Security desk: Trump Undermines His Own Team
President Trump has announced the immediate and rapid withdrawal of troops from Syria — just two days, as The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin points out, after his special representative “publicly pledged that the US commitment to Syria would not waiver.” And barely two months after Trump himself said we would remain there until three basic goals were met: defeating ISIS, rolling back Iran’s influence and achieving a political solution. As a result, he’s discarded his entire Syria and Iran strategy “at a single stroke, giving up any and all US influence in the region.” That will have “devastating and dangerous consequences.” The president has taken a bad policy and turned it “into a strategic blunder that will come back to haunt us.”
Political scribe: The Michael Flynn Delusion
As The Week’s Matthew Walther notes, Michael Flynn narrowly avoided “being sentenced to community service on Tuesday after pleading guilty to lying about a perfectly normal conversation with a Russian diplomat in late 2016.” We “have no idea why Flynn lied,” he adds, “but we also have no idea why the FBI was asking him gotcha questions in the first place.” Whatever the reason, it has nothing to do with election meddling. Liberals “are hanging on every tedious detail” of Robert Mueller’s investigation for one reason: “For them, Mueller is there to undermine a president they loathe.” But there’s a word for “using public funds and subpoena power to cast doubt on the legitimacy of a president as he enters his third year of office.” And it’s not “collusion.”
Foreign desk: Why Corbyn Fears a General Election
There’s only one person in Britain who would beat Prime Minister Theresa May “in a contest to see how far they could kick a proverbial can down the road,” suggests the Spectator’s Ross Clark. “Fortunately for her, it is the leader of the opposition,” Jeremy Corbyn. So why won’t he do it, when no government in the past 40 years has seemed “quite so open to being toppled by Parliament”? Because he’s far from confident he can win a general election. Surprisingly, May still has the better — or, more accurately, less negative — ratings. Moreover, Corbyn would have to accomplish “the virtually impossible”: foisting a hard-left government on Britain. His best hope is a no-deal Brexit — then the EU “would no longer be there to restrain his socialist ambitions.”
Ex-pol: After Union Giveaways, Why the Fare-Hike Shock?
Gov. Cuomo is railing against the MTA’s plans to raise subway and commuter train fares, saying it should concentrate on controlling spending. That’s reasonable, admits Steve Levy at City and State — except that “the wasteful 2014 contracts Cuomo helped broker” with the transit unions “are a major part of what brought us to this point.” Frankly, “few New Yorkers remember what massive giveaways those contracts contained — less for what was given” them in wages and benefits “than for what was not gotten back in streamlined work and overtime rules.” Fearing a transit strike while he sought re-election, Cuomo “pressured the MTA to give the workers raises without the badly needed reforms.” So as he demands spending cuts now, it’s fair to ask why he didn’t demand cost-saving reforms “when he had the chance to do so.”
Theater critic: Broadway’s Betrayal of Harper Lee
Aaron Sorkin has written what the Wall Street Journal’s Terry Teachout calls “a politically corrected” stage adaptation of Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The result is “a grotesque caricature” of Lee’s novel, whose readers will and should “take offense.” Atticus Finch has been turned into “a naïve fool . . . incapable of fully appreciating the total depravity of his racist friends and neighbors.” He’s put straight by his “sassy, wised-up black maid” and his “younger-but-woker son.” The sound you hear, says Teachout, “is Harper Lee turning over in her grave.” It’s a given that “those in charge of the estate of a deceased artist will go along with any scheme, however harebrained, that promises to increase its incoming cash flow.” But “shame on Harper Lee’s estate for letting it happen.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann