Republican: Dems’ ‘Bipartisanship’ Fib
“Democrats just told the country that their desire for bipartisanship is just a talking point” by voting en masse to oust Rep. Kevin McCarthy as speaker after “he brought a truly bipartisan temporary funding bill to the floor,” which “ultimately garnered more Democratic than Republican votes,” fumes Mick Mulvaney at The Hill. “Democrats could have easily split their votes just enough to save McCarthy” or “voted to table (kill) the motion to vacate” or “simply abstained.” Nope. So it’s “ hard to believe that the next speaker, whoever that may be, would think for even a minute about bringing a bipartisan bill to the floor of the House after what they just did.”
Conservative: Chaos Doesn’t Win
The circus in Congress this week is a pointless distraction from the very real issues facing this country. And simply put, it makes Republicans look like fools,” thunders USA Today’s Ingrid Jaques. It ousted the speaker because “a minuscule number of GOP representatives were perturbed that Kevin McCarthy hadn’t delivered on every single promise he’d made months earlier” though he’d “proven he could force Democrats and President Joe Biden to the bargaining table, as evidenced in the debt ceiling fight earlier this spring.” Polls show voters trust Republicans over Democrats by record margins on the economy, immigration and crime. “The country wants a party it can trust. Republicans could be that party, if they don’t keep sabotaging their chances like they did this week.”
Neoconservative: Migrants Trust America
If the nation is as bad off as the right and left say, “why are people around the world flocking to it in unprecedented multitudes?” ponders Commentary’s Abe Greenwald. Righties fume, “We’re a banana republic with a deep state bent on crushing dissent”; lefties insist “we’re a racist, imperialist enterprise poised to turn white-nationalist or fascist,” should Trump win reelection. Yet “181,000 people illegally crossed the southern border” last month, demonstrating that “illegal immigrants aren’t nearly so hung up on partisan politics as American citizens are.” America’s global “cultural dominance” leaves “people with a sense of the opportunities conferred by our system.” Our current crisis “thrives on the shared devaluation of our national self-image.” It could be solved, “if we tried harder to see the nation as they do.”
From the right: Hunter Imperils Ukraine Aid
“Joe Biden’s decision to seek a second term” straight-out guarantees a re-entanglement of Ukraine aid with the Hunter Biden mess,” warns The Wall Street Journal’s Holman W. Jenkins Jr. “Republicans have already lofted these questions into a formal impeachment inquiry,” which will surely revisit the effort by the 51 former intelligence officials “to get Mr. Biden across the finish line in 2020 by lying to the American people about Hunter’s lost laptop,” as well as “Biden’s own lies about the laptop and his personal meetings as vice president with Hunter’s Ukrainian clients.” It all makes it harder to get Republicans to OK more aid to Ukraine, but “in no known universe would an opposition party not make partisan hay out of Hunter whatever peril it poses for the domestic politics of Ukraine aid.” Is Joe “essentially throwing [Ukraine] under a bus” simply because “he wants a second term”?
Eye on ’24: RFK Jr Threatens Who?
If RFK Jr runs third-party, asks Nate Silver at The Free Press, “why the widespread assumption that Biden has more to lose than Trump?” Polls “show Kennedy with stronger favorable ratings among Republicans than Democrats” and “a lot of Kennedy’s policy positions are actually pretty conservative.” Also, “some of Kennedy’s supporters are anti-Biden Democrats” — who “mostly voted for Trump in 2020 if they voted at all.” And on “Guns, abortion, vaccines, and Ukraine” (“quite a quartet”), Kennedy doesn’t toe the party line. “If I’m Biden, I’d probably take a 60/40 chance that Kennedy helps me rather than hurts me. But that’s partly because I wouldn’t be all that confident about my chances to begin with.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
Source link: https://nypost.com/2023/10/04/dems-bipartisanship-fib-the-hunter-hot-potato-and-other-commentary/