Conservative: ‘Twisted’ Justice in Minneapolis
Welcome to the “twisted joke” that is justice in 2021 America, snarks Spectator USA’s Freddy Gray: “American citizens have been hectored endlessly about wearing masks, staying safe indoors and standing apart out. Yet the people who smash up neighborhoods are encouraged to keep expressing their pain.” Witness the latest riots in Minneapolis after a cop’s “stupid and terrible mistake” — by no means a justified response. Yet “politicians and many journalists . . . thrive on giving the rioters emotional succor as they go about menacing police officers and trashing streets. They keep excusing the looting, violent rioters, even as some of them say there is no excuse for looting and violence.”
Foreign desk: The Iran Deal Iranians Need
A new, 25-year trade accord between Tehran and Beijing and a nuclear-deal reboot may seem to give Iran a boost, but they’re “ultimately illusory, as neither can effectively address either the fundamental insolvency of the Iranian economy or the true intent of the mullahs’ nuclear program,” note Victoria Coates and Len Khodorkovsky at The Jerusalem Post. The real solution is “comprehensive economic and security pacts between the United States, Iran, Israel and our other regional partners and allies: the Cyrus Accords.” A “renunciation of hostilities” could lead Iran to the prosperity of postwar Germany and Japan. As allies, America and Israel could help “build Iranian capacity in everything from mitigating Iran’s acute climate and water degradation to building critical infrastructure.”
From the right: America Needs a Prince Philip
“What America desperately needs these days is a Prince Philip” — a man “completely unafraid to say the unsayable,” quips The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker. Indeed, you would have to “search a very long time to find a less woke individual.” The Duke of Edinburgh “was acutely aware of his role as an iconoclast cheerfully smashing the revered verities of progressive modernity.” Sure, he could be “offensive. If the fragile little adolescent minds that now control most of our media and cultural institutions are ‘triggered’ by an ugly word, God knows what they would make of an outspoken duke’s taxonomy.” Yet he “understood well something we have lost — that being offended is part of life.” And “fortunately for him, as the monarch’s husband, there was no canceling Philip.”
Media watch: CBS Proud of DeSantis Smear
“Having lied so brazenly” about Florida’s vax rollout “that even the state’s Democrats felt compelled to speak up in outrage,” CBS took a week to consider “and decided that it did nothing wrong,” grumps Charles C.W. Cooke at National Review. Sharyn Alfonsi of “60 Minutes” “steered clear of such prosaic questions as whether what she had said was true or false,” noting only that some viewers “applauded” the story while others “condemned” it. Yet the segment got slammed “not because it stood up to power,” but because “it knowingly broadcast the lie that” Gov. Ron DeSantis had used the Publix chain for vax distribution “because of a wheel-greasing campaign donation” and omitted him fully debunking the falsehood. “CBS was determined to fire its slings and arrows and would not be deterred by anything so banal as a lack of proof.”
Culture critic: Poetry’s Last Taboos
“Why is there so little good American poetry about business in the office, when business is such a big part of American life?” Tyler Cowen asks Dana Gioia on his podcast. “Before he was California poet laureate or leading the National Endowment for the Arts,” after all, “Gioia marketed Jell-O.” As Gioia says, “I was a poet, but I needed a job, so I went to business school, I got an MBA, and I ended up in marketing at General Foods.” He wasn’t the first businessman-poet — T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens beat him to it — but they rarely address their experience, because “business and money are the only two obscene topics left in American poetry. You can write specifically about sexual acts or excrement in American poetry and be praised, but if you write about business, you’re considered somehow polluted.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
