Moral Blindness on the Right

Gerard Baker is an outstanding columnist at the Wall Street Journal who, in the wake of the murder of Russian dissident Alexi Navalny by the Russian tyrant Vladimir Putin, has applied his talents to the task of pointing out the moral blindness of those on the conservative right who seem to think that either Joe Biden is not much different than Vladimir Putin, or contrarily, that Putin's Russia - and indeed Putin himself - are not so bad.

In considering this latter option, Baker seems specifically to have Tucker Carlson in his sights - although he doesn't mention him by name - since Carlson recently took a trip to Russia in which he praised their subways and supermarket carts and conducted a rather anodyne interview with the murderous Putin himself.

Here's Baker's indictment of the moral myopia of those on the right who think Putin is some sort of exemplar:

The only response of all decent people to the death of Alexei Navalny, the brave critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, in a Siberian prison camp is grief, disgust and unqualified condemnation. It is the sort of event that defines the malevolent nature of Mr. Putin’s Russia.

But that sort of decency evidently was above the moral reach of some of the more prominent leaders of what used to be the conservative movement. Newt Gingrich saw a parallel that many others also highlighted: Navalny’s “death in prison is a brutal reminder that jailing your political opponents is inhumane and a violation of every principle of a free society,” he tweeted.

“Watch the Biden Administration speak out against Putin and his jailing of his leading political opponent while Democrats in four different jurisdictions try to turn President Trump into an American Navalny.”

This last sentence was a reference to the attempt by Democrats to ruin Donald Trump through the legal process so that he couldn't run against Joe Biden in November. Even so, Joe Biden, as autocratic as he may be, is a long way from being Vladimir Putin. Baker continues:

You can believe, as I do, that Joe Biden is doing significant harm to the U.S. You can believe, as I do, that he has weakened our national security, exposed us to dangerous levels of mass illegal immigration, and is contributing to the corrosion of our national cohesion with his promotion of progressive ideology.

You can believe, as I do, that he has many more questions to answer about his and his family’s work for foreign entities. You can believe, as I do, that he and his fellow Democrats have manipulated the levers of justice in pursuit of the man who stands as their principal political opponent.

He should be held accountable for all these.

But, need I say this? Mr. Biden isn’t Vladimir Putin. Mr. Biden doesn’t invade neighbors on a false pretext, killing indiscriminately. He doesn’t make people who have fallen into disfavor fall from the windows of tall buildings.

He doesn’t throw a foreign journalist in jail for reporting the truth about what is going on in his country. He doesn’t arrange the murder of his domestic political opponents on the soil of other countries. And he doesn’t imprison, torture and preside over the “death by sudden death” of his principal domestic critic.

Baker concludes with this, "If you can’t see the difference then I say, respectfully, that you have lost—or discarded—your capacity for moral reasoning. And that is an even bigger problem."

He's right, and the same goes for those on the left who try to convince us that Trump is the next thing to Mussolini, or even Hitler. The people who say such things are either incredibly ignorant of the men they're calumniating or the men to whom they're comparing them, or they're just lying.