A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
Conservatives weighed the various reactions to escalating tensions with North Korea on Thursday. Rush Limbaugh praised the tone Trump took when he threatened North Korea with “fire and fury.”
What are we supposed to do, just sit here and wait until the real one is airborne and hope that being gentle and compassionate and unprovocative will stop this lunatic from doing what he’s doing? Is that what we’re to believe here? We adopt the Obama pajama boy method here? That’s how the North Koreans and Iranians got their nukes, is this pajama boy liberalism way of life. “We must show them mutual respect.” What did Hillary say? We must respect our enemies. We must try to get inside their head and try to relate to them, blah, blah, blah, and that’s called “smart power.”
No, it’s not. It’s called how to lose. So the guy’s launching, he’s been launching for years, and every one of them is a test. But one of these days it isn’t going to be a test. And how are we going to know? So we’re just supposed to sit here. The mature thing to do is sit and watch and monitor? And, what, hope? We can’t pray because the left doesn’t believe in prayer. So what are we supposed to do to stop this guy? And the minute somebody comes up and threatens him and tells him, “If you’re not careful, you’re going to run to hell faster than you ever knew you could,” (Mattis did the same thing), this is provocative?
At Independent Journal Review, Justin Charters noted that the governor of Guam had thanked Trump for his statement. “The governor’s answer was a far cry from criticism,” he wrote. “Calvo said, in part, ‘As far as I’m concerned as an American citizen, I want a president that says that if any nation such as North Korea attacks Guam, attacks Honolulu, attacks the West Coast, that they will be met with hell and fury.’”
At the Resurgent, Susan Wright responded to evangelical pastor Robert Jeffress stating on Fox News Wednesday evening that the Bible gives Trump the moral authority to strike North Korea.
“While it’s easy to compare Jong-un to Trump and say, ‘Kim Jong-un is the evil one! He starves his own people!’ God looks at them both and sees evil,” she wrote. “One starves his own people and the other left his marriage bed, cheated multiple people out of their hard earned money, took services and didn’t pay for them, lies, is abusive to others, and maintains houses of ungodly pursuits, leading countless souls to stray from a path that would lead them to salvation. Jeffress forgets that our God is a holy God, and as a holy God, He cannot look on sin. Evil is abhorrent to Him. He does not rank sin.”
The Daily Wire’s Paul Bois argued that Trump only has the moral authority to wage war against Korea if such a conflict would meet the conditions of the Just War doctrine as laid out by St. Augustine and other thinkers.
Various theologians and Saints have expanded on the guidelines laid out by St. Augustine over the centuries, but the current understanding of them dictates certain parameters that must be met before war can commence:
-the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
-all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
-there must be serious prospects of success;
-the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
In sum, President Trump does have the moral authority to carry out military action against North Korea, but only if the situation meets the above conditions, whose interpretation requires prudence and council.
Hannity.com called Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters “pathetic” for encouraging more diplomacy. “Firebrand congresswoman Maxine Waters lectured President Trump and Secretary of State Tillerson on North Korea’s nuclear threat this week, saying the United States should simply give the communist nation ‘the things that they’re asking for’ to avoid war between the two nations,” the post read.
In other news:
Multiple outlets ran posts about an episode of a video series on philosophy featuring actor James Franco and Princeton professor Elizabeth Harman, who discuss the ethics of abortion. From the Daily Wire’s James Barrett:
There are two different kinds of fetuses, Harman explains, ones with a future and ones without. The “moral status” of an early stage fetus, she says, depends entirely on whether it has a “future.” No future, no moral status. In other words, if the fetus never grows up to feel and experience, killing it has zero moral implications. …
The major stumbling block, as her explanation highlights, is how “moral status” can be attributed or negated after the fact. Despite her best attempts to argue otherwise, she appears to just be attempting to rationalize abortion by claiming that a woman’s choice to abort eliminates any moral implications.
Barrett and others praised Franco for looking perplexed at Harman’s argument and pushing back gently against it by asking her if moral judgments about abortion, in her theory, could only logically be made in hindsight. “I don’t mean to tell the professor her business,” the Daily Caller’s Jim Treacher wrote, “but when James Franco derails your argument in about 5 seconds…”
