Foreign desk: What Really Fueled Ukraine War
“Could it be the Ukraine war is about fighting for people?” asks Ivan Krastev at The Spectator World.
Months before he invaded, Vladimir Putin lamented Russia’s population decline, vowing to do everything possible to reverse it.
By 2039, Russia’s population is projected to fall to less than 140 million, smaller than Nigeria, Brazil, Pakistan or Ethiopia.
And “Russia’s war in Ukraine has involved the large-scale abduction of children, particularly orphans, who have been forcibly transported to Russia and adopted by Russian parents.”
Indeed: “These so-called ‘new Russians’ were central to the way Putin was defining the objectives of his ‘special military operation.’”
Yet Russia has lost 150,000 soldiers in the war, plus 600,000 Russians who’ve fled.
A prolonged war will devastate Russia “economically and demographically.” So those saying Putin could be ready to end the war next year “are probably not entirely wrong.”
Eye on DC: A Case Study in Enabling
In early June Sen. Patty Murray slammed the Wall Street Journal exposé on President Biden’s rapid decline as a “hit piece,” reports the Washington Examiner’s Byron York.
But “after the disastrous June 27 debate exposed Biden’s infirmities for the world to see, Murray is singing a different tune,” namely that “President Biden must do more to demonstrate he can campaign strong enough to beat Donald Trump.”
York sums up: Only once “Murray’s voters could see for themselves what bad shape the president was in” was she “ready to show Biden the door.”
“Multiply that many times over” to include other lawmakers plus “compliant reporters” and “Democratic politicos” who also “had plenty of reason to know the president is not up to the job.”
Physician: Jha’s Mandate Gaslighting
White House COVID czar Ashish Jha just “admitted that although he supported vaccine mandates, they did harm as well,” gripes Vinay Prasad at his Substack.
Yet Jha is still “gaslighting” by claiming that “mandates saved a lot of lives.”
No: “Perhaps as little as 1-2% of US people got a dose of the vaccine due to the mandate,” and both young people and those who’d already had COVID gained minimal added protection.
Yet “vaccine mandates cost lives by pushing people out of the work force — a socioeconomic death penalty. It also cost lives by breeding distrust.”
Jha is still “covering up for his own errors in judgment.”
Conservative: Extremism Won in France
“Far-left socialist Jean-Luc Melenchon now leads the largest [bloc] in the French National Assembly,” notes Commentary’s Seth Mandel — yet he’s an “authoritarian populist who wears his disgust for Jews on his sleeve.”
(For example, he “coolly asserted in an interview that the Jews killed Jesus.”)
So much for the “celebratory attitude” of “post-election discourse”: “Extremists weren’t thwarted. No, one extremist was thwarted through the elevation of a politician no less extreme.”
And “the extremist supported by all the ‘moderate’ commentators luxuriates in the kind of Jew-baiting that is practiced in the classrooms and the cafes and op-ed pages of mainstream publications.”
“The willingness of those in France to partner with Melenchon, and those in the West to advocate for such an alliance, was revelatory.”
From the right: Joe’s Inflation Ignorance
“The price controls they enacted that decade failed miserably, leading to shortages and other market disruptions,” groans City Journal’s Allison Schrager of “how poorly policymakers understood” 1970s inflation.
Yet President Biden’s new “plan to bring down food prices” just “repeats these past mistakes.”
Recent “inflation was caused initially by a combination of pandemic-driven supply constraints and elevated demand from federal transfer payments,” not greedy corporations.
Biden’s proposal ignores “basic economic realities,” “proposes cracking down on corporations” and “doling out money to consumers,” which could worsen inflation.
Rather than pushing “price controls or pressure campaigns on grocers,” Biden “should curb spending and let wages grow, allowing more Americans to weather the disastrous results of the past four years.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
