Fast Takes
From the right: Now Dems See No Election Conspiracy
The same Democrats who insist the 2016 presidential election is invalid because “Boris and Natasha posted something on Facebook,” asserts National Review’s Kevin Williamson, are now watching “with joy in their hearts” at what’s happening in Florida: The “rolling crime wave that is Broward County elections supervisor Brenda Snipes and her co-conspirators” are trying to actually “steal an election.” Fact is, the voting fraud that “our Democratic friends insist never happens, happens quite a lot under Snipes’s watch.” Let a GOP-run state ask voters for photo ID, and there’s public wailing, but when “Brenda Snipes openly flouts the law and dares anybody to try to do anything about it, that’s the epitome of democracy?” Yes, “conspiracy theories are bad for public life. But so are conspiracies.”
Political scribe: Will Moderate Dems Learn From History?
A lot of new Democratic moderates were elected to the House last week — if by “moderate” you mean they’re not part of their party’s small but growing socialist wing. But as The Week’s Ryan Cooper explains, “they are also considerably different than the traditional Blue Dog conservative Democrats, who are all but extinguished.” The old Blue Dogs were “moderate to conservative on both economic and social questions, and made ferociously criticizing the Democratic leadership a key part of their political appeal.” The new moderates are “near-universally socially liberal,” though “some of the old economic ideology survives.” Whether they can avoid “the political-ideological mistakes that killed the Blue Dogs under the Obama presidency will be a key question for the future of the party.”
Foreign desk: Korea’s Missile Work Is No Surprise
Experts have known “for some time” that President Trump’s favorite talking points on North Korea — that the nuclear crisis has been defused — “were shaky,” notes Bloomberg’s Eli Lake. Now we know for sure: New satellite imagery shows Pyongyang is continuing to work on its missile program at bases throughout the country, in “stark contrast” to its decommissioning of a nuclear test site. But while this does “count as a deception,” it “does not count as a surprise.” US intelligence has known about the sites for years; besides, Kim Jong-un has “made his intention” to continue nuclear-capable missile work plain. Question is, “what happens when he is done ‘perfecting’ the missiles he needs to deliver the nuclear weapons he is promising to dismantle?”
Conservative: The Growing Drug-Resistance Crisis
A new United Nations report says deaths attributed to germs that have developed a resistance to antibiotics and antimicrobials could soon surpass fatalities from cancer, constituting “a global health emergency,” reports Bridget Johnson at PJ Media. Because of “persistent overuse and misuse,” the World Health Organization warns that the time in which current antibiotics will still be useful “is running out.” Indeed, the organization predicts that drug resistance could kill 5 million people annually in Asia alone by 2050. Last month, the US Centers for Disease Control reported that an outbreak of salmonella in raw chicken products “was a strain resistant to multiple antibiotics.” Antibiotic resistance, says WHO, “is rising to dangerously high levels in all parts of the world, and is threatening our ability to combat common infectious diseases.”
Culture critic: Now Even Bedtime Stories Are Radicalized
One upon a time, children’s books delivered “simple moral lessons about, for instance, cleanliness and the importance of prayer,” recalls Joe Pinsker at The Atlantic. Today’s story time “is still propelled by moral forces” — of a far different kind. Increasingly, publishers are offering children’s titles “with political undertones and activist calls to action on topics ranging from Islamophobia to race to gender identity to feminism.” Indeed, there’s an “exploding” trend of “woke” picture books intended to help parents “distill some of the day’s most fraught cultural issues into little narrative lessons for their kids” that are “infused with themes that are dear to many political progressives.” As one political-science professor notes, now “kids know that they’re Democrats before they have any clue what a Democrat is.” —