Fast Takes
Media critic: Trump and Acosta — a Love Story
The White House war with CNN’s Jim Acosta is actually “the fakest news in town,” according to Politico’s Jack Shafer. After all, why have President Trump and Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders repeatedly called on him to ask questions instead of “treating him like a ghost”? Answer: They were “counting on the likelihood that he would do that Acosta thing of speechifying and playing microphone hog” while he “turns a question into an extended back-and-forth.” Indeed, “they happily wallow in his pomposity.” But these repeated clashes have served Acosta, too: Fans of “reporters who are better at lecturing than asking a question” probably “find the Acosta clashes sufficiently enriching to make CNN [their] cable news destination.” Now his forced exile has turned him “into a free-speech martyr.”
Senator: Conservative Case for Criminal-Justice Reform
Violent crime decreased during the first two years of Donald Trump’s presidency, and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) at Fox News suggests criminaljustice reform can “keep that momentum going.” He recommends ending federal mandatory-minimum sentences for many drug offenses, which “can lead to outcomes that strike many people as unfair” and “undermines trust in the entire justice system.” Fairer sentencing laws, he says, “will increase respect for police, especially in communities where such respect is currently lacking.” Moreover, excessive sentences “break apart families and weaken communities — the building blocks of American civil society.” The lame duck, GOP-controlled Congress has an opportunity to add common-sense measures via the First Step Act. Because “it is unlikely we will get another opportunity to enact meaningful reform anytime soon.”
Foreign desk: Gaza Is the ‘Separate’ Palestinian State
Mahmoud Abbas can continue to present himself to the world as the “President of the State of Palestine,” but the Gatestone Institute’s Khaled Abu Toameh says, “He’s only living in an illusion.” By now, it’s obvious that Abbas does not represent the 2 million Palestinians living in Hamas-controlled Gaza. In fact, “Abbas has not been able to set foot in the Gaza Strip for the past 11 years, and his chances of ever returning there now seem to be zero.” Frankly, “were it not for the presence of Israel in the West Bank, Hamas would have toppled Abbas’s government a long time ago.” But he refuses to accept this reality, preferring to “accuse everyone else but himself for the fact that there already is a separate Palestinian state in the Gaza Strip” whose leaders continue to give him “the imperial brush-off.”
Culture critic: America Is Raising Generation Paranoia
Glorious fearlessness has long been the natural inheritance of every generation of youth — “except maybe the current one,” declares The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle. Today’s young people “tend to be obsessed with safety, troubled by a pervasive sense of threat. Consequently, understandably, they’re anxious and depressed.” Some blame mass shootings — but while they’re horrifying crimes, “they’re also among the rarest.” Fact is, “American children are at less risk of dying than at any point in human history, and if they do, it’s likely to be in a car crash, not a school shooting.” Blame social media, but also the fact that we’ve “scrubbed their playgrounds of anything even mildly risky (read: fun) and told children they could never go anywhere alone because a stranger might kidnap them.” Today’s kids will be OK, once we stop convincing them that everything’s wrong.
Sports desk: Athletic Coaches Aren’t Kings
College sports means big money — especially for the schools with the most successful teams. And Kevin Binversie at The Weekly Standard asserts that all this money provides “immense leverage to the coaches producing those victories,” giving some free rein “to get away with or cover up scandal.” Which is what’s happening at Ohio State (where the head football coach is accused of lying for years about whether an assistant abused his wife) and Maryland (where a football player died from preventable heatstroke). And “expect the scandals to get worse,” because “the NCAA is a paper tiger with no real authority to punish programs beyond sanctions.” Coaches, he says, “can become legends on campus. But they should never be kings.” —