For ALL of the rest of Quin Hillyer’s Washington Examiner columns for the week, go to this link.
The ones not highlighted elsewhere at Quin Hillyer.com are headlined:
Romney hits bull’s-eye in criticism of Trump
On abortion eugenics, Supreme Court shouldn’t cut and run
Keep the sunlight shining on military waste
The worst American politics since the Civil War
Trump mind-bogglingly defends the Soviets
On the last one, my mind is still reeling. This is important. The invasion of Afghanistan was not some temporarily important skirmish now remembered by few, like, say, the fights between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus beginning in 1974. The Soviet invasion was a seminal event in 20th Century history, one of global importance and lasting effects. And it was unambiguously evil, recognized as such by virtually the whole world. There is absolutely no good excuse for an American president to say the Soviets were justified — especially with more than 7,000 of our own troops still there. Trump just made our job in Afghanistan much harder, by enraging even those Afghanis who are on our side.
That’s why my column started like this, with deliberate hyperbole (but only a little) in the first sentence, for effect:
If presidents could be impeached for ignorance, Donald Trump just merited impeachment for endorsing the Soviet Union’s brutal 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.
To listen to what Trump said today at a Cabinet meeting is to enter a bizarrely anti-moral alternative universe. In a confused, ahistorical, and rambling comment in a ramblingly reality-deprived confab, Trump uttered this stunningly benighted take on the Soviets’ attempt to conquer and permanently communize Afghanistan: “The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They [the Soviets] were right to be there.”
Right to be there? Really?
