Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 127, No. 50, Ed. 1 Saturday, November 5, 2016 Page: 4 of 12
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4 — SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 2016
GAINESVILLE DAILY REGISTER
Opinion
editor@gainesvilleregister.com
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I
The extreme carelessness of Comey
c
Letters Policy
I
Trump and
working-class
Catholic men
Steve and Cokie
Roberts
DID TOY W
WOUT'OR'BURNOUT?
Terry Mattingly is the editor of GetReligion.org
and Senior Fellow for Media and Religion at The
King’s College in New York City. He lives in Oak
Ridge, Tennessee.
seem unfair. But Comey was guilty of a differ-
ent sin: placing his own ego and his concern
for his personal reputation ahead of his
responsibility to the FBI or the democratic pro-
cess.
As Matthew Miller, a Justice Department
spokesman during Barack Obama’s first term,
wrote in the Post, “This case in particular has
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Perhaps worst of all: Bill Clinton’s egregious
decision to meet with Attorney General
Loretta Lynch last June while the Justice
Department was concluding its investigation of
his wife’s handling of classified emails. As a
result of his stupidity, Lynch has little leverage
over Comey.
We won’t know until next week whether
Comey has altered the course of the election.
His letter will probably cause few voters to
change sides, but recent polling indicates that
some Democrats are discouraged, while
Republicans are energized. And intensity and
turnout matter in close races — for the Senate
as well as the White House.
But we do know this: In trying to protect his
personal reputation, and the reputation of his
agency, James Comey has badly damaged
both.
Steve and Cokie Roberts can be contacted by email at
stevecokie@gmail.com.
self-righteousness.” The FBI director seems to
believe “that the rules that apply to every
other Justice Department employee are too
quaint to restrict a man of his unquestionable
ethics.”
Comey’s ill-advised letter would not be so
damaging to Clinton if she had not, throughout
her whole career, earned her reputation for
cutting corners and bending rules. The trope
that all her troubles are caused by a “vast
right-wing conspiracy” and a media that
unfairly exaggerates her flaws is simply not
true.
The Clintons have always given their ene-
mies plenty of ammunition: her misguided use
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The Diocese of Rockville Centre, New York,
had to know the calls were coming, after Bishop
William Murphy’s letter was read in Sunday
Masses.
“Support of abortion by a candidate for public
office, some of whom are Catholics, even if they
use the fallacious and deeply offensive ‘person-
ally opposed but...’ line, is reason sufficient unto
itself to disqualify any and every such candidate
from receiving our vote,” the bishop advised
Catholics in Long Island and other communities
east of New York City.
Murphy added, “Let me repeat that,” and did
so — word for word.
The bishop also said he believes America is
“heading in the wrong direction” — especially
on religious freedom — and asked each believer
to “examine your conscience” before voting.
A diocesan spokesman stressed that Murphy
was “absolutely not” signaling support for
Donald Trump for president.
This unusual Rockville Centre salvo was
news, in part, because U.S. Catholic leaders have
been surprisingly quiet in 2016 — even with Sen.
Tim Kaine, a Catholic progressive, in the vice
president slot for the Democrats. Some Catholic
leaders have even received flak, from left and
right, for noting that both major-party nominees
have disturbing track records on matters of
character and honesty.
Meanwhile, many Catholic voters will remem-
ber an earlier war of words between Trump and
Pope Francis on immigration, with the pope not-
ing that “a person who thinks only about build-
ing walls, wherever they may be, and not build-
ing bridges, is not Christian. This is not in the
Gospel.”
All of this matters, of course, because it’s
almost impossible for Republicans to take the
White House without winning the “Catholic
vote” in Ohio, Pennsylvania and other swing
states. Meanwhile, a recent Public Religion
Research Institute poll showed white Catholics
were evenly split (44 percent each way) between
Trump and Democratic candidate Hillary
Clinton. Hispanic Catholics (84 percent) strongly
backed Clinton.
Gender numbers were even more interesting,
with 49 percent of white Catholic women sup-
porting Clinton, and 58 percent of white Catholic
men backing Trump. Another 13 percent of
white Catholic men were undecided or refused
to answer, along with 9 percent of white Catholic
women.
That’s a lot of undecided voters, especially if
many of them are in strategic blue-collar com-
munities, noted ETWN’s Raymond Arroyo, the
Catholic network’s managing editor for news.
While much has been said this year about angry
white males hurt by global economic trends, the
experts often fail to note that lots of them are
“from typical labor-union Catholic backgrounds,
either Polish, Italian, German or whatever,” he
said.
“Catholics are considered bellwether voters,
but I think that’s true because they’re actually
quite secular and they go where the country
goes,” said Arroyo. “Catholics don’t vote
because of any one issue. It’s a matter of feeling
and fit.... I’m hearing from lots of people who
are still looking at Trump and trying to figure
out who he is as a person. They’ve heard all the
‘locker-room’ stuff. But many of these working-
class Catholics don’t mind that he’s a guy who
has been around and messed up — like they
have.... They’re mad and they’re looking for a
fighter.”
In a recent EWTN interview, Arroyo asked
Trump hard questions about issues of honesty,
character and morality, and received familiar,
evasive Trump answers.
The GOP nominee, as expected, jumped on
WikiLeaks emails that appeared to show Clinton
staffers — including campaign chair John
Podesta — discussing their clashes with tradi-
tional Catholics and the need for a “Catholic
Spring” to force changes in Catholic doctrine,
thus ending a “middle ages dictatorship.”
The New York billionaire said his favorite
saints are Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II,
the latter because he “had a special something.
... There was a toughness, but there was a
warmth that was incredible.” Trump declined to
discuss his prayer life, saying that subject is
“between me and God.”
What now? Arroyo offered this Election Day
advice: Watch Catholic men in the Rust Belt.
“Lots of working-class Catholics aren’t sure if
they’re Republicans or Democrats these days,”
he said. “They keep swinging back and forth....
What I hear them saying is: ‘I’ll go in that voting
booth and make a choice, but I’m not talking
about it. I’ll go behind that curtain and do what I
have to do.’”
FBI Director James Comey knew exactly
what was going to happen.
He was already a controversial figure in
the presidential campaign. His statement
this summer, that Hillary Clinton had been
“extremely careless” in handling her gov-
ernment email accounts, has been repeated
endlessly in Donald Trump ads.
And now he’s done it again. He wrote a let- exposed how Comey’s self-regard can veer into
ter to Congress, less than two weeks before
the election, saying that a new trove of
emails discovered on the
computer of Anthony
Weiner — the estranged
husband of Clinton aide
Huma Abedin — may be
relevant to the Clinton
case, which had been sus-
pended months ago.
There was no hint of
wrongdoing on Clinton’s
part. When Comey wrote
his letter, neither he nor
any of his investigators had evaluated the
Weiner emails. And yet he had to know that of a private email server as secretary of state;
his letter — no matter how carefully
couched — would immediately be distorted
and exaggerated by the Trump campaign.
the appearance of tawdry influence-peddling
that clings to the Clinton Foundation; her
greedy determination to rake in millions of
And it was. The FBI director had provided dollars in paid speeches from institutions that
yet more fodder for Trump’s attacks. But were clearly currying favor with a possible
this time, it was not Hillary Clinton who was future president.
“extremely careless.” It was Comey himself.
Comey cannot plead ignorance. He knew
the rules. He knew that very clear Justice
Department guidelines prohibit doing pre-
cisely what he did: injecting the country’s
most powerful law enforcement agency into
a political campaign.
As The Washington Post reported, in early
October, Comey had specifically invoked
those guidelines in declining to join a state-
ment issued by the Director of National
Intelligence and the Department of
Homeland Security. The statement blamed
Russia for cyber attacks aimed at influenc-
ing the American elections, but Comey
thought “it was too close” to Election Day
for him to get involved.
Even many Republicans have joined the
chorus condemning Comey’s misjudgment.
George J. Terwilliger III, deputy attorney
general under George Bush 41, told The New
York Times: “There’s a longstanding policy
of not doing anything that could influence
an election. Those guidelines exist for a rea-
son. Sometimes that makes for hard deci-
sions. But bypassing them has consequenc-
es.”
Larry Thompson, deputy attorney general
under Bush 43, co-authored an op-ed piece in
the Post that asserted, “It is antithetical to
the interest of justice, putting a thumb on
the scale of this election and damaging our
democracy.”
Joe Walsh, a former Congressman and
fiercely conservative radio host, tweeted
about Comey: “What he just did 11 days b4
the election is wrong & unfair to Hillary.”
There’s no evidence that Comey was delib-
erately trying to help Trump, and charges
that he violated the Hatch Act — which bars
political activity by federal employees —
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Armstrong, Mark J. Gainesville Daily Register (Gainesville, Tex.), Vol. 127, No. 50, Ed. 1 Saturday, November 5, 2016, newspaper, November 5, 2016; Gainesville, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1323839/m1/4/: accessed June 30, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Cooke County Library.