Security Desk: Coats’ Troubling Intelligence Gap
Dan Coats may be director of national intelligence, but as Bloomberg’s Eli Lake notes, that doesn’t mean he’s privy to President Trump’s secrets. Coats was forced to admit he “did not know what transpired” in Trump’s two-hour meeting with Vladimir Putin. And he only learned Trump invited Putin to Washington after the news was made public. But Coats “is not the only one in the dark about what the president is doing. The rest of Trump’s national security cabinet also seems painfully out of the loop.” In Trump’s White House, says Lake, “chaos is a feature, not a bug.” Coats says “he would not advise the president to meet one-on-one with the Russian leader again.” But “it’s a safe bet that this advice will be ignored.”
Culture critic: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Real Problem
There are “much bigger problems” with socialist superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than her “tenuous grasp of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” warns Tablet’s Liel Leibovitz. After all, she “sounded no different than most mainstream Democrats these days.” But then she claimed the reason unemployment is so low is that “everyone has two jobs” and is “working 60, 70, 80 hours a week.” Says Leibovitz: “You don’t have to be an economist to understand” just how wrong she is. And it’s impossible to ignore Ocasio-Cortez’s “utter lack of understanding as to how very basic concepts actually work.” People “who do not yet possess said firm understanding may want to think long and hard before putting themselves up as candidates for leadership,” he says, because “good intentions and an anecdotal familiarity with your constituents’ problems aren’t enough.”
British MP: I Was Right To Confront Jeremy Corbyn
British MP Margaret Hodge faces disciplinary action from her own Labor Party after an angry public confrontation in which she branded party leader Jeremy Corbyn an anti-Semite. Now, she writes in The Guardian, “I stand by my action as well as my words.” Hodge, a self-described secular Jew, charges that under Corbyn, anti-Semitism has “become a legitimate price that the leadership is willing to pay for pursuing the longstanding cause of Palestinians in the Middle East.” As a result, anti-Semitism “has become a real problem in the Labor Party.” This week, she notes, Labor’s national executive committee rewrote its official definition of anti-Semitism “to weaken and change it.” Says Hodge: Corbyn and Labor “chose to make the party a hostile environment for Jews.” They “chose to entrench anti-Semitism.”
Political scribe: Gov. Murphy’s Soccer Sweatshop
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy is reminding us that “it’s always easy to show compassion when you’re using other people’s money,” says City Journal’s Seth Barron. That’s because Murphy is engulfed in a scandal over the women’s professional soccer team he owns, where conditions are described as “sad and bleak.” Players reportedly are underpaid and forced to use porta potties; their training facility has no running water, their homes have plastic bags for windows and they can’t pay their medical bills. Murphy, though the team’s principal owner, disclaimed responsibility, saying he’s not involved in day-to-day operations; those who are, ironically, blame New Jersey’s high cost of living. Yet that’s a factor Murphy himself dismissed when other struggling business cited it. Now, says Barron, he’s learned something “about doing business in New Jersey.”
Foreign desk: Time for a Plan B on North Korea
It’s becoming increasingly clear that President Trump’s diplomacy with North Korea “is going poorly,” warns The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin. Washington “must prepare now for the possibility “that “Kim Jong Un may not be serious about denuclearizing and turning his country into a modern economy” and that the diplomatic process “could fail.” Problem is, Trump is “pretending everything is going great,” and that’s “a dangerous self-delusion.” Rogin says a quiet effort already is under way “to develop options if the talks should fail.” But that “can’t wait until the talks actually break down.” And the president’s newest assertion — that there’s no rush — “is perhaps his biggest misstep to date.” That could leave him with “a binary choice between accepting a nuclear North Korea or going to war.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
