FAST TAKES

Neoconservative: Can’t Take Dems Seriously On Russia

Democrats may be right about the lack of GOP outrage on Russia, but they’re also “wholly lacking in self-awareness as to their own record regarding Russia,” suggests James Kirchick at Politico. Most of those now lecturing Republicans about “being ‘Putin’s pawns’ spent the better part of the past eight years blindly supporting a Democratic president . . . whose default mode with Moscow was fecklessness.” Today’s “liberal Russia hawks would have us believe that they’ve always been clearsighted about Kremlin perfidy and mischief.” Fact is, “downplaying both the nature and degree of the Russian menace constituted a major component of mainstream liberal foreign policy doctrine until about a year ago.” So are Democrats “willing to renounce the foreign policy legacy of one of their most popular leaders?”

From the left: No Dem Majority Without Moderates

For all the talk about what the Democrats need to bounce back, says Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast, what they “need most is 24 seats in the House.” And the reality, “which many liberals refuse to accept,” is that Democrats “have to win in 20 to 25 purple districts. And that means electing some moderates.” In other words, “there can be ideological uniformity. Or there can be a House majority. There cannot be both.” But the party’s message will have to be “packaged in a variety of ways,” because the districts they need to win “are not at all homogenous.” And “no one, center or left, is ahead of anything until there are 218 Democrats reporting to work in the House.”

From the right: Learning What You Just Can’t Say

British evolutionary biologist (and professional atheist) Richard Dawkins has “devoted years of his life to blasting Christianity, and the intellectual left couldn’t shovel enough praise onto his head,” says Charlotte Allen at The Weekly Standard. But now “he has begun blasting Islam, and uh-oh!” KPFA Radio, “the San Francisco Bay Area’s auditory citadel of intellectual leftism,” last week “canceled its scheduled hosting of a live discussion and book signing of Dawkins’ latest work.” The station said “we didn’t know he had offended and hurt, in his tweets and other comments on Islam, so many people.” A miffed Dawkins asks, “Why is it fine to criticize Christianity but not Islam?” Says Allen: “Dawkins, as a bona fide member of the intellectual left, ought to know the answer.”

Conservative: Speech Codes Disadvantage the Disabled

Campus speech codes aimed at so-called “hate speech” actually “discriminate against people with Asperger’s and related conditions,” suggests Toni Airaksinen at PJ Media. She cites a recent article by Prof. Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico which argues that such codes “impose unrealistic demands on students and professors with Asperger’s, Tourette’s, ADHD and other conditions.” These conditions “cause people to say things impulsively” or “blurt out offensive comments” — but campus codes “make no exceptions,” assuming “all students can anticipate whether or not their speech might hurt the feelings” of someone else. Suggests Miller: “If university administrators aren’t scared of losing a few First Amendment lawsuits a year, maybe a few hundred Americans With Disabilities Act lawsuits will get their attention.”

Culture critic: ‘Dunkirk” and the Loss of Great Films

Megan McArdle at Bloomberg says the “nearly flawless” new historical film “Dunkirk” actually “put me on the edge of my seat for two hours,” adding: “I left the theater almost too overwhelmed to talk.” Which got her to wondering “why we can’t have more pictures” like this. And the sad answer is that “it is getting rarer for a genius” like director Christopher Nolan “to be given substantial sums of money to put [his] vision on the screen.” Instead, Hollywood money is going to “franchise films,” the “pursuit of blockbuster movies” that generate box office and merchandising revenue. So “there aren’t so many big movies being made at all, because studios find it much more attractive to rake in cash off of a predictable comic book film with a big global audience than to make risky bets on greatness.”