Sports beat: The Overrated Tom Brady

“Tom Brady is unquestionably a great quarterback and among the greatest of all time,” admits Larry Alex Taunton at The American Spectator. “So when I say that he is overrated I don’t mean that he is not good or that he is average. No, he is, as I have said, great. But I am having trouble with the ‘GOAT’ label — that is, ‘Greatest of All Time.’ ” For starters, much of Brady’s glory depends on the Patriots’ fantastic ­defense. More good fortune: the long period of “ownership stability” throughout his tenure with New England, “with one of the sport’s greatest defensive minds guiding the ship the whole way.” But “the strongest argument against labeling any quarterback the GOAT is that the sports world goes back eons, and the game and its rules have evolved radically.” With the sheer brutality of the earlier National Football League gone, “today’s quarterbacks,” Brady very much included, “have massive advantages over their predecessors.”

Centrist: The Perils of Polarization

Abby McCloskey at The Dallas Morning News looks at how “our politics got this broken” and polarized, creating a “toxic brew of legislative gridlock, extreme special interests and . . . partisan rancor.” New ­research by Princeton scholar Nolan McCarty, she notes, shows that “extreme polarization is mostly manifested by our political elites as opposed to ordinary people, and the data suggest they may be instigating it instead of responding to the electorate’s demands.” Indeed, evidence indicates that “most Americans are exhausted by politics and tend to hold” moderate views. Unfortunately, “obvious solutions” are elusive — and the Democrats’ impeachment push will only deepen the divide.

From the right: Impeachment Is a Hail Mary

Why don’t Democrats press policy instead of trying to unseat the president? Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness gives the “simple ­answer: None of [the Dems’] issues poll anywhere near 50 percent ­approval.” And if Democrats can’t win an election based on their platform, “impeachment is the only mechanism left to abort an eight-year Trump presidency.” From the emoluments clause to the Mueller investigation, Dems have “exhausted every other mechanism for destroying Trump,” so this last-ditch impeachment effort is all they have left, and “the absence of a case” doesn’t matter. “Long-term, however, Trump wins,” with Democratic hysteria imploding and 2020 being “far more favorable than ever imaginable for him.”

2020 watch: Trouble at Bernie’s

Bernie Sanders’ campaign is “in disarray,” Politico’s Holly Otterbein reports, with Liz Warren eclipsing him as “the progressive standard-bearer” and his falling poll numbers demoralizing his supporters. The Vermont socialist has “shaken up his staffs in Iowa and New Hampshire” and “lost the endorsement” of the left-wing Working Families Party, which supported him in 2016 but now backs Warren. Aides insist Sanders is more popular with voters than polls indicate, and he remains “a fundraising and organizing juggernaut” — but even some of his core backers are “expressing alarm.” Should Bernie change tack in hopes of regaining his 2016-level support? Sanders’ “entire identity is about standing firm in his beliefs,” but “the question is whether . . . Americans want a president who won’t bend.”

Conservative: Will the Real Liz Stand Up?

Elizabeth Warren, with her “oleaginous, changeling habit of cycling through one persona after another,” is “Chief Spitting Bull, the lady with a J.D. in B.S.,” snarks National Review’s Kyle Smith. She “isn’t just phony, she’s creepy and alien and able to change form to play on your nightmares,” continually acting on what looks like “failed programming by her alien masters from a distant galaxy.” How many forms has she changed? She “stole her identity from the Cherokee” and used it to her advantage until that was debunked, and for years was a “shameless shill for big business.” Now she advises voters “not to live within their means at all” but instead to blame their “debts on a conspiracy theory about how government and plutocrats are cheating us.” This is a woman who “will say whatever is convenient for her ambitions of the moment.”

— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Sohrab Ahmari