Foreign desk: A Silent Coup in Italy

Talk about liberalism without democracy: Italian President Sergio Mattarella has barred a coalition of euroskeptic parties from forming a government — despite the clear mandate they won from voters. Commentary’s Sohrab Ahmari calls it “nothing less than a bloodless coup d’état” that “laid bare the naked contempt for the vox populi among the Italian and European liberal establishment.” Ostensibly, the row is over the coalition’s choice of a former Bank of Italy official who’s compared German domination of the EU to the Nazi occupation, as economy minister. Mattarella objected, citing European “uncertainty about our position in the euro.” Says Ahmari: Either Mattarella “is the most tin-eared politician on the Continent,” or “he is utterly indifferent to the democratic compact that nominally holds his republic together.” Or both.



Urban critic: Keep Government Out of Sports Betting

The US Supreme Court may have just legalized sports betting, but City Journal’s Bob McManus contends the inevitable rush to institute it “isn’t driven by sound policy or clear thinking.” First there are “the moral issues raised by government-promoted gambling.” Bottom line, though: “As an economic-development tool, gambling simply doesn’t deliver,” as proven by Gov. Cuomo’s “big bet on casinos as an upstate stimulator.” Instead of providing communities with windfall income, “the casinos themselves are asking for government subsidies.” But while betting apps likely will preclude a resurrected OTB, which went bankrupt after years of diminishing returns, history suggests government-sponsored sports betting “won’t generate the kind of cash that boosters are promising.” In fact, that’s “the only safe wager” to be made.

Historian: Jewish Boasting Mars Embassy Achievement

Even before the paint began to dry on the sign in front of the new US embassy in Jerusalem, noted Rafael Medoff at the Jerusalem Post, Jewish groups began claiming credit. Organizations quickly started fundraising based on their claims to a “significant role,” while a rabbi involved in interfaith work “insisted Christian public opinion” was the key factor. But as Medoff notes: Anyone who’s followed the decades-long effort to move the embassy understands that the decision was “the result of numerous diplomatic and political factors, congressional efforts and advocacy by both Jewish and Christian groups.” Yet the only way many of these groups can “justify their existence — and their staff’s salaries — is to make ever louder claims as to what they have supposedly accomplished.”

Political scribe: Jeff Flake’s 2020 Kamikaze Mission

Arizona’s Jeff Flake may be the latest senator to see a future president in the mirror, suggests The Week’s Paul Waldman. Flake, who’s not seeking re-election, sounds more and more like he’s prepared to mount “a doomed yet vital” GOP primary challenge to President Trump. Certainly, he’s become Trump’s “most incessant critic among elected Republicans.” Indeed, liberated from the need to submit himself to his party’s voters, “he has been sometimes blistering in his critiques.” Yet “any challenge to an incumbent would be doomed from the start,” as Flake himself acknowledges. And the most recent such challenges all led to the incumbent losing the general election. Which suggests that if Flake “really finds Trump as repugnant as he says, this would be the perfect way to attack him.”



From the right: Don’t Toss Audience Out With Roseanne

There’s little disagreement with ABC’s decision to cancel “Roseanne” after its star’s tweets. But Philip Wegmann at the Washington Examiner worries that “ABC and all of Hollywood are dangerously close to dismissing the audience of her television show as themselves racist.” And that, he adds, “would be the wrong conclusion.” Those 22 million viewers tuned in to see “comedy from outside a coastal bubble,” not to watch Roseanne “regurgitate conspiracy theories.” The show “spoke to a long-overlooked audience “ about “things they cared about.” And Roseanne, for all her faults, “tapped into a real cultural current,” though in the end she did her audience “more harm than good.” But the show’s cancellation creates “a unique vacuum that can’t be filled with yet another liberal derivative.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann