Border agent: Dems Want Border Crisis Back

Even though illegal immigration has slowed under President Trump, “some Democrats are determined to keep the humanitarian catastrophe going for as long as possible for political gain and at America’s expense,” writes the president of the Border Patrol union, Brandon Judd, at Real Clear Politics. Trump’s policy successes, from “securing funds to construct more of the border wall” to persuading Mexico to “assist the U.S. in curtailing illegal immigration,” have helped to alleviate the crisis on the border. Some House Democrats, though, are “looking for ‘payback’ for Trump’s immigration tactic,” while Democratic presidential candidates are “even more radical,” looking to “ ‘decriminalize’ illegal immigration” and provide “ ‘free’ (i.e., taxpayer-funded) health care” to illegal immigrants. In other words, Democrats “want their crisis back, no matter how much human suffering that entails.”

From the left: Joe Biden Is Not Barack Obama

Joe Biden recently released a new online ad — about Barack Obama. That points to a larger problem with Biden’s campaign, complains Ezra Klein at Vox: He needs to “stop campaigning for Obama’s third term and focus on the case for him first.” And Biden is not Obama: On foreign policy, Biden supported the invasion of Iraq, unlike Obama, yet then he “often took the dovish position” as Obama’s No. 2. Also unlike Obama, Biden is “a true creature of the Senate,” whose approach to politics is “relational” and “in-person.” Above all, “Obama ran as a reformer,” while “Biden represents the system Obama sought to reform.” Obama may have been a great president, says Klein, but “he’s not running.”

From the right: Media Prosecutorial Misconduct

The New York Times’ correction to its story about a sexual misconduct allegation against Justice Brett Kavanaugh was “eye-catching,” notes the Washington Examiner’s Editorial Board: The Times had “omitted the fact — known to reporters — that the alleged victim had no recollection of the incident.” In effect, the Times, acting as a prosecutor, left out “known exculpatory evidence” — which is “considered to be misconduct” when prosecutors do it but is “far worse when supposedly objective reporters do it.” And such “lapses” in journalistic ethics across most of the media always “lean in one agenda-driven direction.” In the end, “it’s not Justice Kavanaugh who has been discredited. It is his ruthless and heavily biased prosecutors in the press.”

Conservative: Mugabe’s Rule Is a Warning

In the wake of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe’s death Sept. 6, his life and totalitarian rule “should serve as a constant warning about why we should not fall for the next charismatic socialist who heedlessly promises everything,” notes Helen Raleigh at The Federalist. Mugabe promised liberation and peace for his war-torn, newly independent country, but he quickly became a despot, committing widespread human-rights abuses, tanking the economy and enriching himself and his cronies. Of course, “Mugabe wasn’t the only charismatic socialist who ruined a country and the lives of millions.” But his rule should remind us that socialism, whoever its “charismatic spokesperson” may be, will always turn a country into a “hell on Earth.”

Foreign desk: Hollywood’s Great Leap Backward

Why, Martha Bayles asks at The Atlantic, is there no outcry against “China’s mounting attack on the film industry”? In China, “which is fast becoming the world’s largest and most important movie market,” the Communist Party strictly censors films “to bring public opinion in alignment with the party’s ideological worldview,” and that censorship is only increasing under President Xi Jinping. “Beijing has been using Hollywood’s insatiable need for investment” to get it to go along. The latest is “a migration of individual film professionals” in the hundreds “into the Chinese film industry” to make movies pushing “the message that Chinese soldiers embody ‘every virtue of innocence, bravery, fraternity, self-sacrifice, and nobility, while outside China’s borders, all is corruption, cowardliness, depravity, and ineptitude,’ ” as a Variety critic put it.

— Compiled by Karl Salzmann