War historian: Will New NSA Get Leeway He Needs?
Selecting Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as national-security adviser is President Trump’s “most imaginative decision to date,” says Fred Kaplan at Slate. The question is, will Trump’s inner circle “let McMaster do his job?” He’s “widely viewed as the Army’s smartest officer” and has “strong ties” to Defense Secretary James Mattis. He has also “made a career of speaking truth to power, often instinctively, without the slightest talent for fawning to his superiors.” But he’s “spent little time in Washington” and “will need an excellent deputy.” So if current deputy K.T. McFarland “and a few others don’t resign in the coming days, it may be an ominous sign that McMaster was given less leeway than he’ll need to do the job right.”
Security expert: Trump Doesn’t Need Public Opinion
Critics “who never accepted” Donald Trump’s presidency “are setting speed records raising the issue of impeachment” or the specter of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him, notes James S. Robbins in USA Today. But their real fear, he says, isn’t that Trump can’t do the job, but “rather that he is using the power of the presidency to do exactly what he said he’d do, and quickly.” Whether the public approves depends on which poll you read. Yet “the question of the reliability of the polls is not as important as the fact that Trump does not care what they say. If he fretted about polling, he never would have been elected in the first place.” That’s because “Trump is not the kind of needy, approval-driven president who even feels it necessary to consult public opinion when naming his dog.”
From the right: Why ‘Jane Roe’ Defended the Unborn
Norma McCorvey, the “Roe” of the landmark “Roe v. Wade” abortion ruling, died Saturday at age 69. And as Nicholas Frankovich notes at National Review, she underwent a midlife “conversion from pro-choice to pro-life activism” when she became a Catholic. In speeches, she noted that she never actually had an abortion (she gave birth while the case was being litigated) “and confessed that she was lying when, to bolster her case, she asserted that her pregnancy resulted from rape.” She also “complained that abortion-rights lawyers and activists had used her as a ‘pawn.’ ” So McCorvey spent the last two decades of her life “defending the dignity of unborn children and, in the process, herself.”
Conservative take: Sports Writing Has Gone All Liberal
Michael Brendan Dougherty at The Week agrees with those who contend that nowadays “sports writing is basically a liberal profession, practiced by liberals who enforce an unapologetically liberal code.” You can see it, he says, “in the way sportswriters police a consensus against the Washington Redskins’ name, or for on-field political activism.” They no longer speak for the common fan — “they speak at the common fan, or even just at a caricature of a fan that they assembled from the most voluble sports talk radio callers and the obscure Twitter accounts that jeer their work.” But this narrowness, he says, “puts them in an antagonistic position not just with fans, but with the entire sports culture beyond journalism.”
Culture critic: Late-Night TV Is No Longer Funny
Once upon a time, says Rachel DiCarlo Currie at Acculturated, “late-night comedians told jokes. Now, apparently, they ‘destroy’ people.” It started with Jon Stewart; the chief “destroyers” now are “Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers and Trevor Noah.” All this destruction, she notes, “tends to be highly subjective” — because “if you don’t subscribe to the progressive worldview, you probably will not agree” that these people effectively “destroyed” their mostly conservative targets. In fact, it’s “politics, rather than genuine comedy,” that drives the laughs: “It’s a culture that too often confuses snark with wit and sneering with reasoning — a culture that values a good ‘takedown’ more than a good argument.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann
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