Just the Facts, Ma’am

By Nelos @Adobe Stock

What Happened

According to The Spectator, the press is salivating about taking down a hated president. For his part, Donald Trump upgraded the episode from a “glitch” to a “witch hunt.” Roger Kimball writes that both accounts are apposite. Kimball thinks the whole thing looks more like an “overheard squabble among angry children in some forlorn government-funded schoolyard.”

Trying his best to help the Democratic Party find a way out of their political wilderness, James Carville, a Democrat strategist, artfully suggests that Democrats play dead.

So far, not happening, Mr. Carville. Instead, the party of Democrats went nuts.

• The Guardian shouted about “the disastrous leak of sensitive information.”
• The Times lamented the “potentially catastrophic security breach.”
• Hillary Clinton – yes, really – excoriated the Trump administration for “put[ting] our troops in jeopardy by sharing military plans on a commercial messaging app and unwittingly invited a journalist into the chat. That’s dangerous. And it’s just dumb.”
• Ambassador Chris Stevens, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen A. Doherty were unavailable for comment.

The subject was the upcoming attack on the Houthis, the Iran-funded terror group that is infesting Yemen and shooting on US and other western ships in the Red Sea. The attack went off without a hitch on March 15. Goldberg took a few days to rub his hands with glee. Then, on March 24, he published a scathing, holier-than-thou article about the groupchat, the shocking, shocking security breach of inviting him, Jeffrey Goldberg, to participate, and the irredeemable awfulness and incompetence of Trump’s unspeakable team.

Despite all the prattle of “security breach,” nothing happened. The Houthis were already aware of the US’s planned attack. What happened was exactly what had been expected: some really bad guys were killed and some really important and sensitive Houthis infrastructure was destroyed.

Compare that to Hillary Clinton’s adventure in Benghazi or Joe Biden’s in Afghanistan. Thirteen American servicemen were killed in the latter debacle. And don’t forget that we left the Taliban $80 billion richer in the state-of-the-art military equipment we abandoned there.

Hillary Clinton set up a private email server in her residence where she stored thousands of emails, at least 1,600 of which were found to contain classified information. That number is likely an undercount considering that, after being informed that she was under investigation, she or one of her aides tried in vain to delete all of the information stored on the server.

A Disarmament Fable

Mr. Kimball wonders if the Signal fiasco was an accident or a setup. No surprise, Mr. Kimball, staunchly in Donald Trump’s camp, suspects it was an accident. More interesting to him, however, will be how long the battalions of anti-Trump agitators will milk this event.

Will they get around to wondering whether Jeffrey Goldberg – who deliberately and improperly sat in on a privileged electronic conversation and then published details about it – himself violated the law and should be prosecuted?

Agita Already Subsiding

The whole affair brings to Roger Kimball’s mind “A Disarmament Fable,” a speech made by Winston Churchill in 1928:

The newspapers had been pressing for the government to reveal details about an arms agreement between France and England. The government declined to accommodate them. “We did not,” Churchill wrote, “think it right to move from that position by the criticism or clamor in certain sections of the Press. Now, however, the whole is laid before them, they are disappointed to find that there is nothing or very little in it.” It was ever thus.