Republicans: Why Do Dems Suddenly Trust Cohen?
The House Oversight Committee is rolling out the red carpet this week for Michael Cohen, note Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Mark Meadows (R-NC) at USA Today, in hopes President Trump’s former lawyer “will sling enough mud to justify beginning the process” of impeachment. The problem: Cohen is going to prison in two months for lying to Congress, among other crimes. So giving him a congressional platform is “a disservice to the public” and “flat-out offensive to anyone who seeks the truth.” Not that Democrats care that Cohen has lied to Congress before, the congressmen charge; they’re focused “on one thing and one thing only” — impeachment, and so they’re prepared to “feed Cohen’s insatiable desire for celebrity.” Which is why this hearing “is a rigged deal.”
From the right: Feinstein Takes on the Climate Kids
If children are our future, then the future “will be typified by insolent hectoring about climate change,” suggests Commentary’s Noah Rothman. Unfortunately, “no one wants to explain to a passionate young idealist that an urgent moral imperative is no substitute for a plan of action, even when they’re being harangued.” Except for Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who apparently “has fewer misgivings about bursting precious little bubbles.” Unlike her more “obsequious colleagues,” the California Democrat had enough respect for the group of young people who recently accosted her “to tell them that they were dead wrong.” This led to predictable attacks from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, among others. But those who “use these children as political props” are merely engaged in “an appeal to emotive reasoning when logic and rationality have failed to persuade.”
Conservative: Sanders Won’t Rebuke Ruthless Dictators
On the same night when Nicolas Maduro detained Univision news anchor Jorge Ramos and his crew, Sen. Bernie Sanders refused to call the Venezuelan strongman a “dictator,” reports National Review’s Jim Geraghty. After “a long and awkward pause” when pressed by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Sanders quickly pivoted to President Trump’s refusal to criticize Saudi Arabia. And he did so without uttering “one critical word about Maduro himself.” Yet this is the same Bernie Sanders who castigates “millionaires, billionaires and the big banks” with “bug-eyed, finger-jabbing, full-throated fury.” No surprise: Back in the ’80s, he “sang the praises” of Nicaraguan Sandanista strongman Daniel Ortega. Fact is, Sanders “is a sucker who will always give the benefit of the doubt to anyone who claims to be a socialist.”
From the left: Don’t Let 2020 Dems Play Rough
With less than a year to go now before the Iowa caucuses, New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore is warning the “unusually — perhaps uniquely — large Democratic field” to “remember the wolf at the door before engaging in any intramural fisticuffs.” Unlike those who encourage a vigorous policy debate among the candidates, Kilgore maintains the stakes are too high, and a second Trump term “would be potentially catastrophic for progressives” — to the point where “the Democratic Party’s very future might be endangered.” He insists that party leaders and activists must “come down like the wrath of God on any candidate” who “succumbs to the temptation of straying over the line into attacks on a rival’s character or motives.” Otherwise, Democrats might end up “wondering how their party blew it again.”
Political scribe: NJ’s ‘Wildly Unconstitutional’ Ballot Ban
The New Jersey state Senate has passed a bill — previously vetoed by then-Gov. Chris Christie — requiring presidential candidates to release five years’ worth of tax returns or be barred from a spot on the state ballot. But as Barbara Boland at the Spectator suggests, the bill “would probably receive unanimous disapproval from the Supreme Court — if it even made it that far.” Especially since it also says that even if such a candidate won via write-in, he would be barred from receiving any of New Jersey’s electoral votes. And it only applies to presidential candidates, when Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy “has only released the first two pages of his own federal returns.” The point of the bill is clear, as even its chief sponsor agrees: Keep President Trump, who refuses to release his taxes, off the New Jersey ballot in 2020.
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
