Michelle Goldberg has a column up in the Times about Joe Kent’s resignation letter which I addressed yesterday below. There’s a lot I agree with. But the part I don’t is contained in the headline itself: “Joe Kent’s Resignation Letter Is Dangerous Because It’s Half True.” The phrasing of something being “half true” is always a complicated one and one that ends up almost always being misleading. Something that is “half true” is of course better termed “untrue.” That’s how true and untrue work. Few things are categorically 100% untrue. And that is the case here. Michelle I think gets closer to the mark in this line down into the piece …

There must certainly be a word-stacking German term for the uncanny feeling of watching as a patently unqualified, far-right, election-denier white nationalist freak becomes the only administration figure to resign over the increasingly disastrous Iran War with an at least vaguely antisemitic gripe. It is an interesting moment. Let’s remember that Joe Kent, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, isn’t just some administration official. He’s a white nationalist extremist who had no business holding any position of trust in the U.S. government. He’s been friends to numerous antisemites long before today’s news broke.

Some people are inclined to be sympathetic to the ideas contained in Kent’s claim that “[i]t is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.” If that’s you, think a bit more seriously about just how Israel would be in a position to exert this “pressure” and don’t let your animus toward Trump make you a fellow traveler with someone as odious as Kent.