Conservative: Establishment’s Reboot Crashes
President Biden’s “selling point was ‘competence,’ ” notes Daniel McCarthy at Spectator World, but he is “beginning to feel like an ex-president after only [eight] months in office.” His promised return to normalcy was “more than Biden could deliver.” COVID remains, but with “more masks, more shots, more closures.” Crime and inflation are soaring, and his Afghanistan pullout “stained” America’s honor. Running as “the anti-Trump” won’t work in 2024 without “a ‘competent’ record for comparison.” In fact, Biden’s first months “have reminded Americans of why they had so little faith in the status quo before” President Donald Trump and “shown that” the establishment “lacks the particular expertise to meet the challenges that bedeviled Trump in the last year of his term.”
Liberal: Censoring ‘Disinfo’ Is Harmful, Too
“Advocates of restricting disinformation stress that it can cause serious harm, including to individual and public health, and even to democratic self-government itself,” former ACLU chief Nadine Strossen observes at Tablet. “Yet expanding government power to punish such expression would also cause harm that is at least as serious — including to the very same values of health and democratic governance.” The category is so vague that those “tasked with censorship invariably enforce this malleable concept in ways that reinforce dominant political and societal interest groups and disadvantage minority groups and perspectives.” And the “same concerns also apply to censorship implemented by dominant technology firms.” Indeed, before the Supreme Court clarified defamation laws, Jim Crow officials used the concept to “systematically persecute civil-rights activists and the national media that covered them.”
Foreign desk: Russia’s Undemocratic Descent
Last weekend’s parliamentary election “removed any lingering doubts that Russia has ceased to be a democracy,” fumes Oleksiy Goncharenko at UkraineAlert. Before the vote, “opposition candidates were prevented from standing, with some jailed or forced into exile,” and “the Russian Internet purged of dissenting voices.” Suppression “verged on the absurd,” with St. Petersburg registering “a pair of ‘clone candidates’ bearing the same name and a striking physical resemblance to one of the few opposition figures” on the ballot. The world’s too long “played along with the charade” of Vladimir Putin’s democracy; let’s “try a different approach.”
From the right: A Tale of Two Killings
When former President Donald Trump assassinated Iranian terror mastermind Qassem Soleimani “with zero collateral damage” in 2020, “media, academia and Hollywood immediately condemned it as impulsive and dangerous,” recalls A.J. Caschetta at National Review. Compare that with the elite reaction to President Biden’s droning of an innocent Afghan aid worker and his family, including seven kids: The “pundit class” was “far more eager to put this strike into proper historical context, if they weighed in at all.” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, for example, praised the military’s mea culpa, while her colleague Chris Hayes “deflected blame” by suggesting the “horrifying” kill was business as usual in America’s 9/11 wars. Celebs who attacked Trump for offing Soleimani, like Alec Baldwin, are conspicuously quiet. “Until they condemn Biden by name with the same wit and energy, they all deserve Academy Awards for hypocrisy.”
Libertarian: Big Minimum-Wage Hikes Backfire
“Younger, less-well-educated workers have been especially harmed by recent state-level minimum wage hikes,” reports Reason’s Brian Doherty, citing a new National Bureau of Economic Research study. “Over the short and medium run,” the researchers write, “relatively large increases in minimum wages have reduced employment rates among individuals with low levels of experience and education by just over 2.5 percentage points.” Housing prices and per-capita income did grow more in states with large minimum-wage boosts, but those gains didn’t trickle down to low-skilled workers. Bigger hikes, Doherty concludes, have “substantially worse” effects on this group than do smaller ones.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board