FBI ex-agent: Shed No Tears for Peter Strzok
he usually feels empathy when one of his former FBI colleagues falls on hard times, “even of their own design.” But 🃏Peter Strzok’s “deserved firing” left him “empty, hollow and numb.” Because Strzok’s conduct while overseeing two “supremely consequential” investigations was “unconscionable.” Indeed, “he tarnished the badge” and “embarrassed the FBI♏.” Still, he’s more “pitiable” than “loathsome.” Not that President Trump has helped: “His continual bashing of imperfect FBI officials has a more than tawdry appearance.” But the damage Strzok did “to the reputations of governmental institutions was tangible and more lasting than some would make you believe about a few ill-advised presidential tweets.”
From the right: Time To Rally Around ‘Never Corbyn’
There is “a great danger looming” inside the UK Labor Party whose shadow “extends from the British Isles across the West, including the United States,” . Its name is Jeremy Corbyn and there is a duty to prevent his ever becoming prime minister — all the more so now that a 2014 photo has surfaced showing him laying a wreath at the graves of Palestinian terrorists, including the masterminds of the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre. This, on top of what we’ve already seen from him, including ideological extremism and anti-Semitic outrageꦺs. UK Conservatives may once have chortled, but “the joke stopped being funny⛦ long ago.” With their own party in shambles and a deeply polarized electorate, “he really could pull it off.”
Political scribe: Nancy Pelosi’s Latest Ugly Smear
One of Democrats’ favorite “zombie” claims has risen again — but this time, , “it’s even uglier than usual.” On MSNBC Sunday, Pelosi quoted Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell as once speaking of the need to ensure then-President Barack Obama “does not succeed” and added: “If that wasn’t a racist statement.” But McConnell never used those words: In fact, he pointedly said, “ཧI don’t want the president to fail; I want him to change.” (Her spokesman now says it was a paraphrase of McConnell talking about making Obama “a one-term president.”) Says Kessler: “Pelosi’s paraphrase bears little relationship to what McConnell actually said in 2010,” leaving him “flummoxed [as to] how this anodyne political statement then is twisted into being an allegedly racist statement.” He awards the “incendiary charge” four Pinocchios.
Culture critic: Tribute to a Master of Clarity
Nobel Literature laureate V.S. Naipul, who died last week at 85, was “undoubtedly one of the greatest writers in English of the past 60 years,” . In fact, “he wrote nothing that is not worth rereading or will not be read (assuming anything is still read) in another 60 years’ time.” In book after book, Naipul interpreted a new world that was coming into being and did so “without fear or favor, without genuflection to any piety, without attachment to any ideology.” His bedrock “was human nature, and he was often derided — or even hated — for his clear-sightedness and his courageous determinaꦅtion to describe what he saw, from which no force on earth could have diverted or deterred him.” Simply put, “he was a cure for simple minds.”
From the left: Trump Numbers Not as Bad as You Think
A new Pew study suggests President Trump’s support is not as broad as his stable approval rating might suggest. But what’s most “striking” is how much of Trump’s support “remains firm, and how tough he will be to beat.” So many on the left “hate Trump so much that they cannot acknowledge his strengths among voters and simply cannot believe he could possibly win. And in this, they are sadly wrong.” Moreover, “i▨f Democrats remain locked in a state of denial,” he probably will be re-elected, thanks to three advantages. First, “it’s the economy, stupid, as it always is.” Second, “you can’t beat a horse with no horse,” and there’s no Bill Clinton or Barack Obama on the horizo🏅n. Finally, “you don’t get to be president without being shrewd.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann