From the right: Dreams From Martha’s Vineyard
“Former President Obama and the former first lady have reportedly made a bid of approximately $15 million on a home in Martha’s Vineyard” — which is rich given that Obama “spent his presidency demonizing everyone else’s success,” snarks Carol Roth at FoxNews.com. The same Obama who’s living large today told “small-business owners they ‘didn’t build that’ ” while he in office — “hypocrisy and envy that continues to permeate the Democratic Party.” The 44th president is only one of several prominent lefties who “peddle victimhood to grab power, wealth and success for themselves.” Democratic leaders frame wealth as a sin, hypocrisy that’s “made worse by the fact that they do it specifically for their own gain, making the political class more powerful and the government more bloated all while damaging the concept of the American Dream.”
Foreign desk: On Climate Action, US Beats G-7
“Blaming President Trump for the lack of progress on climate change might make for a good headline,” notes Robert Bryce at National Review, but the fact is, “the U.S. has slashed its coal use and cut its total greenhouse emissions more than any country in the G-7.” It’s also a “major supplier of liquefied natural gas,” helping countries switch off coal, which emits more CO2. Germany and Japan, by contrast, turned to coal to replace nuclear energy after the Fukushima nuclear accident. Bottom line: G-7 nations and others (India boosted its coal consumption 74 percent over the past decade) “are looking out for their own economic interests,” Bryce argues. “And there’s little reason to expect that will change any time soon.”
2020 watch: Trump Pushes Change, Biden Sells Stability
“It’s a political oddity,” Charles Lipson writes at Real Clear Politics: Democratic challenger Joe Biden is offering stability, while GOP incumbent President Trump promises “an ambitious, transformative agenda.” Trump’s slogan (“promises made, promises kept”) “seems to stress continuity,” but his plans, from “rolling back the administrative state” to maybe buying Greenland, are anything but. Biden, meanwhile, is “running as the Democrats’ version of Warren G. Harding, a bland figure who promised America a ‘return to normalcy’ after the tumult of World War I.” Biden still faces a fight for his party’s nomination as “he offers a more stable future, a return to calmer times and familiar policies.” Democrats may decide that’s a winning message, but “the question is whether they think Joe Biden is competent to pull it off.”
From the Left: Sanders, Warren Playing Different Games
Despite regular media claims that Democratic contenders Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are “ideologically identical,” the two in fact have “distinct approaches to the fundamental problems facing our society,” Meagan Day argues at Jacobin. It’s not just labeling when Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist while Warren says she’s a “capitalist to my bones,” Day notes: “A socialist tries to liberate the things people need from the clutches of capitalist markets,” while “a capitalist respects the superior wisdom of capitalist markets and tries to restore them to optimal functionality” — thus Sanders’ embrace of Medicare for All, on which Warren is “so frustratingly noncommittal.” Above all, Warren “wants establishment Democrats to know that she intends to cause no major upset,” while “Sanders embraces his villainization by the Democratic Party establishment.” So while she “shares some of Sanders’s ideas,” Day concludes, Warren “seems perfectly happy to suture the relationship within the party itself between those who go to bat for the rich and those who are dealt the blow.”
Education beat: California’s Ethnic-Studies Fiasco
The basic idea is “good for many reasons,” but California’s proposed ethnic-studies curriculum has “numerous problems,” Claude Goldenberg sighs in the San Francisco Chronicle. The very term “ethnic studies” is “outdated,” since it covers “nationality, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and beliefs,” so “something along the lines of ‘diversity studies,’ or maybe ‘California population studies’ ” would be better. Worse, Armenians, Greeks, Hindus, Irish, and Jews are “hardly or not even mentioned,” in the curriculum, with “not a word about Jewish stereotypes. Nor about the Jewish Holocaust.” Plus, the document’s “opaque” and “incoherent” language reads “like self-parody.” Since “our collective consciousness about the different types of diversity has grown,” Goldenberg concludes, “so too the representation and discussion of diversity should mature.” And a “reworked” California “curriculum would be an excellent place to demonstrate this maturity.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board