Media watch: Making Excuses for a Nazi
Racket News’ Matt Taibbi blasts away at Keir Giles’ Politico column “Fighting against the USSR didn’t necessarily make you a Nazi,” about a guy “who was actually a Nazi,” Waffen-SS member Yaroslav Hunka. More important, “this story was never about the moral choices of Yaroslav Hunka, but the decision by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau” and others “to applaud as a ‘Canadian hero’ a former member of the SS” who “fought on the other side in a war that killed 42,000 Canadians.” In dissing the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Giles also “appears not to get that the spectacle of Canada’s parliament and Prime Minister cheering” for “any member of the Waffen-SS is exactly the nightmare Holocaust survivors always warned about.” He’s “now asking a Holocaust remembrance group to chill out because it’s not true that ‘everybody in the SS was guilty of war crimes.’ Never forget, except in some cases?”
Eye on Congress: America’s ‘Bipartisan Idiocy’
If you think America’s “political class is characterized” by “an unbridgeable gulf between two tribes with nothing to unite them,” consider the “evidence that both parties are in thrall to extremists with identical aspirations: to achieve absolutely nothing except the satisfaction of their own self-promotion,” scoffs The Wall Street Journal’s Gerard Baker. “The idiocy, at least, is bipartisan.” On one side, there’s Rep. Jamaal Bowman, “a radical New York Democrat,” who pulled a fire-alarm handle Saturday — to buy more time, “almost everyone” knows, for fellow Dems to review legislation. On the other, “Republican Jacobins led by Rep. Matt Gaetz blocked” a conservative budget bill, presumably, “to deliver another government shutdown” that would’ve “redounded to the GOP’s disadvantage,” and now seek to oust Speaker Kevin McCarthy. “They risk delivering us another four years of Joe Biden.”
From the left: Should Biden Drop Out?
“It’s only too late” for Joe Biden to drop out of the 2024 race “if we accept the lunacy of the endless American campaign season,” pleads Jonathan Alter at Washington Monthly. Though “it would be terrible for the party and country for someone to challenge Biden in bloody primaries,” a “statesmanlike withdrawal” would allow “aspirants on the talented bench of the Democratic Party to jump in and create an exciting, energizing campaign about the future.” After all, “voters want alternatives for the nomination — a democratic process for a president who loves democracy.” And “around three-quarters of likely voters think” Biden’s too old. The hope’s that “someone fresh will emerge and turn a new page.”
From the right: Soviet-Like Support for Bowman
Things got “a little Soviet” after Rep. Jamaal Bowman claimed he pulled that fire alarm because he thought it would open a House door, and “every single Democrat and the entire corporate news media immediately responded as if it were a reasonable” explanation, marvels The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson. Bowman’s claim is “the sort of patently false thing no one in his right mind would ever believe,” yet the media and Democrats think they can “simply tell you what to believe, what reality is, and you will accept it — no matter what your lying eyes tell you.” “That’s the real problem here — the blatant lying with the expectation that you just have to accept it and pretend it’s OK.”
Penn. journal: GOP’s Hope for US Senate Seat
With the Pennsylvania GOP’s unanimous endorsement of David McCormick, it’s clear the party sees McCormick as its “best hope” of defeating Democratic Sen. Bob Casey and “retaking the U.S. Senate majority,” cheers the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito. The move gives the McCormick team “an opportunity to marshal resources, save money, and build a superb ground operation.” McCormick “lost last year’s GOP primary race to celebrity Dr. Mehmet Oz, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump but not the state party, by less than 1,000 votes.” As ex-party chairman Bob Gleason puts it, the early endorsement shows “the party has learned its lesson of its non-endorsement in 2022.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board