Conservative: White House Dumpster Fire
“Biden’s job approval rating has hit a new low — just 38% among registered voters, versus 57% who disapprove,” notes The Washington Examiner’s Byron York. That raises the question of “whether the soon-to-turn 79-year-old president — the oldest in U.S. history — will be able to run for reelection in 2024. And if he doesn’t, whether his unpopular vice president, Kamala Harris, can win the Democratic nomination to succeed him.” So far, “a number of Democrats” — Pete Buttigieg, Liz Warren, Amy Klobuchar — “are positioning themselves as possible 2024 candidates” to replace Harris. Yikes. “It is not good if you are a new president, less than a year into the job, and people in your own party are speculating that you can’t make it past one term and your vice president isn’t strong enough to succeed you.”
From the left: Lost in the Rittenhouse Wars
“As with all major news stories lately, the Rittenhouse case saw idiosyncrasies wash away as coverage accumulated, with pundits pounding the trial into yet another generalized referendum on American culture war,” gripes TK News’ Matt Taibbi. This saw The New York Times, for one, “standardizing a practice of underscoring Rittenhouse’s race (“white teenager”) while leaving the [also white] identities of those shot out of coverage.” Lost in the noise: news “that companies in the S&P 500 were set to post a net 12.9% profit in the third quarter of 2021,” the second-highest since at least 2008. “The only better result? The previous quarter, i.e. Q2 2021, when net profits sat at 13.1% overall.” While “Americans have been tearing each other’s faces off over issues like race and vaccination policy,” we’ve missed “the massive widening of our already-obscene wealth gap.”
Media watch: The Dossier Doozy
The press is facing a “reckoning” for its “coverage of the 2017 Steele dossier, after the document’s primary source was charged with lying to the FBI,” reports Axios’ Sara Fischer. “Outsized coverage of the unvetted document drove a media frenzy at the start of Donald Trump’s presidency that helped drive a narrative of collusion between” Trump and Russia for years. “It’s one of the most egregious journalistic errors in modern history, and the media’s response to its own mistakes has so far been tepid.” The Washington Post “corrected and removed large portions of two articles,” but other “outlets that gave the document outsized coverage” have “been less forthcoming”: CNN and MSNBC wouldn’t even “respond to requests for comment about whether they planned to revisit or correct any of their coverage.”
From the right: A Meaningless Climate Confab
The latest global climate confab in Glasgow “produced little of consequence,” sneer The Wall Street Journal’s editors, citing “conferees who warn that the Apocalypse is nigh absent draconian energy policies” but are “disconnected from political and economic reality.” For one thing, the Chinese know they can make “promises they may or may not keep in return for U.S. concessions on economics or national security.” And it’s not clear even the West can deliver on its pledges: Amid “spiking energy prices,” President Biden and Democrats are begging the Saudis and Russia to pump more oil. Climate czar John Kerry claims this is only for the moment, not the long term. Ha! “Lord, make us green, but not yet.”
Libertarian: Hope for Bipartisan Pot Legalization
Reason’s Jacob Sullum flags the release of the States Reform Act by Rep. Nancy Mace (R–SC), which would end the federal ban on marijuana without the “unnecessarily contentious provisions” of similar Democratic bills with “a simpler and less burdensome approach that entails less federal involvement, lower taxes, and greater deference to state policy choices.” Notably, where Dem bills impose federal taxes up to 25 percent, hers goes for “a straightforward 3 percent excise tax, which would remain at that level for at least 10 years” to help “legal marijuana businesses compete with black-market dealers, who do not collect taxes.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
