Conservative: Impeach Hearings Shouldn’t Be Secret

Democrats held two straight Intelligence Committee hearings on Trump-Ukraine in secret, reports the Washington Examiner’s Byron York. Two more scheduled for this week will be closed, too. Yet “there could not be a matter in which the American people have a greater stake” than the impeachment of a president, and neither hearing has apparently involved “highly classified matters.” Chairman Adam Schiff insists he is only complying with a law protecting whistleblowers from exposure, but the statute in question allows for disclosure in the course of an investigation. Bottom line: Democrats can’t forever keep “vital information away from the American people” in the name of preserving the whistleblower’s anonymity. “The impeachment proceedings should be opened up — now.”

2020 watch: How Warren Can Lose

Talking Points Memo’s John Judis hasn’t entirely written off Joe Biden’s chances, but thinks “it has become very likely that Elizabeth Warren will win the Democratic nomination.” He approves — but sees her weaknesses: Warren “has heeded too much the siren call of the metropolitan and college-town liberals,” when what “she needs to think about” is “winning an electoral-college majority in November 2020” by focusing on swing voters and the working class. That would mean backing off high taxes, Medicare for All, decriminalization of illegal immigration and reparations. If she can pivot to the center while maintaining “the support of minorities and of middle-of-the-road suburban voters in states like Virginia and Colorado,” she could be the next president. But if she tries to “out-radicalize Trump,” she may well go the way of Hillary Clinton.

Iconoclast: How Warren Can Win

The Week’s Matthew Walther, though “not entirely sold” on Elizabeth Warren’s chances of winning the Democratic nomination, thinks she can win it “if Biden implodes.” But what about her chances in the general? If she tacks populist and sticks to “policy debates in which she has generally excelled,” Warren can win back swing-state voters who supported President Barack Obama in 2012 but switched to President Trump in 2016. Still, “the Native-American-ancestry controversy is not going away,” and with Warren’s foolish DNA test, she showed that Trump can provoke her. Plus, “if you do not think that there is such a thing as a lifelong Democrat who has doubts about a woman’s ability to be commander-in-chief, you have never been on a UAW golf outing.” All in all, Warren’s best shot at victory is running “as the sober pragmatist she has always presented herself as.”

From the left: The Whistleblower That Isn’t

“Our intelligence community wouldn’t wipe its ass with a real whistleblower,” scoffs Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi. Yet the security apparatus and the mainstream media are circling the wagons around the Trump-Ukraine leaker. Supposedly a “CIA officer detailed to the White House,” he was “instantly celebrated as a whistleblower by news networks and major newspapers.” As actual whistleblower John Kirakou noted, however, a CIA officer regularly deals in “subterfuge and lies” — yet Trump’s call “is the thing he objects to?” Fact is, the complaint reads more like “the work of a group of people, supported by significant institutional power,” propped up by the Democratic Party and the press. Don’t buy the media’s narrative: Reality is “a lot more shadowy and ambiguous than news audiences are being led to believe.”

Libertarian: Hong Kongers vs. the Total State

At Reason, Zach Weissmueller notes: “A major priority of the protest movement that has consumed Hong Kong for the past three and a half months has been to thwart the surveillance apparatus.” Dissidents have “felled camera poles with chainsaws,” “spray-painted security camera lenses” and “used green lasers to destroy sensors.” Indeed, anti-surveillance is a major theme of the uprising. After all, Hong Kongers can see what Beijing is up to on the mainland, where “individuals are rated for good behavior and a bad score can impede their ability to travel, attend the best schools or get hired.” Can a city face down a Communist behemoth? One dissident tells Weissmueller: “We are preparing ourselves for an even longer fight.”’

— Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Sohrab Ahmari