The oath of office
This is the oath of office taken by federal elected or appointed persons:
I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.
It is the oath that the uniformed services take, too. This is the oath that James Comey, until recently the director of the FBI, took.
You will look in vain to find the name of Donnie Bunko, or even the office of president, named in this pledge of fealty. Although it will come as an obvious surprise to him, neither James Comey, nor any other law enforcement official, owes Donnie Bunko a damn thing, at least as Donnie Bunko the person.
To the extent that Donnie Bunko’s actions contravene the Constitution, in fact, the oath demands that he be resisted.
One of the reasons that Donnie Bunko offered in support of his decision to fire Comey was that Comey was “insufficiently loyal.”
“The thing that’s most important to me is loyalty,” Trump said. “You can’t hire loyalty. I’ve had people over the years who I swore were loyal to me, and it turned out that they weren’t. Then I’ve had people that I didn’t have the same confidence in and turned out to be extremely loyal. So you never really know.”
He added: “The thing I really look for though, over the longer term, is loyalty.”
This ought to make you gag. Hitler demanded loyalty. Stalin demanded loyalty. Augusto Pinochet demanded loyalty. So did Generalissimo Francisco Franco, who is still dead, by the way.
Richard Nixon, who echos in this whole business, was big on loyalty, too.
When loyalty is the principal criterion on which you judge people, you will wind up being surrounded by sycophants. Or relatives.
I think we can survive this character, but there is no good reason why we should dither and find out. The Congress cannot cashier this cluck soon enough.
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