A stand-up guy!

At PJ Media Spengler writes about Trump's pardon of Scooter Libby.

W. washed his hands and turned his back on Libby because he feared that a pardon might make him look complicit in some way. Bush was at no legal risk, to be sure. He just worried about the optics. The psychiatric term for such behavior according to DSM-IV is "chickenshit."

To the Never-Trumpers who think that our president is a lout and a ruffian who cares nothing for decent standards of behavior, I say: What you call "decent standards of behavior" have become so perverse, so cowardly, so hypocritical and so self-serving that only an outsider, a "lout," a "ruffian" with contempt for your standards will have the courage to do the right thing. Paul Krugman denounced his "deadly narcissism" in the New York Times, by which he means that Trump values his own opinion more than that of Krugman. A better term is "stand-up guy." We used to have those in America. George W. Bush wasn't one of them.

The president acts on his impulses, and the result sometimes is awkward in the extreme. After hearing about the poison gas attack in the Syrian town of Douma he tweeted perdition against Assad and his Russian ally (Germany's right-of-center newspaper Die Welt called this "the first ever declaration of war via Twitter"). The next day the president had to qualify the statement. My guess is that he acted on his gut response to an atrocity. That's not the most prudent thing for a president to do, but it shows the kind of man he is. Of all the American presidents since Reagan, he is the only one to do what he thinks is right in spite of risks that could cow a lesser man.

Another example is his decision to move America's Israeli embassy to Jerusalem. All his top national security advisers--Tillerson, McMaster and Mattis--told him not to. Why buy trouble in the Arab world in return for no tangible advantage? Our enemies were just as mystified. I ran into a Russian diplomat at a political lunch not long ago. We got to talking about Trump, and he said, "The one thing we can't figure out is why Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem. What was the purpose of this maneuver? Was it to stir the pot and see what sort of reactions he would get?" I told the Russian that he didn't get it. Trump did it because he thought it was the right thing to do. The Russian stared at me uncomprehending. There hasn't been a "right thing to do" in Russia for the past hundred years, just the clever or expedient thing to do.

And that, my Never-Trump ex-friends, is our paradox. We have become so morally timid, so obsessed with the angle, so calculating and so cowardly that we need a Donald J. Trump as a corrective. There's no political advantage to pardoning Scooter Libby on this particular Friday afternoon. The president is embroiled in a battle with the likes of James Comey, who smeared Trump in his recent book while admitting that there is no evidence of illegality. Trump has enough trouble of his own to keep him busy. Why do it? Because he's a stand-up guy.

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