You might find The Hill’s investigation of its own handling of John Solomon’s columns published at The Hill on Ukraine interesting. I did. Here’s its opening:

On Nov. 18, 2019, The Hill announced it was reviewing John Solomon’s opinion columns on Ukraine after State Department diplomats criticized several of those columns during House impeachment hearings.

This review was conducted independently by The Hill’s news staff under the direction of Editor-in-Chief Bob Cusack.

The Hill established working panels for each of 14 relevant pieces that appeared on TheHill.com. These working groups analyzed and discussed the columns at length, looking at possible corrections and/or context that could have been added at the time of the writings. In addition, The Hill reviewed congressional testimony and other public documentation related to Solomon’s columns, as well as related media reports, to add editor’s notes to the columns regarding what has been learned since the columns were posted by The Hill. The Hill also reviewed its editorial policies and processes.

and its closing graf:

Solomon’s Ukraine columns represented a departure from The Hill’s standard opinion content because they attempted to blend opinion and investigative, “original reporting” material. The Hill will avoid such blending of reporting and opinion columns going forward.

I find the free and, frequently, undetectable intermingling of news and opinion problematic, indeed, journalism’s single gravest problem. Here at The Glittering Eye I have frequently urged a return to 5W-style news writing over the point-of-view favored today. I hope other news organizations or what used to be news organizations follow The Hill’s example and perform critical examinations of their own practices.

My all-time favorite wisecrack during Jay Leno’s stent hosting The Tonight Show was this from one of his opening monologues during the early Aughts:

I don’t know why anyone is surprised that France won’t help us liberate Iraq. During World War II they wouldn’t even help us liberate France.

In a similar vein Walter Russell Mead observes about the paradox facing our notional European allies in his Wall Street Journal column:

Since the 1940s, U.S. leadership in the service of a united and secure Europe has been the one unchanging feature in the Continental landscape. For generations, the U.S. committed to protect Europe from Russia, maintain bases in Germany to prevent it from threatening its neighbors, and promote European integration. Now Europeans don’t know where they stand, and a mixture of bafflement, anger, disappointment and fear fills the atmosphere at conferences like the one in Munich.

There’s little doubt that Trump administration policies, ranging from trade wars to toughness on Iran, have tested trans-Atlantic relations to the breaking point. But to understand the growing weakness of the Western alliance, Europeans need to spend less time deploring Donald Trump and more time looking in the mirror. A good place to begin is with a Pew poll released earlier this month on the state of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

Superficially, the poll looks like good news. In 14 European countries plus Canada and the U.S., a median 53% of respondents said they had a favorable view of NATO, while only 27% saw the alliance unfavorably. Despite double-digit declines in NATO’s favorability among the French and the Germans, these numbers aren’t bad. Mr. Trump, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel are all less popular in their home countries than NATO is.

So far, so good—but that support is thin. When asked if their country should go to war with Russia if it attacked a NATO ally, 50% of respondents said no, and only 38% supported honoring their commitment to NATO allies.

Let those numbers sink in. Only 34% of Germans, 25% of Greeks and Italians, 36% of Czechs, 33% of Hungarians and 41% of the French believe their country should fulfill its treaty obligation if another European country is attacked. Only the U.S., Canada, the U.K., the Netherlands and Lithuania had a majority in favor of honoring the NATO commitment to mutual defense.

I’ve quoted it before and I don’t recall whether it was German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer who said it but it states the problem well: “European politicians know what they need to do. They just know that they can’t keep their jobs if they do it.”

It’s called “clearing the field”. They can increase the price of television spots to the point at which it’s impossible to carry on from lack of funds. Or they can crowd the rest of the field out.

After recapitulating the same analysis of Bernie Sanders’s record (spoiler: he is a state socialist), Megan McArdle continues in her Washington Post column:

As Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) looks increasingly likely to win the Democratic nomination, left-of-center people are anxious to downgrade Sanders’s self-described socialism into something more politically palatable — like Great Society liberalism, or perhaps, at maximum, a Nordic-style welfare state.

In this, they struggle with an inconveniently well-documented Early Bernie Sanders, with his calls to nationalize “utilities, banks and major industries,“ his kind words for left-wing dictatorships, and his “very strange honeymoon” in the U.S.S.R. — where he blasted U.S. foreign policy before returning home to say “Let’s take the strengths of both systems. … Let’s learn from each other.”

One should be forgiven almost any number of youthful flirtations with bad ideology. But Sanders was in his early 40s when he went gaga for Nicaragua’s brutal Sandinista regime, and 46 during his sojourn on the Volga. In February 2019, when he was refusing to describe Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro as a “dictator,” Sanders was 77.

Forty years seems enough cultivate skepticism about what you’re shown while visiting a Communist dictatorship. And 77 is certainly old enough to have read the 2019 Human Rights Watch report on Venezuela, which noted that “polls had not met international standards of freedom and fairness,” and went on to state that no “independent government institutions remain today in Venezuela to act as a check on executive power. … The government has been repressing dissent through often-violent crackdowns.” All of which sounds positively dictatorial. If that wasn’t enough, Sanders might have been convinced when Maduro started using military blockades to prevent humanitarian aid from reaching his own famine-stricken citizens.

Her conclusion: “Thus, it’s unsurprising to find that Sanders remains considerably to the left of Europe’s moderate social democrats.” That is certainly true of the version of “Medicare for All” that he has promulgated. It doesn’t actually resemble the systems presently in place in Scandinavia or Germany or France for that matter.

What should concern Democrats about Bernie Sanders is not merely his radicalism but that he has no friends in Washington. He won’t bring a coterie of more moderate connections with him into the White House and he won’t meekly accept the usual suspects of the Democratic Party nomenklatura.

Relying on Republicans to defend you from your own excesses is downright weird to my ear but that seems to be the assumption that a lot of Democrats are making right now.

The big news here is President Donald Trump’s commutation of the prison sentence of impeached former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Doing so is completely within President Trump’s legal authority. It is also uncalled for and unwise.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune declaim:

After Trump revealed his wrongheaded commutation Tuesday, former U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and the three trial lawyers who prosecuted Blagojevich issued a reminder that said in part:

The criminal conduct for which a jury unanimously convicted Mr. Blagojevich included the following actions:

(1) extorting the CEO of a children’s hospital by withholding important state funding to help sick children until the CEO provided campaign contributions;

(2) extorting the owners of a racetrack by intentionally holding up the signing of important state legislation until the owners provided campaign contributions in response to an explicit demand for them;

(3) extortionately demanding funding for a high-paying private sector job, as well as campaign contributions, in exchange for naming a replacement to an open U.S. Senate seat; and

(4) lying to the FBI to cover up his criminal activity.

Trump’s decision spits in the eye of those prosecutors, but also the jurors who found the ex-governor guilty. Remember, too, that we’ll never know how many top-notch people were cheated out of careers in government, or how many employers lost chances at state contracts because, during the Blagojevich years, the fix was in. Nor may we again see such a selfish betrayal as Blagojevich’s effort to sell that Senate seat, which belonged not to him but to the people of Illinois.

while the editors of the Sun-Times first agree with the commutation but then launch into an attack on President Trump’s motives for it:

We have long argued that the former governor is guilty as charged but that his 14-year sentence was way too harsh. On the merits of the case, and especially given the considerably shorter sentences handed out to public officials guilty of more egregious corruption — such as the 6 1⁄2 years given to bribe-taking former Gov. George Ryan for racketeering, conspiracy and fraud — we would argue Blagojevich has been fully and fairly punished. He has been imprisoned for almost 8 years.

But Trump’s decision to commute Blagojevich’s sentence at this time is all of a piece with the president’s warnings that he’s not about to stand by and watch Stone go off to prison for any extended time.

Stone is one of Trump’s closest and shadiest back-channel operatives. He was found guilty of obstructing a congressional investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, including five counts of making false statements to Congress and tampering with a witness.

If Stone’s conviction stands, and especially if he is forced to serve prison time, Trump knows it will be seen as a symbolic indictment of the president himself, who wants the world to believe Congress’ entire probe of Russian interference was a “hoax.”

He did not receive the maximum sentence allowed under the law for his crimes. I concur with the district court judge who rejected Blagojevich’s appeal of his sentence: “these are serious crimes that had an impact on the people of Illinois”. The argument that it’s hard on his kids is specious. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. All crimes are hard on the children of the felons. His crimes were hard on many, many more children.

Taken together President Trump’s pardons and commutations would seem to convey the message that white collar crimes should just not be punished severely. I think the opposite. Just because you commit your crimes with a pen rather than a gun doesn’t make them better. IMO the punishments were too lenient rather than too severe.

This post was inspired by this one at Outside the Beltway. I’m sure this is a topic that will be debated with some heat for the rest of my life. What were our objectives in Afghanistan? I think they were

• Punish and/or destroy the people who were responsible for our being attacked on September 11, 2001.
• Establish a government there willing and able to prevent those people or similar from setting up shop in the country again and which would be allied with us.
• Be able to withdraw from the country within a fairly short timeframe, leaving the government we’d set up able to stand on its own.

It was obvious to me from the very first that those objectives could not be achieved. Oh, the first objective could be achieved but it could have been achieved on the afternoon of September 12, 2001 with ICBMs. We didn’t need to invade. We didn’t need to spend 20 years there. As soon as we put “boots on the ground”, as the saying goes, we accepted certain obligations which led inexorably to the other two objectives.

Here’s my follow-up question: what are the ethical obligations of an American general ordered to accomplish those objectives?

You may recall that during the Obama Administration I never complained about excesses on the party of the Attorney General or question the president’s authority to direct the Justice Department or to appoint an attorney general that suited him. I did, however, point out that for as long as I can remember, i.e. thirteen different presidents, attorneys general been doing the White House’s dirty work. I don’t know how long that has been the case. Maybe since Edmund Randolph. I don’t like it but that’s the reality.

David von Drehle expresses concern about the potential for an upcoming shambles that will make the Iowa caucus look well-run in his Washington Post column:

Handwriting, meet wall. With so many candidates and this set of rules, can anyone win a majority? We have eight highly ambitious, well-funded people hunched feverishly at the craps table, some rolling hot dice, others sure their luck’s about to change. No one’s ready to walk away.

The field may eventually thin, but not before a lot more votes are cast. And the closer we get to the finish line without a clear winner, the less incentive exists for candidates to drop out. They’ll cling to their pledged delegates as potential bargaining chips.

If the new rules fail to produce a majority, an unholy spectacle of threats, cajolery and attempted deals will surely fill the weeks before the convention. Sanders is already laying the predicate, saying that a failure to anoint him as the nominee if he arrives with a plurality “would be a very divisive moment for the Democratic Party.”

No doubt he’s right, but arguably he’s the one doing the dividing. He spent his whole life outside the Democratic Party, but now he wants to own it. Besides: I’m not sure anyone in the party has enough sway to force a deal.

Suppose no one wins a first-ballot majority in Milwaukee. Chaos. The rules say that every delegate becomes a free agent, free to choose virtually any U.S. citizen over 35. What’s more, some 770 superdelegates (yes, them again) are added to the mix. Do they draft Oprah? Michelle Obama? Does anyone have Al Gore’s phone number? Did Hillary just enter the arena? Is that Bloomberg in a helicopter overhead, dropping cash to the delegates below?

Perhaps this could be avoided. Warren could throw her muscle behind Sanders and try to boost him past 50 percent. She doesn’t seem so inclined. The moderates could draw straws — again, not likely.

Maybe Sanders has a plan. Maybe his reshaping of the rules was intentional and strategic, and not the poorly thought-out tantrum it now appears to have been. But unless he can quickly accelerate from the roughly 25 percent share of voters he won in Iowa and New Hampshire to win decisive majorities from coast to coast, he has set the party on a course to unmapped territory.

The irony is that Sanders is the least-suited candidate for the melee of horse-trading and vote-swapping that may lie ahead. He has few friends in politics, having flaunted his purity through the muddy streets of government for decades, disdaining all who compromise. He makes no deals, so he has no chits to call in. He has offended key unions in the party’s labor base by insisting on an end to private health insurance. Grumpy, sanctimonious and unreflective, Sanders would be ill-equipped to strike the bargains necessary to win the nomination on a second or third — or fourth — ballot. A very divisive moment, indeed.

As a thought experiment let’s consider an entirely different model for presidential candidates. What if the objective were to pick the candidate best prepared to craft a new coalition to suit the changing times every four years? Whatever your views of Barack Obama as a president, you’ve got to admit that he left the Democratic Party in a weakened position after eight years in office. He just wasn’t interested in the job of creating a new, stronger Democratic Party.

Hillary Clinton wasn’t that person, either. And neither is Bernie Sanders.

David Moscrop’s op-ed in the Washington Post illustrates one of my pet peeves:

Pierre Trudeau, the late Canadian prime minister and father of current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, characterized the relationship as akin to sharing a bed with a beast. “Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant,” Trudeau said, “no matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast. … One is affected by every twitch and grunt.” He was right. So, it’s understandable that at least some protests against those twitches and grunts take the form of self-satisfied repudiation by comparison.

But the ongoing 2020 U.S. election process is a reminder that some of the remonstrations are on the mark. It’s clear that U.S. democracy is structurally damaged and in need of repair. In this case, duct tape won’t suffice; the mending will require heavy equipment and a willingness to tear the place down to the studs. And at least some of the instructions for getting the job done can be found in the constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy up north.

Canadian elections are among the most secure, reliable and legitimate in the world. They are run by Elections Canada, a national, nonpartisan body that reports to Parliament. On election day, each elector goes to their polling station to vote according to rules set by a federal act and agency procedures that govern everybody. The process is far less politicized and unpredictable than the model of state-by-state responsibility in the United States. Moreover, voting technology in Canada is as simple as it is elegant: paper, pencil, cardboard screen. No voting machines. No punch cards. No Florida in 2000. No Ohio in 2004.

In Canada, federal electoral districts are recalculated and redistributed every 10 years, after the census. The process is led by electoral boundaries commissions in each province, chaired by a judge and undertaken by the chair and two other members. It isn’t without the occasional controversy, and some Canadian ridings are home to considerably more electors than others, but the outcome of seat redistribution in Canada doesn’t suffer from the same partisan — and sometimes racist — failures of the state-based redistricting model that allows for gerrymandering. Contrary to the impulse of the uber-democrat who believes that democracy means chaining each element of the state to an elected office, the Canadian system recognizes that the further politicians are from the process of determining electoral boundaries, the more fair and legitimate elections will be.

The influence of money might be the single most significant shortcoming in U.S. electoral politics — and beyond it. In Canada, elections are affected by money, but parties are forced to rely on small, individual donations by citizens and residents — currently capped at 1,600 Canadian dollars (about $1,200) per year for each party, and the same amount for candidates or riding associations, independent candidates and leadership contestants — since corporate, association and union donations are forbidden. Public funding helps level electoral contests through reimbursement for some election expenses and tax rebates, while strict and modest election spending limits further constrain the corrosive force of money.

The pet peeve is that countries are systems. Big, complicated systems. It is impossible to pick one feature or another cafeteria-style and import them into another country. Which of Canada’s other features should we import? What are the critical features which caused Canada to become what it is?

• Have longer winters
• Be more ethnically homogeneous
• Remain a colony of Great Britain for another two hundred years
• Not assume the role of the world’s policeman

just to name four major differences between Canada and the United States among the thousands.

I like Canada. In many ways I admire Canada. But Canada is not the United States. Our politics has always been more rough-and-tumble than Canada’s. And we have much less social cohesion than the Canadians do.

I agree that we need reform but to achieve that reform we’ll need to look within. We should strive to be the best United States we can become rather than trying to emulate other countries whose differences are as great or greater than their similarities with us.