The most hated man in America?

If you add up all the different groups of people he's pissed off at different times, the landslide winner of this dubious distinction has to be James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Earlier this year he enraged Republicans by recommending against a criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server. At the end of last month he enraged Democrats by announcing that the FBI's own investigation had been reopened to examine emails on a computer used by Huma Abedin, a top Clinton aide who shared the computer with her ex-husband, the disgraced Rep. Anthony Weiner. It was Republicans' turn to cackle as Democrats railed against a partisan conspiracy within the Bureau. The worm turned once more yesterday when Comey announced that the investigation of Abedin's files gave him no cause to change his recommendation against prosecuting Clinton. Now the Republicans raged once more. Back in the summer Comey had been a spineless lackey of Attorney General Lynch in their eyes, but at the end of October he had become a courageous man of integrity. By last night he was corrupt once more, as Donald Trump railed that the investigation had been rigged. He complained that all the thousands of Abedin's emails could not have been examined in a week, forgetting (if he ever knew) that on October 28 Comey had made public an investigation that had already been underway for several weeks. Still, a cynical bipartisan consensus might conclude that Comey was simply trolling the whole nation, terrifying Democrats while giving Republicans hope that justice might be done to the Evil One, only to leave either party thinking that he had done enough damage so late, either by reopening the investigation or dismissing it, to cost its candidate the election. But an observer cynical about our Bipolarchy might adopt some old wisdom and conclude that each party's anger proved that Comey was doing the right thing all along.