Political scribe: Keep the Mueller Report Sealed

The Beltway is itching to read special counsel Robert Mueller’s report into Russian inference in the 2016 election, but The Week’s Matthew Walther says he would be “happy to see it gathering dust in an archive somewhere until it is forgotten.” Fact is, neither President Trump nor his liberal opponents will get what they want out of the report. “The final victory sought by Trump and his allies is not waiting in a boring document,” Walther writes, and anyway “the damage to his presidency has already been done.” As for Democrats: “If you think ‘The pee tape might still be out there, guys, we just have to read Mueller’s footnotes!’ is going to win back Ohio in 2020, go ahead.”

Libertarian: The Socialist Nightmare in Venezuela

“Venezuela is a disaster,” declares John Stossel in Reason magazine. “Yet 20 years ago, it was the wealthiest country in Latin America.” So what’s brought it to its current misery? Democratic socialism, the ideal proclaimed by the late Hugo Chavez that seduced the “majority of voters.” Not to mention “many American leftists,” notes Stossel, like the model Naomi Campbell, who at one point went to Venezuela “to give Chavez a hug” and call him a “rebel angel,” and filmmaker Michael Moore, who claimed that Chavez had “used oil money to ‘eliminate 75 percent of extreme poverty.’ ” Chavez’s Western champions now claim they prefer the Scandinavian model. But the Nordic countries aren’t, in fact, socialist, and “lately they’ve reduced government control of their economies.” Until progressives accept these truths, “tragedies like Venezuela will happen again and again.”

Conservative: Avenatti Helped Dems Against Kavanaugh

Democrats are scrambling to distance themselves from Michael Avenatti, whom federal prosecutors this week charged with attempting to blackmail Nike. So it’s worth remembering, says The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein, “that during the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation fight, leading Democrats peddled absurd attacks from the disgraced lawyer as ‘serious’ and ‘credible.’ ” At the time, Avenatti claimed that the future Supreme Court justice had run a gang-rape ring as a high schooler. Writes Klein: “Democrats, in full character assassination mode, treated the accusation as credible” and even pressed Kavanaugh about it during his second hearing. “So whenever any Democrat acts like they hardly knew Avenatti, remember that they trusted the sleazy lawyer enough to use his client’s absurd charges” in their drive to destroy Kavanaugh.

Vatican observer: American Pope Unlikely Anytime Soon

An excerpt from a soon-to-be-published book on the 2013 conclave — the one that elected Pope Francis — claimed that Boston’s Sean Cardinal O’Malley garnered 10 ballots in the first round. “It was a surprising number,” notes Christopher Altieri in The Catholic Herald, “since the conventional wisdom is that the election of a Roman pontiff from the United States is a practical impossibility”: A pope hailing from the world’s sole superpower would mean “too much worldly and ecclesiastical power concentrated in one person.” Plus, many of the other cardinals, not to mention global Catholicism, look askance at American culture, as a largely Protestant one. Then again, says Altieri, the choice of “a 77-year-old Argentinian Jesuit” in 2013 was equally unlikely. “Still, here we are.”

Lawyer: San Antonio’s Illegal War on Chick-fil-A

It’s to be expected that liberal cities like New York would try to ban Chick-fil-A, notes Mark Pulliam at City Journal. But now San Antonio “has gotten ‘woke,’ too, blacklisting a well-respected business” over the owner’s support for traditional marriage. San Antonio barred Chick-fil-A from opening a branch at its international airport, citing the company’s “legacy of anti-LGBTQ behavior.” But Chick-fil-A is “as mainstream American as it gets,” says Pulliam, and its “personnel policies conform to federal employment law.” All of which means that the ban is wide open to a constitutional challenge: “The San Antonio city council, as a government entity, cannot selectively punish constitutionally protected speech based on its content.” In the end, it will be San Antonio taxpayers who “will foot the bill for their city council’s vindictive foolishness.”

— Compiled by Sohrab Ahmari