I’ve gotten an introduction recently to Laura Ingraham, a right-wing radio talk-show host and commentator. I kept running across references to her in all the reading I’ve been doing about the upcoming election and at first thought she was the same as
Dr. Laura, who is, of course, Laura Schlessinger,
another talk-show host. So I’ve been doing a little research and ran across
this segment from her show in which she makes an equivalent comparison between Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, and Abraham Lincoln. A caller brings up how troubling he finds Trump’s personal life and character. Well, she replies,Ronald Reagan was divorced, wasn’t he? You’re not for divorce, are you? The caller is somewhat taken aback. And what about Abraham Lincoln and his suspension of
habeas corpus during the Civil War? Hmmm? What about
that? (The link above is to the conservative website “Hot Air” by Ed Morrissey and includes some excellent commentary of its own.)
This is one of those statements that is so absurd it doesn’t even fit into the normal parameters of “wrong.” I want to sit her down and say, No, Laura, no, no, no. You can’t equate a decent, honorable man whose first wife divorced him after she had an affair (and which he was willing to forgive her for) and who then married his second wife, and
stayed married to her, and in love with her, for the rest of his life, with . . . words fail me. Can you
imagine Ronald Reagan boasting about his sexual conquests? Does that possibility fit into the same universe with Donald Trump’s nauseating egomaniacism? (And Ingraham worked for the Reagan administration! She is perfectly well acquainted with the the moral caliber of the two men.)
As for the comparison with Abraham Lincoln, surely you, my dear readers, do not need to me to point out that putting Donald Trump on anywhere near the same level as Lincoln is so outrageous I’m surprised her microphone didn’t burst into flame.
You may say that I’m just picking on an isolated clip that has no context. But there is a big difference between something that is characteristic and something that is just an aberration, and as far as I can tell from the reading I’ve done this short exchange is, one might say, a crystallization of Ingraham’s whole attitude. That is, she will say just about anything to rally the troops around her candidate, even if in doing so she makes preposterous claims.
This conflation of the morally defensible with the morally indefensible is called the “false moral equivalency” argument. So now I’ll post the article I had planned as the Sunday bonus, by National Review‘s Jonah Goldberg. You should just devote yourself for the next week to reading all of his stuff, including the pet updates in his Friday G-File column, to which I am now a loyal subscriber. They may not be to everyone’s taste as they tend to be extremely sarcastic (not the pet updates, but the G-File as a whole), but the vast majority of his work is serious, thoughtful, and well-reasoned. I’m very puzzled as to why a man of such intellect and such impatience with foolishness would agree to appear in the Dinesh D’Souza Debacle, but surely he didn’t know how bad it was going to be when he did so. I have his Liberal Fascism on tap for this week’s book review.
“Trump’s Moral Equivalence Game Is Right Out of the Left’s Playbook”
