War Criminals

 I confess that I've spent too much time on Twitter since the pandemic started. Mostly just boredom. The quality of the dialogue on the Hellscape is widely divergent. There are some really interesting discussions to be had. There is also a lot of aggressive twaddle.

One of the worst forms to Twitter Twaddle is the "Person X is a war criminal."  Person X is usually Obama, but it can be Hillary Clinton or any other of "neoliberals" (another misused and overused term). The argument is that Obama didn't end drone strikes and sometimes drone strikes do wrong and kill noncombatants. So he's a war criminal. Obama puts out his Best Books of 2020 list and the relies are full of "Oh, great, the war criminal likes to read." It's exhausting.

I say all this as preface to the fact that Trump has first of all greatly increased drone strikes and secondly and more germane: he is pardoning actual war criminals.

There is an argument that presidential pardons are too stingy. There are certainly people in jail for minor drug offenses that should be freed. Reality Winner needs to be pardoned as soon as Biden can get around to it. Of course, with Trump, his motivations and actions belie any sense that he is doing this out of mercy.

Trump's pardons seem to fall into three categories. First, and most troubling, he is pardoning his associates who have committed crimes. This should be unconstitutional, but the Framers assumed that either the President would not be an open crook or that Congress would check him if he was. Nice call. I've seen the argument that Trump's pardons of his cronies has a silver lining in that they can no longer take the Fifth if called before Congressional panels. If your goal is a Truth and Reconciliation panel, this would be good.

Secondly, he's ladling out pardons and commutations to the various corrupt Republicans and Republican media figures. This is also bad, because Dinesh D'Souza and Duncan Hunter deserve jail time. I doubt that the sheer tonnage of corrupt Republicans will negate the hold that party has on a sizable portion of the population, but consequences matter.

It's the third basket that is perhaps most disgusting. We know Trump is a transactional person. Everything is a "deal." So pardoning his con-conspirators in return for their silence or rewarding political allies seems like a natural extension of his ingrained corruption.

To a degree, the pardon of the Blackwater contractors falls into the "personal allies" basket, as it indirectly helps Erik Prince, a Trump crony and Betsy DeVos' brother. But it's more a part of his native sadism, his wanton contempt for lives that do not benefit him directly. 

Trump has pardoned actual war criminals. Sometimes in war, civilians are killed because wars are brutal and dangerous. These people, along with a Navy SEAL named Gallagher, are people who targeted civilians. They are murderers. Convicted and sentenced. He also pardoned Border Control agents who were convicted of the wrongful shooting death of an alleged drug smuggler. 

Basically, if you want to kill Iraqis or a migrant, you have carte blanche. Meanwhile, he's executing more people than ever at the federal level. Most of them are Black or Brown. 

I think the Left has gotten a bit broad in its use of "racism" as a rhetorical cudgel. I don't actually think it's wrong to use the term in most cases, it's just that the word is getting blunted by overuse. We almost need more versions of the word to keep it sharp.

What Trump is doing with these executions and pardons and commutations is pretty much racism and cruelty. It's deplorable.