From the right: Trump’s Making the Midterms Exciting
The midterm elections have turned “noisy and exciting,” and we have President Trump to thank for that, says The Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes. But even Trump can’t stamp out “the most tedious aspect of electoral coverage,” the media narrative — which this year boils down to two words: “blue wave.” What’s implied is that “as long as Democrats stay out of trouble, they’ll surf to victory on that wave.” Yet Trump “is no longer the punching bag he was last year” — indeed, “there’s evidence a red wave is building.” Republicans have climbed to just minus-3 on the “generic ballot,” but they’ve “under-polled on this question for decades.” And, in “an amazing development,” GOP voter intensity “has gotten stronger than the anger of all those agitated Democratic resisters.”
From the left: A Tribute to Charles Krauthammer
Commentator Charles Krauthammer disclosed Friday that, after a 10-month battle with cancer, his doctors have given him just weeks to live. The editors of The Washington Post, home of his weekly column, say “nothing and no one can replace him.” Krauthammer “wrote for the right reasons” — not for White House invitations, but “to provoke us to think, to enlarge our understanding, at times to make us laugh.” Like few others, they add, he succeeded. Even his critics agreed that “he wrote a column of breathtaking range and intelligence and integrity.” He once mused about what humans should have sent into space as a message to other species. Say the editors: “We could start rattling off” all the Krauthammer columns that could have been included as “genuine evidence of the worth of humanity.”
Liberal take: Dems Should Hope for a North Korea Deal
Whether the summit has been on-again or off-again, Democrats have been “pouncing on any setback or nitpicking any advance” on President Trump’s handling of North Korea, says Bill Scher at Politico. Instead, he suggests, they should “gird themselves for the possibility” that Trump not only gets a deal with Kim Jong-un, but that they’ll “have little choice but to defend it and swallow any subsequent poll bump.” Because Democrats have stressed that “diplomacy is always preferable to war.” So “better for the left to adhere to its own principles and seize the opportunity to build a bipartisan consensus on aggressive diplomacy than to sacrifice principles for political expediency.” Frankly, “it’s in their long-term interest for North Korean diplomacy to succeed, and they should be preparing for the moment when it does.”
Ecology writer: Plastic Straws Are Not the Problem
The latest hot global protest movement has sent nightlife venues “scrambling to replace their plastic straws with more sustainable alternatives, such as paper ones, on the theory that doing so will reduce plastic waste in the oceans,” reports Bloomberg’s Adam Minter. But while it may sound virtuous, “it’s likely to make matters worse,” since straws make up only “a trifling percentage of the world’s plastic products.” So campaigns to eliminate them “will not only be ineffective, but could distract from far more useful efforts.” News media continually claim that Americans use 500 million plastic straws a day — but that figure comes from a survey “conducted by a nine-year-old.” More critical: At least 46 percent of plastic ocean garbage comes from a single source — fishing nets. But getting rid of those is a much harder sell.
Ex-marine: Liberals Know Nothing About Guns
John Vrolyk, a former Marine infantry officer and pro-gun-control Democrat, complains at Newsweek that he finds himself “deeply frustrated by my party’s approach to guns.” Even as he opposes the National Rifle Association’s response to mass shootings, he says Democrats offer only positions that are “ineffective, unlikely to achieve policy changes and politically short-sighted because they are fundamentally illogical.” They seek to control weapons “based on how they look” rather than on “how they function, how deadly they are and how they could be used to commit mass murder.” Gun control, he says, is hard precisely because “it requires real trade-offs between the rights of responsible individuals versus the access of criminals to murder weapons.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
