Liberal: A ‘Deep Sickness’ on the Left
Hamas’ attack on Israel should be “denounced as a war crime,” thunders Noah Smith at his Substack, yet “the American leftists holding pro-Palestinian rallies gleefully celebrated the targeting of civilians.” And “this bloodthirst and support for ethnic cleansing,” is “coming from the grassroots.” Indeed, “there’s a deep sickness in the Western leftist movement”: “It’s one thing to believe that Israel is an apartheid regime and that war against it is justified; it’s another to believe that massacring random festival goers is an acceptable way to prosecute that war.” Bottom line: “When your rallies end up with swastikas and ‘Gas the Jews’ and people making fun of dead innocents, well, you made the wrong choice.”
Libertarian: The Cult of ‘Forever Low’ Interest Rates
“Countless financial soothsayers and Wall Street wizards were once members of a curious cult” that “dismissed those of us who argued that high government debt was unsustainable and, partly because low repayment rates would not last forever, we should control spending,” gripes Veronique de Rugy at Reason. “Interest rates did remain low for an extended period,” but the “main mistake” of “Forever Low believers” was “concluding that there was no cost to trillions of dollars in additional debt.” After “15 years of super-low rates alongside growing government indebtedness,” noe “the winds have shifted,” and “the once-dismissed possibility of rising rates is now a reality.” And: “If the rising interest payments are paid with more borrowing as opposed to fiscal restraint, inflation will only worsen, triggering more interest hikes and more interest payments.”
Middle East watch: Truce No Longer Possible
“In launching its unprovoked, heinous attack on Israelis on October 7, Hamas created the bloodiest day that Israel has seen in more than five decades,” notes Dennis Ross at Foreign Policy. Israel “can no longer be satisfied with a punishing response, followed by a return to the status quo. The assumption Israel could live with Hamas and manage periodic conflicts” stands “shattered.” It “will no longer accept a truce,” and its leaders are “contemplating options that they have not been prepared to consider since” Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza. President Biden “would be wise to formulate plans for different possible outcomes. But there must be one proviso: that Hamas is not in a position to threaten Israel ever again.”
Culture critic: RIP, America’s Poet
“Louise Glück, an American poet whose searing, deeply personal work, often filtered through themes of classical mythology, religion and the natural world, won her practically every honor available,” died Friday at 80, reports The New York Times’ Clay Risen. Born in New York City and raised on Long Island, she was “widely considered to be among the country’s greatest living poets, long before she won the Nobel” Prize for Literature in 2020, “the first American-born poet to win it since T.S. Eliot in 1948.” Glück’s “deeply personal” poetry was “broadly accessible, both to critics, who praised her clarity and precise lyricism, and to the broader reading public.” Yet it was never “solipsistic”: The former US poet laureate believed “Achilles’ triumph” was “his realization of his own mortality.”
Conservative: Voice of America — or Russia?
“Hamas’s terrorist attacks against Israel are a handy gift to Russia’s autocrat Vladimir Putin,” grumbles Ted Lipien at The Hill. Hamas has distracted the West from Putin’s “own atrocities in Ukraine,” contributed to “higher energy prices” and assisted Kremlin propaganda targeting “the radical wings of both the Republican and Democratic parties.” Strangely, “Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty seems to have taken up the task of absolving Putin” of involvement in Hamas’ barbaric attack, while Voice of America is promoting “Putin’s nuclear doom and gloom” Ukraine narrative. House Foreign Affairs Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) is probing “VOA’s alleged hiring of former Putin propagandists.” American conservatives who are accepting Putin’s lie about Ukraine should wonder how “Ronald Reagan, who called the Soviet Union the ‘Evil Empire,’ would have reacted to Russia’s current attempt to restore it.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board