"It just doesn’t feel right... that company CEOs Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Sundar Pichai get to decide which politicians Americans can hear and which ones we can’t."

"Everyone mocking Trump’s misreading of the First Amendment would be foolish to dismiss that feeling. Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet (which owns Google and YouTube) barred Trump from their platforms after he incited violence on Jan. 6. They are private companies, and they had every right to do so.... But the fact that Trump failed so miserably to find alternatives to these platforms reinforces the common-sense feeling that they are not ordinary private businesses. Most people understand that they are private companies but also that, in today’s America, if those three are silencing you, you are being excluded in a serious way from the public square. And many understandably wonder: Why should they get to make that call? Trump’s lawsuits certainly don’t point the way to an answer.... Yet that brings us back to the hard question: Do we want Facebook CEO Zuckerberg making those judgments?" 

Writes Fred Hiatt in "Opinion: Legally, Trump’s tech lawsuit is a joke. But it raises a serious question" (WaPo).

CORRECTION: I had the wrong name for the columnist and have corrected it.

"Will you work for a murderer? That’s the question a host of ex-generals, diplomats and spies may soon face."

A headline, on a WaPo column by Fred Hiatt, just one of many things I'm seeing this morning as I try to find some inroad into the story of Jamal Khashoggi.

Now, as more and more evidence implicates Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in the reported murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi on Saudi diplomatic property in Istanbul, the equation has changed.

The "reported murder" is a strange way to say "suspected murder" or "alleged murder" and it makes me uneasy about fake news. The fact that something has been reported doesn't make it true unless journalism itself is a process that ensures truth. I remain confused.

Hiatt imagines a daughter asking "Daddy" about why he works for a murderer, which just seems like sententious blather. Hiatt goes on to paint Trump as unscrupulous and greedy, thinking only about the money we get from Saudi Arabia. The column is padded out with the moral struggle of the imagined "Daddy" and concludes "No matter what Saudi Arabia offered, could its supposed friendship be worth shrugging off the ensnaring and killing of a critic whose only offense was to tell the truth?"

I'm wary of the foreign-policy-as-friendship rhetoric. I'm wary of the test: Can Daddy explain it to his little girl? In this invented moral scenario, why are we using a parent and child and why have a male parent and a female child? I know you want to play on my heartstrings, but could you play something less babyish? Was Obama's foreign policy — say, with Iran or Syria — put through an explain-it-to-a-child test?

People criticize Trump as being a big child, but this criticism of Trump expects us all to think like children.