Is it too late for sixty or seventy million american voters to write in Joe Biden for President? Probably. So, we’re stuck where we began, with a choice between a spoiled, rich boy, egomaniacal, ill-informed demagogue or an ambitious, secretive, suspicious, self-righteous, self-serving, corporate lawyer and bureaucrat

At least as we rounded the turn for home it looked, for one brief, shining moment, like both candidates were going to address issues vexing the voters for the final ten days. Rather than keep up the endless smears and character assassinations of the last year, they were going to talk about how to get healthcare to Americans who need it, jobs that pay a living wage, security in a splintering, disorderly world, and a future worth having for the next generation.

But no. The high road lasted about a day and then the latest campaign-trailside bombs exploded, courtesy of the usual unsavory cast of supporting characters we have become accustomed to. First came Julian Assange, the anarchist fugitive from justice sought to answer charges of espionage and rape. He released more grist for the Republicans’s mill. It was provided by the Russian capo di tutti capi, Vladimir Putin who fears Hillary Clinton in the White House would be bad for his criminal enterprises. To everyone but his fan, Donald Trump, that sounds like a reason to favor Hillary.

In fact, the latest stolen documents were pretty thin gruel. They showed Clinton campaign insiders bickering and revealed that the Clinton Foundation was funded by rich people seeking tax breaks, ego-gratification, and proximity to power. Some seemed to be out for more tangible benefits, but evidence that they received it has failed to materialize. And at least the Clinton Foundation does actually good works, unlike Trump’s which appears to be a con game in which he takes money for charity and gives it to his own enterprises.

Yes, the Clinton’s who came from modest beginnings have feathered their own nests — doing well while doing good as he saying goes. Mostly by giving speeches at absurd prices to business weasels seeking an edge. That is, Republicans. But that used to be regarded as the American Way. It is a bit absurd to damn them as unusual for exploiting a rigged system. What holder of high office hasn’t come out of Washington vastly richer than they came in, with the possible exceptions of Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter?

In this regard, the financial lives of Reagan and Nixon make instructive reading. And multimillionaire dynasties like the Bush, Romney, and Trump families inhabit a dense generations-long web of mutually enriching relationships and connections that are only characterized as corrupt in parvenus like the Clintons.

In any case the latest details about the Clinton Foundation were only hors d’oeuvres. The main course was served up by FBI director Comey who dropped a poison apple into the final week of the election.

It turns out a computer used by both the endlessly humiliated Huma Abedin and her creepy sex criminal husband Anthony Weiner was confiscated by the FBI in pursuit of evidence of Weiner’s latest trolling for underage prey. Lo and behold, some of Abedin’s emails were also on the device, lurking among the Weiner porn.

Maybe some of them would turn out to be to or from Hillary. Maybe they would contain classified material. Maybe they would show more of what Comey called reckless, careless, non-prosecutable poor judgement in handling official secrets. Maybe Hillary would be revealed to have committed treason, personally killed the ambassador in Benghazi, smothered Antonin Scalia in bed. Or maybe they would prove to contain nothing but boring office communiqués.

The fact is, so far no one knows what if anything is contained in these emails or how many of them there are. No matter. Comey was urged by Clinton haters in the FBI to reveal their discovery. He was simultaneously told by his superiors at the Justice Department to do no such thing, to follow protocol and investigate quietly until evidence of wrong-doing, if any, was found. And then to refer it to prosecutors for a decision about how to proceed. He was told further that longstanding rules forbade actions that might muddy the waters of an electoral campaign in its final weeks, particularly with an announcement of vague possibilities and no actual facts.

As all the world now knows, Comey did the opposite. It turns out he is known in the bureau for his moral vanity, for his confidence that he knows best, even when many advisors tell him he’s wrong and counsel a different course, as they did when he galloped off to Capitol Hill to shoot off his mouth last summer after finding nothing in Hillary’s email behavior to prosecute.

Not content with that, he felt the punctilious need to express his personal discomfort with the laxity at the State Department, its failure to toe the line when handling classified material. In this latest case he is said to have worried if he didn’t announce more Clinton emails might have been found on the Weiner laptop, leakers in his own shop would have blurted it out.

But this is ironic in light of the fact that the subject he is so finicky about is secrecy. It looks like the FBI director and those who report to him are all incapable of keeping quiet when they are in the middle of investigations that, if nothing damning is found, can unnecessarily damage reputations and, in this case, change the course of history. Who’s careless now, who can’t be trusted to keep a secret?

And, of course, the inevitable has happened. Trump is slouching toward election day, baying that unread emails of unknown content on a pervert’s laptop are worse than Watergate, the end of civilization as we know it, a part of a vast, left-wing plot to allow Chinese to steal jobs from coal miners in West Virginia. And only Putin, Julian Assange and the Alt-Right are happy. Where’s Biden when you need him? Or perhaps we should all write in Michelle. I bet she can keep a secret, and could teach Trump a really painful lesson behind the gym.