Culture critic: The East Craves Western Values
“When I first visited Hong Kong in 2013,” recalls Mark Milke at The Post Millennial, “almost every politician, civil servant and business leader I met emphasized three priorities”: capitalism, rule of law and anti-corruption. Though Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, “here was a Confucian-based culture, composed mostly of non-British and non-Europeans, who understood and valued the most consequential, positive aspects of the British legacy.” While Westerners wrung their hands over imperialism and “appropriation,” Hong Kong’s leaders “wanted critical vestiges of past British colonialism and ideas strengthened, not abandoned.” This is why the territory’s anti-Beijing protesters are raising British (and American) flags. Among our intelligentsia, “Western civilization writ large is assumed to be the cause of multiple ills,” but Hong Kongers know that’s “a simplistic, black-and-white, good-versus-evil caricature of human history.”
Impeachment watch: No More Shoes Will Drop
“The more impeachment looks like an exercise in partisan futility,” predicts James Antle at The National Interest, “the less likely it is to command the public’s attention and garner the support of independents.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s stalling gives the game away. “While Democrats insist” they’re delaying “to avoid a ‘Potemkin impeachment trial,’ implicit in some of their arguments is a concession that the Trump-Ukraine case isn’t the slam-dunk they imagine.” Stalling lets them wait “for various other shoes to potentially drop. Except this is precisely the strategy that failed in the Trump-Russia investigation.” There, “Democrats and Never Trumpers fervently hoped special counsel Robert Mueller would uncover something much worse.” He didn’t, and Democrats’ rush to impeach over Ukraine anyway has proved to be similar “political theater.”
Media desk: The Oblivious, Mystified Press
New Yorker Editor David Remnick can’t understand why the “facts” he and his colleagues write don’t “penetrate so many of our brothers and sisters in the United States of America” — evidently oblivious, sighs David Catron at The American Spectator, to the fact that his “patronizing attitude” is “precisely what created and still drives public mistrust of the media.” If he is really looking for an explanation, he should consider the “absolution” The Washington Post gave to Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam for his racist yearbook photo, or the “special dispensation” CNN gave to White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins, who “tweeted antigay slurs in college.”
From the right: Wait, What ‘Failures’?
The left and the “Never Trump right” like to claim that President Trump has “failed,” notes Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness, yet even Trump’s “supposed failures” are “instructive.” For example, Trump hasn’t built his “envisioned initial phase of 1,000 miles or so” of southern border wall, but he has succeeded in “replacing previous makeshift barriers” — while “border crossings have dived over the last six months.” Similarly, while Trump’s critics have “pilloried” the president as “a mercantile Quixote jousting at Chinese windmills” on trade, he has successfully moved the trade deficit in the right direction. The real reason behind the dubious claims of “failure”: Liberals grasp that “Trump is succeeding” — while they only offer “lunatic multi-trillion-dollar proposals” to finance the progressive agenda.
Conservative: A Year of Dem Derangement
At RealClearPolitics, Frank Miele tallies the left’s political bloopers in 2019. Democrats, who took over the “Animal House of Representatives” in January, found that the Robert Mueller report was “a big goose egg” in time for Easter in March. In April, Joe Biden committed “professional suicide” by announcing his presidential candidacy when his legacy couldn’t clash more sharply with his party’s hard-left base — all while the Trump economy boomed in May. In September, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she would “go after the Guinness Book of World Records title” for “shortest successful impeachment proceeding,” but ended up delivering the “impeachment with the least evidence” — which has eaten up the news cycle ever since. Miele “can’t wait for 2020,” but it “will be hard to top 2019,” especially “if you enjoy a good laugh at the expense of liberals.”
— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Kelly Jane Torrance
