American Political Integrity Is in a State of Collapse

The woman who went on every major Sunday-morning news program after the Benghazi terrorist attacks and told flat-out falsehoods about its nature and motivations is now lecturing America about integrity.

.. A person who was one of the chief national-security officials when the Obama administration was spinning false narratives about the Iran nuclear deal

.. watching Demcrats spill crocodile tears over the Supreme Court, convinced that Neil Gorsuch was basically stealing Merrick Garland’s seat. Yet every sentient being in Washington knows that if the roles were reversed and, say, one of the liberal justices stepped down or passed away in the final months of a Republican presidency, the congressional Democrats would have behaved in the exact, same way

.. In fact, none other than Joe Biden made that same promise more than 20 years before.

.. The president and his team have repeatedly issued false denials about contacts with Russians, and the president himself keeps tweeting allegations and assertions that are most charitably described as incomplete, imprecise, and sometimes just outright wrong. Even when he’s “vindicated,” it’s often a strange kind of vindication, where his actual words were wrong, but something still happened. For example, wiretapping becomes “incidental collection.” Millions of illegal votes becomes millions of illegal registrations.

.. All of this nonsense is justified, excused, and indulged through the sheer force of tribalism. Unilateral honesty is seen as unilateral disarmament.

.. In one of John Adams’s most famous letters, he wrote that “our constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

.. “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.”

.. America needs political virtue. Where will she find it?

Paul Krugman’s Lack of Self-Awareness Is Truly Stunning

The claim that Bush “lied” is, frankly, unsupportable. There is no evidence that Bush took us to war believing that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction. None. It’s the kind of blatantly absurd and destructive conspiracy-mongering that only men such as Paul Krugman or — Hey! — Donald Trump would spread.

.. No legitimacy to opponents,” huh? What he means is that he wants conservatives to recognize him as legitimate, even as he spits disgusting, historically illiterate bile at the GOP. Respect for me, but not for thee.