From the right: Look at Prez’s Actions, Not His Words
President Trump “speaks differently from most other statesmen on the world stage,” admits Roger Kimball in American Greatness, and often Trump’s crudeness rankles. Yet rhetoric aside, “the most outrageous part of Trump’s tenure to date has been the success of his economic policy” and the “principled realism” that has marked his relations with adversaries and rivals like Russia and China. On both fronts (the economy and foreign relations), Trump “has acted with much greater forcefulness and clarity of purpose than his immediate predecessors” did. And besides, “what’s the alternative to Donald Trump on any of these issues? Joe Biden? Elizabeth Warren? Bernie Sanders? To ask the question is to answer it.”
Media critic: The Times’ Trump Obsession
If you think The New York Times is obsessed with the supposed racism of President Trump now, wait till you see the Gray Lady as we get closer to the 2020 election, predicts Byron York of The Washington Examiner. At a leaked staff meeting recently, Times executive editor Dean Baquet outlined a new strategy, which York calls “building the Trump-is-a-racist narrative.” The Times’ problem is that “the Trump-Russia hole came up dry.” So Baquet has been forced to “transition to a new ‘vision’ for the paper for the next two years.” As Baquet put it, “We’ve got to change [and begin to] write more deeply about the country, race and other divisions.” In other words, same target, slightly different focus.
Foreign desk: BoJo’s Second Brain
Dominic Cummings is unelected and doesn’t have a seat at the Cabinet, yet “he is UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s most important adviser,” reports Bloomberg’s Therese Raphael. “Johnson wants a proven hand to carry out his ‘do-or-die’ Oct. 31 Brexit pledge and win an election,” and Cummings is just the man for the job. But the partnership between the two goes beyond Brexit, Raphael suggests. “At the heart of the new government are two ambitious men possessed by a sense of history, some would say grandiosity and an appetite for taking big gambles.” For Cummings, that means finishing the job that Margaret Thatcher started but never could finish: “reforming the civil service, whose inefficiencies Cummings finds maddening.” What would a Cummings takeover of the British state look like? “Visualize,” Raphael says, “a room resembling a NASA launch-control center in which Bismarck is huddled with, say, a crack team of designers and coders on loan from Apple.”
Celeb watch: Ease Up on the Feminism, Taylor Swift
At the Independent Women’s Forum, Patrice Lee Onwuka writes: “Taylor Swift entered the political fray again at the Teen Choice Awards this weekend to encourage her fans to fight gender inequality and the pay gap.” Specifically, Swift championed the members of the US Women’s National Soccer Team, who feel “gender discrimination is behind why they get paid less than men. But before Swift unleashes her 120 million Instagram followers on the patriarchy, she may want to do some research.” In fact, “women actually earn more than men in soccer by some measures.” The 2015 women’s World Cup brought in $73 million in revenue, of which 13 percent went to the players, compared to the men’s 9 percent in 2010 (out of revenues of nearly $4 billion). As a teen icon, Onwuka says, Swift should embrace “truth and facts rather than emotion and misinformation.”
Church beat: Lord, Save Us From Liberal Boomers
A video that recently surfaced on social media shows the aging, liberal and uniformly white parishioners of St. Francis Church in Portland, Ore., shouting at their young, conservative Nigerian priest. Father George Kuforiji’s sin? “He had removed their supplement to the recitation of the Creed,” as well as lefty “political statements from the front of their parish,” Chad Pecknold at The Catholic Herald explains. “The protest concluded with parishioners singing the civil-rights-era song ‘We Shall Overcome,’ locked in arms against their black priest.” That preposterous display, Pecknold argues, is what happens when “lay participation” becomes “lay control” aimed at “aligning the liturgy with the rubrics of progressive pieties. George aimed, instead, at restoring the liturgy of this parish to align with the rubrics established by the church.” Concludes Pecknold: “The African Church can’t get to America fast enough.”