Larry Summers was once the Secretary of the Treasury. He also used to be the President of Harvard until he was forced out by the ultra-left for daring to consider the idea that there might be differences between the sexes. Since then, Summers has been on super-probation. He is, or so it seems, required to announce extremely liberal positions, even ridiculous ones, as if he were an inmate at one of the Maoist re-education camps of the Great Leap Forward era.
I was reminded of all this when I read Summers latest bit of punditry. According to Summers, President Trump surrendered all claim to moral leadership by the USA when he withdrew from the Paris climate accords and failed to announce specific support for article 5 of the NATO treaty.
Let's work backwards and start with the NATO treaty. One can call NATO a great many things, but no one ever called it a moral force. It is, rather, a mutual defense treaty that was originally aimed at the threat from the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, NATO expanded by incorporating nearly all of the Warsaw Pact countries as well as a number of former Soviet Socialist Republics that had escaped the Russian orbit. Turkey with its nearly Islamist leaders, the Netherlands with its open drugs policies, Greece with its financial issues, Estonia with its stridently anti-Russian policies and nearly all of Europe are members of Europe. There is essentially no moral creed that covers all those nations. Swearing fealty to NATO is a defense issue not one of morality. Indeed, the idea that morality has anything to do with NATO is merely a construct of the current left because it provides a means to try to discredit President Trump. Remember, during the 1980s when NATO really stood as a bulwark against Soviet style Communism and the repression then prevalent in Eastern Europe, the same leftist groups who now rhapsodize about the morality of NATO called it an immoral force leading the world to war. They wanted unilateral nuclear disarmament back then.
And when did the Paris agreements become a moral issue? It is a question of science and of appropriate remedies. Is there man-made global warming is not a moral issue. How do we combat global warming if it exists? That too is not a moral issue. Nevertheless, Summers like the good liberal that he must appear to be claims that it would be immoral not to have the USA spend three trillion dollars on a program that will have no meaningful effect on the climate according to those who support the Paris agreements. Many believe it would be immoral for a president to allow such major waste to happen. These are the people who understand that symbolic actions do not change reality.
One last note: immorality is not a political concept. It is a philosophical or religious concept. The strange thing is that while the left is prepared to accept the idea that climate change is a manifestation of evil, they won't even consider the idea that certain people, like Islamic terrorists, are evil. No, those terrorists are just victims of the economic system or, even worse, they are driven to terrorism by global warming.
I was reminded of all this when I read Summers latest bit of punditry. According to Summers, President Trump surrendered all claim to moral leadership by the USA when he withdrew from the Paris climate accords and failed to announce specific support for article 5 of the NATO treaty.
Let's work backwards and start with the NATO treaty. One can call NATO a great many things, but no one ever called it a moral force. It is, rather, a mutual defense treaty that was originally aimed at the threat from the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations. After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, NATO expanded by incorporating nearly all of the Warsaw Pact countries as well as a number of former Soviet Socialist Republics that had escaped the Russian orbit. Turkey with its nearly Islamist leaders, the Netherlands with its open drugs policies, Greece with its financial issues, Estonia with its stridently anti-Russian policies and nearly all of Europe are members of Europe. There is essentially no moral creed that covers all those nations. Swearing fealty to NATO is a defense issue not one of morality. Indeed, the idea that morality has anything to do with NATO is merely a construct of the current left because it provides a means to try to discredit President Trump. Remember, during the 1980s when NATO really stood as a bulwark against Soviet style Communism and the repression then prevalent in Eastern Europe, the same leftist groups who now rhapsodize about the morality of NATO called it an immoral force leading the world to war. They wanted unilateral nuclear disarmament back then.
And when did the Paris agreements become a moral issue? It is a question of science and of appropriate remedies. Is there man-made global warming is not a moral issue. How do we combat global warming if it exists? That too is not a moral issue. Nevertheless, Summers like the good liberal that he must appear to be claims that it would be immoral not to have the USA spend three trillion dollars on a program that will have no meaningful effect on the climate according to those who support the Paris agreements. Many believe it would be immoral for a president to allow such major waste to happen. These are the people who understand that symbolic actions do not change reality.
One last note: immorality is not a political concept. It is a philosophical or religious concept. The strange thing is that while the left is prepared to accept the idea that climate change is a manifestation of evil, they won't even consider the idea that certain people, like Islamic terrorists, are evil. No, those terrorists are just victims of the economic system or, even worse, they are driven to terrorism by global warming.
No comments:
Post a Comment