Foreign desk: Arabs Are Ditching Palestinians
“For much of the last 70 years,” The Guardian’s Martin Chulov recounts, the Palestinian cause was the major issue in the Arab world. Yet as Iran became a greater worry, the issue began to play “second fiddle,” and under President Trump, it’s “barely been given a seat in the orchestra pit.” “Ambassadors from Oman, Bahrain and the UAE” have now endorsed Trump’s Mideast plan, and Jordan and Lebanon saw “little outrage” over it. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has decided that Palestinians have become “a burden, financially and politically,” and Israel is a better partner. The lack of Arab hostility over Trump’s plan sounds “a death knell for the formula” embraced by his predecessors. That’s because the “conversation has now moved” far in “one direction” — and Arab countries “do not seem to mind.”
Health beat: Learning From Coronavirus
Viral epidemics, like the coronavirus, have become “a serious threat to humanity,” warns Guy Sorman at City Journal. They are becoming “recurrent” and “emerging more quickly,” especially in China. When they do, “it takes months to create a vaccine,” so “the only effective measure” at first “is to isolate the sick to control contagion.” And “Chinese Communism worsens the problem,” because its officials routinely suppress bad news. Thus, when coronavirus hit, “local authorities delayed action in favor of silence” as millions traveled in and out of Wuhan province. One long-term answer: Though current vaccines protect against 20 percent of flu strains, “creating and storing” those that protect against 80 percent “isn’t beyond reach” — but “would require massive investment in research and production.” Alas, it might take “a global epidemic of extreme gravity” to prompt “the necessary research and change political behavior.”
Impeach watch: Dems’ Dirty Little Secret
Democrats are “demanding” John Bolton testify in President Trump’s impeachment trial, yet Charles Lipson at Spectator USA knows their secret: Neither Democrats nor Republicans really want witnesses. Dems would “pay a heavy price”: The president would use executive privilege to drag out proceedings, forcing senators running for president to stay in Washington, and Republicans would get their own witnesses who might “damage” the Dems’ case and even Rep. Adam Schiff and 2020 wannabe Joe Biden personally — all for the Senate to acquit Trump in the end anyway. Dems’ best hope is a “party-line Republican vote to forego witnesses,” which would then let them call the acquittal a “Republican cover-up.” Either way, Americans will probably view impeachment as a “serious mistake.” Question is: Will they “punish those who made it”?
Eye on 2020: Bloomy Spooks the Biden Camp
Joe Biden supporters “are growing anxious about” Michael Bloomberg, report The Hill’s Jonathan Easley and Amie Parnes. They fear “Bloomberg will divide the centrist vote” on Super Tuesday, when a third of delegates are up for grabs, allowing Bernie Sanders to “benefit from the split field and thunder to the nomination.” Biden World thinks the ex-veep is “best positioned to go one-on-one with Sanders and that he’ll have earned that right if he posts strong showings in Iowa and New Hampshire.” But polls show Bloomberg “beginning to cut into Biden’s base of support among black voters and older people.” One Biden ally calls the fears overblown: “If Biden takes care of business in the first four [states], Bloomberg can go back to telling people not to drink soda.”
Conservative: Dems’ Endless ‘Get Trump’ Mania
At American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson notes that Robert Mueller’s exoneration of President Trump hasn’t mattered to House impeachment managers, who “cannot finish a sentence without exclaiming ‘Russian collusion.’ ” That’s because impeachment started “the very week Donald Trump was inaugurated,” with “one effort to remove Trump or members of his administration” following “rapidly and furiously upon another.” So, after this impeachment fails, what’s next? “A newly discovered Trump phone call to Poland, Romania or Mexico”? Whatever it is, it will happen — because the “unhinged” left knows that if Trump gets two terms, he’ll “weaken the entire progressive project for a generation.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board