Ex-diplomat: The Mueller Show Is a Dud

“A baby born when Robert Mueller started his investigation would be talking by now,” observes Peter Van Buren in The American Conservative. Yet the special counsel hasn’t produced any “real evidence” of Russian “collusion.” A recent Mueller memo about Paul Manafort underscored that the one-time Trump campaign chief’s cooperation with the special counsel “seems to have turned out to be mostly a bust.” Various campaign sideshows turned out to be just that. As for President Trump’s first national-security adviser, Michael Flynn, a year since “he started cooperating with the government, still nobody has heard anything about whatever the big deal is.” Mueller’s final product, Van Buren predicts, will be a “steaming pile of legal ambiguity,” which the Dems can use for hearings “from now until global warming claims the city of Benghazi and returns it to the sea.”

Culture critic: Hail Totalitarianism’s Greatest Critic

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was the last century’s “greatest critic of the totalitarian immolation of liberty and human dignity,” writes Daniel Mahoney in a City Journal essay marking the Russian master’s centenary. From his boyhood, Solzhenitsyn dreamt of becoming a writer, but his early flirtations with Marxism threatened to bring his vast talent to naught. Captivity in the Soviet forced-labor camps changed all that. “His cellmates helped him see the light of truth and the unparalleled mendacity of the ideological lie,” Mahoney says, “the destructive illusion that evil is not inherent in the human soul, that human beings and societies can be transformed at a revolutionary stroke.” That enlightenment would propel Solzhenitsyn to the literary heights of “The Gulag Archipelago” and other words that “remain a gift to us all.”

Foreign desk: Macron’s Warning for US Dems

France is on fire because the country’s liberals decided to “steamroll the opposition,” argues Joseph Sternberg in The Wall Street Journal. The promise of President Emmanuel Macron, he notes, was that as an independent technocrat he could rally enough voters from the traditional parties, without having to persuade or bother with rural and working-class voters who reject his values. But it turned out that those disaffected French still form a substantial minority, able to throw the country into turmoil when they feel left behind. The lessons for American Democrats and liberals who imagine they’re culturally and demographically ascendant: It’s better to “trade interests and strike compromises” with the other side, and to cherish the very constitutional limits on direct majority rule that Dems most frustrating.

Mass. paper: Bay Staters Cold on Warren 2020

Massachusetts voters like having Elizabeth Warren as a senator, but they’re not so enthusiastic about her higher aspirations. That’s how the editors of the Boston Herald interpreted a recent University of Massachusetts/YouGov poll, which found that Warren “was only the third choice at 11 percent,” trailing former Vice President Joe Biden (19 percent) and Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders (14 percent). Ted Cruz challenger Beto O’Rourke was hot on her heels at 10 percent, while Barack Obama’s putative favorite, former Gov. Deval Patrick, trailed behind at 6 percent. This, even though Warren enjoyed overwhelming support in her re-election bid to the Senate in November. Maybe Massachusetts voters “just want Warren to serve her full Senate term.”

Albany watch: Lawmakers Haven’t Earned a Raise

“I doubt that most of you have ever received a 63 percent raise,” Chris Churchill tells his readers in the Albany Times Union. So, he asks, by what right are New York legislators giving themselves just such a raise, to $130,000 annually by 2021, from $79,000 currently? It’s equally outrageous, he argues, that Andrew Cuomo’s “annual pay would increase from $179,000 to $250,000 by 2021” under a plan devised by a special panel appointed by the Legislature — and the governor himself. New York’s governor shouldn’t earn more than governors of larger states such as California and Texas, Churchill insists, not least when many citizens upstate are struggling and the area’s population dwindles. The columnist’s alternative proposal: “Let’s tie the money paid to the governor and Legislature to shifts in upstate’s population. They make less as long as it continues to shrink and will make more only if the region’s population rises.”

— Compiled by Sohrab Ahmari