News of Netanyahu’s Political Death Might Have Been Greatly Exaggerated. As Maine Goes, So Go the Parties. El-Sayed’s Bananas Campaign. What’s With the Sympathy for Killer Moms? More
It appears that the political obituaries for embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu might have been premature.
The Wall Street Journal has Netanyahu holding on as election results at this point show no clear winner:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party moved into the lead position in Israel’s election Wednesday morning, denying his opponents a victory but still sitting short of a majority that would return his coalition to power.
The partial results could still fluctuate in the hours and days ahead as more votes are counted. But his showing gives the prime minister a solid position for the high-stakes showdown in the coming weeks over whether he will stay in office.
No doubt Republicans are taking heart from this state of affairs that reports of a blue wave here won’t materialize. “The seven races that will decide control of the Senate” in the Washington Post admits that “tight contests in a handful of states, making it hard to tell whether Democrats or Republicans will prevail next week.” As Maine goes … A Wall Street Journal headline headlined “Why Maine Is a 2026 Senate Bellwether” suggests that the choice between moderate Republican Senator Susan Collins and leftist Democrat Troy Jackson will influence the future direction of both parties:
A Jackson victory, along with one by Mr. El-Sayed in Michigan, will advance the left’s growing strength in the Democratic Party. More Democratic socialists will run in primaries. And Ms. Ocasio-Cortez might take it as a signal to run for President rather than against Mr. Schumer for Senate in New York.
If Ms. Collins wins, it would show that an independent-minded Republican can survive even in a Democratic-leaning state. The same goes for Republican John Sununu in New Hampshire. If they lose, Senate polarization will increase and compromise on spending and other policies is far less likely.
The Maine race is essentially tied, and Ms. Collins has the burden of Mr. Trump’s unpopularity. The irony is that as a centrist Republican in a closely divided Senate, she’d be a better check on Mr. Trump’s excesses than Mr. Jackson would be as one more left-wing backbencher.
The Abdul El-Sayed campaign for the Senate went bananas this week with an ad blaming Jews for higher grocery prices (including for bananas). The Free Press’ Eli Lake writes about “Abdul El-Sayed and the Banana Libel“:
In an ad from a pro–El-Sayed PAC, a couple complains that they cannot afford groceries because of Israel. Why won’t the candidate denounce the grotesque clip?
“Blaming the Jews for Everything in Michigan” is the headline over a Wall Street Journal editorial:
A common theme of antisemites throughout history is to blame the Jews for any and every social ill. The Nazis famously scapegoated them for Germany’s hyperinflation during the 1920s. And now this trope has reappeared in America, with a new ad by a leftwing group for Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed that blames grocery prices on U.S. support for Israel. …
Restaurant critic and former President Barack Obama, winner of the James Beard-Marie Antoinette Critics Circle Award, has been campaigning for El-Sayed. Batya Ungar-Sargon isn’t biting: She contends that Obama’s comparison of questions about El-Sayed’s apparent family ties to the Muslim Brotherhood to the “kooky” and racist birther movement is wrong.
Meanwhile, Florida Senate hopeful and DSA stalwart Angie Nixon was asked if Cuba is a dictatorship. Well, to her knowledge …
“You know, that is what people have told me. I have never been to Cuba, and so I will have to take their word for it,” Nixon told CBS News when asked directly whether she considers Cuba a dictatorship.
Has Ms. Nixon gotten wind of this yet? “A Cuba Showdown at the U.N.” “Havana’s bullies try to shut up U.S. Ambassador Mike Waltz for calling out the regime’s corruption”:
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz keeps making the right enemies. On Tuesday he was back on the General Assembly podium seeking to expose the private wealth and corruption of Cuba’s Communist officials. This so riled the Cuban foreign minister and his subordinates that they marched all the way to the stage to shout and harangue. But the stunt backfired.
“Mr. President, this individual needs to back away from this podium,” the U.S. Ambassador said. “He’s not going to intimidate me, in the United States of America, like he tries to intimidate political prisoners.”
“Why All the Sympathy for Moms Who Kill?” asks The Free Press. Author Kat Rosenfield finds a recent New Yorker essay that humanizes a woman who said she let her toddler die, then burned his body, disturbing:
As the summer of suicidal empathy gives way to the fall of the copycat child killer, I find myself engaged in the bleakest of thought experiments. Namely: I am trying to imagine a world in which the male perpetrators of sensational crimes enjoyed the same cultural status as their female counterparts.
It would be a hell of a place, that world—emphasis on hell—replete with disturbing spectacles and dark absurdities alike. I picture men dressed up in baby blue and demonstrating en masse outside the courthouse in support of Chris Watts, who in 2018 murdered his entire family, hiding the bodies of his toddler-age daughters inside a pair of industrial oil tanks.
That’s a difficult item to follow. I’m going to go with Lionel Shriver’s “What do progressives really want?” in the New Criterion, but helpfully reprinted in its entirety at RCP (here). Maybe Shriver can shed some light on society’s predicament:
In our naiveté, vanity, arrogance, historical ignorance, provincialism, psychological cluelessness, entitled prosperity, and political gullibility, my peers and I sowed the seeds for both “woke” and democratic socialism—the DSA being a seemingly separate case, but still of a piece. As a teenager, I wore beads and bell bottoms, I went to protests, and I dutifully deplored my own country. The state of the American Left is partly my fault. …
Despite their paying endless lip service to protecting the “vulnerable,” progressives’ driving emotions are negative. These people are striving less to realize a Shangri-la than to destroy what, and more particularly whom, they revile. Those hippie-era origins are embarrassing, but at least the Sixties’ love-not-war cliches, the era’s experimental sex and better living through chemistry, did project a credible glint of sunlit uplands.
Uh-oh. More evidence that men and women might be different. In “Thank God for Brave Men,” Free Expression’s Louise Perry argues, “Women don’t typically run toward danger the way Kaylub Giamanco did to stop a school shooting in Bend, Ore.” Point to Ponder:
What if Mr. Gallant’s actions [which included being convicted of murder for stopping a terrorist with a fire extinguisher abd narwhal tusk] weren’t a sign of “change,” but the opposite? What if the instinct to use violence to defend the innocent, and the instinct to use violence per se are, in some men, intertwined? How can we encourage such men to channel their instincts for violence, aggression and courage toward good rather than evil?
“Bob Woodward Loved a Good ‘Squish’.” Watergate reporter Bob Woodward has written another book in which he deplores Post owner Jeff Bezos (natch) and reveals the identities of his secret sources, who are largely unable to defend themselves, being dead and all. Tevi Troy comments:
Seeing a number of Mr. Woodward’s sources revealed at once shows that they tended to be on the “squish,” or liberal, side in the liberal-versus-conservative divide in the GOP administrations of that era. Other exposed leakers include Bush Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and two-time national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. For decades, conservatives in and out of administrations have bristled at the superior coverage that the squishes got in places like the Post. While they suspected that leaking played a role, the scale that Mr. Woodward has now described is shocking. Scowcroft, for example, was a “secret source for 35 years.”
Former CBS and Fox investigative reporter Catherine Herridge, meanwhile, refuses to reveal her sources, even when forced to pay an $800-a-day fine for her refusal to reveal her sources. Herridge deserves a Pulitzer (Woodward has several of these) instead of a fine, notes George Washington University law professor and Fox Contributor Jonathan Turley, who asks the Supreme Court to review Herridge’s case. It’s a matter of journalistic integrity.
Save the Children? Flock cameras raise legitimate privacy concerns, but Charles Fain Lehman writes in City Journal about “The Children Saved by Flock.” Lehman’sargument:
Automated license plate readers have become a political flashpoint. No one talks about the dozens of children they’ve rescued.
