Conservative: My Beef With Bernie
National Review’s David Harsanyi has a gripe with Bernie Sanders that starts off personal: “In the summer of 1968, my parents — both in their 20s, both with secure jobs, both beneficiaries of ‘free’ health care, both graduates of top-flight Communist literacy programs” defected from Hungary to the United States, where Harsanyi was born. Some 600,000 Soviet troops were then crushing reformers in Czechoslavakia, as they had done in Hungary in 1956. Meanwhile, “Bernie Sanders was role-playing a Trotskyite in his class war against the . . . kulaks of Burlington, Vt.” In addition to a lifetime of offering apologies for the Vietcong and the Castro regime in Cuba, Sanders “never offered a word of support for the thousands of Jews trapped in the Soviet Union.” Bottom line: “The way we treat Bernie, as a crank or well-meaning left-winger, is itself a way to normalize Marxism — ‘democratic socialism,’ in this iteration. We would never treat any other similarly destructive ideology with the same nonchalance.”
Health watch: Keep Calm on Corona
At FoxNews.com, ex-Sen. Jim Talent, who has been working on pandemic preparation for more than a decade, is “optimistic” that the impact of the coronavirus won’t be as harsh as originally feared. Yes, it “will cause tragic deaths, economic damage and social disruption and uncertainty,” but its “virulence appears to be much lower” than initially feared. “Response to a pandemic is a lot like a military campaign,” he warns: “The fog of war surrounds everything, even good plans have to be adjusted, decisions are made on the fly and some of them go wrong.” Above all, “there is a lot more help available than most people in most places at most times have ever had.” So avoid panic, and “keep calm and carry on.”
From the left: Why Biden Can Win
Joe Biden’s big Super Tuesday wins “broke the narrative that had defined the Democratic primary race,” notes Vox’s Ezra Klein — and suggest he can succeed in the general. “What did the narrative get wrong?” First, “voters just don’t care that much about malapropisms and meandering rhetorical styles,” often seen as Biden’s biggest problem. Second, Biden mobilized nonvoters, who, unlike “political obsessives,” prefer moderates to “ideologically extreme candidates.” Third, “most Democrats seem to agree with Biden” that we should return to “the pre-Trump status quo,” rather than “do anything drastic to alter economic trends.”
From the right: Why Joe Won’t Win
Joe Biden’s political experience will hurt his chances in November, argues The Washington Examiner’s Byron York. Supporters trumpet his “36 years in the Senate” — but “no one who served” even 15 years in the Senate has “ever become president.” Veeps rarely win the White House, and only Richard Nixon has “gone from the vice presidency to private life and then to the presidency,” the situation Biden is in now. Above all: “Politicians have a strict sell-by date”: “No one gets elected president” 14 years after winning his first major election, and it took Biden nearly four decades to “get from his first Senate victory to the vice presidency.” To win, Biden will have to prove every one of these rules wrong.
Foreign desk: The Times’ Tehran Troubles
“What happened to The New York Times’ man in Tehran?” wonders Peter Theroux at Tablet. Thomas Erdbrink’s last piece in the paper ran Feb. 16, 2019, followed by a tweet four days later — then he vanished. On June 10, the Times announced that “the Iranian authorities had barred Erdbrink from working,” then “dropped the subject entirely, a marked contrast to the customary bluster and hand-wringing over journalists with misfortunes.” He seems to be alive but prohibited from travel. Erdbrink’s PBS documentary covered the crimes of the regime “with power that has been notably lacking from Erdbrink’s officially sanctioned reportage for the Times.” Now keeping him “in limbo probably guarantees a certain level of compliance from his successor.” But “why The New York Times so readily accedes to what looks from here like blackmail is another question.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
