https://www.google.com/amp/s/nypost...ts-are-helping-putin-destabilize-america/amp/
Last week, The Washington Post published an op-ed headlined “It’s not wrong to compare Trump’s America to the Holocaust.” As with similar examples of this genre, it’s a sickening display of moral relativism that belittles the suffering and murder of millions in the service of some shortsighted and crass partisan fearmongering.
Elsewhere, Politico published an opinion piece headlined “Putin’s Attack on the U.S. Is Our Pearl Harbor,” which demeaned the sacrifice of American service members by likening a military attack on American soil that brought us into the bloodiest war mankind has ever experienced to phishing.
On MSNBC, where illiterate histrionic analogies litter coverage every day, a contributor compared President Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin to Pearl Harbor and Kristallnacht, just to be safe. Social media are teeming with similar hyperbole — “treason,” “traitor,” etc. — and not just from anonymous trolls.
Defenders of this hyperbole often claim they’re not making an exact equivalence to the lives lost but rather speaking to the intent of all those attackers. All such attacks, they say, are intended to destabilize “our democracy.”
Well, yes. But one aspect of similarity doesn’t make the events comparable. It’d be like saying Iran’s spying on the US — which resulted in our military technology being sold to China — was comparable to 9/11 because both sets of attackers intended to harm our democracy. If this were so, it’d be treasonous to make peace with these nations and rational to wage war.
Russia attempted to meddle in our affairs, and there should be retribution and condemnation for those efforts. But our electoral system was not undermined. The reaction to those hacking efforts, on the other hand, does no favors to democracy, and it certainly does no favors to Democrats, who are suddenly horrified by the Putin threat.
You may remember how liberals lectured Americans after 9/11 about appropriate ways to deal with terrorists. For the most part, it amounted to saying, “Don’t kill them! That’s exactly what they want!”
Well, it’s certain that this is what Putin wants. Few things destabilize democracy more than imbuing a foreign strongman from a second-rate power with the imaginary capability of deciding our elections.
Nor is Trump’s ham-fisted, misguided and transparent Putin-coddling tantamount to sedition. For a number of reasons — including an inability or refusal to make any distinction between Russian “meddling” and attacks on the legitimacy of his election, a trait shared by many of Trump’s detractors — the president is a fan of Putin, even though his administration has been tougher on Russia in many respects than the previous ones.
That doesn’t make his foreign policy an act of treason, any more than it was treason for Barack Obama to coddle Iran — even though the former president sided with Iran (and Hezbollah) over US law enforcement. Democrats’ hysterics make it impossible for many people to even concede that they have a point to make.
Since Trump met with Putin in Helsinki, many Republicans, including the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader, have come out in support of the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian meddling, weakening the argument that the GOP always walks in lockstep behind the president.
There could even have been some consensus in Washington over how to move forward. Instead, we had elected Democrats spinning melodramatic political fairy tales about the Russkies controlling the GOP, about the need to start a coup and about the presence of kompromat. Last week, an army of blue checkmarks was retweeting and oohing and aahing over an erroneous report about how a Russian spy had infiltrated the Oval Office, simply because the woman in question looked vaguely similar to an accused spy.
The Trump news conference with Putin was unhinged. But so is Democrats’ reaction to it.
David Harsanyi is the author of the forthcoming “First Freedom: A Ride Through America’s Enduring History With the Gun, From the Revolution to Today.”
Last week, The Washington Post published an op-ed headlined “It’s not wrong to compare Trump’s America to the Holocaust.” As with similar examples of this genre, it’s a sickening display of moral relativism that belittles the suffering and murder of millions in the service of some shortsighted and crass partisan fearmongering.
Elsewhere, Politico published an opinion piece headlined “Putin’s Attack on the U.S. Is Our Pearl Harbor,” which demeaned the sacrifice of American service members by likening a military attack on American soil that brought us into the bloodiest war mankind has ever experienced to phishing.
On MSNBC, where illiterate histrionic analogies litter coverage every day, a contributor compared President Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin to Pearl Harbor and Kristallnacht, just to be safe. Social media are teeming with similar hyperbole — “treason,” “traitor,” etc. — and not just from anonymous trolls.
Defenders of this hyperbole often claim they’re not making an exact equivalence to the lives lost but rather speaking to the intent of all those attackers. All such attacks, they say, are intended to destabilize “our democracy.”
Well, yes. But one aspect of similarity doesn’t make the events comparable. It’d be like saying Iran’s spying on the US — which resulted in our military technology being sold to China — was comparable to 9/11 because both sets of attackers intended to harm our democracy. If this were so, it’d be treasonous to make peace with these nations and rational to wage war.
Russia attempted to meddle in our affairs, and there should be retribution and condemnation for those efforts. But our electoral system was not undermined. The reaction to those hacking efforts, on the other hand, does no favors to democracy, and it certainly does no favors to Democrats, who are suddenly horrified by the Putin threat.
You may remember how liberals lectured Americans after 9/11 about appropriate ways to deal with terrorists. For the most part, it amounted to saying, “Don’t kill them! That’s exactly what they want!”
Well, it’s certain that this is what Putin wants. Few things destabilize democracy more than imbuing a foreign strongman from a second-rate power with the imaginary capability of deciding our elections.
Nor is Trump’s ham-fisted, misguided and transparent Putin-coddling tantamount to sedition. For a number of reasons — including an inability or refusal to make any distinction between Russian “meddling” and attacks on the legitimacy of his election, a trait shared by many of Trump’s detractors — the president is a fan of Putin, even though his administration has been tougher on Russia in many respects than the previous ones.
That doesn’t make his foreign policy an act of treason, any more than it was treason for Barack Obama to coddle Iran — even though the former president sided with Iran (and Hezbollah) over US law enforcement. Democrats’ hysterics make it impossible for many people to even concede that they have a point to make.
Since Trump met with Putin in Helsinki, many Republicans, including the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader, have come out in support of the intelligence community’s assessment of Russian meddling, weakening the argument that the GOP always walks in lockstep behind the president.
There could even have been some consensus in Washington over how to move forward. Instead, we had elected Democrats spinning melodramatic political fairy tales about the Russkies controlling the GOP, about the need to start a coup and about the presence of kompromat. Last week, an army of blue checkmarks was retweeting and oohing and aahing over an erroneous report about how a Russian spy had infiltrated the Oval Office, simply because the woman in question looked vaguely similar to an accused spy.
The Trump news conference with Putin was unhinged. But so is Democrats’ reaction to it.
David Harsanyi is the author of the forthcoming “First Freedom: A Ride Through America’s Enduring History With the Gun, From the Revolution to Today.”
