If Robert Kagan hoped to generate some conversation with a lengthy Washington Post opinion piece last week, he succeeded. Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an editor at large for the Post, presented a provocative warning to the public, arguing that the United States faces the possibility of a “dictatorship” if Donald Trump is returned to the White House.
Sen. J.D. Vance — a former Trump critic turned sycophant — evidently wasn’t persuaded by Kagan’s case. On the contrary, the Ohio Republican this week sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Secretary of State Antony Blinken seeking some kind of investigation into the published piece. From the senator’s letter:
“I wish to address to your attention a recent opinion piece published in the pages of a widely-circulated American newspaper. Based on my review of public charging documents that the Department of Justice has filed in courts of law, I suspect that one or both of you might characterize this article as an invitation to ‘insurrection,’ a manifestation of criminal ‘conspiracy,’ or an attempt to bring about civil war.”
In other words, Vance, a Yale-educated lawyer, believes the Post op-ed might have crossed a legal line.
Isn’t the duty of a newspaper to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable?” This senator is way too comfortable - with a dictatorship.
It’s scary that Republicans are committed to overthrowing our government, but if our last few decades of attempted regime change are anything to go by, they’ll fail and we’ll be left with a brutally divided sectarian state riddled with violence and crumbling infrastructure.