Thursday, February 28, 2019

Thankful for that

Our president, speaking about Kim Jong Un’s knowledge of Otto Warmbier’s treatment:

“I don’t think the top leadership knew about it.”

“I don’t believe that he would have allowed that to happen.”

”Those prisons are rough, they’re rough places, and bad things happened.”

“I don’t believe he knew about it.”

“He tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.”
All I can say is, thank goodness our president never met Hitler.

comments: 7

Elaine Fine said...

Or Stalin.

Pete said...

He certainly seems willing, even eager, to take people at their word. Makes you wonder why he ever legally documented any of his business deals.

Sean said...

I wonder what he'd say if someone asked him whether he believed the Holocaust happened.

Slywy said...

Hitler wouldn't have denied it. Then what?

Michael Leddy said...

Milton Mayer’s book They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933–1945, which draws on his postwar conversations with “ordinary” Germans, has a passage that hits that question. It didn’t happen, they say, or if it did, it was not as bad as people claim, or it was not the result of an overall plan, or if there was a plan, certainly he didn’t know about it.

Slywy said...

I was thinking more of:

American president: Did you kill our citizen?
Hitler: Yes.
American president:

Michael Leddy said...

Ah, got it.

It’s all so disorienting that I forget to step backward. Setting aside the death — the guy was sentenced to hard labor for taking a poster. And the president calls the man who presides over that system a friend.