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Wow! It’s the first anniversary of the COMMENTARY Magazine Podcast! So it’s long and wordy and a little hysterical! Three subjects consume Noah Rothman, Abe Greenwald, and John Podhoretz. 1) The cascading foreign-policy programs that are forcing Donald Trump to consider his role as leader of the free world. 2) The war inside the White House. 3) The condition of the Republicans on Capitol Hill. It’s good. It’s passionate. It’s the beginning of Year Two. Give a listen.
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I rarely disagree with John in his opinions, but in terms of the end of the filibuster I tend to think that the Democrats’ intransigence made this inevitable. Presented with a nearly perfect candidate for Associate Justice they proceeded to use every spurious argument they could and to vote solely on party lines to defeat his nomination. Unquestionably, they would have done the same with every possible candidate acceptable to the right. The filibuster is, perhaps, a mechanism that kept things balanced, but what kind of balance can be maintained when one side possesses a lockstep unity which bears no thought to ethics or the Constitution and the other is divided by a host of such beliefs? There is no collegiality in the Senate, nor is there likely to be for some time to come. For Republicans, the Trump administration has an opportunity to recreate the balance of the Supreme Court in our own image which will go a long way in preventing the Progressive reshaping of the United States. If it means that the Senate needs to lose some of its archaic procedures, then so be it. The country will not be the less for it.
I really want to know now how different this podcast would have been if they recorded it a day later.
The Italians used mustard gas against Ethiopia in 1935. The League of Nations knew full well that they had and nothing happened. The Japanese released fleas infected with bubonic plague in China in 1937 (we didn’t find out about that until after we got our hands on Unit 731’s records after the war).