Obama Cites Military’s Many Virtues, But It’s Not a Model for Society
Max Boot 2012-01-25That was a very curious State of the Union address President Obama delivered, at least as it relates to our armed forces. Instead of beginning, as one would expect, with domestic issues, he began with a tribute to the armed forces and used that to segue to his domestic agenda. His words of praise for the armed forces were obviously heartfelt and eloquent: He cited “the courage, selflessness and teamwork of America’s armed forces. At a time when too many of our institutions have let us down, they exceed all expectations. They’re not consumed with personal ambition. They don’t obsess over their differences. They focus on the mission at hand. They work together.” To which, one can only say: Amen.
But then his remarks took a curious turn. He said: “Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed their example. Think about the America within our reach: A country that leads the world in educating its people. An America that attracts a new generation of high-tech manufacturing and high-paying jobs. A future where we’re in control of our own energy, and our security and prosperity aren’t so tied to unstable parts of the world. An economy built to last, where hard work pays off, and responsibility is rewarded.” In other words, the civilian population should emulate the military. There is something seductive in this appeal, which is why even many on the right (perhaps especially on the right) favor some form of “national service” requirement. And there is virtually universal nostalgia for the days of the Greatest Generation which won World War II and returned to build postwar America. Obama himself tapped into this nostalgic vein when he said: “We can do this. I know we can, because we’ve done it before. At the end of World War II, when another generation of heroes returned home from combat, they built the strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known. My grandfather, a veteran of Patton’s Army, got the chance to go to college on the GI Bill. My grandmother, who worked on a bomber assembly line, was part of a workforce that turned out the best products on Earth.”
But nostalgia should not mask the fact that the “Mad Men” world is not one most of us would like to live in today. It was, after all, a world where big institutions–whether big government, big media, big business or big unions–had far more power than they do today. The downside of this arrangement was captured in numerous contemporary critiques such as “The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit” and “The Organization Man” and “The Lonely Crowd” that were a touchstone for Baby Boomers rebelling against the conformism of the 1950s.
From our standpoint today, there are some good aspects of the 1950s–the hard work, the sense of common purpose–but also much that we would reject, especially the pervasive racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia, and other social attitudes–not to mention the pervasive drinking, smoking, and other bad habits. America today is far more individualistic and far more meritocratic with far less tolerance for rank prejudice and far less willingness to blindly follow the orders of rigid bureaucracies.
On the whole this is a positive development–it is what has made possible the dynamism of an information age economy symbolized by Apple’s staggering earnings. We would all be poorer–literally–if we went back to more of a top-down command economy, which is what Obama seems to be pining for. Indeed per capita income in 1950 was $1,500 (which, adjusted for inflation, works out to around $10,000 today) compared with almost $40,000 today.
Make no mistake: the military works well. But that’s because it’s comprised of volunteers with a mission–defending America. Members of the armed forces are willing to accept privations and hardships, and respond unquestioningly to orders, in a way that civilians will not and should not. Let’s temper our admiration of the military: For all its virtues, it is not a model for the rest of society.
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Obama Cites Military’s Many Virtues, But It’s Not a Model for Society
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The White House Didn’t Ignore the Russia Sanctions Law
Why won't Trump tout his record on Russia?
Noah Rothman 2018-01-30
Senator Claire McCaskill called it a “constitutional crisis.” Congressmen Raja Krishnamoorthi and Ted Lieu claimed that the president is bucking the will of Congress expressed in signed legislation. In a statement, the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s top Democrat, Eliot Engel, said the Trump administration had the opportunity to “follow the law” but balked. “They chose instead,” he insisted, “to let Russia off the hook again.”
Those are strong words—reckless words if they are misapplied. Democrats deployed them amid reports that the Trump administration would not impose new sanctions on Russian entities in accordance with a bipartisan act of Congress. Donald Trump has not earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to Russia, and the administration’s justification for holding back on sanctions is derisory. The sanctions bill itself, the administration insisted, has already served as a “deterrent” for bad actors. Nevertheless, Moscow continues its destabilizing behavior abroad and anti-democratic agitation at home.
But has the president flagrantly ignored the law and inaugurated a crisis of constitutional legitimacy, and done so to curry favor with a hostile power, as Trump’s Democratic critics have alleged? The answer won’t surprise you.
The Trump administration was required by the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act to give Congress both a classified and unclassified list of Putin allies and oligarchs that could be targeted for potential sanctions, which they did. The law also required the administration to provide a report detailing the impact of sanctions on Russia’s sovereign debt, which they did. The law provides the administration a 120-day grace period for the imposition of new sanctions on unspecified targets if the president can claim that those targets have already substantially reduced their business activities in the Russian defense and intelligence sectors. In a statement, the State Department declared “that foreign governments have abandoned planned or announced purchases of several billion dollars in Russian defense acquisitions,” therefore satisfying that requirement. The statement left open the possibility for more sanctions on Russian and non-Russian entities, but added that the State Department would not “preview” them.
Lawmakers who allege that this amounts to a “constitutional crisis” should be ashamed of themselves. Their hyperbole is wildly irresponsible. And yet, given Trump’s bizarre efforts to seek Vladimir Putin’s approval, those who dismiss the State Department’s comments are not entirely unjustified in thinking this is all obfuscation. Trump has, after all, worn his admiration for Russia and its strongman president on his sleeve. The president’s rhetoric aside, however, this administration has also demonstrated that it is perfectly comfortable adopting an aggressive posture toward Russia.
In its earliest days, the new Trump administration did seek a grand rapprochement with Russia—the third such overture by as many administrations over the last 15 years. But this latest “reset” with Russia didn’t survive the administration’s first winter. The White House did not lift Obama-era sanctions on Russia, either those tied to Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine or those linked to Russia’s intervention in the 2016 elections. A failed effort to engineer a split between Russia and its Iranian allies and the unsuccessful effort to persuade Moscow to pursue Western objectives in Syria sealed this new reset’s fate.
In the wake of this failed diplomatic offensive, the Trump administration began imposing new sanctions on Russian entities well before Congress took action. The Kremlin responded by expelling American diplomatic personnel from the Russian Federation. The Trump administration followed suit, expelling Russian diplomats and closing three U.S.-based Russian diplomatic facilities. In this period, the White House dragged its feet on implementing the new sanctions passed by Congress, but it also issued public guidance statements and listed potential targets including aviation, chemical and conventional arms manufacturers, and intelligence services even beyond what the last administration designated as targets of sanctions. These statements of purpose had the effect of curtailing commercial activity ahead of the imposition of new restrictions.
In November of last year, the Trump administration approved the sale of Patriot anti-missile systems and liquid natural gas to Poland, helping to liberate a target of Russian harassment from the threat both of kinetic force and of Moscow’s extortive energy policies. In December, the administration approved the sale of offensive arms to Ukraine, a nation that is at war with Russia and which has been asking for lethal aid since the invasions of the Donbas region and the Crimean Peninsula. That same week, the White House announced new financial and travel sanctions would be imposed on 52 government officials with Kremlin ties under the Magnitsky Act—the same anti-corruption law that the Russian-linked attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya lobbied the Trump campaign to ignore in an infamous Trump Tower meeting with campaign officials in the summer of 2016.
If the Trump administration is dedicated to selling out American sovereignty to Russia, they’re going about it in an extremely confused fashion.
And yet, you would only know any of this if you were paying close attention. The White House does not go around touting its laudably hawkish record on Russia. Perhaps administration members fear that, if they talk too loudly, the president might hear. Trump still clearly clings to his fantasy of a thaw with Russia. He continues to talk about that prospect as if it was realistic, and he rarely passes up an opportunity to praise the Russian strongman and his disgraceful record in office. If the president has engineered this stringent regime, he does not act like it.
The White House has allowed its opponents to shape public perceptions regarding its record on Russia. The Trump administration has a good case to make, but they’re not making it. They could list the ways in which they have boxed in Putin’s Russia and vastly improved on the last administration’s permissive record. The benchmark for appearing in thrall to despots in Moscow should be inking a “reset” with Russia months after Putin invaded and carved up Georgia. Similarly, outsourcing the enforcement of self-set red lines in Syria to Moscow, thus enabling an ongoing chemical genocide and setting the stage for a dangerous armed confrontation between Moscow and NATO forces in 2015, might be considered a form of naïve “collusion.” But the Trump administration isn’t making this argument.
Just as it would be blind to ignore the president’s hawkish record on Russia, it would be foolish to ignore the president’s history of obsequious toadying to Putin at the expense of American prestige. The administration has a short window to comply with the law, and the indications are that they eventually will. But this president has a narrative problem of its own making when it comes to Russia. Trump seems to think that if he admits what his administration freely concedes—that Russia interfered in the American political process, will do so again, and must be aggressively deterred from those destabilizing actions—it would sap his presidency of credibility. He has it precisely backward.
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Glibness at the Grammys
The price of myopia.
Noah Rothman 2018-01-29
The tectonic force that unearthed hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse and harassment and swept from the public square as many prominent alleged abusers has largely left the music industry unscathed. Largely, but not entirely. The music producer Russell Simmons, for example, faces claims from at least six women involving alleged abuse or assault over a quarter century. Confronting those allegations–and the fact that he was once honored by the Grammy Museum and hosted well-attended industry parties around the awards show–would be hard. It would be far easier to wear a symbolic white rose in solidarity with the victims of abuse and neglect. Guess which course last night’s Grammy attendees took?
Of course, the recording industry did not entirely miss this unique historical moment. There was speechifying. Despite the fact that the music industry’s old oaks have largely withstood the cleansing fires of this new age of candor, artists like Janelle Monáe confirmed that her business was not without its predators and victims like Kesha enjoyed earned prominence. But displays of valid indignation today only serve to emphasize how pervasive the institutional pressures that kept the preyed upon from speaking out once were. In many ways, those old pressures persist, but in ways that are visible only from a distance.
The “Me Too” movement has become about more than exposing and condemning sexual harassment and violence. It has become a movement dedicated to burying the notion that the powerful can escape censure from their peers if their public persona is agreeable enough or if they have the right politics. In that way, the Grammys failed spectacularly to meet the measure of this moment.
Undeniably, the most talked-about segment of Sunday night’s Grammys telecast was also its most ill-considered: a skit centered on the “spoken-word auditions” for the audio version of Michael Wolff’s dubious Washington tell-all, Fire and Fury. Reading from this factually-challenged account of the earliest days of the Trump White House gave recording artists an opportunity to cast aspersions on the president, but the sketch’s participants might come to regret it. The book’s author had appeared on HBO with Bill Maher on Friday where he strongly insinuated that the president was having an affair. Because this claim lacked any substantiation, he couldn’t put it in his already thinly-sourced book, which should have told everyone all they needed to know about the allegation. Wolff told viewers to seek out a specific reference in his book for clues to his riddle, and they dutifully obliged. The scavenger hunt led observes to conclude that Trump’s supposed paramour was United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Haley was compelled to spend the weekend insisting to reporters that she did not, in fact, sleep her way to the top, but was respected and valued by her colleagues in the White House based on her merit alone. She insisted that, again, Wolff got not only the headline but the basic supporting facts wrong. Haley had every right to publicly lament the politicization of the awards ceremony, particularly considering her ordeal.
The trivialization of Haley’s experience tainted this sketch, but it did not alone cast it in poor taste. It was the sketch’s payoff that should have led cooler heads to eighty-six the bit before it ever aired.
After a cavalcade of celebrities had read aloud from and riffed on Wolff’s book, the sketch reached its crescendo when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared as the final guest star. Clinton’s appearance held obvious political and comedy value, but it cheapened the night’s thematic condemnations of predatory men and their enablers.
Only 48 hours earlier, the New York Times revealed that Hillary Clinton herself intervened on behalf of a 2008 campaign staffer—her faith advisor, Burns Strider—who was accused of improper conduct involving a young woman. Strider was alleged to have repeatedly sexually harassed his subordinate and, when this came to the attention of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, she immediately took it to the candidate and recommended Strider’s dismissal. But Hillary Clinton overruled her campaign manager. Instead, she docked her faith advisor’s pay and sent him off to counseling. His accuser was reassigned. After the campaign, Strider went to work for Clinton ally, David Brock, to prepare for the former secretary of state’s 2016 bid. Strider’s career was cut short, however, when he was again accused of harassing the young female aides in his orbit.
This sketch had no higher purpose than getting under the president’s skin, which isn’t a difficult task. In the process, however, it undermined the moral authority associated with yet another industry’s efforts to get right with its past and atone for the silences that were maintained in the pre-“Me Too” era. The Grammys should have scrapped the sketch, but misjudgment on the part of these entertainers is forgivable. It’s the malpractice on Hillary Clinton’s part that is not.
It was Hillary Clinton’s complicated legacy on matters involving accusations of infidelity, imbalanced power dynamics in relations involving subordinates, and the character of Bill Clinton’s accusers that rendered her unable to make Donald Trump’s indiscretions a campaign issue. Her continued presence on the political stage compels her fellow Democrats to strike a cautious balance on the subject of sexual assault. In the process, they water down their message and come off sounding more mealy-mouthed and opportunistic than righteous. Hillary Clinton cannot be expected to exercise the discretion necessary to help her fellow Democrats move forward in the Trump era, and so it will be up to them to see what works and what doesn’t. The inconsistency on display at the Grammys did not work.
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If You Don’t Obstruct Justice, Did You Obstruct Justice?
Podcast: #MeToo and Mueller
John Podhoretz 2018-01-29Grammys. Mueller. Trump. Rosenstein. Memo. Nunes. Midterms. Polls. You know, the usual stuff. Podcast. Podhoretz. Rothman. Ahmari. Greenwald. Give a listen.
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Democrats Are Being Outmaneuvered
Flirting with incoherence.
Noah Rothman 2018-01-26
A fair scoring of the Trump presidency’s first year would have to hand 2017 to Democrats. The opposition party exploited the Trump-led GOP’s mistakes and excesses and translated them into victories both on Capitol Hill and at polling places around the country. But that was then and this is now. Democrats remain married to tactics that have not served them so well in the New Year. Democrats are not winning this moment. They don’t know it yet.
Not even the most optimistic Republican could have anticipated the reaction that markets and large employers have had to the first significant overhaul of the tax code in over 30 years. Since that bill was signed into law on December 19, firm after firm has announced its intention to share the windfall with its employees in the form of raises, bonuses, and 401(k) hikes. Manufacturers ranging from Chrysler to Apple are repatriating capital and factories they had parked overseas. Even the minimum wage is on the rise for several major employers, including Walmart and financial institutions like Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, and Bank of New York Mellon Corp.
Democrats had argued that the Republican tax code reform plan would benefit only the wealthy and, despite the strong economy and tight labor market, corporations were unlikely to reinvest their new capital. The Democratic message has not adapted along with changing conditions. They feel obliged to undermine the good news surrounding tax code reform, but they’ve gone about it in a spectacularly tone-deaf fashion.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the $1,000 bonuses that a variety of firms had provided their employees in the wake of tax code reform amount to “crumbs” and “pathetic” gifts designed to purchase cheap loyalty. Rather than invest in their employees, she added, these firms should “invest in infrastructure.” Pelosi later called these bonuses and wage hikes “cute,” but ultimately insulting to the American worker because they are not commensurate with the advantage corporate tax reform provides employers. “Some of them are getting raises, and the rest are getting crumbs,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed. When “you spread $1,000 over the course of the year,” former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz pondered, “I’m not sure that $1,000 (which is taxed, taxable) goes very for almost anyone.”
If the Democratic Party is trying to convince voters that the GOP is detached from the concerns of average Americans, demonstrating you have no idea how far $1,000 goes is a bad way to go about it. For a family making the median household income (as of September of last year), $1,000 is more than 20 percent of their monthly income.
Democrats might hope to trade on lingering antipathy toward the tax bill they successfully fomented in the run-up to its passage, but the narrative that worked in December is going to start yielding diminishing returns. The headlines speak for themselves; even just the anticipatory effects of this tax bill are not being enjoyed exclusively by the wealthy. The longer Democrats ask voters to believe them over their lying eyes, the more they will find that they are only preaching to the converted.
Similarly, the GOP has boxed the Democratic Party in on the issue of immigration reform.
On Thursday night, the White House revealed the outlines of what amounts to a skinny immigration reform package. The one-page memo outlined a plan to provide a pathway to citizenship not just for the roughly 700,000 beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which expires in March, but some 1.8 million DACA-eligible immigrants—approximately half the estimated population of immigrants who were taken into the U.S. as minors. In exchange, the White House requested $25 billion for security at both the Mexican and Canadian borders. Furthermore, the White House requested curbs on family migration, limiting the extended family that these formerly illegal immigrants could bring with them into the U.S.
This is a reasonable initial offer. The administration, having just secured an unambiguous victory over Democrats following a failed legislative gambit that resulted in a brief government shutdown, could have pressed their luck. Instead, the White House barely budged off its initial request for border security funding. Meanwhile, the administration made a big step toward resolving the status of nearly two million illegal immigrants, which has enraged some in the president’s immigration-hawk base. In fact, the White House reportedly had a difficult time trying to sell immigration restrictionists on the plan. “Lots of them hate the proposal,” Axios reporter Jonathan Swan related. Mark Krikorian, the executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, summed up his fellow hawks’ thoughts succinctly: “Time to start burning your #MAGA hats.”
But for all the administration’s overtures toward Democrats, the responses have been hyperbolic and inflexible. Senator Dick Durbin said Trump had taken DREAMers “hostage” and was on a “crusade to tear families apart.” “The White House is using Dreamers to mask their underlying xenophobic, isolationist, and un-American policies,” wrote Democratic Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham. Pelosi called Trump’s proposed restrictions on extended family unification represent “an unmistakable campaign to make America white again,” which aligned with sentiments in the liberal grassroots. A statement by the activist organization United We Dream called Trump’s immigration proposal “a white supremacist ransom note.”
This means Democrats are again handing the keys over to the party’s activist base just days after the party’s activists drove them into a ditch. Democrats spent months insisting that they wanted a “clean” bill to restore long-term funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). When they got it, they voted against it—sacrificing their claims on CHIP in the process. Now, the White House has made a good faith attempt to find common ground on DACA, only to be called racist for the effort. This is a remarkably short-sighted and parochial strategy.
By insisting that $1,000 constitute “crumbs” and giving citizenship to nearly 2 million illegal residents is racist, Democrats are flirting with utter incoherence. These claims might enliven their base, but they risk turning off every other sentient voter capable of an objective thought. Moreover, unreasonable polemics have a habit of activating the opposing side’s partisans at a time when reliable Republican voters have been staying away from the polls. The risks of the Democratic Party’s present course seem to outweigh the rewards.
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Integrity Matters
Conspiracies kill credibility.
Noah Rothman 2018-01-25
For Republicans, the Trump presidency has been one long test of faith. The truest believers in Trumpism are compelled to demonstrate their commitment to the cause by publicly defending obvious falsehoods with as much zeal as they can muster.
Thus, former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer endorsed the claim that Trump drew “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration,” an assertion he now regrets defending. Thus Trump campaign officials contended that crime in America is trending up, not down, contrary to federal statistics, and then credited Trump for ending a crime wave that never existed. Thus, the administration wasted federal resources establishing a legally dubious commission designed to ferret out the millions of illegal voters who supposedly robbed the president of a popular vote victory, only to quietly dissolve under the weight of its own contradictions. Thus, Trump’s fans in conservative media latched onto the odious theory that a 27-year-old DNC staffer’s tragic murder was, in fact, a political assassination; payback over his alleged role in leaking files to WikiLeaks, which conveniently absolved Russia of culpability for the hacking of Democratic targets in 2016.
This was all so much bunk, but these claims were based on grains of truth. Of course, violent crime remains a problem, particularly in the nation’s gang-plagued urban centers, and violent crime has recently been on the rise. Voter fraud is not a myth, Democratic claims to the contrary notwithstanding. The WikiLeaks hacks and Russian active measures targeting U.S. institutions is not a partisan issue; Republicans, too, were reportedly victims of cyber espionage by Russian sources. These are real issues that desperately need sober and serious advocates who command enough authority to be heard over the partisan din. Sadly, the president seems to demand that his allies sacrifice their credibility amid conspicuous displays of loyalty. This administration would rather have unflinching soldiers on its side than accuracy and trustworthiness.
Of all the scandalous sacrifices of authority in the Trump era, “text-gate” might be the worst of the lot, if only because of the collateral damage it has wrought. In the frenetic effort to cast a preemptive veneer of doubt over whatever Robert Mueller’s probe may find, Trump’s advocates across the Republican political spectrum grasped onto the December revelation that a member of that probe—a ranking official formerly with the FBI’s counter-espionage unit—had shared anti-Trump text messages with his mistress. Upon that discovery, Agent Peter Strzok was reassigned from the Mueller probe and dumped into the FBI’s purgatorial human resources department to languish. Since he served on the probe for fewer than two full months, it is likely that Strzok’s influence was limited. Still, the discovery of an anti-Trump voice in the independent investigation provided the probe’s critics with a way to discredit the investigation, and many jumped at the chance.
The discovery that thousands of text messages between December 2016 and May 2017 had gone missing added a tantalizing element of mystery to the nefarious allegations of bias in the Mueller probe. Was the entire Bureau in on this operation? What could have been said? After all, the suspect text messages that hadn’t been deleted were seriously disquieting. In 2016, Strzok texted his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, about his intention to have an “insurance policy” in the event that Trump won the White House. Later, it was revealed that Page stated her intention to form a “secret society,” presumably, of like minds.
Senator Ron Johnson alleged that this society was “holding secret meetings off-site,” according to an informant. Rep. Bob Goodlatte insisted that the texts “illustrate a conspiracy on the part of some people” to undermine the president. “These are the elements of a palace coup that was underway to disrupt President Trump,” claimed Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz.
You didn’t have to be a professional cynic to think that it was unlikely for FBI counter-intelligence operatives to be plotting the sabotage of a presidency on their government-issued cell phones. A review of all the text messages Strzok sent, including the mitigating material, further undercut the idea that he was an anti-Trump saboteur wrecking the administration from within. But lawmakers threw caution to the breeze, and they surely regret it today. When ABC News discovered the infamous “secret society” text, it was exposed as entirely banal. Republicans like Johnson have since backed off the claim that Strzok and his mistress were engaging in anything other than playful bluster.
This was a credibility sapping debacle, and no one should be more livid at the Republicans who sacrificed their honor to it than those who believe in limited and good governance. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes allowed himself to be used last year by the White House to corroborate the president’s baseless claim that he was personally spied upon by Obama-era law enforcement officials. As a result, he sacrificed his credibility and was forced to recuse himself from Russia-related investigations. But there was a FISA warrant granted to investigate the Trump campaign, and no one knows the extent to which flimsy and political evidence was used to grant that warrant. Trump administration officials were swept up in that surveillance, and subsequently “unmasked” by unknown sources when the transcript of that reconnaissance was improperly related to journalists. That, too, is an abuse of power about which only Republicans seem to care. These are serious causes that require equally serious advocates. Unfortunately, those advocates are all busy throwing their integrity away so that Trump can win a news cycle or two.
Impugning law enforcement professionals in service to a political narrative is unconscionable. Republicans should be equally frustrated by the willingness with which their allies are so willingly discrediting themselves. If they don’t start vocally demanding better, Republicans will soon find themselves bereft of credible advocates. They’ll have no one to blame but themselves for that condition, of course, but that should prove no obstacle to finding a scapegoat somewhere.
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