A "Comey" to Jesus Moment?

Sorry for the bad pun, but that’s what this feels like it should be. I doubt that it will be, sadly; I don’t think anyone in the Trump administration has a milligram of moral courage to say that “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH” and we already know that both Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell donated their spines to alligators at Mar-A-Lago several months ago. For this administration to fire an FBI director who has been an equal opportunity offender and investigator should come as no surprise. That they manufactured reasons to do so should also be no surprise. They can’t very well admit the real reason:

Comey’s investigation into the ties between agents of the Russian government and members of the administration and (almost certainly, given that Eric bragged about it to a golf analyst!) the Trump family was getting too close to the smoking guns/blue dress/tapes missing 18 minutes for the comfort of those whose power is at risk.

This reminds me very much of the Biblical story of David and Bathsheba. David, the villain of the piece, uses his power to acquire the wife of one of his army officers, Uriah, while Uriah is deployed to the battle zone. I will note that this is CLEARLY as story of abuse of power with sex as one of the weapons; Bathsheba was in no position to deny the king what he wanted for fear of her husband’s life. As the story unfolds, Bathsheba gets pregnant, so David sends for Uriah to come home for some “R&R”, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. I always imagine that Bathsheba is quite unwilling to help David out and threatens to spill the beans the first time, only to be told that her husband’s life is at stake if she does. The wrinkle is that Uriah wants to remain pure for battle, so rather than reunite with his wife in the marriage bed, he remains celibate at the guard house to the palace during his leave. Now David is in a quandary: Uriah will surely realize that his heretofore faithful wife has been with another man and David isn’t entirely sure Bathsheba won’t tell the truth the next time her husband comes home. So David sends Uriah back to the front with his own death warrant. This works out just fine for David, sort of, because he gets another wife and, after their first son dies as punishment for the sin of David (and because the Bible is sexist like this, Bathsheba, though she was also a victim), a second son named Solomon who ruled over Israel after David.

In our modern morality play, Trump is David, the American people are Bathsheba (though because no analogy is perfect, we actually do bear equal responsibility for this mess), and Comey, representing the American ideals of truth and justice, is Uriah. Comey/the FBI were doing as we expect them to do, investigating allegations of wrongdoing on our behalf on the battlefield of truth. Trump dragged us away from our prayerful waiting for the soldiers of truth to return by tweeting SQUIRREL! every other hour, but when it became clear that we were not longer buying the distractions, and that the soldiers of truth wouldn’t be intimidated into pointing toward every SQUIRREL! instead of the truth they were slowly but surely uncovering…it was time to take out the captain of the soldiers of truth. At least in this telling, Comey didn’t carry his own pink slip, though it is telling that he had his first inkling and laughed it off as a joke when he saw banners and crawls on TV sets in the ballroom where he was speaking in Los Angeles.

The analogy hopefully ends there. I certainly don’t want Eric or Don, Jr., to get any ideas and I am doubly certain neither of them has the wherewithal to pray for wisdom like Solomon did. Comey is still living and, God willing, will testify before Congress soon about everything he knows and can legally say in open testimony. There is a death here even so, and that’s that with Comey gone, the likelihood that the investigation into these ties to Russia will continue. 

Comey’s successor will be vetted and grilled to well-done perfection during his or her (I like the idea of Sally Yates for FBI director!) confirmation hearings, no doubt in hopes among all the Democratic and some Republican (looking at you, Lindsay Graham) senators that the next director will be as dedicated to and diligent about finding the truth as Comey. But the better step, the one that will never happen because it threatens those with power, is a special prosecutor to oversee the investigation and unravel the threads that tie the Trump administration so closely to Russian government interests. The question for all of us in this moment is this: Who will be the Nathan who finally gets through to our David to make him see the error of his ways and the necessity of confession? Or at the very least, an unfettered investigation that tells us for once and for all how big the fire is and who is burning in it.