Democracy Dies in Daylight
Eight years ago the Washington Post pledged to save democracy, but now argues we need to be saved from it
A month ago in the Washington Post, not long before the Colorado mess, neoconservative icon Robert Kagan wrote, “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” We may accuse Kagan — husband of Victoria Nuland, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century, and co-author (with Bill Kristol) of the “benevolent hegemony” theory of world conquest that was the real reason for America’s Iraq invasion — of much. We can’t accuse him of not knowing history. The graphic was a bust of Caesar, perfect for a six thousand word opus on stopping Donald Trump at all costs, whose sniper-scope subtext was as subtle as the Bullwinkle float at the Thanksgiving Day parade. It could have been headlined, “Where’s Hinckley When You Need Him?”
Kagan kept trying to suggest a biological solution to the Trump problem without actually saying it. The word count can get hot quickly when you’re trapped in that kind of mind-loop. Here he tries to express the idea, “We gotta stop Trump before the election”:
Indicting Trump for trying to overthrow the government will prove akin to indicting Caesar for crossing the Rubicon, and just as effective… What limits [his] powers? The most obvious answer is the institutions of justice — all of which Trump, by his very election, will have defied and revealed as impotent.
If elected, Kagan went on, it would mean:
Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans threw every legitimate weapon against Trump and still failed. Will they turn instead to illegitimate, extralegal action?
What’s the irony level of a clarion call for a Caesarian “intervention” appearing in the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Washington Post? Can that level of hypocrisy be quantified?
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