RUTHFULLY YOURS

Double standards are a way of life in Washington, but they can still manage to take you aback. Witness the different standards applied to the recent punishments of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and former Trump National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired Mr. McCabe on March 16, acting on the recommendation of career employees in the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility. That followed Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s finding that Mr. McCabe made an unauthorized disclosure to the media about the Hillary Clinton server investigation, but more importantly lacked candor under oath with internal investigators.

Democrats and various media voices described the McCabe firing as vindictive, because it disqualified the former agency No. 2 for early retirement benefits and came amid Donald Trump’s crass attacks on Mr. McCabe.

On Friday Mr. McCabe defended his conduct in the Washington Post. “Amid the chaos that surrounded me,” Mr. McCabe wrote, “I answered questions as completely and accurately as I could. And when I realized that some of my answers were not fully accurate or may have been misunderstood, I took the initiative to correct them.” He says he “may well have been confused and distracted.”

The country will have to wait for Inspector General Horowitz’s report to judge this claim. What we do know is that federal law has a policy of zero tolerance toward anyone who makes false statements to the FBI—a felony charge with up to a five-year prison sentence. Presumably the critics would have preferred the Attorney General to hold Mr. McCabe to a lower standard than that for average citizens.

Compare the conventional wisdom after the McCabe firing to its efficient disposal of Michael Flynn. In January 2017, Mr. Flynn denied to the FBI that he had discussed Obama-era sanctions with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak prior to Mr. Trump’s inauguration. As incoming National Security Adviser, Mr. Flynn would have known the government was monitoring Mr. Kislyak’s phone, which makes it unlikely he’d intentionally lie.

He agreed to talk to the FBI’s agents with no counsel present. And in March 2017 former FBI Director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee that the two agents who interviewed Mr. Flynn concluded he hadn’t lied but had forgotten exactly what he’d discussed.

Still, what he told the FBI was false, and in December Special Counsel Robert Mueller extracted a guilty plea from Mr. Flynn on the charge of lying to the FBI. There is reason to believe Mr. Flynn took the deal to end the threat of financial ruin, or the prosecution of his son, Michael, Jr. Be that as it may, it’s hard not to notice that in what is considered polite Washington society today, Mr. McCabe has been elevated as a martyr to the anti-Trump cause, while Mr. Flynn’s fall is necessary justice.

No one knows where the Mueller investigation is going to end up. But the country would be better able to absorb the result if it believed that Washington was playing it straight, and not playing favorites.

The ideological crack-up between Left and Right was readily apparent when thousands of students marched against guns – guns that killed 17 Florida students in a violence that would awaken passion in even the most cold blooded. What it means, however, is seemingly less significant than the symbolism. Educators and politicians who should know better encouraged students to engage in protests. Mayor De Blasio in New York said students would not be punished if they left their desks to participate in the rallies.

Surely press notices and most spokesmen congratulated the students on their public consciousness. Yet for anyone observing this event without an ideological lens, you might ask what was going on. Students were demonstrating against guns, and the NRA was generally the target, but what was the legislative goal, a modification in the Second Amendment? Guns can kill, but so can knives. A gun in the hands of St. Francis is not a weapon. Therefore, the gun owner is the critical factor in this equation. All parties agree that a person with mental illness should not have a gun. All parties agree that criminals should not be able to obtain guns. Surely on those matters alone consensus can be achieved. But this is not the real issue.

These demonstrations are actually the full-throated anger of the Left organized in large part by instructors who are manipulating students during this period of grief and rage. Suppose, for the sake of argument instructors were to call for a national rally to protest abortions and the one million fetuses killed each year. Would there be any response?

“He is a forthright man of peace who understand the dangers of pacifism in a world where evil is rife. He would applaud, and rightly, the Roman military historian Vegetius: si vis pacem, para bellum: ‘if you want peace, prepare for war’.

The hysteria from the Left over Donald Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as National Security Advisor to replace Lt. General H. R. McMaster has been partly hilarious, partly alarming to behold. From The Guardian in this country to The New York Times, CNN, Slate, Salon, and beyond in the United States, we are presented with a scarecrow figure who makes Jack D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove look like Albert Schweitzer after a nap. ‘Yes’, screamed an editorial in The New York Times, ‘John Bolton Really Is That Dangerous’. Bolton is a ‘hawk’s hawk’, an ‘extreme ideologue’ and ‘warmonger’ whose appointment ‘scares people’ and ‘puts us on a path to war’. Adds Fred Kaplan, writing in Slate, ‘and it’s fair to say [sure it is, Fred] that President Donald Trump wants us on that path’. In short, ‘the time to panic is now’. Argh!!!

Hysteria has its pleasures. But if we step outside the echo chamber of this feverish anti-Trump mad house, we soon discover that John Bolton is not the reincarnation of Genghis Khan. On the contrary, he is an informed and thoughtful commentator on international affairs. The over-caffeinated chihuahuas yapping at his heels are in a panic because he doesn’t like the ‘deal’ (what some of us would describe as the craven capitulation) that Barack Obama made with Iran over its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Obama shovelled more than a billion dollars in cash to the Mullahs and said in effect ‘pretty please do not make any nuclear bombs’. The New York Times, in one of its excoriations of John Bolton, wrote that ‘The Iran deal has substantially halted the nuclear program and needs to be maintained’. But anyone not blinded by ideology knows that the third thing the Iranian leaders do each morning, after proclaiming ‘Death to Israel’ and ‘Death to America’, is to chivvy their scientists to get on with their work making a bomb with which to obliterate the Zionist entity and threaten the Great Satan.

Some years ago, I wrote a column about adultery and politicians. In light of the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal interviews concerning their alleged (and probable) affairs with President Donald Trump, it is time to revisit the subject.

I do not agree with those—Right or Left, religious or secular—who contend that adultery invalidates a political or social leader. It may invalidate a pastor, priest or rabbi—because a major part of their vocation is to be a moral/religious model, and because clergy do not make war, sign national budgets, appoint judges, run foreign policy or serve as commanders in chief. In other words, unlike your clergyman or clergywoman, almost everything a president does as president affects hundreds of millions of Americans and billions of non-Americans. If a president is also a moral model, that is a wonderful bonus. But that is not part of a president’s job description.

But even anti-Trump conservatives still assert character matters a great deal in a president and other political leaders.

There are two problems with that argument.

The most obvious is that adultery is frequently an inaccurate measure of a person’s character. Indeed, many otherwise great men have been unfaithful to their spouse. And while it is always a sin—the Sixth Commandment doesn’t come with an asterisk—there are gradations of sin.