RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/no-one-is-above-the-law-that-means-a-trump-doj-must-indict-joe-biden/

Let’s apply the new Trump standard.

Special counsel Robert Hur found that there was enough evidence to charge Joe Biden with a crime, yet he didn’t.

As we know, Hur concluded that a jury would probably find that Biden didn’t have criminal intent, although he stipulated during his congressional hearing a couple of weeks ago that a reasonable juror might conclude that Biden was guilty.

If this wasn’t an outlandish decision on Hur’s part, neither was it inevitable. Clearly, the fact that recommending charges against Biden would have been a thermonuclear political event, potentially affecting the election outcome, helped stay Hur’s hand. He could have gone by the strict letter of the law but allowed prudential considerations — again, not unreasonably — to play a role.

The ongoing bout of civil cases and criminal indictments against Donald Trump and, soon enough, a criminal trial raise the question: Why, if Trump wins election, should his Justice Department accept Hur’s judgment? Why wouldn’t it simply take Hur’s report and fashion it into an indictment of former president Biden?

After all, if there’s anything we’ve learned recently, it’s that no one is above the law.

After getting her fraud judgment against Trump, New York attorney general Letitia James said, “No matter how big, rich or powerful you think you are, no one is above the law.”

https://americanmind.org/features/national-conservatism-vs-american-conservatism/two-adams-two-foundings/

There’s no escaping the tensions inherent in National Conservatism, and in political life.

Charles Kesler’s indictment of the conflicting elements in National Conservatism—between religion and secular rationalism; tradition and Constitutionalism; nationalism in the sense of “shared inheritance as the essence of shared identity and common will” and America’s “exceptional” nationalism—is so compelling as to make any attempt at refutation pointless. I plead guilty on all counts, but with extenuating circumstances. I signed the National Conservatism manifesto in full awareness of its inconsistencies, and would do so again today.

“Our nationalism has always been exceptional,” Kesler observes, “featuring more individualism, more pluralism, more freedom, and more statesmanlike deliberation and prudence than is typical. We think of ourselves as a founded nation; most nations don’t think they have or need such a clear, conscious, and principled beginning.” I would go even further: The supposed “shared inheritance” of the European nations is less the result of sedimentary accretion of traditions stretching back into the mists of time, than an ossified remnant of an earlier founding. I wrote in my review of Yoram Hazony’s 2022 book Conservatism: A Re-Discovery that “the nation as it came into existence after the ruin of the Roman Empire was not—as Hazony seems to imply—a spontaneous agglomeration of families, tribes, and clans for purposes of self-defense. On the contrary, it was a project of the Catholic Church, which sought to civilize the Visigoth barbarians who conquered Spain and the Merovingians and later Carolingian rulers of France.”

Kesler draws a bright line between Europe’s ethnocentric nationalism and America’s concept of citizenship—rightly so. The nationalism of the 19th century was a Romantic attempt to reinvigorate the nations of Europe by reinventing the Middle Ages after Napoleon leveled the Old Regime. It was a new founding rather than a continuation of ancient and accretive traditions, and it prepared the slippery slope that led to the World Wars of the 20th century. Europe’s atavistic nationalism was not a revival of tradition but a perverse innovation. Sometimes empire is better. The Austro-Hungarian Empire provided governance far superior to the plethora of nationalisms sponsored by the Versailles Treaty.