From the right: Democrats’ Impeachment Chaos
It is President Trump’s critics, not the president, who are “the most media-addled people in public life,” argues The Spectator USA’s Freddy Gray, since “nobody is quicker to reach the most hysterical conclusions.” Case in point: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to launch an impeachment inquiry over Ukraine, after the Trump-Russia conspiracy proved to be “the biggest media cock-up in modern history.” Trump’s release of the transcript has already made the story go “from total bombshell to probably fake news.” It is difficult to tell Pelosi’s plan in all this, but we already know “the obsession with ‘getting’ Trump is self-defeating to the point of madness,” and, by pursuing impeachment, Democrats will only validate the president’s claim that “his opponents are scared of facing him in a fair democratic fight.”
Foreign desk: China’s Population Problem
“China has a problem,” says National Review’s Kevin Williamson: “not enough people.” Thanks to past population-control measures, the country’s work force has “declined by 25 million workers” since 2011. So, after years of enforcing a one-child policy, Communist officials now want “Chinese couples to have more children, but Chinese couples are not obliging.” The worker shortage is likely slowing economic growth, which is still rapid but, by Chinese standards, normal — and, in China, “normalcy is a crisis.” That’s just one problem with central planning — it puts heavy government force to ideological ends, even when policy is at odds with reality. Of course, “the Chinese are not alone in this”: In the West, the same folly leads to bad policy in the name of fighting overpopulation and climate change.
From the left: Warren Is Dems’ Best Shot
“Polling shows one of the most decisive factors for Democratic primary voters” is which candidate has the best shot of beating President Trump — and that candidate is Elizabeth Warren, claims Robert Creamer in USA Today. “The Trump victory didn’t result mainly from a mass exodus of blue-collar Democratic voters to the Republican candidate,” he argues, but because “many former Obama voters elected not to vote at all or vote for a third-party candidate.” And Warren can best tap into those voters’ concerns: The Massachusetts senator has a “populist economic message” and “inspires people of all sorts, particularly young people.” Plus, she is the right candidate at a time when “women are overwhelmingly disgusted by Trump.”
Conservative: Kavanaugh Saga’s Other Victim
The “hero” of the attacks on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh has been accuser Christine Blasey Ford’s longtime friend Leland Keyser, says The Washington Post’s Kathleen Parker. “Keyser is the other female student whom Ford named as having been at the small party where Kavanaugh allegedly pinned her down on a bed and groped her” — and she bravely “swore under penalty of perjury that she doesn’t recall such a party or, in fact, ever having met Kavanaugh.” In spite of threats and “pressure to rethink her initial statement” from former friends who say her problems with addiction have caused her to misremember the event, Keyser hasn’t changed her story to be more in line with Ford’s. “In my book, that’s heroic.”
Climate beat: The Private Sector Solution
The most unsettling aspect of all variants of the Green New Deal is not their “immense multitrillion-dollar cost,” writes Mark Whittington at the Washington Examiner, but rather their “utter lack of seriousness as solutions.” The plans “seem to demand the destruction of civilization in order to save it.” But there is a better and already existing solution. NET Power has been testing “a prototype natural-gas power plant” in Texas that can use the carbon dioxide it produces to turn electrical turbines instead of emitting it into the atmosphere. “So far, the test has proved successful,” and NET plans to sell its technology in a few years. Other companies are joining NET’s lead, yet “Democratic presidential candidates are ignoring” these “real-world,” market-based solutions in favor of their “unworkable fantasy plans.”
— Compiled by Karl Salzmann