FAST TAKES
Dem: Trump’s More Popular Than We Want To Admit
Former California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown has some advice at the San Francisco Chronicle for his fellow Democrats: It’s time “to stop bashing President Trump.” No, he admits, “it’s not going to be easy.” But “Democrats need to start changing course now.” Because, “like it or not, a significant number of Americans are actually happy these days.” The jobs growth report, North Korea and the steady economy “are beating out” Stormy Daniels and Robert Mueller. Which is why Democrats “are not going to win back the House by making it all about” Trump. They need to “look like adults, not like another pack of screaming kids on the playground. And they need to start now.”
Historian: US Holocaust Museum Whitewashes FDR
A new exhibit at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum blames America’s failure to aid European Jewry during the Nazi era on “public opinion, Herbert Hoover and a couple of bad guys in the State Department — but never on President Franklin D. Roosevelt,” reports Rafael Medoff at The Jerusalem Post. It claims “the accepted rules of international diplomacy” prevented FDR from speaking out about Nazi persecution during the ’30s, even though six previous presidents publicly denounced foreign anti-Semitism. It also claims there was “little or nothing” Roosevelt could do because of “anti-Semitism, nativism and isolationism.” Somehow, this “strong, decisive leader” has been turned into “the Incredibly Disappearing President.” Bottom line: The museum “has distorted the historical record in order to make excuses for inexcusable policy decisions.”
From the right: Forget About That Blue Tidal Wave
Pundits keep upgrading the coming “blue tidal wave” into an “electoral disaster of biblical proportions” for President Trump that will sweep Democrats to victory in November. But Jared Whitley at The Hill says “just one thing stands in the way” of this prediction: reality. Fact is, “the writing is simply not on the wall for a Democratic blow-out,” not with Trump’s approval rating “consistently higher” than Barack Obama’s was at the same point in his presidency and “staggeringly good” economic news. Not to mention that “the Democrats’ ‘big tent’ has become a three-ring circus” that has “turned on core liberal values.” Says Whitley: “Voters may want to check some of Trump’s eccentricities, but why give control of the country to people who can’t hate it enough?”
Conservative: Nothing ‘Safe’ About Safe-Injection Sites
Mayor de Blasio has announced support for “safe injection sites,” where addicts can take illegal street drugs with legal sanction in a medically managed environment. De Blasio sees them as an important tool to combat the national opioid epidemic. But Alex Titus at City Journal argues there is “virtually no evidence” that they lead people into treatment. The “worst possible consequence is the normalization of serious drug use in the name of harm reduction.” Such sites are “essentially state-sponsored shooting-up galleries” with no defined limits on “who can use them, or how often.” One site in Vancouver, “touted as a major success by advocates,” has resulted in “a whole neighborhood being destroyed.” Legal-injection sites, says Titus, “will only worsen the crisis.”
Political scribe: Time To Fix Presidential Line of Succession
With many Democrats still itching to push for impeachment if they win the House in November, Bloomberg’s Jonathan Bernstein suggests that “now is the time to finally fix the presidential order of succession.” It’s set by legislation, not the Constitution, and has several problems — not the least of which is that by inserting the House speaker and president pro tempore of the Senate (the most senior senator) into the line of succession, it “raises the possibility of a partisan incentive to remove elected officials” and “that’s a terrible idea.” He also suggests removing minor Cabinet officials from the succession order: Limit those eligible to the secretaries of state, treasury and defense and the attorney general. This, he says, “is a very real fix for a real, if unlikely, problem.”