Liberal: You Can’t Trust Vlad
The evident assassination of Yevgeny Prigozhin “illustrates the fundamental flaw at the heart of incessant calls for negotiations and ceasefires to ‘end the war’ in Ukraine,” argues The Liberal Patriot’s Peter Juul: “Putin cannot be trusted to abide by any agreement he strikes,” like the one that supposedly let Prigozhin retire safely. There’s “zero reason to believe that Putin would stick to any deal that doesn’t simply give him a victory he can’t win through force — and no reason for Ukraine to capitulate given the situation on the battlefield.” So “full Russian military withdrawal from Ukraine ought to remain the top goal for U.S. policy.” “Only when Ukraine feels secure enough to withstand Putin’s inevitable” moves to “subordinate Kyiv to his own whims will peace be possible.”
From the right: Protect Women From VAWA
The Violence Against Women Act should be renamed, urges Andrea G. Bottner at The Hill, since its core work was horribly compromised by a 2013 provision ordering that “facilities serving women at risk cannot turn away biological men who identify as women.” Huh? “A woman who was just brutalized and sought escape might not be comfortable when a biological man becomes her roommate in the very place she thought she would be safe.” Congress should consider the Women’s Bill of Rights, which “defines exactly what a woman is and recognizes there are legitimate reasons to distinguish between the sexes with respect to . . . places where biology, safety and or privacy are implicated.” “Women are no longer prioritized in the Violence Against Women Act — at the very least, they deserve some transparency.”
COVID journal: Campuses Still Flunk Safety
College administrators are prepping for a new COVID wave with “onerous rules” all too “likely to make students sicker,” warn Leslie Bienen & Margery Smelkinson at The Wall Street Journal. Most universities “still purport to require that students isolate after testing positive,” i.e, leave campus or live in solitary confinement. Expect that many “students with Covid-like symptoms will stay away from the campus health clinic for fear they will be tested and summarily sent off campus.” This could boost “circulating infections such as flu, strep or mononucleosis.” And students “who do leave campus with Covid will encounter elderly people, who are at higher risk.” “It’s hard to think of a more useless and ill-conceived ‘mitigation’ policy.”
Conservative: Biden Deserves Impeachment
Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s impeachment-inquiry critics “are right about one thing,” admits Jonathan Tobin at Newsweek: “The GOP base is still fuming over the Democrats’ impeachment” of Donald Trump — and “want to get even.” Yet the “rationale for impeachment goes beyond” revenge. Absent an inquiry, debate and trial, “there’s simply no way to break through the liberal corporate media’s refusal to substantially cover” Biden-family corruption. True, there’s “a lot more we need to know,” but federal prosecutors seem “suspiciously incurious.” Meanwhile, the story of Hunter’s work with Burisma and then-Veep Joe’s boasts of getting Ukraine to fire the prosecutor probing it “are enough by themselves to justify an impeachment.”
Congress watch: Bipartisan Push on the CCP
House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party leaders Mike Gallagher (R-Wisc.) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) “deserve credit for their bipartisan effort to protect the nation from China,” cheers the Washington Examiner’s Tom Rogan. “The committee wants American companies to divest from certain areas of the Chinese economy,” but Wall Street leaders who “believe that their maximization of Chinese profit should come before national security” resist. The two “rightly believe that no U.S. company should be helping the People’s Liberation Army improve its means” of defeating the US military. They also seek to update regs like one that makes it “difficult to share human beings and knowledge and technology” with allies like the UK and Australia. The pair prove “that patriotism and bipartisan cooperation can sometimes still intersect in Washington.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board