Critic: How NYC Could Have Protected Terror Victims
Tuesday’s terrorist attack in lower Manhattan, which targeted pedestrians and cyclists, was “eminently preventable,” contends Justin Davidson at New York magazine. That’s because the “ostensibly ‘protected’ bike lane” where it occurred actually isn’t: “Anyone who regularly rides that way knows to watch for garbage trucks, maintenance workers’ golf carts, police cruisers and Con Ed vehicles blocking a lane.” In other words, it has “openings that are, well, wide enough to drive a truck through.” The solution: “a thin steel bollard, strategically placed and quickly unscrewed if necessary.” Indeed, he notes, “when Richard Rojas gunned his car through Times Square last May, he wound up impaling it on precisely such bollards arrayed around a pedestrian plaza.”
Conservative: Dem Double Standard on Politicizing Death
“Tactless, partisan” Democrats and their media allies are “feigning offense” over President Trump “politicizing” Tuesday’s terror attack by criticizing Sen. Chuck Schumer’s support of the Diversity Visa Lottery program, says Commentary’s Noah Rothman. His response: “The hypocrisy here is staggering.” After all, he notes, if the eight people killed had been “victims of gun violence and not terroristic vehicular homicide, ‘politicizing’ this event would be a virtuous activity.” President Barack Obama said precisely that after a 2015 mass shooting at an Oregon college, declaring that episodes of gun violence were “something we should politicize.” And the reaction was “cheers” from “those who are allegedly so repulsed by the politicization of violence today.”
Sportswriter: This World Series Just Rescued Baseball
The Houston Astros’ thrilling seven-game victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers was “just what baseball needed,” suggests Robert O’Connell at The Atlantic: “sleep-robbing, Internet-igniting, star-making proof of not only relevance but also vitality.” This, he says, “was the rare championship that will be remembered more for how it was contested than for who won . . . It pulled fans who went to bed early back out to their sofas.” And it was helped immensely by “the amount of visible emotion the players displayed.” For a week and a half, “baseball was at the center of the sports world, the subject of every morning’s bleary eyed talk.” This World Series “proved that baseball can rival any sport for sheer excitement, especially when the players let themselves show it.”
Political scribe: I’m Amazed Manafort Got Busted
The real news in the Paul Manafort indictment “is that someone has actually been prosecuted under a foreign lobbying law that has existed for decades but has almost never been enforced,” says Ken Silverstein at Politico. If nothing else, it proves “how flawed the foreign lobbying rules have always been and how easily they are flouted.” In the 20 years he’s covered foreign lobbying, “I’ve seen only a handful of cases brought against people or organizations accused of not registering as foreign agents” — and “never a wired Washington lobbyist like Manafort.” Fact is, “if you’re going to indict and prosecute lobbyists for failing to disclose their activities, roughly half of Washington would be under arrest.” Had he not been Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Manafort would be kicking back and enjoying his allegedly laundered cash at this very moment.”
Education beat: Can Yale Be Elite Without Shakespeare?
Yale, always ranked at or near the top of American universities, has now decided “it will no longer require English majors to study literary luminaries such as William Shakespeare and John Donne,” reports The Federalist’s Joy Pullmann. This after “students charged it’s racist to require them to study influential British authors because those authors happen to be white.” So at Yale, writers are now judged by “the color of [their] skin and content of their gonads rather than the quality of their literary works.” But it’s “preposterous to assert that someone can be considered well-educated if he has actively shunned reading Shakespeare.” So maybe “it’s time we stop venerating and sending our kids” to institutions “whose main function seems to be rotting students’ brains and American society from its leadership down.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann