GOOD GRIEF THIS CONGRESSIONAL HEARING

[Content Note: Misogyny.]

So, all day, FBI Director James Comey has been testifying on Capitol Hill in front of a House Committee, the Republican members of whom are relentlessly grilling him on why charges were not brought or recommended against Hillary Clinton because of her emails.

It has been an obscene spectacle. I've written about a few of the early highlights of the testimony for BNR, including some video with transcripts: "Grilling of Comey on Emails Even More Humiliating for GOP Than Benghazi Hearing." Here's an excerpt:

If Republicans were really in pursuit of justice, if they actually cared about the facts in this case and not just about yet another in a decades-long string of partisan attacks on Hillary Clinton, none of which have yielded any evidence of wrongdoing (beyond "carelessness"), this charade would have ended the moment Comey delivered this bit of testimony, his voice rising:

No reasonable prosecutor would bring this case. No reasonable prosecutor would bring the second case in a hundred years focused on gross negligence.

And so I know that's been a source of some confusion for folks, but that's just the way it is. I know the Department of Justice; I know no reasonable prosecutor would bring this case. I know a lot of my former friends are out there saying they would; I wonder where they were for the last forty years, because I'd like to see the cases they brought on gross negligence. Nobody would; nobody did.

So my judgment was: The appropriate resolution of this case was not with a criminal prosecution. As I said, folks can disagree about that, but I hope they know that view – not just my view, but of my team – was honestly held, fairly investigated, and communicated with unusual transparency, because we know folks care about it.

This is not about justice. This is theater, with the singular purpose of trying to discredit Hillary Clinton, who has long been a target of Republican ire – and for whom their resentment has only grown as she's emerged unscathed from their ill-conceived investigations over and over, and now sits on the precipice of becoming the nation's first woman president.

They haven't been able to stop her, and it's all they've ever wanted to do. So they keep trying. They will keep trying themselves right into disgrace and defeat. As always.

There is much more at the link.

Including my feeling about watching a bunch of Republican Congressmen talk about whether Hillary Clinton will be "disciplined."

Flames. FLAMES.

Particularly as they are doing it under the pretense of their faux outrage that she will face no "discipline," despite the fact that this public tableau of protracted shaming is far worse than any formal professional reprimand ever could be.

This is not about justice. It is about harming a woman they don't like.

UPDATE: [CN: Racism; classism] And, naturally, any public spectacle wouldn't be complete without some racist dog whistling. JFC.