From the right: John McCain’s Fair-Weather Admirers
John McCain is receiving near-universal adulation following his death from brain cancer at 81. But National Review’s Jim Geraghty wonders whether it’s “petty to remember all the times those who praise McCain today once derided him as “Crazy Grandpa Warmonger”? Because “no national figure in the modern era flipped so quickly” in his media coverage from hero to villain to back again “depending upon whether the majority of the mainstream media agreed with his stances or not.” Indeed, “you could measure the coverage of McCain by who he was being contrasted with at that moment — against Bush in 2000 he was a hero, against Barack Obama in 2008 he was a villain and against Donald Trump in 2016 he was a hero again.”
Ex-CIA Analyst: No More Knee-Jerk Moves on No. Korea
President Trump’s abrupt cancellation of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s planned trip to North Korea has rattled South Korea’s government, but “it might not be such a terrible move,” suggests Soo Kim at The Hill. After all, with no firm guarantee that he was going to meet with Kim Jong Un, “and presumably with no concrete agenda or objective,” just what could Pompeo hope to achieve? Fact is, four months since the inter-Korea talks and two months since the Singapore summit, “there has not been much progress in getting the Kim regime on track to denuclearization.” But the sudden cancellation seemed to indicate “a lack of coordination on Washington’s North Korea game plan.” Since Pyongyang “is in this for the long haul,” she suggests renewed focus on “planning, articulating and consistently executing an enduring North Korea strategy.”
Conservative take: How Cuomo United Left and Right
It takes something extraordinary to get the very liberal American Civil Liberties Union on the same side as that bugbear of the left, the National Rifle Association. But Gov. Cuomo has managed to do it — with what Commentary’s John Steele Gordon calls “a breathtaking act of political thuggery.” The state has “advised” every bank, financial company and insurer doing business in New York to “review any relationship” they have with the NRA — with the result that numerous companies have severed that relationship. The NRA, backed by the ACLU, is suing, because if “a liberal governor can use the state’s regulatory power to stifle the ability of a conservative group to advocate for its position, then so can conservative governors go after, say, Planned Parenthood or even the ACLU.”
Economist: The World’s Poor Are Getting Richer Fast
The speed with which global poverty has been alleviated in the past quarter-century is “historically unprecedented,” asserts Alexander Hammond at the Foundation for Economic Education: “Not only is the proportion of people in poverty at a record low, but, in spite of adding 2 billion to the planet’s population, the overall number of people living in extreme poverty has fallen, too.” In fact, over the past 25 years, 1.25 billion people — 138,000 each day — escaped extreme poverty. Of those who remain in extreme poverty, 40 percent lives in just two nations: India and Nigeria. Yet even in India, the poverty rate has declined by 24 percent. The new age of globalization has seen “the largest escape from poverty ever recorded.”
Culture critic: Why We Still Need James Bond Movies
With uproars over the next James Bond flick causing some to suggest it’s time to let the franchise expire, Christian Toto at PJ Media says “we need James Bond now — more than ever.” For one thing, Bond isn’t like today’s action heroes, who spend an entire movie “wringing their hands about the fallout from their fighting.” With Bond, “the world is on fire” and “he’s here to douse it, or die trying.” Moreover, he’s the embodiment of what the left hates most: toxic masculinity. Bond is “a man’s man, the kind women drool over and men want to emulate.” Finally, for all the radical change in popular culture, the Bond franchise has endured since 1962. He may be “an antiquated hero,” but we still care about him all the same.
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
