Foreign desk: New Question Mark for Tehran’s Mullahs
Supporters of the Iran nuclear deal reacted with “shock and horror” as the Trump administration put Tehran “on notice” for its ballistic missile test and followed up with new economic sanctions, notes Eli Lake at Bloomberg View. But while “predictability and steadiness are important for statecraft,” nevertheless “there are exception” — and “Iran’s recent aggression . . . is one of them.” Since the nuke pact was signed, Iran has tested ballistic missiles at least 12 times, all in violation of UN resolutions. More important, the tests mean “Iran is perfecting the delivery mechanism for an eventual nuclear weapon.” So better that President Trump “creates an atmosphere of uncertainty for Iran’s leaders, who don’t yet know” the new president’s full intentions.
Liberal take: The Rise of Left-Wing Fake News
In the past two weeks, notes Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic, anti-Trump progressives have increasingly turned to “online stories that look like real journalism but are full of fables and falsehoods.” It’s a sharp reversal from last fall, when “the press chastised conservative Facebook users for sharing stories that had nothing to do with reality.” Apparently, “given the choice, democratic citizens will not seek out news that challenges their beliefs; instead, they will opt for content that confirms their suspicions.” And “now the left has its own panoply of wishful thinking.” But “a preponderance of fake information ultimately harms the political cause that absorbs it.” And “a polluted information environment does little to preserve the consensus reality that permits democracy to work.”
Historian: When Obstruction Becomes ‘Resistance’
No, the United States “is not currently in the grip of a mass popular movement to overthrow its new president,” says Varad Mehta at National Review. But you’d never know it “from reading the breathless coverage” of the ongoing protests against Trump: “Anti-Trump forces have cast themselves as a ‘resistance movement,’ and the media has bought into this self-conception,” probably fancying itself “the movement’s vanguard.” Yet under Barack Obama, there was no resistance, “because the media never said there was. There was, however, plenty of obstruction. And this rose with a different name did not smell nearly as sweet.” True, “the Tea Party was never a resistance. But the anti-Trump Left isn’t one, either, because there’s no place for such a thing within the American political order.”
Urban wonk: NY’s Sanctimonious State of Mind
Bob McManus at City Journal is dubious of all the “progressive outrage” emanating from New York’s political class: “New York isn’t alone in its objections to Trump administration immigration policies, but the level of New York’s sanctimony places the Empire State in a class by itself.” When it comes to sanctuary cities, he says, “the issue is not history or custom but rather respect for the rule of law.” And Trump’s victory “was about nothing if not national impatience with political elitism of the sort reflected in the sanctuary-city rhetoric common in New York.” Because New York “habitually ignores the rules of economics, in addition to the commonly accepted duties of citizenship, like obeying immigration laws.” And “while the consequences have been a long time coming, they may well have arrived with President Trump.”
From the right: Armageddon — Or Liberal Hysteria?
The Doomsday Clock, created by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, ostensibly measures how close the world is to the nuclear precipice. So, as Dave Taylor notes at Acculturated, there was predictable media hysteria after Trump’s took office when the clock was moved “from three minutes to midnight to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight.” Yet, during Obama’s presidency, “the clock moved from six minutes to midnight to three minutes to midnight,” a “significant jump,” and no one said boo. That’s because “the Doomsday Clock has long been a partisan, not a scientific, device.” It’s more a “reliable measure of liberal angst than the risk of a nuclear holocaust, and it should be treated as such.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann