Patrice de Bergeracpas

THOMAS L KNAPP—As I write this, news reports indicate that Trump intends to celebrate Memorial Day by pardoning several other Americans convicted of (or accused of and not yet tried for) war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. That’s a horrible idea for several reasons. One reason is that it’s morally repugnant to excuse the commission of crimes, especially violent crimes, for no other reason than that the criminal is a government employee. A second reason is that it is detrimental to the good order and and discipline of the US armed forces to excuse violations of law by American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.

TONY DUNNELL—For about three years, a black mongrel named Malchik lived in the Mendeleyevskaya Station of the Moscow Metro. After a 22-year-old woman stabbed him to death, Moscow was outraged, and later erected a monument to the poor pooch.

JIM NAURECKAS—In reality, of course, there is more to the human rights community than Chait imagines. There’s a statement, for example, signed by 70 Latin American scholars and humanitarian activists condemning “US support for an opposition strategy aimed at removing the government of Nicolás Maduro through extra-electoral means”—signed by leaders of such groups as the Alliance for Global Justice, the Center for International Policy, Code Pink, the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and Toward Freedom.

RAINER SHEA—This is the fundamental madness of the anti-Russia campaign of recent years. There are people who otherwise think sensibly, and put on a rational common-sense veneer, while at the same time promoting an insane CIA-manufactured effort to drive the world’s greatest powers into an ever-escalating nuclear standoff. If Trump’s numerous war provocations against Russia haven’t given these people “some degree of certainty” that Trump isn’t working for Putin, they haven’t been approaching this issue rationally, and they likely won’t start to as the U.S.-Russia cold war continues.