From the right: Carter the Terrible
Jimmy Carter “was a terrible president but an even worse former president,” thunders National Review’s Philip A. Klein. His “true legacy is one of economic misery at home and embarrassment on the world stage.” “He left the country in its weakest position of the post-World War II era” and “spent the rest of his life meddling in U.S. foreign policy” in a “manner that could fairly be described as treasonous.” And that’s to say nothing about his “obsessive hatred of Israel.” We’ll see “an effort to rewrite history and claim that the 39th president was underappreciated and that people have been too harsh on him. But the truth is that historians have not been harsh enough.”
Conservative: Good Riddance to GEC Censorship
By denying it funding, Congress has forced “the Global Engagement Center, an office housed within the State Department . . . to close up shop,” cheers the Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky. “The taxpayer-backed GEC,” created in the name of thwarting misinformation, “violated its mandate to work only overseas and devolved into a partisan enabler of speech suppression in the United States” by granting funds “to the British Global Disinformation Index, which created a blacklist of” right-leaning US-based websites (including The Post) that reported on such stories as “the Hunter Biden laptop story and COVID-19 lab leak hypothesis.” The GEC “even circulated internal guidance with the aim of discrediting” critical reporters such as Kaminsky and Matt Taibbi. Its defunding “is a further vindication of our reporting on its seemingly unlawful activities.”
Media watch: Distorting Reality in Gaza
“Nothing is as it seems” in Gaza, fumes Commentary’s Seth Mandel. Take the Kamal Adwan Hospital and its medical director, Hussam Abu Safyia. The New York Times mentioned “dismissively” that Israel “claims” Hamas was using the hospital, and Safyia penned an opinion column griping about conditions. But a recent IDF raid on the site revealed it was in fact hosting 240 suspected terrorists, “including Safyia.” Many tried to flee. “It’s easy to see through the mainstream press’s smokescreen” around “medical staff and patients who aren’t medical staff or patients, trying to flee the hospital that isn’t a hospital.” “Journalists who aren’t journalists,” “teachers who aren’t teachers” and “aid workers who aren’t aid workers — who are these folks even trying to fool?”
From the left: Uncovered Story of the Year
Racket News’ Matt Taibbi notes that “2024 was the year in which people we used to call ‘elites’” fell back on “trying to bulls - - t their way through crises holding no cards at all,” with “over-covered pseudo-stor[ies]” like “the politics of joy” and “ostentatious non-coverage of big, real questions, many still unanswered.” For one: “Who’s running the county?” “We now know America hasn’t had a functioning president for at least this year and probably longer, which means someone other than the president has been making presidential decisions.” Indeed, “this real-world Dave script involves someone not named Biden steering presidential authority to approve billions for shooting wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, while handing out pardons in record numbers, among God knows how many other things. Is there even a word for fraud on that scale? A lot of people need to go to jail behind this caper.”
Urban beat: Dems vs. ‘Livable’ Cities
The horrific video of a “woman burning to death” on a Big Apple subway “is a snapshot of the city’s problems: crime, mentally deranged and intoxicated vagrants, undocumented migrants and unsafe subways,” observes The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley. Though New York City’s “subways are a microcosm of its disorder,” it “seems to be an epidemic in big Democrat-controlled cities like Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.” While “Democrats love to talk about making cities ‘livable,’ ” it’s “their high taxes, crime and chaos” that have made them “unbearable.” “When Christmas dinner conversations turn to a poor soul burned to death on a New York subway, Democrats have a five-alarm fire on their hands.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
