At Donald Trump's Discretion

The point that conservative journalist Jonah Goldberg is making is a good one.  It's not a small one, either.

This is just a bunch of bs. I’m sorry I live in DC. Miller is simply making stuff up. I mean I do believe DC is marginally safer now. But this version of DC where moms are coming out of their bunkers for the first time and everyone is rapturous is just a lie. It’s not a small one… https://t.co/7PkMF0PJ9q

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) August 26, 2025

 

On second reading, I realized that Goldberg meant "I'm sorry but I live in D.C."  Evidently, crime is not not quite as bad in the District as Trump, Steve Miller, et al. claim because

More than 2,200 troops, some from as far away as Mississippi and Louisiana, have been deployed in D.C. since Trump’s declaration of a “crime emergency” here. Ostensibly, they were mobilized to support federal law enforcement and local police, but in recent days those orders have expanded to encompass “beautification” tasks such as trash removal and groundskeeping around the National Mall and other federal property. Service members may work on removing graffiti, too.

Typically, custodial work like this falls to the National Park Service, which was already facing staffing shortfalls when the Trump administration this spring directed additional cuts as it gutted the federal workforce. The service used to have 200 people assigned to maintain thousands of acres of trees and gardens in D.C., and now there are 20, a Park Service official told The Post

Assigning members of the Guard to do work that in many jurisdictions is typically done by prisoners or offenders serving a sentence of probation is a misuse of their training and skills and makes them feel like volunteers or criminals being punished. However, on a positive note, these Guard members are not being called to perform police work, for which they are untrained.

Quite the national emergency the President has declared. Had crime there recently spiked or even been on a steady incline over the past few years, the executive order the President signed directed the Attorney General to address "the crime emergency and ensure public order and safety." Despite the many cynics- especially conservatives, but also moderates and even liberals- the reality that violent crime has declined in the District is no insignificant matter.

The declaration of emergency is akin to the President's contention that  economically, other countries are "robbing us blind."  While Trump frequently complains about himself being the victim, he periodically whines about the wealthiest and most powerful nation on earth being taken advantage of. And now, we are being "robbed":

If I didn't win this election, this country was gone- I'm telling you- economically, it was gone. None of these things we're talking about would have happened and the shole world was robbing us blind. Friend and foe, they were stealing our jobs, our money, our factories. They were stealing everything. We would have been a shell. We would have been a bankrupt, broken shell.

Without  him, he's lecturing, the country economically "was gone," a falsehood that nonetheless could claimed as a pretext for doing- well, whatever he chose to do. And so now, in a different context, the President has established "specialized units" in the National Guard, specifically rained and equipped to deal with public order issues." CNN finds this "the clearest sign yet he intends to expand the US military's role in domestic law enforcement activities across the country." 

After fewer than two months into this term, the President threatened to decrease funding for colleges which permitted what he termed "illegal" protests and deport foreign-born students who participated in them. And soon, "public order"  Foreign students- for now.

He isn't entitled to any action he wishes to take- constitutionally. However, he has vowed not to let that stop him.

Trump on deploying the National Guard to Chicago: "I have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the president of the United States." pic.twitter.com/CR2T6Srb5C

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 26, 2025

"If I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger in these cities, I can do it," saith the President. There need not be an emergency or the USA in crisis. He himself need only believe (or say) that the country is in danger- as it always is to some degree- from crime, protests, foreign enemies, the economy, or anything. Or nothing. As Steve Schmidt says (at 7:50), "There's a tank on a street near you- or maybe it's just coming to you soon. But it's coming." 

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Hamstrung By Accuracy

Some things are sure bets. There will be a World Series this year, and the Milwaukee Brewers won't be in it.  A few months later, there will be a Super Bowl, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers won't be in it.  Several months later, the Minnesota Timberwolves won't be in the NBA finals.  Between now and then, it will snow in Maine, Vermont, and Wisconsin. And when someone accuses you of "nitpicking," he has lost the argument.

The National Review's Jonah Goldberg is unaware (or is at least pretending to be unaware) that

Seeking to avert a government shutdown, Republican leaders drove a bill blocking Planned Parenthood's federal funds through the House on Friday, hoping to contain conservatives' demands for a politically risky showdown with President Barack Obama by striking a quick blow against abortion.

The nearly party-line 241-187 vote followed a no-holds-barred debate that included a graphic, poster-sized photo of a scarred, aborted fetus and underscored how abortion has resurfaced as a white-hot political issue. The battle has been rejoined just in time for the 2016 election campaign and next week's historic address to Congress by Pope Francis.

The issue's re-emergence followed the release of secretly recorded videos of Planned Parenthood officials offhandedly discussing how they sometimes procure tissue from aborted fetuses for medical research.

Two days earlier, Carly Fiorina at the GOP presidential debate pontificated

As regards Planned Parenthood, anyone who has watched this videotape, I dare Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama to watch these tapes. Watch a fully formed fetus on the table, it’s heart beating, it’s legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.

This is about the character of our nation, and if we will not stand up in and force President Obama to veto this bill, shame on us.

Now that Fiorina has been exposed as a fabricator (which she already had proven herself to be), Goldberg concedes "The exact scene, exactly as Fiorina describes it, is not on the videos."

That seems rather clear. However, it doesn't really matter because Goldberg says: never mind. He protests "But anybody who has watched the videos would find Fiorina's off-the-cuff account pretty accurate."

As Sarah Kliff has outlined, there is no footage of the moment described by the former Planned Parenthood technician, nor hard evidence that it even occurred. The footage of the fetus isn't from the Planned Parenthood videos; one image is of a still born baby and "other footage evidently is derived from a collection of stock footage of fetuses."

Goldberg doesn't deny Fiorina's account is inaccurate, instead claiming her "critics want to claim that because she didn't take into account these distinctions, she's just making stuff up." Facts become "distinctions" and irrelevant to him.  The critics, obsessed with facts, have "become Jesuitical nitpickers, muddying the water to conceal the fact that late-term abortions offend the conscience when discussed or displayed with anything like journalistic accuracy."

Accuracy doesn't matter, as long as it's "anything like journalistic accuracy,"  and especially if it reinforces the notion of abortion as offensive to the conscience.  Because late-term abortions are objectionable, anything goes.  It's "muddying the waters" to note that Fiorina preceded her rant with "as regards to Planned Parenthood," notwithstanding the absence of evidence of any connection to Planned Parenthood.

Hoaxes happen. More significantly, the reasoning displayed by Goldberg is characteristic of much of modern conservative thought.  Details are unnecessary, facts expendable. Late-term abortion shocks the conscience, reasons Goldberg, so any visual depiction, or description, of the procedure is righteous.

Carly Fiorina- "as regards to Planned Parenthood"- lustily joined the wholesale, destructive attack on Planned Parenthood, even suggesting it is linked to the regime in Tehran. She went on to describe vividly a scene (even frighteningly referring to "harvesting organs") which she had little reason to believe took place at Planned Parenthood.  With its potential to damage reproductive rights, it has far greater implications than anything Ann Coulter has said about Pope Francis, Donald Trump about Barack Obama, or Ben Carson about Muslims.











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Jonah Goldberg, Misguided

In The Columbus Dispatch, it was "In Cairo, It Was All About Obama;" in National Review Online, it was "The Prism of Obama" (and subheaded) "This was precisely the moment to let Obama be Obama." Taken together, they reflect the slightly schizophrenic nature of the conservative columnist's column of June 5 on Barack Obama's June 4 speech in Cairo, Egypt. But with either title, Goldberg is plain wrong.

The National Review columnist concludes by arguing:

This was precisely the moment to let Obama be Obama. Yes, he is a hypocrite for downplaying his Muslim connections when running for office and then touting them once in office. But such hypocrisy is a small price to pay. If Richard Nixon was a statesman for laying aside his anti-Communism to engage China, then surely Obama can brag about his Muslim father. Obama has a cult of personality in the Muslim street. If he can exploit it for America's and the world's benefit, he should.

This is a safe, centrist view: if Obama can fool the enemy by pretending to be sympathetic and empathetic, and it redounds to the benefit of the U.S.A., it can only be useful.

There is little analogy with President Nixon engaging mainland, then commonly referred to as Communist, China. No matter the benefit or cost, it was more than a strategy but actual action and can be evaluated on its own merits. Obama's approach in Cairo, whether sincere (as liberals believe) or not (as Goldberg and some other moderate-conservative Americans believe) is a strategy, one the President hopes will quell some of the enthusiasm in the Muslim world for the terrorism of its extremists. It either will be backed by action- disappointing the Jonah Goldbergs, presumably- or if it is insincere, represent an effort to buy cheaply from the Muslim world support for American goals and actions.

If it is the latter, it's likely that at some, more critical, point (or gradually), Arab nations and groups will catch on and believe themselves betrayed. Nevertheless, Obama's effort to dupe- or convince- the Arab community would be doomed at birth to failure if he were not able to acknowledge the most obvious of failings.

This obviously is the United States' government war of choice in Iraq, an acknowledgment which escapes Goldberg, who writes

Obama was reliably Obamaesque again when he disparaged the Iraq war as a "war of choice." But wait, he also thinks Iraq is better without Saddam, so maybe it was a good choice?....

....As ever, Obama's positions on Iraq cannot be reconciled. Just as he often celebrates our troops' success but can't say we succeeded, he celebrates Iraq's democratic progress but -- hamstrung by his own ideology and pride -- won't fully acknowledge that such progress is even possible, given that it began at the point of an American gun. In short, President Obama is straddling Iraq just as candidate Obama did.

Whom does Goldberg believe he is fooling? The Arab street, overwhelmingly opposed to the U.S. action in invading Iraq? The ranks of terrorists, swelled in response to the military action? The soldiers in Iraq, for whom providing resources was less important to the President than cutting taxes on the wealthy? The soldiers in Afghanistan, shortchanged as President Bush pursued in Iraq a far less important strategic objective? Or perhaps the families of the soldiers who have been killed in a war trumped up by false claims about nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons, and, well, practically everything?

Clearly, Goldberg, commenting "just as he often celebrates our troops' success but can't say we succeeded," is frustrated that he cannot pin on Mr. Obama the "liberals hate the troops" meme. He fails to understand- or more likely, does not want to concede- the distinction between the honorable service of individuals in the nation's armed services and the utter failure of American policy under the leadership of George W. Bush.