Conservative: A Sports Star Who Shot Down Chinese Comms

The NBA season opens in the shadow of “the league’s disgraceful kowtowing to the regime in Beijing,” sighs National Review’s Rich Lowry. But “our athletes once weren’t so . . . deferential to Chinese Communists.” Indeed, “one of the greatest American sports stars of all time,” Ted Williams of the Red Sox, “perhaps the greatest hitter to ever live . . . risked his career — and his life — to fly dozens of missions against the North Korean forces and their Chinese allies in the Korean War.” The last man to hit .400, who lost the prime years of his career “serving his country” in World War II and Korea, stands as a “reminder that professional athletes once had a deep connection to their nation” and didn’t shudder at “offending the government and people of a hostile power.”

Liberal take: Warren Better Have a Walk Back Plan

Liz Warren, who has branded herself as the candidate with a plan for everything, better have a “walk-back plan,” too, grouses Albert Hunt in The Hill. The issues on which she has chosen to focus “are smart,” Hunt says, but “she goes to unrealistic extremes,” and “some of her expansive and expensive positions would be ripe targets for Republicans.” For example, she is pushing “a single-payer health-care system costing the federal government more than $30 trillion over a decade” but refuses to say “how much middle-class taxes would be raised” to pay for it. All this has “shades of Barry Goldwater and George McGovern — who lost in landslides.”

From the left: Hill’s Paranoia Is Now Mainstream

Hillary Clinton might be “nuts” to insinuate that Tulsi Gabbard is a Kremlin asset, snarks Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, yet such paranoia is now well within “the Democratic Party mainstream.” As far as liberals are concerned, “everyone is foreign scum these days.” In their telling, President Trump “is a Russian pawn. Mitch McConnell is ‘Moscow Mitch.’ Third-party candidates are a Russian plot” and Bernie Sanders’ movement is “the beneficiary of an ambitious Russian plot to ‘stoke the divide’ within the Democratic Party.” It adds up to “a massive breach from reality.” After all, “even if you posit the most elaborate theories of Russian interference (which I don’t, but of course I’m denialist scum), what happened in 2016 was still almost entirely a domestic story, with Trump benefiting from long-developing public rejection of the political establishment.”

From the right: Meet the Trump Doctrine

With an all-caps tweet, notes Andrew Bacevich in The Spectator USA, the commander-in-chief moved to “at long last enunciate a Trump doctrine”: America will “fight where it is to our benefit, and only to win.” This may horrify “the mandarins of the foreign policy establishment” yet revives “a central tenet of an American military tradition” from Ulysses Grant through FDR and Reagan “that has recently gone missing.” It’s to Trump’s credit that he sees “something amiss”: Where “once the United States fought wars to end them,” it now “seemingly fights wars to perpetuate them.” The establishment needs to rethink, since from Iraq to Libya and elsewhere, the post-9/11 “misuse of American military power produced chaos and undermined US credibility on a scale far greater than will result from Trump’s abandonment of the Kurds.”

Foreign desk: Get Ready for Mexico’s Collapse

The Mexican state is collapsing, warns John Daniel Davidson at The Federalist, and the proof comes from Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa state, where “a battle erupted between government forces and drug cartel gunmen after the Mexican military captured two sons of jailed drug kingpin Joaquin ‘El Chapo’ Guzman.” Saved when his men “overpowered government forces,” the elder son then launched an “all-out siege of the entire city” to free his brother. The eight-hour battle ended with government forces “outgunned and surrounded, without reinforcements or a way to retreat” — and ordered by President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador to release the criminal. This, says Davidson, leaves “no doubt about who is in control of Sinaloa, let alone the rest of the country.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board