Security desk: John Kerry Is Delusional on North Korea
John Kerry claims President’s Trump’s rhetoric has “given North Korea a reason to say ‘Hey we need a bomb.’ ” But as Bloomberg’s Eli Lake suggests: “Perhaps Kerry was too focused on the Iran nuclear deal to notice, but North Korea already has a nuclear bomb.” In fact, it conducted four nuclear tests during Barack Obama’s presidency — “all during Kerry’s tenure as secretary of state” and all of them pretty “hard to miss.” Says Lake: “The real danger of Trump’s rhetoric” is that his “inartful” fire-and-fury threats from earlier this year “will reveal America to be a paper tiger.” After all, “North Korea has continued its threats, and there has yet to be fire or fury.”
Conservative: Guns Alone Don’t Explain Murder Rate
Violence “is endemic to American life,” laments Ethan Epstein at The Weekly Standard. The proof: “People are largely inured to it, at least when it happens to other people.” Most people “point to America’s unusually lax gun laws as being solely responsible for the elevated homicide rates.” Yet subtract all the gunshot deaths and “our murder rate is still higher than many of our peer nations,” including Australia, Germany, Spain, Ireland and Japan. In other words, “even if we removed every gun homicide in America, we would still be significantly more violent than other countries.” And that, he adds, is “much more disturbing than the fiction that America’s violence problem is one of technology, and not of deep societal rot.”
Crime expert: Bill de Blasio’s Broken Narrative
City Journal’s Heather Mac Donald is troubled by a New York Times article on post-Broken Windows policing in which an NYPD detective let a marijuana dealer go so as to concentrate on “violent stuff” instead of “small stuff.” But, she notes, “this distinction between ignorable criminal ‘small stuff’ and attention-worthy ‘violent stuff’ is precisely what the Broken Windows philosophy rejects.” Until recently, she adds, “the NYPD firmly rejected that distinction as well.” That’s because “a community characterized by street disorder is a magnet for violent street predation, since criminals rightly perceive that social controls there have broken down.” Moreover, “maintaining public order in high-crime communities is a moral imperative, because that is what the law-abiding residents there demand.” But “if the NYPD continues to allow public disorder to fester,” Bill de Blasio inevitably will become “the mayor who let crime rise on his watch.”
From the right: Nothing Normal About That Dossier
The left is hard at work trying to “rehabilitate Fusion GPS’s image and normalize its [anti-Trump] dossier and its behavior,” says Ned Ryun at The Hill. Axios called it a normal case of ex-reporters trying to make a living, while Hillary Clinton said it was just opposition research. Except it wasn’t. “Opposition research is based on fact,” assembled from verifiable records, while the dossier “was misinformation,” culled from “Google internet search materials and left-wing conspiracy sites” spreading hearsay. Nor is this “the first time Fusion GPS or its partners have been accused of using fictional misinformation.” Yet the mainstream media “bit hard on this scam. They treated Fusion GPS’s work as legitimate, never double-checking or even simply checking whether anything in it were true.”
Historian: Why Won’t the Nightmare of Communism Die?
Tuesday was the 100th anniversary of Russia’s October Revolution that “set off the long global reign of terror of Communism,” notes Robert Tracinski at The Federalist. That century of Communism “achieved four main results for the people who suffered under it: poverty, oppression, war and mass death,” with as many as 100 million killed. So, he asks, “why won’t the nightmare dream of Communism die?” Indeed, “a recent poll shows that a majority of millennials prefer socialism or Communism to capitalism” — hardly a surprise when The New York Times “has been celebrating 100 years of Communism” and its supposed “idealism.” But “the crime of Communism” is that it implemented those ideals “all the way to their logical conclusion. That is what people don’t want to face up to in the history of Communism.”
— Compiled by Eric Fettmann