RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Those of us of a certain age were brought up in a time when spiteful words were common, unpleasant to endure, but not “harmful.” In those long-past days, if we came home in tears we were told to ignore what words may have hurt our pride or our sensibilities. Today, “harmful” words create victims, especially if directed at women, people of color, gays or those of the Muslim faith, and are deemed “harmful;” perpetrators must be punished. This attitude is prevalent in educational institutions, the media, the entertainment industry and among progressive politicians. The prohibition of uncomfortable remarks and dissenting opinions is reminiscent of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia. It brings to mind a letter from E.B. White written to the New York Herald Tribune in 1947. The Tribune had defended the movie industry for requiring its employees to state their political beliefs: “…I can only assume that your editorial writer, in a hurry to get home for Thanksgiving, tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.” We are at the same point today, only now it is the Left doing the blacklisting, not the Right. 

This is not to suggest that words cannot have effect. They can and they do. We find solace in words from the Bible, beauty in poetry from Keats and Shelley, and meaning in writings from Shakespeare to Hemingway. “The pen is mightier than the sword” is a metonymic adage coined by the English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839. In speeches, Thomas Paine rallied Americans for independence. Adolph Hitler used the power of his voice to incite hatred of Jews, while Churchill’s speeches held a nation together as it fought alone against the tyranny of Nazism for over a year. Saul Alinsky was a master wordsmith. In his 1971 Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals, a book that influenced Barack Obama as a community organizer in the early 1990s and later as a politician, Alinsky emphasized that ridicule was man’s most effective weapon. Political rallies are used to gin up enthusiasm. But just as we should ignore the words used in political rallies for those we support, we should not take seriously those used in rallies for those we oppose.

Russiagate prober Robert Mueller testified yesterday on Capitol Hill for a total of five hours. Or perhaps he testified twice, which would be a reasonable assumption in the light of two diametrically opposed accounts of his performance.

Were you to invest faith in the report of ABC Washington bureau veteran Zoe Daniels, the Russiagate inquisitor’s turn at the microphone was a creditable performance. Here’s a little taste of how she saw the quizzing:

Democrats spent weeks practising for that exact scenario and strategically loaded their questions with all the phrases they needed.

# Cedric Richmond: “So, it’s fair to say the President tried to protect himself by asking staff to falsify records relevant to an ongoing investigation?”

# Hakeem Jeffries: “Donald Trump told [former White House counsel] Don McGahn that Mueller has to go. True?”

# Mike Quigley: Do any of Trump’s quotes about Wikileaks disturb you?

Mr Mueller answered in the affirmative for all those questions (and added “problematic is an understatement” for the last one). Democrats, surely, cheered internally.

So Mueller acquitted himself with aplomb? Not according to The Federalist‘s David Harsanyi, whose column touches on a number of matters concerning bias and prosecutorial incuriosity that somehow escaped Ms Daniels’ notice. Harsanyi writes:

[Mueller was asked] if he could cite a single example besides Donald Trump where the DOJ “determined that an investigated person was not exonerated because their innocence was not conclusively determined.” Mueller responded: “I cannot, but this is a unique situation.”

After lecturing everyone about how justice must be meted out equally to all Americans, we now hear that rules are malleable if we’re talking about Donald Trump. As [was] also pointed out, Trump should not be above the law, but he should not be below it, either.