Conservative: Court Confirmations Are a Disgrace
The battle over Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination shows just “how low we have sunk,” contends Theodore Olson at Time. Through most of our history, justices have been confirmed “in a process marked by dignity and decorum.” These days, confirmation proceedings — even of outstanding individuals with impeccable credentials — are characterized “by acrimony, political grandstanding, nasty charges, protests, mischaracterizations and quite possibly defamatory innuendo.” Indeed, we make these nominees “submit to the most destructive, indecent and undisciplined political process that our nation has ever spawned.” And the senators in charge “seem to enjoy the images they are projecting.”
Foreign desk: Murder Exposes Truth About Palestinians
Last Sunday, Ari Fuld — a Queens-born Israeli social media figure and father of four — was stabbed to death, but not before chasing down his terrorist assailant and shooting him. This, says Commentary’s Sohrab Ahmari, “is a grim reminder of the wisdom and essential justice of the Trump administration’s tough stance on the Palestinians.” Thanks to the Taylor Force Act, US taxpayers are no longer underwriting the Palestinian Authority “slush fund used to pay stipends to the family members of dead, imprisoned, or injured terrorists, like the one who murdered Ari Fuld.” Frankly, “it is up to Palestinian leaders to decide whether they want to be terrorists or statesmen.” Pretending “they can be both at once was the height of Western folly, as Ari Fuld no doubt recognized.”
Policy wonk: NYC Schools Boss Increasingly ‘Woke’
Almost since the moment he took office, New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza has made “incendiary messages designed to foment racial hostility . . . part of his brand,” charges City Journal’s Seth Barron. And he’s “continued to spread his radical, race-based message of transformation.” Indeed, he told Al Sharpton’s National Action Network last weekend, “We’re not about improving the system. We’re about changing the system.” Then he retweeted a “silly, poorly argued and unpublishable” article about one writer’s efforts to get a young white woman “woke to her unearned white privilege.” Previous chancellors, notes Barron, “usually avoided communicating in such a deliberately divisive manner.” At the rate Carranza’s going, expect to see him soon “manning the barricades.”
Political scribe: Obama’s Stealth Midterm Campaign
Andrew Malcolm at the Miami Herald calls it “one of those ironies that makes politics so interesting”: Democrats “have turned for campaign help this fall to the same man who set them on a long road to electoral disaster” — former President Barack Obama. Then again, he notes, Democratic candidates “really have no one else of political stature to help.” As for Bill and Hillary Clinton, “who’d want their advice after so thoroughly botching the 2016 campaign that hung there for the taking?” But “absence does make the heart grow fonder, even in a party that has seen its ardent base move so far to the left” of Obama’s policies in just two years. So he’s sneaking into carefully selected districts, even if at times he sounds “a little touchy . . . after his calls to vote for Hillary Clinton were so roundly rejected.”
Culture critic: The Man Bun Is Destroying Civilization
Samurai man buns are OK and so are “crunchy hippie man buns,” admits Caroline D’Agati at The Federalist. But today’s average man bun “has become the petty rebellion of millennial men who refuse to grow up and buy into society.” Some men say their bun is “a personal choice” showing they won’t “cave to the pressures of society.” Fair enough: “Part of being a man is sticking to your principles and choosing which hills to die on.” But seriously, “is that greasy poof” really today’s Rubicon? Fact is, man buns are “a hurdle to being taken seriously, both by older men and women of all ages.” They’re simply “a shallow way to grab attention and differentiate yourself through flash instead of substance.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann