By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, September 09, 2016
There was a time when one of the worst sins you could
commit on the American Right was to buy into “false moral equivalence.”
During the Cold War, this usually meant saying that we
were no better than the Soviet Union. For example, Democratic Senator William
J. Fulbright — Bill Clinton’s mentor — said of the Soviet Union in 1971, “Were
it not for the fact that they are Communists — and therefore ‘bad’ people —
while we are Americans — and therefore ‘good’ people — our policies would be
nearly indistinguishable.”
My old boss William F. Buckley famously had the best
retort to this kind of myopic asininity. “To say that the CIA and the KGB
engage in similar practices is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes
an old lady into the path of a hurtling bus is not to be distinguished from the
man who pushes an old lady out of the path of a hurtling bus: on the grounds
that, after all, in both cases someone is pushing old ladies around.”
After the Cold War, the false-moral-equivalence arguments
didn’t stop; they simply mutated to fit the times. The isolated abuses at Abu
Ghraib prison in Iraq were expanded into an indictment of America itself.
“Shamefully,” Senator Ted Kennedy declared in 2005, “we now learn that Saddam’s
torture chambers reopened under new management: U.S. management.” Senator Dick
Durbin claimed American policies were indistinguishable from those of the
Nazis, the Soviets, and Pol Pot. Amnesty International dubbed the prison at
Guantanamo Bay “the Gulag of our time.”
The problem with this sort of rhetoric should be obvious;
however bad Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay may be in your eyes, logic and facts
can’t make them the moral equivalents of genocidal mass slaughter (in Saddam’s
Iraq, Nazi Germany, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or the Soviet Union). Nor is locking up
terrorists and enemy combatants anything like imprisonment — or summary
execution — of dissidents, intellectuals, and other civilians.
Last year, President Barack Obama went for a personal
best in the worst moral equivalence Olympics. At a National Prayer Breakfast,
he argued that those who condemn the tactics of the Islamic State — the
beheadings, the slavery, the mass rapes, burying people alive, and so forth —
must understand that Christians did some very bad things ten centuries ago
during the Crusades. So let’s not “get on our high horse” about all that.
Conservatives, including yours truly, ran to their
respective rhetorical garages to get as many brickbats, crowbars, and
sledgehammers as necessary to demolish that specious nonsense.
So it’s interesting to see how conservatives have been
responding to the Republican nominee’s own adventures in moral equivalence.
Last December in an interview with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, Donald Trump was
asked about his sometimes lavish praise of Vladimir Putin.
Scarborough noted that Putin “kills journalists,
political opponents, and invades countries. Obviously that would be a concern,
would it not?”
“He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader,”
Trump replied. “Unlike what we have in this country.”
Scarborough persisted: “But again: He kills journalists
that don’t agree with him.”
Trump’s answer: “I think our country does plenty of
killing, also, Joe, so, you know.”
More than nine months later — a suitable period to
rethink one’s absurd and ridiculous position, one might think — Trump was asked
again about his so-called bromance with the Russian autocrat. In a
“Commander-in-Chief forum,” NBC’s Matt Lauer confronted Trump with some of his
past quotes about Putin, including Trump’s claim that, “in terms of leadership,
he’s getting an A, our president is not doing so well.”
When Lauer ran through just a few of Putin’s offenses,
including his alleged involvement in the hacking of the Democratic party’s
computers, Trump responded: “Well, nobody knows that for a fact. But do you
want me to start naming some of the things that President Obama does at the
same time?”
I take a backseat to no one as a critic of Barack Obama,
but this is repugnant. Barack Obama has done some terrible, foolish, and
deplorable things as president. But all of his transgressions are measured
against the standards of our constitutional system and our political culture.
For instance, in 2009, the Obama Justice Department outrageously monitored the
phone calls and e-mails of my Fox News colleague James Rosen. In order to get
the warrants, they hilariously named Rosen a “criminal co-conspirator” of one
of his sources. That’s really bad. But it is not the moral equivalent of having
Rosen gunned down in the street.
That Donald Trump cannot see such distinctions is no
longer shocking. That many of his conservative supporters can’t either grows
less shocking by the day.
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