More finely, the president of the United States is about to launch an attack – on his own say-so. No declaration of war, per the Constitution.

It is bizarre. It is cognitively dissonant. It is incandescently hypocritical.

Does anyone remember the howling that emanated in certain quarters when the German Reich of 1939 attacked another nation that had not attacked it? (This howling was curiously mute when the Soviet Union attacked that same nation just a couple of weeks later.) More finely, when the Fuhrer of the German Reich ordered the invasion, on his own say-so?

At any rate, the unprovoked attack by the German Reich was said to be a war crime, it being unprovoked and contrived and entailing mass death and destruction visited upon not just another nation but the civilian population of that nation. "Democracy" was in danger, went the howl.

After the German Reich was defeated, its remaining political and military leadership was brought to trial and most ended up being hanged. Of course, it was a show trial. The Soviets sent a judge – the same judge who had presided over the show trials in Moscow before the war. It was a foregone conclusion that the men would hang – even men who were merely unpleasant, such as the publisher Julius Streicher – who no one even alleged had actually (personally) killed anyone.