Soothsayers on Tennessee Race. Can Somalis Assimilate? Do They Want To? What We Love About Climate Change. Nuzzi Huzzi? & More
Soothsayers—or rather pundits and pollsters—are poring over the entrails. What do the results of Tuesday’s special election for Tennessee’s 7th congressional district portend for the midterms?
An editorial in the Wall Street Journal says that “the clock is ticking for Republicans,” adding that the GOP majority is on “borrowed time.” The Republican won, but the WSJ’s politics columnist Karl Rove says the double-digit dip in their margin is a wake-up call:
Republicans need to talk about real concerns of real people. Americans want candidates who understand their problems and have sensible answers.
Authenticity matters. Voters can smell a phony a mile away. They’ll vote for someone with whom they don’t totally agree if they believe that candidate is honest, decent, empathetic and knows generally what to do about their top issues. Local and state issues, not only national ones, will be up there for voters in a midterm election.
As much as the White House may want this contest to be about Mr. Trump, so do Democrats. Let GOP candidates make their races about themselves and even create some distance from the president.
The focus must be on kitchen-table issues. James Carville’s 1992 pronouncement is still true today: It’s the economy, stupid, and don’t forget healthcare.
Meanwhile, Kimberley Strassel writes that Congress remains nowhere on health care. National Review’s Noah Rothman says that there’s another way of looking at the Tennessee race. The Democrat in the race, socialist Aftyn Behn, was a “terrible candidate,” who professed her hatred for Nashville. Rothman suggests that the emboldened Dems might be encouraged to select similar standardbearers next year.
Whether you believe the anger against Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is cynically trumped up by the out-of-power political party to harm the Trump presidency—as Isaac Schorr argues—or the response to a war crime, it’s a preview of the atmosphere of Washington if the GOP loses the House. The New York Times has an analysis of legal issues. (I know. I know.) The Washington Post, which launched the Hegseth controversy with a story that has been heavily critiqued, reports Republican frustration with Hegseth. The editors of National Review call for a “fair accounting” of Hegseth’s role in the boat strike but question the Trump administration’s activities in the Caribbean:
Pete Hegseth and Admiral Bradley may have been unfairly maligned by the Washington Post, but that does not make the Trump administration’s military campaign in the Caribbean prudent or constitutional.
But Real Clear Polling finds that the U.S. military’s actions in the Caribbean and Hegseth’s general policies are popular with the American public. Both sides are claiming vindication in the report on Signalgate. Meanwhile, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Corina Machado (admit it: it’s probably better that she won) calls President Trump “a champion in the fight for ‘Venezuelan freedom.”’
The massive welfare fraud centered on Minnesota’s politically powerful Somali community tells us a lot about what Barton Swaim of the Wall Street Journal calls “America’s other migration problem.” Immigrants who won’t assimilate. Swaim writes:
The Somali fraud story is in some respects akin to the so-called grooming scandal in Britain, in which gangs of mostly Pakistani men sexually abused young girls, even as the country’s government and news media looked the other way, terrified by accusations of racism or “Islamophobia.” In the Twin Cities, state authorities couldn’t rouse themselves to stop the theft—hundreds of millions of dollars siphoned from Medicaid, housing and other welfare programs. It is to the great credit of the U.S. , under administrations of both parties, that it didn’t allow the perpetrators’ race, religion or country of origin to hinder the prosecution of crime.
Both scandals, in the U.K. and Minnesota, raise a question most of us would rather not consider: that of large-scale immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. It’s true that other ethnic immigrant groups, Italians in the early 20th century most famously, imported forms of criminality from the home country. It’s also true that Minnesota’s roughly 80,000-strong Somali community contains many industrious people and good citizens.
But an unbiased observer could be forgiven for thinking Minnesota’s Somali population isn’t capable of assimilation.
Chadwick Moore wonders what Rep. Ilhan Omar knew about the scam.
Ms. Must is thinking that Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the 29-year-old Afghan national and suspect in the Washington, D.C. shooting of two National Guard members, might not have assimilated properly. The lefty Daily Beast reports that a claim that the Taliban made Lakanwal, though living in the U.S., an offer he couldn’t refuse. PJ Media’s Matt Margolis explores this shocking angle. The New York Times has a piece on Mr. Lakanwal’s alleged cries for help, the theme of which can be summed up as “poor, poor fellow.”
Let’s Say Something Nice about Climate Change: Sensible environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg writes that climate change may have spared America from hurricanes. Lomborg notes a news story on hurricanes “turning away” from the East Coast:
Not once did the piece invoke climate change. The journalists seem to believe that climate change can cause only bad outcomes. If warmer oceans energize storms, couldn’t they also influence other meteorological phenomena that diverted this year’s hurricanes harmlessly out to sea? No one ran the models to check. No professors lined up for quotes.
This isn’t an anomaly; it’s a pattern. Dig into past coverage, and you’ll find climate framing in hurricane coverage dating back to the mid-2000s—tying intense storms and active seasons again and again to global warming. These stories overflow with experts declaring each event a harbinger of climate doom, backed by fresh attribution studies. Yet when reality bucks this narrative, no one makes the connection.
Germane to the Lomborg article, the Free Press has a piece headlined “The Cost of Confused Climate Science,” about a “retracted blockbuster study shows the motivated reasoning that fuels climate hysteria.”
Let’s Clear Up Some More Confusion: Critics came out to attempt to refute a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study that found that there is at best a “low certainty” of evidence for the benefits of puberty blockers and surgical procedures aimed at sexual transition for minors. City Journal has a masterful explanation of how well the HHS report holds up. “The agency’s updated document could change pediatric gender care in America,” the article argues.
Examiner Chief Political Correspondent Byron York poses a question: “Do voters care about a ‘peace President’?” York writes:
There are times, of course, when presidents cannot choose the work in front of them. Crises present themselves, and the president has to do something. Now, of course, Trump is trying to end the most serious conflict of all, the war between Russia and Ukraine. He will of course win much praise if he can come up with a solution that satisfies both sides. But he shouldn’t look for it to be a big winner with the voters.
“There’s a special place in hell for women like Olivia Nuzzi — whose career as a journalist is over,” Miranda Devine observes in a scathing piece on Ms. Nuzzi’s new book and her amours:
There’s a reason that women like Olivia Nuzzi used to be shunned by polite society in more orderly times.
Any woman who sets her sights on a married man is making a deliberate, selfish choice to cause pain to another woman. This is not a sisterly act.
Through history, women who make enemies of other women are seen as lethal to the tribe’s cohesion and are cast out. That’s the way it was when shame existed, and genteel social norms had replaced stoning or drowning or other horrors the medieval world bestowed on women.
The heroine of Devine’s piece is Cheryl Hines:
Cheryl Hines, Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s wife, obviously is the victim in this tawdry tale, but she has played the crappy cards her cheating husband dealt her about as perfectly as any woman could.
Do You Have This on Your Bingo Card? Don Jr. as J.D. Vance’s Veep?
Ms. Must is off tomorrow. See you Monday.
