Did you know that Nikki Haley’s defense of Donald Trump contains a significant logical contradiction? Did you know that there are good reasons for rejecting the impeachment of Donald Trump, but these same reasons also argue against his reelection? Did you know that Donald Trump’s and Barack Obama’s policies towards Ukraine, while different from one another, are similar in that both differ from the policy advocated by Marie Yovanovitch?
Well, it’s true, and it’s also true that these and other moral and political arcana are easily available and readily found in the recent posts of Ramesh Ponnuru, Eli Lake, and Ross Douthat, respectively. Because these gentlemen, though they can’t ignore Donald Trump’s grotesque moral unfitness for office—any office—completely, would much prefer not to have to comment on that fact directly. And so they stand, these masters of politico-logical conundra, like little boys staring at their shoes while dad proceeds first to take a dump on the carpet and then rape the upstairs maid. Anyone for tennis?
Afterwords
Ross Douthat’s column contains the unique defect of being inaccurate as well as dishonest. It’s “arguable” (because I have argued it) that the Obama administration’s policy towards Ukraine was far too confrontational, determined to pull that country into the orbit of western Europe and away from Russia. Since Ukraine (at that time) possessed the Crimean peninsula, Russia’s outlet to the Mediterranean, its “loss’ would be unacceptable to Russia. Obama should have known that, but he let Hillary Clinton and the rest of the noble Wilsonians in the State Department push a compulsively confrontational policy in Eastern Europe, leading us, and Eastern Europe, to the continuing disaster we face today.
