Foreign desk: China Proxies Get Congressional Smack
Tucked inside the new $716 billion defense bill is a provision that may force schools that want their students to learn Chinese to choose whether Washington or Beijing pays the bill. The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin reports that the act bars any US university “from using Pentagon resources for any program involving Confucius Institutes,” which are “Chinese government-funded language schools embedded inside US colleges.” There are more than 100 such programs on US campuses and are a focal point of concern about Beijing’s ability to “silence criticism and sanitize education about China,” according to Sen. Ted Cruz. Arizona State even bragged about how it was mingling its Confucius Institute with Pentagon-funded programs. Under the new law, the Pentagon has directed schools to sever those links, citing national security concerns.
Media critic: Press Just Played Right Into Trump’s Hands
It should go without saying that President Trump’s brand of press-bashing is alarming, contends Politico’s Jack Shafer. The president rarely points to actual inaccuracies, preferring to “dismiss any news that impedes his agenda or disparages him as fake and dishonest.” But Thursday’s simultaneous editorials in over 200 newspapers — all “singing from the same script” denouncing Trump — only provides him with fresh evidence that a “national press cabal” has “been convened solely to oppose him.” Fact is, “Trump will reap enough fresh material to whale on the media for at least a month.” Besides, this anti-Trump project is “an exercise in redundancy, not to mention self-stroking,” and it’s “not likely to move the opinion needle.”
From the right: Trump Can’t Afford To Lose Jeff Sessions
President Trump is at it again, denouncing his own appointee, Jeff Sessions, on Twitter, where he wished he had “a real Attorney General.” After a year of public abuse, suggests David Freddoso at the Washington Examiner, Sessions “would be well within his rights to quit” — and that may be exactly what the president wants. But “he should think twice about what happens if Sessions leaves. Because it won’t be good for him.” Indeed, warns Freddoso, it “would be an unmitigated disaster.” For one thing, it will be very difficult to replace him — especially after Trump tweeting that a “real” AG would end the Russia investigation. That would leave Rod Rosenstein as acting attorney general — and he and Trump already have an, er, “interesting relationship.”
From the right: Let Frank Keating Investigate the Church
Following the revelations about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s history of abuse and the explosive grand jury report exposing hundreds of priests who abused children since the 1940s, many are calling for a special prosecutor to determine who knew what and when. Michael Strain at National Review agrees — and he suggests former Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, who headed a panel of lay Catholics that investigated the crisis 15 years ago. Keating resigned after bishops bristled at his comparison of the behavior of some of them to the mob. Keating defended himself, saying: “To resist grand-jury subpoenas, to suppress the names of offending clerics, to deny, to obfuscate, to explain away; that is the model of a criminal organization, not my church.” Back then, notes Strain, some thought this “overheated rhetoric.” Today, though, “it seems on the mark.”
Legal writer: Partisanship Won the Confirmation Wars
Benjamin Wittes at The Atlantic has just thrown up his hands in defeat: He’s long argued that judicial nominations “ought not be a skirmish in a larger war for the courts” and that nominees should be treated “decently and without undue delays.” But he and others who similarly argued for de-escalating “got our clocks cleaned. We lost decisively on every front” at the hands of “Democrats and Republicans alike.” Most importantly, “we lost at the hands of the voters,” who demanded “precisely the kind of activity of whose dangers we warned.” But “picking judges on the basis of raw power alone and creating party factions on every court in the country is a contagion that will spread.” And the escalation will continue — because “the only thing stopping it from happening before was that it was unthinkable.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
