Conservative: Covington Kids Can Teach Media ‘Adults’

A healthy culture “investigates before it condemns,” which is why Fox News’ Michael Knowles believes “a great many adults owe” the boys of Covington Catholic High School “an apology.” Unfortunately, few have offered one and most “have doubled down on their calumny.” But if the Washington Mall incident — which saw the boys get falsely accused of mobbing a Native American activist — and the ensuing journalistic ­uproar offer any lessons, it’s that “our culture has become inverted: journalists peddle lies; officeholders vilify their constituents; clerics abandon their flocks to wolves.” Fact is, “a social media lynch mob inverted the truth of what happened at the National Mall.” The Covington kids “comported themselves with exemplary restraint and maturity,” while “the adults around them behaved like children.” So much for “a teachable ­moment.”

Law professor: Lawsuits Don’t Win Football Games

Everyone agrees, and the video is clear, that the refs made The Worst Call (or Non-Call) in Playoff History toward the end of Sunday’s NFC Championship Game, robbing the New Orleans Saints of a ticket to the Super Bowl. Now some Saints fans have filed suit to overturn the result. As Stephen Carter notes at Bloomberg, “Fans are angry, and angry people say silly things.” Face it: Major sports events have long been replete with officiating errors that changed the final result. But in a year or two, Sunday’s terrible call will “be displaced by another” — and “that one soon by [yet] another.” Saints fans need to accept “the most obvious way in which sports mirrors life: Sometimes bad things just happen.”

Neoconservative: A Tribute to Nathan Glazer

The intellectual world “will be a much poorer place” with the death last week of Nathan Glazer at 95,” laments Adam Wolfson at The American Interest. Under Glazer and longtime co-editor Irving Kristol, The Public Interest was “one of the nation’s most important and influential policy journals.” Glazer remained “skeptical of what social policy could achieve, and wary of its unintended consequences.” But he was “fearless when it came to offering his opinions on contentious topics” — not in tweet-like angry bursts, but in “long essays of 8,000 words or more.” Says Wolfson: “He saw more capaciously than most of us ever will, and was able to make sense of what he saw and then write about it” in a way that made all of us understand the world “a little better than we did before.”

From the right: So Why Not Bloomberg for President?

Many voters doubtless have forgotten that former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, now giving serious thought to running for president as a Democrat, pretended to be a Republican for a little while. Frankly, suggests National Review’s Kevin Williamson, “the Democrats could do worse. And they most certainly will.” But he would provide “a hilarious counterpoint” to Donald Trump: “Who better to run against an arrogant New York City billionaire than an even more arrogant New York City billionaire who could buy and sell him a dozen times over?” Yet he’s “close to what so many voters often say they want: fiscally responsible, socially liberal.” He likely has too many strikes against him for Democrats to accept, and he’s “a neurotic nanny who obsesses about salt and soda.” But having a reasonable Democrat “is in the nation’s interest.”

From the left: Giuliani All Over the Map on Trump

Rudy Giuliani was sent out over the weekend to crow about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s unusual decision to discredit a BuzzFeed story claiming President Trump told Michael Cohen to lie to Congress. But as Allegra Kirkland notes at Talking Points Memo, thanks to his “confusing and often contradictory statements,” Giuliani “himself became the story.” He repeatedly divulged major new information, only to quickly backtrack. Indeed, his interviews often are “so all over the place that it seems ill-advised to treat him as a credible, reliable witness.” Even Trump is said to be getting frustrated by Giuliani’s “ham-handed public performances.” But he’s “inadvertently revealed accurate information before” — so “it’s worth keeping track.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann