Security Watch: Focus on FBI Leaks, Not Just Spying
Attorney General Bill Barr says he thinks US intelligence agencies spied on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and is now investigating the matter. He’s right to do so, says Bloomberg’s Eli Lake — but “what also deserves scrutiny is how an ongoing intelligence investigation into that campaign became public.” That, he insists, is “the real abuse of power here.” Unlike most Washington leaks, disclosure of counterintelligence operations “are a different matter.” Besides the risk of undermining them, such leaks “are also deeply unfair to the targets” by “tarnishing their reputations without a full airing of the evidence.” Moreover, says Lake, “if Democrats see no problem with the anonymous disclosure of elements of ongoing counterintelligence investigations or the fruits of surveillance, what is to stop Trump from doing it too?”
Foreign desk: Using Children as Political Warriors
Sanctifying the opinions of the young has become “an international phenomenon,” notes Theodore Dalrymple at City Journal. Sweden’s Greta Thunberg, 16, “made global headlines when she announced that she would stage a school strike to demand action over climate change.” In Paris, political organizers are now using children as young as six in protests to wave placards demanding “schools in which there is freedom of thought” and keeping “commercialism . . . out of education.” Today’s children may be precocious, but “are they really able” at that age “to argue for freedom of thought or against the entry of market forces into education?” It reminds Dalrymle of the child soldiers who are being “used on a large scale in Africa and the Middle East, fighting for causes they cannot possibly have understood.”
From the right: Gillibrand’s Tactile, er, Tactical Blunder
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is being widely ridiculed for having repeatedly referred, during a New Hampshire event, to America’s “tactile” nuclear weapons rather than “tactical.” Unfortunately, contends Commentary’s Noah Rothman, that’s “the least disturbing part.” Because she also believes that the mere “existence of low-yield weapons is a predicate for a preemptive nuclear strike against some unknown adversary.” Gillibrand’s not the only Democrat to think so, which means “they all share a basic misunderstanding of deterrence theory.” Fact is, “a smaller, more tactical” nuclear arsenal “changes the calculation for America’s adversaries.” Indeed, “far from inviting the use of nuclear weapons, a viable tactical arsenal decreases the likelihood that a rogue nation would test our resolve to respond to a nuclear provocation proportionately.”
Critic: SJW Fury as Hollywood Rehabilitates a Hero
The left is up in arms over the new Netflix film “The Highwayman,” which stars Kevin Costner as famed Texas Ranger Frank Hamer and his hunt for Bonnie and Clyde. That, insists David Forsmark at PJ Media, is because it “flies in the face of Hollywood liberal convention and restores the reputation of an American hero” whom “Hollywood lore slandered as a vengeful, murdering buffoon way back” in Warren Beatty’s 1967 mega-hit “Bonnie and Clyde.” Those involved in making the film seem to have “cared deeply about restoring Frank Hamer to his proper place in American history. Like Hamer himself, they have accomplished this mission deliberately, efficiently — and, when it calls for it, brutally — to the great benefit of us all.”
Science watch: Twitter Just Robbed Us of Wonder
Black holes are “remarkable celestial phenomena,” declares Navneet Alang at The Week, “so massive and dense that nothing — not even light itself — can escape their gravitational pull. And now, for the very first time, we have a picture of one.” But the collective response on Twitter (and even The New York Times) to this mind-blowing event was: “LOL, it looks like Sauron from Lord of the Rings!” Granted, for most of us the image of an orange halo is unremarkable. In fact, “to be truly wowed by the reveal takes some quiet reflection.” Unfortunately, that’s “something Twitter certainly doesn’t facilitate.” It’s easy to say Twitter itself is “the real black hole,” but the fact is it has “a particularly annoying knack to be flippant about serious subjects.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann