Political scribe: Media Lunacy on Mueller Speculation
We’re seeing yet “another round of lunatic speculation about the state of the investigation into collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin,” says The Week’s Matthew Walther, adding that he spent an entire morning “reading dozens, possibly as many as a hundred, of these pieces without learning anything.” And while “it’s easy to understand why journalists cater to their readers’ appetite for this stuff,” every onetime campaign volunteer who admits to having lied about sending some e-mails is being turned into another “second gunman on the grassy knoll.” Frankly, what “it all really means” is “nothing.” But “for people who have convinced themselves that all of this is hugely significant, anything can be evidence of everything — even nothing.”
Historian: Leftist Fantasies Could Sabotage Dems
If the widely predicted blue wave fails to appear in November and Republicans retain control of Congress, “some of the most damaging blows to Democratic hopes” may have come from “friendly fire,” suggests Jeff Greenfield at Politico. The “most harmful” may have been retired Justice John Paul Stevens’ call for repeal of the Second Amendment. Indeed, “it is hard to overstate just how off-kilter Stevens’ argument is.” Because “the key to any chance of enacting useful” gun control “is to argue that they can co-exist” with the Second Amendment and “are not a backdoor effort to confiscate weapons.” Same with the Left’s impeachment obsession: The lesson of 2016 is that “the low regard in which most Americans hold Donald Trump does not necessarily translate into votes for Democrats.”
Culture critic: The ‘Logic’ of Corbyn’s Anti-Semitism
No one can say for certain, notes City Journal’s Theodore Dalrymple, whether British Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s “anti-Semitism is a sincerely held prejudice or merely a matter of electoral calculation,” given that the UK has ten times as many Muslims as Jews. But what “no one seems to have noticed” is that anti-Semitism “is perfectly logical for someone of Corbyn’s cast of mind.” Anti-Semitism may be the socialism of fools, but it’s “more accurate to say that socialism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals” — both “proceed among the same lines, using the same kind of presuppositions and evidence.” So it’s “perfectly reasonable, or at least in keeping, for [Corbyn] to be anti-Semitic: He hates none more than the independently successful” who don’t “need such as him to save them.”
Conservative: What Really Caused the 1968 Urban Riots?
This week marks 50 years since the assassination of Martin Luther King, and The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle observes that “the scars of the riots that followed” are still not fully healed. What’s clear, though, is that they were not simply “a function of unemployment and poverty.” After all, “most people, for most of history, have lived in objectively wretched conditions without rioting.” So what did cause these and other riots throughout the ‘60s? “Rage and despair and a lot of hard-to-quantify socio-political factors” — summed up in one word: respect. The civil-rights movement changed many things for the better, but it did not “obliterate the racism that still followed black people.” Pure social disrespect matters, and “if we forget that, we will never resolve our problems — not the old ones and not our current differences, either.”
Political scientist: Save the President’s News Conference
President Trump has held only one formal solo news conference since taking office 15 months ago. As Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein notes, Trump also takes questions “in impromptu groups of White House reporters” and does “sit down for extended interviews with individual reporters.” But is that enough? And “would it really be a big deal” if formal news conferences disappeared? No, “there’s nothing special about them,” but Bernstein still believes they’re “an institution worth saving, because they at least guarantee that a president will “be exposed to tough questions from independent reporters on a somewhat regular basis.” They also “stand for democratic values of openness in government and the idea that the president works for the people, rather than ruling over them.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
