William Webster's obit and his 101 years on the planet are handy reminders that seeing the Federal Bureau of Investigation in a state of general fuck-upped-ness is nothing new.
When Director Webster took over in 1978, the FBI was still trying to recover from the half-century of endless abuses committed by that closeted freak, J. Edgar Hoover. Then came Iran-Contra (thanks, Ronald Reagan), followed quickly by the government's complete miss on the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Not to mention all those spies who had been sharing secrets with Moscow. What a mess.
This isn't to say, of course, that the FBI under the cretinous Kash Patel is any better (or the CIA under John Ratcliffe, for that matter). In fact, with only seven months gone in Benedict Donald 2.0, we may learn of even worse scurrility in the years to come. Still, it's helpful to be able to place the Trumpsters in some historical context. Things at the bureau are terrible now, but they've certainly been terrible there before.
One note of caution, though: There were guardrails in place 40-plus years ago that are either gone or very shaky today. We have a supine Congress and a mostly compliant press, so maybe Patel will get away with stuff that William Webster wouldn't have tolerated for a moment — like, say, helping to bury L'Affaire Epstein. We cats HISS.
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