Conservative Washington Post columnist Max Boot called out Attorney General Bill Barr for pretending he would quit if the president didn't curb his irrational tweets about judicial matters that Barr said he was handling. The tweets haven't stopped, but Barr is still there.
So, instead, Barr went after the "secular left" proclaiming his "own right-wing, religious vision of how the government should function." Wednesday, Barr spoke to the Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville where he only contributed to the ugliness he claims to defy.
Calling out Barr’s "erudite citations in the address," Boot said that the attorney general couldn't disguise his "extremist sentiments he espouses." Barr went on to claim that it's liberals who promote a “totalitarian democracy, which seeks to submerge the individual in a collectivist agenda.”
It's an idea that he's borrowing from a 1950s book by Israeli historian Jacob Talmon, Boot explained. "Totalitarian democracy" described states like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
"A more common phrase today is “illiberal democracy” — which is used to describe countries such as Hungary, the Philippines or Poland, where a strongman evokes the popular will to undermine the independent judiciary, freedom of the press, protection of minorities and other characteristics of liberal democracy," said Boot.
But progressivism isn't the reason American democracy is being undermined.
Boot explained, "it’s Trump with his pardons for politically connected criminals; his demands that his political enemies be prosecuted; his slander of the intelligence community, FBI and Justice Department; his interference in criminal cases involving his cronies; his attempts to use the threat of withholding military aid to coerce a foreign country into helping him politically; his incessant dishonesty; his purges of apolitical civil servants; his unhinged attacks on political opponents and his mistreatment of immigrants. Barr must be aware of all this, yet he apparently objects to none of it. Indeed, Barr has been Trump’s accomplice and enabler. No wonder more than 2,000 former Justice Department employees recently demanded the attorney general’s resignation."
It's just another case of the Trump administration's selective outrage, said Boot.
"He had the gall to complain in Nashville that there is a progressive plot against the hallowed doctrine of federalism: 'We have come to believe that we should have one national solution for every problem in society. You have a problem? Let us fix it in Washington, D.C. One size fits all,'" Boot quoted.
After all, it was Trump who proclaimed at the Republican Convention, "I alone can fix it."
But Bill Barr's hypocrisy when it comes to federalism is only "exceeded by his hypocrisy on freedom of the press," wrote Boot. While Trump attacks the media, Barr tried to pretend he loved the "free press … as a check on the despotic tendency of democracy." then Barr went off on the "fake news media" being the "enemy of the people."
"Perhaps Barr’s most bizarre statement was his contention that we need more religion in politics, because 'religion tends to temper the passion and intensity of political disputes,'" Boot quoted. "Has he never heard of the Thirty Years War — or the more recent conflict over abortion in America? Only in Barr’s fantasy-world is religious fervor a force for political moderation."
"Barr is the second most dangerous man in America not only because he abets Trump in undermining the rule of law, but also because he seems determined to put a highfalutin’, pseudo-intellectual gloss on Trump’s power-grabbing. His Nashville speech was simply his latest attempt to make the indefensible appear acceptable," he closed.
