Photo by Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC
Libertarian: Praying DOGE Succeeds
“President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency,” headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, “might work where nothing else has,” argues Reason’s J.D. Tuccille.
“It seems that no matter how much money the U.S. government collects, it spends more.”
Perhaps “a pair of wealthy tech entrepreneurs can stage the intervention that the federal government so obviously needs.”
DOGE “won’t have any power to actually enforce its will,” but “working outside the government means” it’s “are also freed from the government way of doing things, with all its red tape and bureaucracy.”
“A rotating cast of lawmakers and presidents let spending outpace revenue for decades and show absolutely no interest in changing their habits. Maybe — just maybe — outsiders can get it done.”
Media watch: The Truth About Journalists
“President-elect Donald Trump’s victory revealed (once again) how out of touch so many journalists are — how disconnected they are from all those folks who live west of Manhattan but east of Malibu,” grumbles Bernard Goldberg at The Hill.
Washington Post big David Ignatius writing that he’s “mystified by this outcome” is one revelation; as is the WaPo columnist who blames Trump’s win “on the media going easy on him” and another bewailing the “right-wing media ecosystem” as though Harris didn’t have a “left-wing ecosystem” pushing her.
Gallup finds that 31% of Americans don’t trust “the media to report the news ‘fully, accurately and fairly.’”
As Steven Brill once observed: “When it comes to arrogance, power, and lack of accountability, journalists are probably the only people on the planet who make lawyers look good.”
From the right: Catholics for Trump
Exit polls found that “the nation’s Catholic voters split 56 to 41 in favor of Donald Trump,” notes Mary Eberstadt at First Things.
No surprise, when “key Democratic party policies have been locked in combat with key Catholic moral teachings for a long time now.”
Consider the Biden team’s embrace of “abortion,” “the Equality Act, which would have gutted religious freedom,” and “transgenderism,” plus the Justice Department probing “tradition-minded Catholics” as a new threat.
And then-Sen. Kamala Harris’ “interviews with Catholic judicial nominees evoked McCarthyism.”
Now Veep-elect JD Vance “is the first unembarrassed Catholic politician of high executive rank in a very long time.”
Fact is, “the wonder isn’t that more American Catholics lined up for Trump-Vance. It’s that so many have tolerated being called haters and bigots, with little pushback, for so long.”
Liberal: RIP, Ted Olson
Ted Olson, “a legal luminary of the right” who died Wednesday at 84, was “the finest Supreme Court practitioner of his generation,” mourns Joe Nocera at The Free Press, having argued before the court 65 times.
Yet it wasn’t all the “Supreme Court victories or the other career achievements” that made Olson “great” but “his integrity”: “His unyielding belief in free speech is why he took the Citizens United case” and also repped plaintiffs fighting to end Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court secrecy. Also on principle, he worked to legalize gay marriage and “opposed affirmative action, viewing it as reverse racism.”
Frustrated “that so many people on both sides of the political divide were so unwilling to listen to the other side,” he spent “his entire life” trying to understand “the way the other side thinks.” “Would that we could all follow his example.”
French Zionist: How To Fight Back on Campus
After “my 10-day campus tour of North America,” Bernard Henri-Levi offers in The Wall Street Journal “my theory of the day”: “The Jews of Europe and the U.S., until today, enjoyed, with the Enlightenment’s triumph, unconditional protection.”
Now they’re told: “You have the right to be protected, but only if you aren’t openly or excessively Zionist.”
How should students respond to professors who insist Israel is a “colonial creation”?
“Interrupt them. Impeach them. You need to treat them the way the students of May 1968 treated the most reactionary teachers.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board