From the right: A Witch Hunt, After All

Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the origins of Russiagate documented “serious procedural irregularities” so egregious that the probe “clearly should have been shut down,” argues The Arizona Republic’s Robert Robb. The “claimed predicate for launching the investigation” was “a suggestion of a suggestion” that Russia might help the Trump campaign, which “hardly warrants” the FBI’s secret tapings of conversations with Trump aides, including one “whom the FBI didn’t suspect of wrongdoing,” or its reliance on the phony Steele dossier to justify wiretapping. Fact is, the report goes to show that the “Russian-collusion investigation was a witch hunt” — just as President Trump claimed.

2020 watch: Democrats’ Diversity Blues

Andrew Yang, “who has explicitly disavowed identity politics,” will join six white Democrats in the next primary debate, notes City Journal’s Kay S. Hymowitz. The reason? “Despite the best efforts of progressives and the party establishment,” it seems “the Democratic rank-and-file have limited use for identity politics.” Joe Biden is strong with blacks, in good part because “black voters are less likely to call themselves liberal than white voters.” Meanwhile, “no one drank from the diversity well more deeply” than Kamala Harris, yet she “appealed more to political and media elites than the Democratic hoi polloi” before dropping out. A final irony: “The political establishment has been hell-bent on ignoring Yang’s impressive candidacy even, though he is nonwhite,” simply because Asians “cloud any simple narrative of crushing white power and racism.”

Conservative: The Wages of Trump-Hatred

At American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes: “When a party, an ideological movement and an entire political agenda are based on hatred, people and policies become warped.” Witness the effects of Trump-hate on Democrats. Their obsession with destroying the 45th president has turned impeachment — “a rare constitutional remedy for presidential criminality” — into a “cruel caricature.” Trump-hate has also distorted the party’s presidential message, with even mainstream Democrats openly voicing the view that unless they impeach Trump, he will get re-elected in 2020. “The common denominator in all these catastrophes is an existential hatred of Donald Trump — his person, his family, his successes, his agenda and his supporters.” If only the damage were limited to the Democrats alone: “In their downward spiral, they are destroying themselves and many of our institutions along with them.”

Foreign desk: Our Duty to Iraq

The American media are obsessed with impeachment, “but we had better make room for the Iraqi people,” warns National Review’s Kathryn Jean Lopez. Iraqis have been pouring into the streets to call for a better political arrangement, and as Chaldean Archbishop Bashar Warda of Erbil warned in a speech this month, “at stake is whether Iraq will finally emerge from the trauma of Saddam and the past 16 years to become a legitimate, independent and functioning country” or “become a permanently lawless region.” While defeated for now, ISIS and other Islamists could soon regroup if Iraq’s democracy fails to meet the population’s demands, posing a particular threat to minority Christians and Yazidis. “That should rattle and convict us” to continue to support economic development, political reform and security efforts in Iraq, Lopez concludes. “Whatever is going on domestically, let’s not look away.”

From the left: Biden’s Intervention Malarkey

Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden frequently bills himself as “an opponent of the Iraq War he voted for 17 years ago” — which is “bald revisionism,” blasts The Daily Beast’s Spencer Ackerman. Even when Biden “became alarmed that the Bush administration was prematurely losing focus on Afghanistan in favor of Iraq,” he supported the second war — and kept supporting it right until he joined Team Obama. Now, Biden is running for president as “the last of the pre-Obama generation of Democratic foreign-policy grandees who enabled the Iraq War,” with “flexible” criteria for deciding when and how to use force overseas. That should worry Democrats — because it “wasn’t so long ago that Biden thought the Iraq war met his tests.”

— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Sohrab Ahmari