By CHRISTOPHER MANION
Mona Charen, who worked in the White House for Nancy Reagan, now has a syndicated column carried by a paper here in the Shenandoah Valley.
Which is typical. The paper’s editor, recognizing our area’s conservative character, “balances” the copious left-wing op-eds with “conservatives” who just happen to detest Donald Trump.
So this week, Charen’s title was, well, puzzling: “Why this pro-life conservative is voting for Biden.”
“I have been pro-life my entire adult life,” Charen writes. “I haven’t changed.”
Then why vote for the most pro-abortion presidential ticket in history
“It’s wrong to take innocent life,” she sighs. “But other things are immoral, too. It’s also wrong to swindle people, to degrade and demonize, to incite violence, to bully, and while we’re at it, to steal, to bear false witness, to commit adultery and to covet.”
Now Mona has lived in DC a long time. She knows that she’s sowing palaver, borrowing some from Bernie, some from AOC, and maybe some from Basement Joe’s handlers here and there. She’s an able writer, but here she relies instead on the routine brand of bombast that every pol in Washington keeps handy to fire at any adversary.
So, due to Trump’s sins against Charen’s borrowed Decalogue, the lives of millions of unborn children are expendable.
Granting all of Trump’s failings, are they equivalent to endorsing the murder of an innocent child — much less a few million? Planned Parenthood might think so. But pro-life Mona Charen?
Charen works at Washington’s Ethics and Public Policy Center, founded by my old friend Ernie (Dr. Ernest) Lefever. Several of her colleagues could show her how to make moral distinctions, assess the relative gravity of various evils, the hierarchy of goods, and prudentially apply these principles to the challenge she confronts: supporting a political party platform that advocates free, universal, and uninhibited abortion up to and including birth. Nationwide. Funded by the taxpayer.
But Charen won’t make distinctions. Abortion is murder, she knows that. And taking an innocent life is not morally equivalent to being a blowhard or a cad. She knows that too. But mentioning that would require that she reconsider. And she won’t.
Why not?
Some Possibly Relevant History
When George Bush launched the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I was among a few conservatives who publicly opposed the war from its inception. I agreed with Pope John Paul II that the invasion would be a “disaster” and would cause “chaos” in the Middle East.
Mona Charen was among the invasion’s strongest supporters. Some of them called opponents of the invasion “traitors,” or worse. They meant it, they repeated it, and by 2008 the war had permanently shattered the conservative movement, as well as the Republican Party.
When he left office in 2009, George W. Bush left the country with a House led by Nancy Pelosi, a Senate led by Harry Reid, and a White House occupied by Barack Obama.
By then, many who had cheered the war knew that they were in trouble. Their names are now forgotten. But their excuses mirror those of today’s “Never-Trumpers” who supported the war: They’re always wrong, they always blame somebody else, and they never, ever, apologize.
Jay Nordlinger, a contributor to National Review, hosts a weekly podcast with Charen. Recently he recounted how in 2008, Trump told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that Bush had “lied. He got us into the war with lies.” In a 2016 Republican primary debate, Nordlinger continues, Trump said, “I want to tell you, they lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”
Donald Trump had called the Never-Trumpers “liars.” And then he won in 2016.
They’ve never recovered. Many had built their careers during Bush’s presidency. Trump ran against their president and their war. He won and they lost. In 2008, they saw their futures go up in the flames of Democrat victories, Iraqi defeats, and eight years of Obamanation. In 2016, Trump beat them again. They just kept losing.
So Mona Charen has a right to be unhappy. Has that clouded her judgment? So abortion on demand is OK because why, exactly?
Threats And Rumors Of Threats
In a 2016 column, Charen insisted that, while Bush had won the war by 2008, he had “made mistakes.” She blamed the rise of ISIS on Obama. Earlier this summer, without mentioning Trump’s defeat of ISIS, she wrote that “Trump is the threat to civilization.”
Well, speaking of civilization, let’s look at what her war did to it. In 2014, Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako, the Chaldean archbishop of Kirkuk in Iraq, was blunt. “Intervention by the West in the region did not solve the problems of those countries, but on the contrary, produced more chaos and conflict. Honestly, 1,400 years of Islam could not uproot us from our land and our churches, while the policies of the West have scattered us and distributed us all around the world.”
The unintended consequence? Millions of Christians in the Middle East have been driven into exile, persecution, even death. And today, the Christian population of Iraq is ten percent of what it was in 2002.
While that result might not have been important to many of the war’s supporters, it should have been to George W. Bush. In 2004, Bush had defeated Al Gore due to the diehard support of millions of Evangelicals who considered him to be one of their own. And indeed Bush was unashamedly Christian, and admired by millions for it.
Nonetheless, while the former president has led a quiet, private life since he left office, it is surprising that he has not publicly come out early, strong, and often in defense of the Christians in the Middle East. Why didn’t he respond to the pleas of Patriarch Sako and his fellow Middle-Eastern prelates when they asked for aid? Weren’t they Bush’s fellow Christians, after all?
Plunder
Clearly there were principled advocates of the war who stuck to their guns, so to speak, when many others changed their minds. But as long as the wars went on, thousands of legitimate and illegitimate actors made millions of dollars. After all, according to Transparency International, Iraq and Afghanistan were among the world’s most corrupt nations already. Planeloads of 100-dollar bills flew from the U.S. into the countries every day. And audits? How can you have audits in a country where everyone involved in every deal demands his ten percent right off the top?
Meanwhile, Bush’s “Big Government Conservatism” at home and the wars abroad brought untold thousands of rent-seekers to Washington to share in the plunder. Once-Republican Virginia turned dark blue, and the five counties surrounding D.C. became the richest in the country. “War is the health of the state,” wrote Randolph Bourne, and war has been very good indeed to Washington.
But repeat after Mona, “Trump is the threat to civilization.”
Is that why she will vote for Joe Biden? We’ll never know. But it is important to take into account the historical record in order to understand the ferocity of the opposition to Trump that rages among the “Never-Trumpers.” After all, he called them “liars,” didn’t he? And “losers”? And he beat them in 2016, right? Why should they let him beat them one last time?
Trump is a bad man. So abortion until birth is acceptable. It’s logical.
There you have it. Call them a cadre of true believers, call them a gaggle of sore losers. . . . You decide.
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