Foreign desk: Trump’s Clever Long Shot in Venezuela

For once, President Trump is enjoying support from governments in Europe and Latin America after launching a new push for democracy in Venezuela, reports Charles Lane at The Washington Post. Before this, ­despite leftist claims that US sanctions destabilized Venezuela, Washington had “shown restraint in dealing” with Caracas’ socialist regime. Trump’s new strategy of supporting interim president Juan Guaidó “is a long shot, but still the cleverest concept America and its allies have come up with yet.” Guaidó’s transition plan, based on military amnesty and free elections, “offers genuine hope for a peaceful solution” and a return to economic stability. In this instance, at least, Trump “has chosen a worthy foreign-policy goal, assembled a multilateral coalition and adopted an ­actual strategy.”

Conservative: How Did Kamala Harris Get Ahead?

Longtime California political kingpin Willie Brown has acknowledged that he and current Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris “dated” more than 20 years ago. Moreover, as Paul Mirengoff notes at the Power Line blog, Brown admits he “may have influenced her career” at the time by appointing her to two state commissions, which paid her $100,000 above her prosecutor’s salary and helped “build her resume.” Brown also gave her a BMW. Harris “having an affair with a married man won’t shock many consciences these days,” Mirengoff admits. Nor will the fact that she benefited “from her relationship with a powerful man.” Certainly, she “won’t lose the morality sweepstakes to Donald Trump.” But in the #MeToo era, it’s certainly something “worth pointing out.”

Culture critic: The Future Is Female — And Furious

Days after Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in to the Supreme Court, recalls Cathy Young at Reason, The Washington Post published a retired professor’s account of “channeling her rage into half an hour of screaming at her husband” that “I hate all men and wish all men were dead.” While pure clickbait, it was “an extreme expression of a larger cultural moment” of female fury. Yes, that phenomenon “taps into real problems and real frustrations.” But the “central theme of the call to feminist rage is sexual victimhood” — or, as the late activist Andrea Dworkin argued: “The lives of modern Western women and girls are an everyday ‘atrocity’ of male depredations.” Indeed, this has become “mainstream feminist belief.” Yet while “anger can be productive, usually as an impetus for short-term action,” rage feminism “is a path of fear and hate. It traps women in victimhood and bitterness.”

From the right: Michael Jackson, Child Molester

It’s “been apparent since the mid-1990s that Michael Jackson was a child molester,” asserts National Review’s Kyle Smith. Now, with the release of a devastating new documentary, “the pattern of grotesque allegations has become impossible to ignore.” Yet, just as with Bill Cosby, we as a society “set aside the many horrific and entirely credible claims” against him “simply because we want them not to be true.” Moreover, “Jackson’s unfortunate early demise, his apparent closeted homosexuality and his wounded, childlike nature have made fans fiercely protective of him, with the media largely sidestepping the issue since he died in 2009.” Should Jackson now be “erased from the culture, the way Cosby has been”? Smith doesn’t think so — but “the label of serial child molester must be forever attached to Michael Jackson’s name.”

GOP activist: Resistance Is Not a Real Governing Strategy

Polls show House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was the big winner of the shutdown showdown — even as they also show she has become the most ­unpopular politician in the country. Or, as John Feehery suggests at The Hill, “a few more victories like this and Republicans will be in a great position to take back the House.” Because her base “desperately wants to ­impeach President Trump and wants her to resist at all costs.” And given her suggestion last weekend that Vladimir Putin may “have something” on Trump, Pelosi clearly agrees with the base. But she needs to prove to the rest of America that she and the Democrats are “capable of both serving as a check on the president’s excesses” and governing responsibly.

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann