Think tank head: Dems Don’t Fear O’Care Collapse
With each passing day comes more evidence that “ObamaCare is falling apart before our eyes” and its long-term viability is in serious doubt, writes John Hinderaker on Power Line Blog. Republicans are sounding the alarm, but “notably missing . . . is any sign of disappointment, let alone panic, from the Democrats.” Why? Democrats, he says, “don’t expect to be punished for inflicting an expensive, failed program on the American people.” In fact, they’ll claim “we tried the market-based approach and it didn’t work” – leaving “only one alternative left: single-payer health coverage.” And then “the road to socialized medicine, the holy grail of modern leftism, will be open.”
From the right: I Hate Trump, But He Gets a Raw Deal
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry makes no bones about it: Donald Trump, he writes at The Week, poses “a genuine threat to the continuation of the republic.” And yet, despite “all the lies, all the exaggerations” Trump utters, “the media still finds ways to twist and misrepresent what he says. They just can’t help themselves.” Part of the problem is that Trump “is so toxic . . . he enables everybody’s worst impulses. Including all the media.” However, we’re also seeing a “broader narrative among left-wing journalists that journalists shouldn’t report ‘both sides,’ but just the side they agree with.” And Gobry’s real fear is that “one consequence of his candidacy will be an even more biased press in the future.”
Milwaukee sheriff: Liberals and Media Fueled Riots
Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke says the racially fueled anti-police riots that engulfed his city this week “should be the last time the policies of liberal Democrats are held up as anything other than misery-inducing, divisive, exploitative and racist manipulation of the urban populations.” Writing in The Hill, he says he’s “furious that the progressive left has put my citizens in harm’s way and that I had to send my officers into cauldrons of anarchy and hatred” the left created. Fact is, “Milwaukee is run by progressive Democrats” whose “decades-long . . . regime has done nothing to reduce these urban pathologies.” The rioting “had little to do with police use of force – it was a collapse of the social order.”
Foreign desk: The Saudi Kingdom Strikes Back
Political fallout from President Obama’s nuclear deal keeps growing, writes John Hannah at Foreign Policy, and one of the most “consequential for regional security, has been the steadily escalating confrontation between Saudi Arabia and Iran.” It’s no surprise the Saudis are panicking, he says, given Obama’s “penchant for stoking Saudi paranoia and fears” by calling for an “equilibrium” between Riyadh and Tehran. “Rather than seeking to counter Iran’s revisionist agenda,” he writes, Obama wants the Saudis to “accommodate themselves to ‘sharing’ the Gulf with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.” So now “the kingdom is striking back,” becoming an “active participant in Syria’s civil war” and forging new ties with Israel. The result: A “deep mistrust . . . now plagues the U.S.-Saudi relationship.”
Boys of summer: ‘Choo-Choo’ Coleman, RIP
Aaron Goldstein at The American Spectator pays a fond tribute to Clarence “Choo-Choo” Coleman, one of the original 1962 New York Mets, baseball’s worst-ever team, who died this week at 80. “Aside from ‘Marvelous’ Marv Throneberry,” he writes, “no one exemplified their futility better than Coleman, who had to place colored tape on his fingers to keep track of the pitches he would call behind the plate.” Challenged by fellow Met Charlie Neal – his former roommate – to tell him his name, Coleman replied : “I know your name. You’re number 4.” Coleman’s stats from his four-year major league career were hardly distinguished – he was a career .197 hitter – but “he will always have a place in the hearts of New York Mets fans.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
