A plot twist so absurd as to defy credence

I wonder sometimes whether Washington, D.C. and the Mandarin Class aren't some sort of forcing mechanism intended to increase the mental acuity and mental suppleness of the population. They do and say such ridiculous things so much of the time that you really have to work your brain hard to bring sense to it all.

And sometimes you are left with a set of facts that seem both impossibly improbable and also true.

In this instance there is the coincidence pertaining to James Comey and John Brennan, former head of the FBI and the former head of the CIA respectively and both of them at the center of the effort to leverage the Russiagate dossier into some sort of power play over candidate and then President Trump. That whole concoction of bad behaviors and bad motives is still unravelling and new light being shed. Characterized in many quarters as a Deep State coup attempt, it is at the very least an example of the eternal danger identified by Juvenal, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes, (Who will watch the watchmen?, or who will set guard against the guards themselves)

But that is not my focus here. Comey and Brennan share more than just being in the center of the mess. Brennan is known to have lied multiple times to Congress as did Comey.

In the past month, another shared attribute has arisen. One so absurd that it belongs in a John Birch hallucination or as a desperate plot twist of a hack fiction writer.

I have seen elements of this story referenced in different publications but here is one which pulls them together. From Comey Was a Commie? by Paul Kengor. It is the sort of hyperbolic headline which usually drives me away. And, as it turns out, it is pretty feverish writing. But the two core facts it references, I have seen reported elsewhere by more stable writers.

The first element of the story is from Mr. Comey Goes To Washington by Chris Smith in New York Magazine in October, 2003. It is a puffball piece celebrating Comey's arrival in Washington. It starts with a now ironical "Jim Comey is laughing." Not much laughter now after the twisted journey of the past sixteen years.

There is this oddity, though, in the interview from way back then.

Comey has been savaged by William Safire and lauded by Chuck Schumer; just what kind of Republican is he, anyway? This sets Comey howling again. “I must be doing something right!” he says. “In college, I was left of center, and through a gradual process I found myself more comfortable with a lot of the ideas and approaches the Republicans were using.” He voted for Carter in 1980, but in ’84, “I voted for Reagan—I’d moved from Communist to whatever I am now. I’m not even sure how to characterize myself politically. Maybe at some point, I’ll have to figure it out.”

It has the tell-tale penumbra of the Mandarin Class. Insider confidences shared, self-absorption, false modesty, manipulative presentation, and exaggerated claims. Was Comey a communist? Pffftt. I would guess that that was a false claim to exaggerate his mystique and appeal as a self-evolving enlightened player of the Mandarin Class. Perhaps he was a College Democrat. But a self-identified Communist? I doubt it. But . . .. Communism is the delusion of the young and it used to not be unknown for the socially lost or the socially rebellious to find a niche in such small eddies of high school and college.

To the extent that anyone can agree on what a neocon is, one of the shared understandings is that it involves those who have made the journey from left to right. Not necessarily from Marxist communism per se, but at least from the philosophical left to the philosophical right.

In this regard, it is worth some context. The American Communist Party peaked in 1944 with 80,000 members before shrinking to 5,000 members in the mid fifties (of which 1,500 were informants). In Brennan and Comey's era of the 60's and 70's, it clawed itself back up to perhaps 25,000 members. Add in all the hanger-ons, the breakaways, the maoists, the trotskyites, those prowling for hot Marxist chicks, tweed-jacketed sociology professors, social misfits, etc. and you still probably don't have 100,000 people willing to identify as communist in a nation of some 150 million potential voters. Niche, niche, niche.

So was Comey a communist or was he just slinging brand enhancing absurdities? I would be more inclined to the latter than the former. But he said what he said.

But then there is this second report from CNN from three years ago. From Polygraph panic: CIA director fretted his vote for communist by Tal Kopan.

At his first polygraph test to enter the CIA, the future director had a secret.

John Brennan on Thursday recalled being asked a standard question for a top security clearance at his early CIA lie detector test: Have you ever worked with or for a group that was dedicated to overthrowing the US?

"I froze," Brennan said during a panel discussion about diversity in the intelligence community at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's annual conference. "This was back in 1980, and I thought back to a previous election where I voted, and I voted for the Communist Party candidate,"

Brennan was responding to a question about barriers to recruiting diverse candidates for the intelligence fields, including whether past records of activism could hurt someone applying for a clearance later in life.

The CIA director said the agency's mission is to protect the values of the Constitution -- which include free speech.

"We've all had indiscretions in our past," he said, adding neither some drug experimentation nor activism was a non-starter. "I would not be up here if that was disqualifying."

He proceeded to tell the story of his test.

"I froze, because I was getting so close to coming into CIA and said, 'OK, here's the choice, John. You can deny that, and the machine is probably going to go, you know, wacko, or I can acknowledge it and see what happens,'" Brennan said.
He said he chose to be forthcoming.

"I said I was neither Democratic or Republican, but it was my way, as I was going to college, of signaling my unhappiness with the system, and the need for change. I said I'm not a member of the Communist Party, so the polygrapher looked at me and said, 'OK,' and when I was finished with the polygraph and I left and said, 'Well, I'm screwed.'"

But he soon got his admission notice to the CIA and was relieved, he said, saying that though the agency still had long strides to make in accepting gay recruits and minorities, even then it recognized the importance of freedom.

"So if back in 1980, John Brennan was allowed to say, 'I voted for the Communist Party with Gus Hall' ... and still got through, rest assured that your rights and your expressions and your freedom of speech as Americans is something that's not going to be disqualifying of you as you pursue a career in government."

As an aside, it is interesting to note that John Brennan's telling the truth was motivated by his assessment that he would be caught if he lied and not from any native commitment to truth-telling. A revealing point perhaps, given his subsequent repeated untruthful testimony to Congress.

So John Comey declared himself to have been a communist in his youth and John Brennan declared that he voted for the Communist Party candidate in 1980.

OK, is this a pair of self-absorbed narcissists trying to burnish their street cred with the other cool kids in the Mandarin Class or is this an out take from No Way Out?

I am strongly inclined towards the former.

But in what world is it conceivable that the head of our federal police agency AND the head of our international spy agency would both have identified in some fashion as communist in their early adulthood. It could only be in the world of Washington, D.C.