Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
Trump the liar
President Trump is a selfish liar, and a vain one. Those traits, together, can cause chaos, as they did on Thursday, when, in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt, Trump undermined his own alibi for firing the F.B.I. director, James Comey. The official story had been that Trump was moved to act on Tuesday only after the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, and the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, came to him with concerns about Comey’s competence—specifically, his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails…. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the deputy press secretary, [threw] in some smears of Comey, who she said had committed “atrocities” while at the F.B.I. and was disliked by its rank and file. Speaking to Holt, Trump stood by the smears: “Look, he’s a showboat, he’s a grandstander”; “I just want somebody that’s competent.” But, when Holt asked him about heeding Sessions and Rosenstein, Trump seemed to bristle. Could Holt think that he, Trump, needed to hear what anyone had to say—that he had his mind changed by subordinates?
