So our Mountebank-in-Chief, Donald Trump, has finally fired James Comey. Good riddance. I’ll shed no tears for our vain Inspector Javert. But once again Trump, the Master of the Self-Inflicted Wound, has done the impossible. In a single stroke, he has transformed the almost universally loathed Comey into a sympathetic, if not heroic, figure.

Trump, who once fired people for a living on TV, bungled the termination of the director of the FBI director so badly that he also succeeded in reigniting a scandal that had started to cool to a slow simmer–and, not incidentally, may have committed the impeachable offense of “obstruction of justice,” motivated  primarily by personal pique. (See Article One for the Impeachment of Richard Nixon.)

One might be tempted, like Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss, to assess the fallout from Trump’s slow-motion purge of the prosecutorial state (Sally Yates, Preet Bharara and Comey) as the best of all possible worlds: Comey is gone, the Department of Justice is implicated, the FBI is internally splintered and Trump is wounded, perhaps mortally.

Yes, all very good–except, naturally, for the intervention of the liberals, who have adopted Comey as a martyr in their Russian witch hunt and have started praising the FBI–an agency literally engineered to prosecute (if not invent) the Red Scare–as a “beacon of integrity and independence.” A few minutes after the news broke, even Michael Moore panted: “COMEY FIRED! Dirty, corrupt things afoot.”

Comey is a self-righteous prude, whose preening sense of rectitude is more than “mildly nauseating.” It’s not surprising he is despised by many on his staff, who feel Comey sucked up all the oxygen in the dark chambers of the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Comey’s awful tenure at the FBI, though brief, was cruelly destructive to basic liberties. Comey’s counter-terrorism record consists largely of having his FBI agents fabricate plots and then entice mentally disturbed misfits, druggies and loners to join them.

Let us also recall that James Comey was one of the leading propagandists for the phony War on Cops, a smokescreen to hide the carnage inflicted by the police’s pitiless war on black street kids. This spring Comey ordered the FBI’s terrorism task force to investigate Standing Rock protesters. How can you repress your revulsion to lavish praise on such a man?