Seriously, how do you fight a bully?

"Donald Trump is contagious. He turns everyone he touches into Donald Trump. Now he has done it to James B. Comey."

So saith Karen Tumulty in a Washington Post column recently, but so have tons of others--many of them card-carrying liberals. They all look a little askance at Comey's getting down-and-dirty with the Duke of Down-and-Dirty. They all wish he'd taken the high road--you know, Michelle Obama's old campaign slogan: "They take the low road, we take the high road."

They wish Comey had done without references to a pee tape and the size of the man's hands, not to mention his talking about Trump's weird hair, his pink saddlebags, and strange orange aura. Let it alone, lots of libs have been saying. It would be a better book without the mud.

Sure. Tell that to Jeb Bush. Tell that to 18 Republican primary candidates the wild man wiped out last year in a tempest of trash talk. Tell that to Hillary, who once claimed Trump's kids were really nice people. Tell you what--tell that to your kids when they get flattened every other recess by some fat schoolyard bully. Just turn the other cheek. Sure. Let him run all over you.

Here's Frank Bruni, from the New York Times, a couple days ago:

James Comey’s book is titled “A Higher Loyalty,” but it surrenders the higher ground, at least partly. To watch him promote it is to see him descend.

Not to President Donald Trump’s level — that’s a long way down. But Comey is playing Trump’s game, on Trump’s terms. And in that sense, he has let the president get the better of him. 

How, pray tell, do you grab a pig? Do you wear fine deerskin gloves, or do you hop into the pen? Even the man's loyalists know he's a bully. How does anyone deal with bullies?

Liberal criticism of James Comey has roots. The splendid October surprise he gave Trump just two weeks before the November election was like none other in American history. We're reopening the case against Hillary Clinton, he told the country, at the same time the Russkies were Facebooking her demise (two of my FB friends re-sent stories about Hillary's pizza palace child porn ring.) Comey told the American people the FBI found a thousand Hillary emails on the laptop of Anthony Weiner (it's  difficult to keep your chin on the curb these days, isn't it?). BTW, that's Anthony Weiner whose wife is a known terrorist.

Twice last weekend, Trump called Comey a "sleaze ball," even tweeting that Comey should be in jail (who can forget "lock her up!"). How do you fight fire out here on the open prairie? You light your own.

But all of those anti-Trump voices may be right. Maybe Comey shouldn't have mentioned the pee tape at all, not even brought it up.

Maybe fighting Trump requires people who, like the President, hung out at places like the Playboy mansion with his old buddy Hefner, people who make a good living by turning out porn, people who get paid top dollar to be fix up the rich guy's messes. Maybe they're the best ones to take on the bully.

Last week, ex-bunny Karen McDougal won her day in court. Look for her story to appear somewhere soon--and what she scored with the billionaire President is a whole lot more than the one-night fling the Donald had with Stormy the porn queen. Not that we need more sleaze.

What it takes to fight a bully may well be another one, or two, or fifteen--in this case, all of them women. "Liars," he calls them--everyone of them. What everyone knows is that not all of them are. 

We'd all be smart to keep your hats and boots on through the next three years because far more mud will be flung. Just look what he's done to the word evangelical. 

We've got both feet in the Trump era now, and it's only just begun.