Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, wrote an interesting tweet: “From a wmn carrying a mattress on her campus to Afghanistan’s Wmn’s Nat Cycling Team, reaching true equality req showing change is possible.”

I learned about this from Paul Mirengoff: “Samantha Power and the Analogy from Hell.” (Power wrote a well-known book called “‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide.”) He learned about it from Katie Pavlich: “UN Ambassador Compares Struggles of Afghan Women to a College Student Who Lied About Rape.”

As I understand it, there’s a student at Columbia University who carried around a mattress to symbolize the rape that she said had been committed against her. Apparently, there was no such rape.

In any event, I am very, very familiar with what Ambassador Power has done. In fact, I had an essay in National Review a few issues ago: “The Even-Steven Temptation: Adventures in moral equivalence.”

May I quote several paragraphs — short ones — just so you get the gist? Here I go:

When I was growing up, the worst thing you could be was a racist. (And racism was often defined with grotesque, malicious looseness.) The second-worst thing you could be, probably, was a jingoist. An “ethnocentrist.” A flag-waver. Even simple patriotism was suspect, a sign of naivety and boobishness.
You were not to think yourself anything special as an American. You were not to be too big for your britches. Everything had to be equal, balanced, even-steven. The Soviet Union tossed poets into prisons? Yeah, well what about the Hollywood Ten?
At the time, there was a best-selling book called “I’m OK — You’re OK.” It was by Thomas A. Harris, M.D. One of the original self-help books, it sold more than 15 million copies. Its title expresses the principle I’m talking about: “I’m okay, you’re okay,” or, maybe more accurately, “I’m not okay, you’re not okay.”
If I raised concerns about what the Chinese Communists were doing to the Tibetans, it would fall to you to say, “Well, what did we do to the Indians?” That wouldn’t help the Tibetans at all. But it would obey “even-steven.” If I said it wasn’t nice to shoot people as they scaled the Berlin Wall, you would say, “It wasn’t nice to lynch blacks in the South, was it?”
“GULAG,” said one guy. “Japanese internment,” said another (meaning the internment of Japanese Americans). “Nazi war machine,” said one guy. “Dresden,” said another (referring to the American and British bombing of that city). “Imperial Japan.” “Hiroshima and Nagasaki!” Etc.

Anyway, read the whole thing, if you like. The phenomenon I discuss may be very, very familiar to you.