Paul Rosenzweig is a former national security and, under George W Bush, DHS official. Last month he was hailed by Democrats and other opponents of Trumpism as a lucid, heroic voice of fighting back: He had advocated a scattergun deployment of President Biden's pardoning power.
In mid-November articles for The Atlantic and The Bulwark, Rosenzweig revisited Democrats' prolonged embrace of a rather peculiar philosophic approach to battling the dark forces among us: "If you get down in the mud with a pig, the saying goes, you only get dirty. In the political context, this misconception contributed to the Democrats’ recent defeat. The problem is that Trump was playing dirty."
The analyst confessed his participation in Michelle Obama's "high-road" approach. In the 2016 election's aftermath, "[it was] my belief that the best response to Trump was to keep up traditional standards of conduct and restraint. Boy, was I wrong. And so were other critics." Rosenzweig elaborated:
We’d misjudged the situation and made a strategic error—one that opponents of Trump are still making today. It’s time to correct that error. If we want to have a real hope of reversing Trump’s authoritarian course, we all need to stop playing tee-ball and start playing legal hardball. Trump’s opponents need to stop showing automatic deference to historical norms and limitations that ought, in a good and just society, be adhered to—not because those norms are bad, but rather because it behooves us to suspend normal decorum when the building is on fire.
NO ONE SHOULD WELCOME the coarsening of normative behavior that will result. Nonetheless, opponents need to deploy every legal tool in their toolkit to oppose Trump’s encroachments, whether or not it is “appropriate” or “traditional” or “historically legitimate” to do so. If opponents of Trump don’t fight to win, they will lose, plain and simple.
Biden needs to throw aside the constraints of “good governance” and use the pardon power liberally, not to benefit his cronies but rather for the ethical and moral reason of protecting his supporters and allies from Trump’s revenge. Everyone from Liz Cheney to Gen. Mark Milley should be offered as much protection from Trump as Biden can possibly give them before he leaves the White House.
Again, for taking the above position, Rosenzweig was universally praised by opponents of Trumpism. They agreed wholeheartedly that enough was enough; that the analyst's Bulwark title was spot on: "It's Time for Outgoing Democrats to Play Hardball." Pardon them, pardon them all, they said — Biden should pardon every person in the president-elect's vindictive crosshairs "for the ethical and moral reason of protecting his supporters and allies from Trump’s revenge."
So now let us talk true hypocrisy, the charge being hurled by Rosenzweig's champions at those now defending Biden's pardon of his son. Among the president's "supporters" is Hunter, perhaps the president's foremost supporter. He has consistently denied baseless Trumpian allegations of his father illicitly benefiting from his business endeavors. And there is no dispute that Hunter will be the foremost target of "Trump's revenge" (or at least secondary to his father).
And yet when the president followed through on Rosenzweig's advice — the very advice which had earned the analyst a hero's status among Trump's adversaries — by pardoning the incoming president's No. 1 bullseye personified, those who are now screaming hypocrisy instantaneously and with no aforethought heatedly argued that Hunter and Hunter alone should have been excluded from the advice writer's vast net of protection.
As bad or worse than hypocrisy is the critics' wholesale lack of logical consistency. Their one feeble argument in denying only Hunter is that he was convicted in criminal court. "The system" worked, they say; his prosecution was valid; he committed those crimes; there was no judicial weaponization at work.
But that lies far outside the relevant point of "sweeping pardons" for everyone about to fall within in Trump's weaponized persecutions. Whatever his "enemies" did or didn't do will have nothing to do with his extrajudicial assaults on them. As the vernacular has it, Trump and his prosecutorial allies will just make shit up.
Hunter's bogus firearm application, his failure to file tax returns — such would have been the least of the incoming gangsters' concentrated focus. The Trumpian gunsels were (and no doubt they remain) dedicated to pursuing the president's son via any asinine, "traitorous" avenue and with immense, untrammeled hostility. Have President Biden's self-celebratory detractors grasped this essential, incontrovertible proposition? If so, they have chosen to simply ignore it, which is intellectual cowardice.
Do they understand that singularly excluding Hunter from the president's pardon power is altogether contrary to their earlier celebration of Rosenzweig's unqualified, expansively "liberal" use of that power for the ethical and moral reason of protecting his supporters and allies from Trump’s revenge? Do the scolds who so proudly executed what they peddled as meticulous logic in Hunter's case see that compounding their hypocrisy was in reality a shocking blindness to logic itself?
No they do not see it, they grasp none of it, for they're too busy patting themselves on the back for having demonstrated not an independence of mind, but an independence from what really terrifies them: the accusation of partisan hackery.
These brave new worriers have taken this fear so much to heart, they can longer distinguish legitimate criticism of an allied politician from knee-jerk displays of what they hope their readers will so deeply admire: intellectual rigor.
Next time, and there's always an eager next time, perhaps they'll use some of its authentic stuff.