maybe a return to accountability? Just this: The two Democrats who tried to topple a president just received $1.2 million and $800,000 from America’s taxpayers to compensate for lost privacy … release of their anti-American texts.

If this is not folly, the word folly no longer has meaning.  If this is not worse than a million-dollar award for hot coffee, crazier than saying a mentally unfit guy is fit, or making the queen of “word salad” a leading Democrat contender, words and laws no longer matter.

Our constitutional system – premised on truth, responsibility, common sense, and some semblance of moral authority – appears way out of kilter. Bottom line: 2024 really matters.

Some things will never change, among them human foibles, and our willingness to endure them – until we say “Enough!” Wrote Plautus: “How great in number are the little-minded men.” There you have it. Plautus knew, which is why he wrote satire, that we can do better. We must.

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.