War watch: Joe’s Ukraine-Israel Double Standard
Besides promising to nix “any standalone Israeli aid,” President Biden “is also reportedly thinking about circumventing Israel and formally recognizing a Palestinian state,” fumes The Federalist’s David Harsanyi.
As “Ukraine is prodded by the United States to fight for every inch of its land, Israel is prodded to commit suicide.”
In the name of peace, Israel is asked to reward those who murdered its citizens “with a brand-new nation,” yet Ukraine isn’t being pushed “to create a new Russian ethnic state in Donbas.”
“While backing Ukraine allows Democrats to virtue signal about their love of ‘democracy,’ turning on Israel allows them to appease the growing anti-Western sentiment of their base.”
Expect it “to get worse in the coming years.”
Elex beat: No Debate on America’s Goals
Joe Biden and Donald Trump are supposedly opposites on Ukraine, with the prez backing aid for it and the ex-prez opposed, observes The Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn.
Yet when it comes to spelling out “a strategic argument, the two are one.”
Trump’s “skeptical” about “what we get for our alliances” and “uncomfortable” with long-term overseas commitments.
Biden had to be “backed into” supporting Ukraine, after his botched retreat from Afghanistan.
And he hasn’t really tried to “sell” the case for aiding Kyiv, perhaps because he’s not “physically” up to it or is “skittish about splits within the Democratic Party.”
Yet between him and Trump, America isn’t “getting the crucial debate about what we want the outcome to be and why.”
Ga. lawyer: Judge Should Disqualify Willis
“If this case were in federal court,” then disqualifying Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis over her undisclosed sexual relationship with subordinate Nathan Wade “would be a no-brainer,” writes Andrew Fleischman at The Hill.
“At the hearing for the motion to disqualify her from continuing in Georgia’s Trump prosecution,” she “bulldozed into the courtroom with testimony so nonresponsive and embittered that the trial court had to threaten to strike her testimony.”
Wade testified that the relationship started after his appointment as special prosecutor, despite evidence submitted to the court that it had begun before.
Judge Scott McAfee’s “best option may be” just “to point to the confirmed conduct, and the way that Fulton County’s lawyers conducted themselves, as a basis for disqualification.”
From the right: The Squad’s Israel Problem
When 65% “of Americans agree Hamas is more responsible for the war than Israel,” asks Eli Lake at The Free Press, why (to choose just one example) would lefty Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) call the hostage rescue in Rafah “indefensible” and congratulate “a Carnegie Mellon professor for receiving tenure after she compared Israel to Nazi Germany for its conduct during the Gaza war”?
Fact is, “for the first time since the 2018 swearing-in of its inaugural class, the Squad could be shrinking, as its defamation of Israel after October 7 has repelled old-school liberals and centrist Democrats” thanks to “more moderate Democrats and the pro-Israel lobby that champions the Jewish state’s right to defend itself against the worst massacre of civilians in its history.”
Libertarian: Hope on Rent Control
Though the Supreme Court just declined to hear two New York rent-control cases, Reason’s Christian Britschgi sees hope in “a short statement from Justice Clarence Thomas otherwise agreeing not to take up the cases.”
The rejected petitioners argued that 2019 changes “to New York’s rent stabilization law amounted to a physical taking because they prevented property owners from choosing their tenants or withdrawing their property from the rental market,” and that the post-2019 “law amounted to a regulatory taking by tanking the value of their properties.”
And while “Thomas agreed with the Court’s denial of cert, saying that petitioners’ claims in their lawsuits ‘primarily contained generalized allegation,’ ” he also wrote that the “constitutionality of regimes like New York City’s is an important and pressing question.”
To Britschgi, that implies a “need to see more specific arguments about the circumstances of individual landlords.”
Compiled by The Post Editorial Board