POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH

What is 'Common Good Capitalism,' and Why Are Some Conservatives So Enamored?

Advocating for the common good has notable German precedents. Hitler shared with the German Left of his day the slogan: "Gemeinnutz vor Eigennutz" (Common use before private use). And who preceded Hitler in that? Friedrich Engels at one stage ran a publication called "Gemeinnuetziges Wochenblatt" ("Common-use Weekly")

"Common-good capitalism" is all the rage these days with national conservatives. But what exactly is it, you may ask? That's a good question. As far as I can tell, it's a lovely sounding name for imposing one's preferred economic and social policies on Americans while pretending to be "improving" capitalism. If common-good capitalism's criticisms of the free-market and prescriptions for its improvement were ice cream, it would be identical in all but its serving container to what much of the Left has been dishing up for decades.

The wider adoption of the term Common-Good Capitalism (CGC) can be traced back to a speech given by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., at Catholic University in 2019. While there are different strains of common-good capitalism, they all have in common the goal of producing a more balanced and stable economy that better serves the nation and its people.

The common good is, of course, a vague and subjective concept, the details of which are hard to pin down. Its advocates claim it's an alternative form of conservative governance meant to promote things like tradition, workers' dignity, religion, order and families, rather than the singular free-market focus of personal liberties and economic freedom. How exactly government policies will be used to mold capitalism into achieving these goals -- many of which go further than economics -- is unclear. This haziness explains why those defending common-good capitalism usually do so only by listing what they see as wrong with the free market, rather than by giving their audiences specific details.

For instance, common-good advocates' complaints about no-prefix capitalism often include excessive income inequality caused by greedy, cosmopolitan capitalists who heartlessly offshore jobs to low-wage foreign countries, or gripes about corporations somehow simultaneously charging monopolistically high prices that hurt consumers and low prices that threaten small firms and damage local communities. I wouldn't blame you if you thought these complaints were coming from the likes of Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

While I don't dismiss some of their complaints about the underperformance of the economy -- specifically the hardships suffered by some workers and families -- common-good capitalists make the same mistakes as their counterparts on the Left. They start by mistaking problems caused by government intervention for problems inherent in the free market. They end by offering up even more government interventions as supposed solutions.

It's striking to listen to CGC advocates act as if today's markets have been freed of all the fetters that I and other advocates of small government have warned about for decades. The size and scope of the government say otherwise. With $31 trillion in debt, more than $6 trillion in annual federal government spending and a future 30-year government shortfall of $114 trillion, it's ludicrous to assert that the dominant governing philosophy in Washington over the past 50 years has been Milton Friedman-style market theory. Also contradicting the common-good capitalists' mythmaking is the well-documented burden imposed by the regulatory state at all levels of government.

But rather than demanding fewer government-erected barriers to exchange, employment and housing affordability, the CGC crowd wants tariffs to obstruct consumers' access to inexpensive imports. They want to line the pockets of the firms they favor while punishing those they dislike. Further, these "capitalists" want to forbid the business practices that they think favor capital over labor, when in reality capital fuels innovation, hiring and higher wages. And they want to make families artificially dependent on government design with policies such as federal mandated paid leave and extended child tax credits. These policies, of course, are favored also by the Left.

In the end, CGC champions the same tired policies that big-government types predictably propose whenever they see something they don't like. Industrial policy, export bans and other forms of protectionism are, based on ample evidence, terrible for both economic resiliency and efficiency -- and thus for workers and families. What's more, research suggests that giving relatively large amounts of money to parents without any strings attached disincentivizes work and makes more child poverty likely.

At every turn, common-good capitalism implies a greater role for government in regulating and directing the market to achieve the fancies of common-good capitalists. Who truly believes that such interventions won't result in more inefficiency, corruption and political capture by special interests? I don't. I also worry that common-good capitalists won't be interested in balancing the rights and the freedoms of those persons who disagree with their economic and social designs.

https://townhall.com/columnists/veroniquederugy/2023/05/18/what-is-common-good-capitalism-and-why-are-some-conservatives-so-enamored-n2623414

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Hillary Clinton says Trump supporters are mentally ill

Hillary Clinton has suggested Donald Trump supporters are mentally unwell, complicating any longshot comeback by the former secretary of state amid questions surrounding Joe Biden’s ability to lead the Democrat ticket for president in 2024.

In comments reminiscent of her controversial “basket of deplorables” description of Republican voters during her unsuccessful campaign for president in 2016, the former secretary of state questioned the rationality of Mr Trump’s supporters.

“Any sensible person who looks at that former president and says, ‘oh, let’s do this again’, needs an intervention because he’s only gotten worse,” she said at a Financial Times conference in Washington overnight on Saturday.

Mr Trump, facing a series of potential and actual criminal and civil investigations, remains the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president, enjoying upwards of 50 per cent of support among Republicans according to most recent polls.

A national ABC/Washington Post poll published earlier this month put the former president’s support at 49 per cent, seven percentage points ahead of Joe Biden, 80, on the question of a hypothetical 2024 rematch, as the incumbent Democrat struggles to generate momentum.

Mrs Clinton, 74, who has said she wouldn’t put herself forward as a candidate again, dismissed concerns about Mr Biden’s age and declared US democracy would end if the former president won a second term.

“[A Trump victory] would be the end of democracy in the United States, and it would be the end of Ukraine in a week; he will pull us out of NATO if he wins again, just like he pulled us out of the Iran deal and out of the Paris accords,” she said.

The veteran Democrat powerbroker and wife of former president Bill Clinton also, confusingly, suggested Vladimir Putin – whom she described as a “complicated, Messianic, narcissistic, authoritarian” – would not have invaded Ukraine if Mr Trump had won re-election in 2020.

“[Putin] launched his invasion, his second invasion of Ukraine, in part because Trump lost, because he thought if Trump had won, Trump would have pulled us out of NATO, it would literally have been a cakewalk for him,” she said.

“And so when Trump didn’t win, [Putin] figured he had to go forward, he thought he had enough chips with the Germans and others to prevent a united front in support of Ukraine against his invasion. He turned out to have absolutely the wrong calculation.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/hillary-clinton-slams-donald-trump-voters-as-mentally-unwell/news-story/c06c0f92542df9f4e4a278e8f5e24fb6

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WHO says artificial sweeteners are no good for weight loss or health. Is sugar better?

Artificial sweeteners could make you FATTER

This week, the World Health Organisation (WHO) advised that “non-sugar sweeteners should not be used as a means of achieving weight control or reducing the risk of non-communicable diseases” such as diabetes and heart disease.

Artificial sweeteners are either natural compounds or synthesised compounds that taste sweet like sugar – and are up to 400 times sweeter by weight – but provide no or negligible energy.

As a comparison, sugar has 17 kilojoules (or four calories) per gram, so one teaspoon of sugar would have 85 kilojoules.

Several types of artificial sweeteners are used in Australia. Some are synthetic, others are extracted from foods such as monk fruit and the stevia plant.

So, what do the new WHO guidelines mean for people who have switched to artificial sweeteners for health reasons? Should they just go back to sugar?

Promoted for weight loss

As a practising clinical dietitian in the 1990s, I remember when artificial sweeteners began to appear in processed foods. They were promoted as a way of substituting sugar into food products that may lead to weight loss.

A can of sugar-sweetened soft drink contains on average about 500 kilojoules. Theoretically, the substitution of one sugar-sweetened can of soft drink with an artificially sweetened can of soft drink every day would reduce your weight by about 1 kilogram per month.

But research over the past few decades shows this doesn’t hold up.

What’s the new advice based on?

The WHO has based its recommendation on a systematic review it has conducted. Its objective was to provide evidence-based guidance on the use of artificial sweeteners in weight management and for disease prevention.

Weight management is important, given obesity increases the risk of diseases such as diabetes and certain types of cancer, which are the leading cause of death globally.

The WHO’s systematic review included data from different types of studies, which give us different information:

50 were randomised controlled trials (when scientists intervene and make changes – in this case to the diet – while keeping everything else constant, to see the impact of that change)

97 were prospective cohort studies (when scientists observe a risk factor in a large group of people over a period of time to see how it impacts an outcome – without intervening or make any changes)

47 were case-control studies (another type of observational study that follows and compares two groups of otherwise matched people, aside from the risk factor of interest).
Randomised controlled trials provide us with causal data, allowing us to say the intervention led to the change we saw.

Prospective cohort and case control only give us associations or links. We can’t prove the risk factors led to a change in the outcomes – in this case, weight – because other risk factors that scientists haven’t considered could be responsible.

But they give great clues about what might be happening, particularly if we can’t do a trial because it’s unethical or unsafe to give or withhold specific treatments.

The WHO’s systematic review looked at body fatness, non-communicable diseases and death.

For body fatness, the randomised controlled trials showed those consuming more artificial sweeteners had slightly lower weight – an average of 0.71 kilograms – than those consuming less or no artificial sweeteners.

But the cohort studies found higher intakes of artificial sweeteners were associated with a higher body mass index (BMI) or (0.14 kg/m2) and a 76 per cent increased likelihood of having obesity.

The prospective cohort studies showed for higher intakes of artificial sweetened beverages there was a 23 per cent increase in the risk of type 2 diabetes.

If artificial sweeteners were consumed as a tabletop item (that the consumer added to foods and drinks) there was a 34 per cent increase in the risk of diabetes.

In people with diabetes, artificial sweeteners did not improve or worsen any clinical indicators used to monitor their diabetes, such as fasting blood sugar or insulin levels.

Higher intakes of artificial sweeteners were associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and death in the long-term prospective observational studies that followed participants for an average of 13 years.

But artificial sweeteners were not associated with differences in overall cancer rates or premature death from cancer.

Overall, while the randomised controlled trials suggested slightly more weight loss in people who used artificial sweeteners, the observational studies found this group tended to have an increased risk of obesity and poorer health outcomes.

Does the review have any shortcomings?

The WHO’s advice has led to some criticism because the randomised controlled trials did show some weight-loss benefit to using artificial sweeteners, albeit small.

However, the WHO clearly states its advice is based on the multiple research designs, not just randomised controlled trials.

Additionally, the WHO assessed the quality of the studies in the review to be of “low or very low certainty”.

Are they unsafe?

This advice is not suggesting artificial sweeteners are unsafe or should be banned. The WHO’s scientific review was not about chemical or safety issues.

So are we better off having sugar instead? The answer is no.

In 2015, the WHO released guidelines on added sugar intake to reduce the risk of excess weight and obesity.

Added sugars are found in processed and ultra-processed foods and drinks such as soft drinks, fruit drinks, sports drinks, chocolate and confectionery, flavoured yoghurt and muesli bars.

It recommended people consume no more 10 per cent of total energy intake, which is about 50 grams (10 teaspoons), of sugar a day for an average adult who needs 8700 kilojoules a day.

The WHO’s recommendation is in line with Australian Dietary Guidelines, which recommends no more than three serves of discretionary foods per day, if you need the extra energy.

However, it’s best to get extra energy from the core food groups (grains, vegetable, fruit, dairy and protein group) rather than discretionary foods.

So what do I drink now?

So if artificial and sugar in drinks are not advised for weight loss, what can you drink?

Some options include water, kombucha with no added sugar, tea or coffee. Soda and mineral water flavoured with a small amount of your favourite fruit juice are good substitutes.

Milk is also a good option, particularly if you’re not currently meeting your calcium requirements.

https://thenewdaily.com.au/life/health/2023/05/18/sugar-artificial-sweeteners-health/

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Our Weaponized Legal System Misfires

The greatest threat to democracy today is not populism, as elite liberals claim. Nor is it the old-fashioned dictatorial coup d’etat. The greatest danger that multiparty democracy faces is “lawfare”—the weaponization of national judicial systems by political parties to delegitimize, harass, bankrupt, disqualify, and sometimes imprison politicians of other parties.

In Scotland, the husband of former Prime Minister Nikola Sturgeon has been arrested in a case involving Scottish National Party finances; soon she may be arrested herself. In India, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi has been arrested and sentenced to two years in jail and expelled from parliament for joking about the name of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi. In Pakistan, former Prime Minister Imran Khan has been arrested, with Pakistan’s Supreme Court holding that his arrest by paramilitary forces was unconstitutional. In Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was recently elected president, after having been arrested and imprisoned on corruption charges, only to have the verdict thrown out by a judge. In 2018, half of all former living South Korean presidents were in prison.

Latin America, sharing separations-of-powers constitutions like the U.S., leads the world in impeachments of presidents by opposition parties carrying out “legislative coups.” Of 12 impeachments in Latin America since 1900, 10 have taken place in the last three decades and six in only three nations—Brazil, Ecuador, and Paraguay.

In the 235 years in which the U.S. has been governed under the federal Constitution, three of the four presidential impeachments have taken place in the last 25 years, and two in the last three years. In North America, as in Latin America, impeachment has gone from being the last resort in emergencies to being a frequently used weapon by one political party against another.

Has any U.S. president ever deserved impeachment? Yes, one: Richard Nixon.

Nixon’s Special Investigations Unit, known as the Plumbers, had originally been created to spy on opponents of the Vietnam War. On June 17, 1971, Nixon told his aide H.R. Haldeman he wanted the Plumbers to obtain files that might be in the safe of the Brookings Institution that could show that his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, had ordered a bombing halt in Vietnam to help Nixon’s Democratic opponent in 1968, Hubert Humphrey. Nixon wanted to use the files to blackmail Johnson.

In contrast to the possible impeachment of Nixon, the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and the two impeachments of Trump, were unjustified exercises of partisan power. Andrew Johnson was a terrible president, but the radical wing of his own Republican Party impeached him because they opposed his Reconstruction policies, not because he committed any “high crimes and misdemeanors.” Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and his perjury in concealing it; Trump’s clumsy attempt to get Ukrainian President Zelensky to supply him with incriminating evidence against Hunter Biden; the inflammatory effect of Trump’s claim that the election had been stolen in inciting the unforeseen January 6 riot (not “insurrection”)—all of these deserved the harsh penalty of censure by Congress, but not the nuclear weapon of impeachment and removal from office.

A more serious charge arises from Trump’s recorded phone call to fellow Republican Brad Raffensburger, Georgia’s secretary of state, asking him to “recalculate” to “find 11,780 votes.” Raffensburger refused, as the state had already done three separate ballot counts and two certifications of Biden’s victory.

Even with Georgia’s electoral votes, Trump still would have lost the electoral college to Biden. Trump failed to persuade officials in other states, as well as Vice President Pence and other leading Republicans, to take steps to delay or overturn the certification of Biden as president. From this distance in time, Trump looks less like the mastermind of a plausible scheme to overturn the election and establish a dictatorship than an incompetent, pathetic narcissist who genuinely believed that he had been cheated out of a second term and listened to cronies who fed his delusion.

Even after the riot on January 6, six Republican senators and 121 Republican House members objected to certifying the electoral outcome in Arizona, while seven Republican senators and 138 House Republicans objected to certifying the results in Pennsylvania.

This was a disgraceful stunt, but it was an escalation of what had become the normal practice of both parties for years. In January 2005, House Democrat Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio and California Sen. Barbara Boxer, also a Democrat, objected to the certification of Ohio’s electoral votes, claiming: “We believe there are ample grounds for challenging the electors from Ohio as being unlawfully appointed.” If their motion had succeeded, all 20 Electoral College votes of Ohio for George W. Bush would have been denied and with neither candidate having an Electoral College majority the election would have been decided by the House of Representatives. Although the effort failed, 32 members of Congress, all Democrats, voted for this attempt to overturn the presidential election of 2004.

On Jan. 6, 2017, the following seven Democrats in the House objected to the certification of the electoral count: Jamie Raskin, D-Md., (objecting to Florida’s votes); Jim McGovern, D-Mass., (objecting to Alabama’s votes); Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., (objecting to Georgia’s votes); Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., (objecting to North Carolina’s votes); Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, (objecting to votes from North Carolina, South Carolina, Wisconsin, and Mississippi; Barbara Lee, D-Calif., (objecting to Michigan’s votes); and Maxine Waters, D-Calif., (objecting to Wyoming’s votes).

Several of these Democrats objected to congressional certification of the 2016 election on the basis of conspiracy theories. Barbara Lee alleged Russian manipulation of the election and malfunctioning voting machines. Sheila Jackson Lee claimed there had been “massive voter suppression” in Missisippi. All were overruled by then-Vice President Joe Biden in 2017, in the same way that Vice President Mike Pence overruled similar objections in 2021.

One of the Democrats in the House who tried to stop the certification of the election in 2016 on spurious grounds, Jamie Raskin, went on to be the lead impeachment manager in the second impeachment of Donald Trump.

Impeachment has gone from being the last resort in emergencies to being a frequently used weapon by one political party against another.

Having lost the election of 2020 and returned to private life, Donald Trump is now the most likely opponent of Joe Biden in the presidential election of 2024. Trump continues to be the victim of Democratic lawfare. Attorney General Merrick Garland authorized a theatrical ransacking of Donald Trump’s home by FBI agents to collect classified documents during a dispute over ownership—shortly before it was learned that President Joe Biden also had possessed classified documents, from his days as vice president.

Now Alvin Bragg, the elected district attorney of New York City, has had Trump arrested and indicted. Trump is charged with falsifying business records while legally paying hush money to Stormy Daniels, a porn star with whom he had an affair. By an extreme stretch of the imagination, Bragg claims this violated campaign finance laws. Even so, normally this would be a misdemeanor, punished by a fine. For example, in 2022, the Federal Election Commission fined the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign more than $100,000 for disguising payments to Fusion GPS, the opposition research group behind the pro-Clinton “Russiagate” hoax that claimed Trump was a witting or unwitting Russian asset, by claiming falsely that the money was for legal expenses incurred by the law firm Perkins Coie.

But Bragg, instead of seeking to fine Trump for similar campaign finance violations, has promoted 34 charges to felonies. If convicted on all 34 counts, Trump could face a maximum sentence of 136 years.

Cy Vance, Bragg’s predecessor as DA, refused to charge Trump on such flimsy grounds. His refusal infuriated many Democrats who welcome Bragg’s prosecution of Trump as revenge, pure and simple, for Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and the failure of the two unjustified impeachments of Trump by partisan Democrats in the House. Campaigning for election to the post of district attorney, Bragg boasted: “I have investigated Trump and his children and held them accountable for their misconduct with the Trump Foundation. I know how to follow the facts and hold people in power accountable.” This sounds very much like a campaign promise to voters in overwhelmingly Democratic New York City to find some excuse, any excuse, to use the power of the District Attorney’s Office to try to imprison a former president they despised.

“Whataboutism” is a perfectly valid argument, when it is proof of a double standard. For most Democrats, Bill Clinton’s perjury about his affair with Lewinsky was “just about sex” and blown out of proportion to the offense. And yet Trump’s hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, many Democrats tell us, threatened democracy itself by somehow subverting the 2016 presidential election.

In yet another case in overwhelmingly Democratic New York, a federal jury found Trump innocent of a charge of raping E. Jean Caroll, while finding him guilty in a civil trial of defamation and sexual abuse and ordering him to pay a fine of $5 million. Assuming that Trump was guilty on these lesser counts, perhaps Alvin Bragg or other Democrats can come up with a creative theory why this incident, like the Stormy Daniels incident, threatened American democracy.

For his part, Trump has often threatened to wage the kind of lawfare to which he has been subject by Bragg and other partisan Democrats abusing the powers of their office, like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats who thrilled their voters by impeaching him twice. In a presidential debate on Oct. 9, 2016, on live television, Trump told Clinton: “If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your [missing email] situation, because there has never been so many lies, so much deception.” When Clinton replied, “It’s just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law in our country,” Trump interjected: “Because you’d be in jail.”

During campaign rallies, Trump smiled as his followers chanted “Lock her up!” and at one point he told a crowd: “She has to go to jail!” All of this over Clinton’s use of a private email server during her service as U.S. secretary of state, a minor security breach and a misdemeanor of a kind which in most cases the government has chosen not to prosecute.

When I raise my concerns about the increasing resort by both parties to lawfare as a substitute for regular electoral politics in the U.S., I am sometimes told that nobody is above the law. But this is a facile answer, for two reasons.

The first has to do with legal complexity and ambiguity. Many of the politicians who have been attacked by their partisan rivals with the weapons of lawfare have been ensnared by charges of corruption in campaign spending. I do not claim to be an expert in U.S. campaign finance laws, much less those of Israel or South Korea. But the campaign laws in our country and many others are so complex and vague that any clever prosecutor might be able to indict any politician. Hush money payments to keep an extramarital affair out of the press constitutes election interference? Really, Mr. Bragg?

Moreover, some abuses of office in return for donations are perfectly legal in the United States. For example, all presidents appoint a number of rich campaign donors or bundlers, many of them utterly unqualified, to ambassadorships. Joe Biden has given around a third of ambassadorial appointments to donors. Isn’t this … selling offices? And if so, this routine practice is not so different from the corruption of former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who was impeached by the Illinois legislature and sent to prison for, among other things, plotting to “obtain a personal benefit in exchange for his appointment to fill the vacant seat in the United States Senate [left by President-elect Obama].” If former President Obama is not in prison for appointing 31 campaign “bundlers” who each raised $50,000 or more and who together raised more than $20 million for Obama’s campaigns to cushy ambassadorial posts in Western Europe, Canada, and New Zealand, why was Blagojevich’s sale of Obama’s Senate seat—as distinct from his other misdeeds—a crime? (In 2020, President Trump commuted Blagojevich’s 14-year sentence after eight years in prison.)

Another form of perfectly legal corruption in the United States involves ex-presidents being paid enormous sums for speeches by special interests that may have benefited from their policies while in office. In 1989, former President Ronald Reagan reportedly earned $2 million from a Japanese media conglomerate for a speech and tour of Japan.

Hollywood and Wall Street are major donors to the Democratic Party and they see to it that former Democratic presidents get rich quickly. After serving in the White House, for example, Barack Obama made $1.2 million for only three Wall Street speeches. He and former first lady Michelle Obama were given lucrative deals to produce TV shows and films with Netflix and podcasts with Spotify through their company Higher Ground Productions, hastily founded for that purpose in 2018. How is this any different from the former head of a congressional committee or a former executive branch regulator immediately being hired or otherwise paid off by the industry he or she regulated?

I am not arguing that Barack and Michelle Obama should be locked up, though they should be shamed for their blatant buck-raking. My point is that, just as it is hard to make sense of American campaign finance laws, there seems to be no logic to which certain kinds of pay-to-play deals and payoffs for services rendered are legal in this country and which can lead to jail time. It follows we should be skeptical about corruption charges along with alleged campaign finance violations, particularly when a partisan political motive is behind a prosecution.

The second reason that the phrase “nobody is above the law” is a trite answer that evades serious questions has to do with legitimacy. When I have taught courses on politics, I have asked students: What is the purpose of multiparty democracy? To achieve justice? No, I suggest, it is to avert civil war, by exchanging ballots for bullets. If elections are thought of as bloodless civil wars every few years, then the losers must be conciliated and made to feel that they remain valued members of the national community and that they have a chance to win next time. If each party portrays the other as an enemy to democracy and society, and the winners use the court system to bankrupt and jail opponents in attempts to prevent the losers from winning elections in the future, then the legitimacy of the democratic system will collapse.

Here we can learn lessons from actual civil wars. Thanks to President Andrew Johnson’s 1868 proclamation “granting full pardon and amnesty for the offense of treason against the United States during the late Civil War,” only two Confederate soldiers were executed for crimes committed during the war, Henry Wirz, commandant of the notorious Andersonville prisoner of war camp, and a Confederate guerrilla, Henry “Champ” Ferguson. Both Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate army, and former Confederate President Jefferson Davis were pardoned as part of Johnson’s amnesty, even though the rebellion they led had caused the death of more than 600,000 Americans—more than died in the world wars, the Korean War, the Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War, the War of 1812 and the War of Independence, combined.

Abraham Lincoln almost certainly would have approved of his successor’s amnesty. In Recollections of Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln’s bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon related the following story:

General Grant asked for special instructions of Mr. Lincoln, whether he should try to capture Jefferson Davis, or let him escape from the country if he wanted to. Mr. Lincoln related the story of an Irishman who had taken the pledge of Father Matthew, and having become terribly thirsty applied to a bar-tender for a lemonade; and while it was being prepared he whispered to the bar-tender, ‘And couldn’t you put a little brandy in it all unbeknownst to myself?’ Mr. Lincoln told the general he would like to let Jeff Davis escape all unbeknown to himself; he had no use for him.

Partisan prosecutions need to be condemned by all civic-minded Americans now. Otherwise, Republican versions of Alvin Bragg all over the country may soon appear and start suing former Democratic officials now in private life. American democracy may die, not all at once in a coup d’etat, but slowly as the result of party-driven legislative impeachments and vengeful partisan lawsuits.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/our-weaponized-legal-system-misfires