Foreign desk: Putin Confirmed Sanctions Are Working
Midway through his press conference with President Trump, Vladimir Putin suddenly started talking about Bill Browder, the billionaire who is pushing anti-Putin human-rights legislation around the world. Clearly, says The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin, Putin is “upset about Browder’s activities.” And that means “human rights sanctions are working.” As Browder himself acknowledged, it shows “the power” of the Magnitsky Act, which has been used to sanction Russian officials for human-rights abuses each year since it was passed in 2012. Which is why Putin has been working hard to overturn it and to prevent other countries from passing similar legislation. Says Rogin: “Perhaps if Trump realized human rights was the one thing that really gets Putin’s attention, he could use it to get the things he says he wants for America.”
From the right: The Anti-Trump Hysteria Doesn’t Help
President Trump’s press conference may have been a debacle and “a new low from a chief executive who is redefining the term,” but Danielle Pletka at The Atlantic suggests “the reaction on Twitter from the foreign-policy establishment was almost as untethered as Trump himself.” Trump’s performance “was dreadful, even disgraceful — but it wasn’t treason.” Fact is, “it’s Trump’s words that are terrible. His policies are, in the main, not.” After all, he’s “crushed Russia beneath escalating sanctions” and “armed the Ukrainian opposition to Putin.” So “frothing conspiracy theories” and “non-stop outrage” are exhausting and counterproductive.” Trump may be “driving us all mad, but it’s time to get a grip.”
Conservative take: Stupid Is as Stupid Does
Maybe it’s because of the tendency for “like-minded people” to “herd themselves into politically homogeneous communities.” Maybe it’s the result of all the “caustic, stubborn posturing” on social media. Either way, contends Commentary’s Noah Rothman, “it has become an undeniable fact that getting ahead in public life demands some deference to unmitigated stupidity.” Case in point: the Democratic Party’s newest celebrity, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose recent primary win has led some to “assign to her a level of political competence that she has not yet earned.” That much is obvious given her recent interview on Israel and economic issues — and responses that actually proved her embarrassed admission that “I am not the expert.” But maybe “a little tactical stupidity is a valuable asset” in a vast marketplace for “those who are willing to tell you what you already believe.”
History watch: Setting a Bloody Century in Motion
One hundred years ago this week, Russia’s abdicated Czar Nicholas II and his immediate family, along with four retainers, were murdered and buried in haste under cover of night” by a Bolshevik firing squad. And as City Journal’s Seth Barron notes, “despite Nicholas’s failure as a leader to rein in the revolutionary energies that rocked Russia throughout his two-decade rule, and the excesses in repression that attended it, there was no justice in how he and his family were killed.” It was “as bloody and ghastly as any mass murder of women and children.” It was, in other words, “a fitting curtain-raiser to what would follow” — 70 years of “Soviet oppression, which fed millions into a maw of death in the name of ‘history.’ ”
Ex-prosecutor: ‘Abolish ICE’ Will Come Back To Bite Dems
Not only did the Democrats’ “Abolish ICE” campaign distract attention from President Trump’s family-separation controversy, asserts Gregory Wallance at The Hill, it actually “backfired so badly that it put Democrats on the defensive on immigration policy, which could hurt their prospects in the midterm elections.” Because those who’ve rushed on board the “Abolish Ice” bandwagon are “misunderstanding the role of the agency they wanted to abolish.” Fact is, ICE didn’t separate immigrant families — the US Border Patrol did that. And unless they can come up with an immigration policy that is “humane and true to our history as a nation of immigrants, but one that will also reassure swing voters” they can “control the nation’s borders,” Trump “will bash the Democrats on immigration like a piñata.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
