From the right: Media Ignores Mattis’ Hit on Obama

Press coverage of Gen. James Mattis’ new memoir, “Call Sign Chaos,” has mostly dealt with the former defense secretary’s relations with President Trump, notes Matthew Continetti at National Review. The Atlantic went with “The Man Who Couldn’t Take It Anymore”; The New York Times with “The Man Trump Wishes He Were.” Yet neither piece “mentions another president” Mattis dishes on: Barack Obama. And his critique of Obama “isn’t just harsh. It’s blistering,” says Continetti: Mattis blasts Obama’s decision to pull “all our troops out of Iraq” and to throw then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak under the bus. Under Obama, Mattis argues, the US offered “no leadership or direction” and shook “our friends’ confidence” in the US. Mattis offers a “devastating assessment” of Obama’s foreign policy, Continetti sums up; “Maybe we ought to pay attention?”

Urban beat: New Yorkers Heading for the Exits

“One million people” have fled the city and tri-state area “in the last nine years” alone, Jack Kelly observes at Forbes. “Almost 300 people are moving out” each day. Why the mass exodus? The “schools, bridges, tunnels, trains, airports and hospitals are falling apart.” Residents face “exorbitant taxes.” City streets are “crowded and dirty.” Also, thanks to technology, it’s now “easy to work anywhere in the world.” Yet politicians, contends Kelly, “don’t seem to care.” That paves the way for a downward cycle: “As people and companies leave, taxes will have to be raised to make up for the lost revenue,” pushing even more people to flee. And “the quality of life for those who remain will diminish.”

Religion desk: Ex-Cardinal McCarrick Doesn’t Get It

Though Pope Francis stripped former DC Archbishop Theodore McCarrick of his cardinal’s hat in February and ordered him to live “a life of prayer and penance,” Marc Thiessen charges at The Washington Post that it seems “the message did not get through.” McCarrick refuses to confess that he “sexually assaulted minors and seminarians,” and insists, “I do not believe that I did the things that they accused me of.” The church has not made its evidence public; Thiessen calls it “pathetic” that “almost everything we know about the McCarrick coverup has come not from the church itself but from investigative journalists, grand juries and whistle-blowers” and that many of his enablers “are still in positions of power today.” Moreover, McCarrick “is not the only abuser whose actions were covered up by bishops,” Thiessen argues. “We cannot rest until every single one of them has been exposed and removed.

2020 watch: Joe’s ‘Electability’ Isn’t Enough

Joe Biden is “at the top of Democratic primary polls, and in swing state matchups with President Donald Trump,” concedes Chris Smith notes at Vanity Fair. Yet, as a top strategist for a rival Democrat asks, “what happens if the perception of [Biden’s] electability starts to slip?” Biden’s advisers “dispute the notion” that their man’s candidacy rests on his odds of beating Trump. But, counters Smith, the former veep “has talked mostly about undoing” Trump’s actions “rather than how he’d break new ground, or on how his ideas are superior to those of his Democratic opponents.” And with most voters still undecided, “There is good reason for this year’s front-runner to be anxious.”

From the left: Why Bernie Has Stalled

At The Week, David Faris notes that Bernie Sanders had “a number of clear strengths” after he first announced his candidacy and “surged to within striking distance of frontrunner Joe Biden.” Plus, his April town hall “showed a candidate at the top of his game.” Yet “little has gone right for him since then.” Sanders got no “bounce” from the debates, and, this week, Elizabeth Warren passed him in the polls. Faris blames Bernie’s stall on his blatant contempt for the Democratic Party, made obvious by hires like that of “firebrand progressive journalist” David Sirota, who has a “public record of Obama-hating” — when Obama remains “wildly popular” with most of the Democratic base. Sanders seems to be running “against the Democratic Party” instead of for it, an attitude that “has transformed” him from “arguably the favorite to someone who is going to need a lot of breaks, and a new attitude, to win.”

—Compiled by Karl Salzmann & Elisha Maldonado