Media critic: FBI’s Bizarre Statements on Scalise Shooter

The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway calls foul on the FBI’s description yesterday of the man who attacked Republicans during a baseball practice last week. The FBI said the shooter, James Hodgkinson, “had no concrete plan to inflict violence,” and the agency “had not yet clarified who, if anyone, he planned to target, or why.” Hemingway points out the problem: Hodgkinson had what seemed like a target list with him, had raged against Republicans online, mapped out the DC area and had been seen taking target practice in recent months. “The FBI made a poor decision to gaslight Americans by claiming that the assassination attempt wasn’t premeditated terrorism but a spontaneous ‘anger management’ problem,” she writes. And the result is distrust from the American people: “The FBI’s briefing appears so contrary to the facts as to be insulting.”

Econ wonk: Why Uber Outgrew Its CEO

At Bloomberg, Megan McArdle takes a look at why Travis Kalanick stepped down as Uber’s CEO. Kalanick “was the distilled essence of a disruptive entrepreneur; a hypomanic extrovert,” which allowed him to grow “a sort of populist limo movement.” But these qualities also led to his downfall. The same leadership that “waltzed into markets and built an enthusiastic customer base, then essentially dared regulators to shut him down” adopted a “laissez-faire attitude toward the sort of sexist behavior that stopped being legally or socially acceptable shortly after the Mad Men era.” Uber had to make a change: “The skills and personality traits that enable disruptive innovation are often wildly at odds with those that you need to turn a company into a mature and stable firm.”



Historian: New Churchill Flick’s a Fraud

You can’t believe everything you see in the movies — especially the new one on Winston Churchill, writes Andrew Roberts for Heat Street. Roberts, an acclaimed World War II historian who has written books on Churchill’s wartime leadership, lists the inconsistencies and areas where the film, written by historian Alex von Tunzelmann and starring Brian Cox, strays from the record — most notably by portraying Churchill as opposed to the Normandy landing. “Ms. von Tunzelmann has twisted the truth about Churchill and D-Day in a truly repulsive way, without ever hinting to the viewer that this is a totally untrue account. Indeed in the opening and closing credits it attempts to present the drama as factual. It is not; it is fraudulent.”

Foreign-policy hawk: Trump Hasn’t Abdicated Duties

President Trump picked three well-respected generals to shape his foreign policy: Defense Secretary James Mattis, National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly. Now his critics complain he relies too much on them and is abdicating his responsibilities as commander in chief. Not true, says Victor Davis Hanson at National Review. During the campaign, Trump promised to wipe out ISIS without major ground invasions or nation-building. Within those parameters, Hanson asserts, “the US military can drop a huge bomb on the Taliban, strike the chemical-weapons depots of Syria’s Bashar Assad, or choose the sort of ships it will use to deter North Korean aggression — without Trump poring over a map, or hectoring Mattis or McMaster about what particular move is politically appropriate or might poll well.”

Campaign expert: The Suburbs’ Warning for the GOP

The GOP’s win in Georgia, Charlie Mahtesian explains at Politico, obscures the fact that its victory in November was “the third presidential election in a row in which the GOP nominee failed to crack 50 percent of the suburban vote.” Now “a combination of demographic change and cultural dissonance is gradually eroding its ability to compete across much of suburbia, putting entire areas of the country out of the GOP’s reach.” One cause: the suburbs “grew far more diverse. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of racially diverse suburbs increased by 37 percent, growing at a faster clip than majority-white suburbs, according to one study.” Plus, “recent history suggests that once these big suburbs go blue, they don’t come back.”

— Compiled by Brendan Clarey & Seth Mandel