RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15158/alan-dershowitz-steve-cohen

For [Congressman Steve] Cohen [D-TN], the issues surrounding impeachment are one-sidedly simple, and there is no reason for anyone to express or listen to opposing points of view. Therein lies the true road to tyranny: when government officials like Cohen berate people for expressing contrary points of view, free speech and dissent are chilled.

Congressmen Steve Cohen, who has a long history of one-sided condemnation of Israel, recently called me a Nazi collaborator on MSNBC as the show’s host Alex Witt sat silently by. Here is the context: several days earlier, I had been on a Fox News show discussing impeachment when the host and another panelist began attacking Lt. Col. Alex Vindman, who was preparing to testify the next day regarding U.S. President Donald Trump’s call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of the Ukraine. When the attack on Vindman occurred, I had never heard of him and had no idea why he was being vilified. Since I had no knowledge to offer, I remained silent about Vindman and continued to discuss the subject at hand, namely impeachment.

As soon as I learned who Vindman was, I did three things: I tweeted a strong statement criticizing the accusation against Vindman and describing him as a patriot who served his country; I went on TV and publicly apologized for my silence, explaining that I knew nothing about the issue at the time; I then wrote an op-ed declaring Vindman to be a patriot and calling on Republicans to “stop their smears.”

It was several days after I offered these explanations and apologies that Cohen described the attack on Vindman and said that “Dershowitz sat there listening like a quisling.” He said nothing about my subsequent statements.

For those too young to remember who Vidkun Quisling was, let me remind you. Quisling was a Nazi collaborator and strong supporter of Hitler. The name quisling has become a descriptive noun meaning traitor, collaborator and Nazi. I assume that congressman Cohen knew all this when he threw that despicable term at me.

The crowning irony is that Cohen was criticizing me for remaining silent while someone else wrongfully called Lt. Col. Vindman a traitor. Yet, Cohen himself was prepared to call me — a patriotic American and a liberal Democrat — a quisling. The further irony is that Cohen went on to bemoan how divided we have become as a nation: “we are separated tremendously.” Of course, we are separated, and Congressman Cohen is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/trump-vs-the-policy-community/

We resolve policy disputes by elections, not impeachments.

When it comes to Russia, I am with what Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman calls the American “policy community.”

Vindman, of course, is one of the House Democrats’ star impeachment witnesses. His haughtiness in proclaiming the policy community and his membership in it grates, throughout his 340-page House deposition transcript. I couldn’t agree more, though, with our experts’ apparent consensus that Moscow is bad, should be challenged on various fronts, and would best be seen as the incorrigible rival it is, not the potential strategic partner some wish it to be — the “some” here known to include the president. Ukraine, for all its deep flaws, is valuable to us as a check on Russia’s aggression, another conclusion about which the president is skeptical.

That is, on the critical matter of America’s interests in the Russia/Ukraine dynamic, I think the policy community is right, and President Trump is wrong. If I were president, while I would resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly associate myself with the delusion that stable friendship is possible (or, frankly, desirable) with Putin’s anti-American dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia family and is acting on its revanchist ambitions.

But you see, much like the policy community, I am not president. Donald Trump is.

And that’s where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him — not the National Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their assorted subject-matter experts — in charge of making policy. If we’re to remain a constitutional republic, that’s how it has to stay.