If she bothered to check history, legal precedent and the Constitution, she would know that the attack on Iran did not require Congressional consent and that such consent under the conditions that prevailed is not required by the Constitution. She didn’t bother because she just wanted to signal her anti-Trump sentiments to her friends and colleagues who consider them a mark of virtue and perspicacity, when in this instance they are signature significance for irresponsible punditry, hackery, and bias.
And why didn’t an editor red-pencil that irrelevant section with a note saying, “Julia, even Grammarly is smart enough to know this section doesn’t belong here. You might as well inject a recipe for lasagna. Get serious!”? The reason why is that Times editors today are also Trump Deranged hacks with no integrity.
The line about the Iran mission represents bad research, bad taste, bad judgment and bad ethics, demonstrating how the Times and its writers see inserting Trump Hate into every nook and cranny of their paper as the equivalent of subliminal advertising in movies—the now banned practice where frames of film showing icy glasses of Coca-Cola were inserted into features to make audience members thirsty. The goal is to turn regular readers into indoctrinated zombies like Reggie Jackson in “The Naked Gun”…except that instead of chanting, “I…must..kill…the Queen!” they will be moaning, “I…must….vote…for …Democrats!”
Nah, there;s no mainstream media bias…
Ethics Alarms 
It should be pointed out that the assertion about Epstein also has holes in it. There has been no suggestion the girls were captives or threatens with violence if they did not submit to Epstein or the client demands. You can argue that the girls may not have been able to legally consent to that being asked of them by virtue of some social construct creating an arbitrary minimum age but those laws fly in the face of the fact that we routinely give birth control out in middle schools and some are fighting for those same children to undergo sex change surgeries without parental consent.
Why should we believe that these girls did not go voluntarily to live a life of celebrity.
Because we have to set a standard and because we generally oppose birth control in middle school and certainly oppose gender reassignment surgeries on the basis that the kids are not old enough to grasp the long-term consequences of their decisions. This is why it is the responsibility of adults to wisely guide youth until they reach an age at which some wisdom has been obtained. Adults who take advantage of the naivete of youth should be penalized.
This is a paraphrase here but there’s a line from “The Office” by Pam in which she points out that you don’t blame a five-year old kid who tries to drive a car. You blame the 30-year old who gives him the keys and says,” Go for it”.
AM
Perhaps I was not clear. Progressives are claiming that gender is a social construct that allows little girls and boys to choose their sex. These same people are arguing that minor children should have agency over their bodies when it comes to gender reassignment surgery and puberty blockers as well as providing condoms in middle schools because “they are having sex at that age anyway”. Now they are claiming that these young women were manipulated by adults to provide sexual gratification for powerful men. The arguments are contradictory and are used to buttress two political goals.
Whatever we establish as the age of consent it must apply to all aspects of human sexuality and law.
My question at the end about why should we question the veracity of the victims is both to point out the obvious contradiction but also to question whether or not these “victims” were competent to consent given social mores of the 21st century.
Yet at the same time we won’t let them buy spray paint because we don’t trust them to use it properly. We have very odd standards.
This person’s compulsive insertion of something Trump into her article is similar to what a terminally Trump deranged friend was doing with every email he’d send me. I finally had to ask him to stop it, which he did. We get along fine now and correspond regularly.