Category Archives: War Commentary

Education, History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary, War Commentary

Stop Trivializing Naziism

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Thoughts from David Harsanyi:

It’s difficult to take this spurious reasoning seriously, but simply because you think you detect some trace parallels between what Nazis engaged in and contemporary politics doesn’t make them comparable in any important way. The Nazis adopted a bunch of socialist policies, but that doesn’t mean Bernie Sanders is a would-be Himmler.

Admittedly, there is huge space in-between zero tolerance and lawlessness at the border. But none of the positions that have been taken in American political discourse so far portends the Fourth Reich. Switzerland and Japan, to name just two liberal democracies, have far stricter immigration laws than the United States, and neither is on the cusp of fascism. Simply because the arbitrary number of allowable immigrants you’ve come up with differs from that of your political opponent doesn’t make that person a budding sociopath.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Mueller Investigation

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Michael Mukasey: “It’s time to end it.”

Yes, but we also need to properly investigate what happened with the Obama administration, and see that justice is done. Though perhaps Horowitz’s report will have the whole story.

[Update a few minutes later]

(Democrat pollster for Bill Clinton during his impeachment) Mark Penn agrees. He’s been on Fox News saying this for a while.

[Update late morning]

The hunter becomes the hunted:

The current conflict in Washington, though dismaying, is at least much more comforting than the condition where everyone sings each other’s praises. The whole purpose of oversight, checks, and balances is to avoid the formation of an absorbing Markov transition — a kind of political Hotel California — which you can enter but never leave.

Avoiding a crisis depends on not crossing certain lines and concealing that fact if it has occurred. That has now gone by the board. When a system is undeniably confronted with deceitful lawlessness it is like finding the dealer was cheating at cards. Trump, by officially demanding an answer into whether the previous administration engaged in political spying, is effectively accusing them of cheating at cards. As everybody knows, once you ask this question at a table, the surface game stops and a deeper game begins. Suddenly the little cardboard rectangles don’t matter anymore.

Stay tuned.

[Afternoon update]

I suppose I shouldn’t be, but I’m kind of gobsmacked at the number of people on Twitter, many of whom purport to be journalists, claiming that the Justice Department is “independent of the executive branch.”