Feminist scribe: Why’d Clinton Reckoning Take So Long?

One of the most remarkable things about what Slate’s Ruth Graham calls “this cavalcade of comeuppance for sexual abusers and harassers” is that it’s now “taking down men who once seemed untouchable to the media in part because they were on the right team.” And this event’s nonpartisan nature explains “why the Bill Clinton moment has finally arrived.” Two decades ago, “progressives and even many feminists seemed happy to defend the country’s most important Democrat.” Says Graham: “We should have known better, of course,” whether it was Bill Clinton or Bill Cosby or “all the other culturally beloved men whose sordid reputations it was convenient to dismiss for so many years. But we were in the dark until we weren’t.”

Policy wonk: NJ’s Public Unions’ Moment of Triumph

Democrat Phil Murphy captured the New Jersey governorship with the fervent support of the state’s public-sector unions. Now, warns Michael Lilley at City Journal, he must tackle the Garden State’s biggest crisis: its “deeply underfunded — and costly — public-employee pension system,” with its $202 billion shortfall. Problem is, Murphy’s “biggest allies, especially the teachers’ union, contributed mightily” to the mess “by winning plush benefits” and “fighting against cost-saving reforms.” Moreover, the teachers’ union “lobbied for many of the laws that have undermined” the system, including a guarantee “that current workers could never see any benefit cuts.” Now Murphy, “who surely can do the math, has promised unions that he will fully fund this broken pension system without reforming it — thus rewarding the interests that helped create the crisis.”

Culture critic: What To Ask on Decades-Old Harassment

As accusations of sexual-harassment, some decades old, against prominent men continue to snowball, Bloomberg’s Megan McArdle asks: “How ready are we for the consequences of rewriting the sexual rulebook so drastically, all at once?” Not about people like Harvey Weinstein, “whose behavior was very far over any line we might care to draw between ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’,” but behavior that seems crude and boorish rather than violent. In general, she says, “it’s a bad idea to punish people for trespassing against rules they didn’t know. Or rules that didn’t exist.” And even then, “I still wouldn’t be eager to out and punish them now. I did a lot of things decades ago that I regret, and I would hate to be held accountable for them now as if they’d happened last week.”

Foreign desk: Don’t Read Too Much Into Saudi-Israel Ties

Last week’s interview by Israeli Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot to the Saudi news site Elaph “is an important step,” says Elliot Abrams at the Council for Foreign Relations. So is Eizenkot’s offer to share intelligence on Iran with Riyadh. But “let’s not go too far in interpreting what all this means,” he warns. After all, “the Trump administration’s efforts to ‘fast forward’ Israeli-Saudi relations have not succeeded.” Because “public collaboration with Israel or concessions to it” remain “politically dangerous” for Riyadh — even as the Saudis already are getting “the military and intelligence cooperation they appear to want from Israel in secret.” But “a great leap forward, such as the groundbreaking Sadat visit to Jerusalem, is highly unlikely, as are most public displays of official contacts.”

Libertarian: Handling Twitter Is Like Surviving Disease

Society “seems to be growing steadily crazier” — and maybe it is, suggests Glenn Harlan Reynolds at USA Today. He compares it to early civilizations, when “a bunch of people and their animals would crowd together in a city, and diseases that weren’t much of a threat when everybody was spread out hunting and gathering would suddenly spread like wildfire.” Same with social media: “We’ve gone from an era when ideas spread comparatively slowly, to one in which” Facebook and Twitter “allow them to spread like wildfire.” Eventually, he hopes, “we’ll come up with something like the germ theory of disease for ideas.” What we need now is the intellectual “equivalent of nutrition,” like “traditional training in critical thinking” and “a skepticism regarding groupthink, ad hominem arguments and virtue signaling.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann