From the right: Franken’s Phony Farewell
Sen. Al Franken’s resignation speech “seemed less heartfelt than grudging” — cast not as “an act of atonement” but rather “a reluctant act of gallantry,” says George Neumayr at The American Spectator. As for the actual sexual-harassment allegations, Franken portrayed himself as “an innocent man on the pyre while guilty men” like Donald Trump and Roy Moore “walk free.” Knowing that they’ll hold his seat allowed Democrats to engage in “cost-free moral posturing,” hailing Franken for “doing the right thing.” But, asks Neumayr, “how is he doing the right thing if he continues to deny the charges?” Fact is, “Democrats enjoy the luxury of growing a conscience about the age of Kennedy and Clinton — now that it is over.”
Liberal take: Charter Schools Don’t Cause Segregation
One of America’s biggest injustices, contends Jonathan Chait at New York, is the system “that ties [public] education to neighborhoods that are segregated by race and class.” Stranger still is the criticism leveled at “one of the sources of amelioration” for victims of those neighborhoods: charter schools. A new Associated Press analysis claims charter schools put “growing numbers” of students “in racial isolation,” though its data “does not remotely bear out this sensational charge.” In fact, “charter schools largely serve children whose only other option is a bad neighborhood school.” And they “disproportionately serve children in heavily minority neighborhoods because those are the children who can’t get a decent education from their neighborhood schools.” Yet this fact has somehow “become a central indictment against them.”
Culture critic: The Irony of Time’s POTY Announcement
Becket Adams at the Washington Examiner says eyebrows were raised at Time magazine’s announcement of its “Persons of the Year” — the #MeToo “Silence Breakers” — on a segment of NBC’s Today show. After all, this is the same program that until last week was co-hosted by Matt Lauer, now terminated for repeated sexual misconduct. Then again, dark irony aside, where else could Time have gone? To CBS, which recently fired co-host Charlie Rose over allegations he, too, sexually harassed female staffers? Or ABC, where “former political director Mark Halperin reportedly degraded and forced himself on his female subordinates?” In fact, “it didn’t matter which network” hosted the announcement, since none have clean hands. Which just drives home “the entire point” of the #MeToo movement.
Foreign desk: Backing the Wrong Man in Ukraine
It’s becoming “increasingly clear,” says Bloomberg’s Leonid Bershidsky, that Obama-era US pols backed “the wrong people in Ukraine” — specifically, President Petro Poroshenko, whose “moves to consolidate his power now include sidelining the anti-corruption institutions he was forced to set up by Ukraine’s Western allies.” He and his first prime minister, Aseniy Yatsenyuk, posed as “Westerners who would lead Ukraine into Europe. But their agendas turned out to be more self-serving.” For now, the State Department is backing the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, target of a government crackdown. But Poroshenko clearly has concluded that “as long as he maintains an anti-Russian stance” and is seen “as a bulwark” against Moscow, he can act like “any other old-school Ukrainian politician, for whom the borders between power, money and brutal force are blurred.”
Political scribe: Trump Is Starting To Rack Up Wins
President Trump’s first year may have been a rocky one, says Will Rahn at CBS News, but “he’s ending it on an upswing.” Congress is set to pass tax reform; Robert Mueller’s Russia probe is getting bad press; Roy Moore is favored to win Alabama’s special election; the economy is booming and blue-collar wages are rising. Meanwhile, “Trump’s enemies are still harboring their go-nowhere fantasies of impeachment.” And many of his Democratic enemies who “have long portrayed themselves as champions of women have been revealed to be not only serial harassers but also hypocrites.” The president’s one problem: Most of these wins “have less to do with Trump than the incompetence of others,” which means “it could all come undone in a heartbeat.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann