Foreign desk: Israel’s New Ben-Gurions
On Oct. 7, “ordinary Israelis left their offices, closed their laptops, and abandoned their fields to pick up weapons, in many cases without waiting for instructions from the state or its army,” notes The Free Press’ Bari Weiss — “democratic heirs to Cincinnatus,” the Roman general who left his farm to serve his country. But “the binary of war and peace is a retrospective luxury of powerful nations or empires. A small democracy, whose very existence is contested by populous autocracies, does not have the privilege.” If Israel is “currently fighting a second war of independence — an existential war necessary for the survival of the state, as everyone here believes — then the young men and women of this country are more than soldiers. They are latter-day Ben-Gurions,” akin to Israel’s central founding figure.
Defense beat: Joe’s Perilous Pentagon Cuts
The prez just “rolled out a military budget fit for 1991, the twilight of the Cold War,” snark The Wall Street Journal’s editors: an $850 billion Pentagon request for 2025, “a mere 1% increase over 2024” and “a cut after inflation.” Global dangers abound from the Mideast to “Putin’s war in Ukraine.” “China announced a 7.2% increase in defense spending.” Yet “Biden thinks this is an acceptable moment to put American defenses on a diet.” His priorities are those of “a peacetime welfare state, not a nation serious about defending itself” against “determined enemies and new technology that will put the U.S. at increasing risk.” “The political class in Washington is failing at its most important obligation, which is providing for the nation’s defense.”
Libertarian: Biden’s Boost to Inflation
“There’s a direct connection between a tidal wave of government borrowing and spending and the eroding value of people’s money,” warns Reason’s J.D. Tuccille. Democrats have pushed through “trillions of dollars in spending, deficits, and debt on the theory that Americans would like the results,” but it’s backfired. And “inflation ticked up” again “in the latest figures,” by “enough to keep the eroding value of the dollar in the headlines, feed Americans’ dissatisfaction with the economy, and be received as very bad news by the White House.” Yet “the Biden administration seems determined to double down on high spending and massive borrowing in its economic policies going forward.”
Eye on DC: Sinema’s Exit = Vanishing Center
Now-retiring Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has been a “serious, substantive and consequential” senator, laments Danny Seiden at The Hill. Elected as a Democrat, she grew “uncomfortable with and unwilling to acquiesce” to her party’s progressive wing, so she became an independent, signaling she wasn’t “willing to settle for the status quo when bipartisan solutions [were] within reach.” “President Biden should be thanking her, for such cross-aisle achievements as the CHIPS and Science Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law. Yet “despite practicing the bipartisanship Americans say they want and expect from their leaders,” she’s recognized that politics today don’t reward centrism. Her departure is “leaving the Senate, and our politics, worse off.”
White House race: Empty State of the Union
“The divide” between what “the legacy press, Democrats, and cable news hosts observed” during President Biden’s State of the Union address and how “persuadable” voters of both parties reacted was “jarring,” reports Salena Zito at the Washington Examiner. The suburban Philadelphia voters she sat with “felt Biden just yelled at them.” Most media presented it as “Biden was back.” But in an ABC poll Friday, “29% said that he had done better than they expected, 12% said it was worse than expected, and 24% said it was exactly what they expected,” while “35% said they did not read, see, or hear about the address.” And a Tuesday HarrisX/Forbes poll found 61% “saying his performance was inadequate” and 59% that “it served to divide the country further.” Watch “the people who will turn this election one way or another, rather than the people who share the media’s worldview.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board
This story originally appeared on NYPost
