From the right: Chuck’s Border-Security Games
Sen. Chuck Schumer is “pushing for another vote” on Sen. James Lankford’s border bill, “which he is sure to lose by an even bigger margin” than in February, when it couldn’t get 50 votes, groans the Washington Examiner editorial board. “Unlike Senate Democrats, voters know the border is in crisis. They also know Biden is entirely to blame.” This bill “is not a serious fix for the open border,” as “it doesn’t require Biden to do anything,” and worse, it “creates a permanent new system for processing illegal migrants” that “mandates [their] release into our country.” “It would make the crisis worse.” Instead, “Schumer should call up the House-passed Laken Riley Act, which not only received more than 30 Democratic votes but also would have prevented the death of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.”
Mideast desk: Oct. 7’s Terrible Lesson
“Hamas’ grisly terror raid on Oct. 7,” observes Eugene Kontorovich at Tablet, gained the group “more recognition than the [Palestinian Authority] has won in the entire past decade” from the United States; while international institutions like the United Nations “have also showered gifts on the perpetrators.” All this was bought with “murder on a scale never previously accomplished. Murder of the most wanton and barbaric kind, rape and torture, mass kidnapping of civilians from babies to Holocaust survivors.” Atrocities of “the ISIS or al-Qaida variety,” by contrast, “did not lead to calls among progressive elites to champion their political agendas or recognize their pseudo-states. Rather, this enthusiasm is reserved for specific perpetrators: Iran and the Palestinians.” And “that is explained only by the specific identity of the victims: Jews.”
Iran beat: Raisi Death Might Unravel Regime
The sudden death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi “won’t likely produce a tremor, but whenever the regime’s security services confront the Iranian people, a fissure might happen,” forecasts Reuel Marc Gerecht at The Free Press. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei “understands the dimension of today’s sedition and the need for a firm, ruthlessly clever hand” to sow enough fear to suppress dissent. Advancing his son Mojtaba for president “could generate a lot of opposition from those in the Islamic Republic opposed to dynastic succession.” The death of the other leading candidate, Raisi, could unleash “a lot of competing forces” — “clerics vs. the Revolutionary Guard Corps, cynics vs. true believers, and the people vs. the government.” Ironically, Raisi’s sudden demise might lead the regime “to make mistakes that cracked the fear that allows the theocracy to survive.”
Libertarian: Alito Lost on Bud Light
Justice Samuel Alito “shouldn’t have sold his Anheuser-Busch stock,” explains Reason’s Eric Boehm, not for “any moral or ethical” reason, but because “it cost him money.” Whether or not he was joining the Bud Light backlash when he sold $15,000 worth of shares in the parent company, his timing stunk: “BUD was trading at $56.35. Today, each share of the same stock is worth over $66.” Bottom line: “The stock market exists so we can all benefit from the wealth generated by successful businesses. Allowing the culture war to get in the way of that goal is a shame — and potentially a costly one. Let’s not do that.”
Elex watch: The‘Most Polluted’ Race Ever
Brace “for the most polluted election in American memory,” warns The Wall Street Journal’s Holman W. Jenkins Jr. in the wake of slanted press reports that Russia’s interfering to benefit Donald Trump. Thing is, a “Russian propaganda video” on social media has far less impact than, say, The New York Times touting it. Indeed, NYU researchers “confirmed that Russian propaganda” itself had “zero effect on the 2016 election,” but “disingenuous claims of Kremlin influence had an incalculable effect on our politics.” Notice: Moscow has accused Hunter Biden’s former company, Burisma, of financing terror inside Russia — just the kind of “meddling the U.S. press loves to report” — yet it’s gone “unreported, perhaps because it would remind U.S. voters of the Hunter mess, something Biden supporters don’t want” you reminded of.
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board