From the right: David Shulkin’s Phony Martyrdom
Newly fired Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin is trying hard to make himself into a martyr, suggests Noah Rothman at Commentary. He’s not going quietly — “though he most certainly should.” In a New York Times op-ed piece, Shulkin claimed his tenure “had been broadly successful” and that he was the victim of a “brutal power struggle” over partial privatization of the VA system. If he was trying to “tug on Democratic heartstrings,” it worked: Shulkin has redefined himself “as a victim for a cause, rather than a substandard manager of an agency in perpetual crisis.” And he’s distracted attention from the fact that, under him, the VA performed “as one would expect from Washington’s most poorly managed bureaucracy.” All it took, says Rothman, “was a cheap gesture of passive aggression toward the president.”
Political scribe: Trump Is Right About Amazon
President Trump certainly is “a kind of genius” at “driving his political opponents into a kind of self-destructive madness,” says The Week’s Damon Linker. The latest example: the liberal response to his tweet zinging Amazon, which presumes that it was motivated entirely by Trump’s hostility to The Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Maybe so, but Trump is right: “Amazon is much too big. Its exponential growth has been greatly aided by its avoidance of taxes. And its business model has done enormous damage to retail outlets across the country.” Liberal journalist Franklin Foer made precisely the same points last year in his book, “World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech.” Yes, says Linker, “Trump is awful. But that doesn’t mean he’s always, invariably wrong.”
Foreign desk: S. Africa Next Big Exporter of Piracy
As president, the late Nelson Mandela carefully steered South Africa “away from the radicalism of the African National Congress’s Marxist past and toward a policy which embraced moderation and responsibility in international affairs,” recalls Michael Rubin at the Washington Examiner. But his successors “have spent South Africa’s moral capital shilling for increasingly radical regimes, terrorist groups and causes.” Now its new radicalism has “spilled over into piracy.” In effect, South Africa’s government and courts — which increasingly favor “terrorist groups and radical causes over international law” — have signaled that they’re “willing to seize ships belonging to nationals of countries they dislike in order to seize cargo.” Along with newly authorized land confiscation, “the precedent is chilling.”
Conservative: Nothing Wrong With Citizenship Question
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra is suing the Trump administration over its plans to include a question about citizenship status in the 2020 Census, calling it “not just a bad idea” but also “illegal.” Wrong, declares Marc Thiessen at The Washington Post. Lots of countries ask that question, including Canada and Australia; the US did so for 130 years. The uproar is all about “money and power”: Dems fear the question will “dampen participation by illegal immigrants” and that would reduce “the total population count in the Democratic-leaning metropolitan areas where illegal immigrants are largely concentrated.” That, in turn, affects both congressional apportionment and the allocation of federal funds. In effect, they’re arguing that “sanctuary cities should be rewarded with more federal money for interfering with the federal enforcement of our immigration laws and turning themselves into magnets for illegal immigrants.”
Culture critic: TV Execs Are Starting To Pay Attention
Stefan Kanfer at City Journal observes that ABC has just discovered what George Orwell said seven decades ago: “To see what is in front of your nose needs a constant struggle.” What network execs just discovered is that roughly half the country voted for Donald Trump — and “no network can afford to lose half its audience.” Hence its revival of “Roseanne,” about a fervently pro-Trump housewife. ABC News may be “in attack mode” when it comes to the president, “but its programming department is too canny to go down that increasingly crowded highway.” So while viewers on the deep-blue coasts didn’t tune in, the show’s debut was a smash in red and purple states.
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann