• The newly besuited Senator John Fetterman (D., Pa.) is standing strong against Hamas apologists in his party. Imagine the possibilities if he gets a three-piece.
• In the weeks after eight House Republicans, less than 4 percent of their total number, joined with Democrats to remove Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) as speaker, nobody else has been able to get the necessary majority. Steve Scalise (R., La.) beat Jim Jordan (R., Ohio) to win the Republican conference’s endorsement, but enough Republicans were saying they would not vote for Scalise that he withdrew. Jordan failed, twice, to get enough votes and is trying a third time. Some Republicans are considering keeping Patrick McHenry (R., N.C.), the acting speaker, in charge for the next few months and maybe afterward. One possibility is a bipartisan deal to give him the power to advance certain pieces of legislation—although it is not clear that he needs any affirmative grant of power beyond what the position already affords. All in all, it remains unclear what toppling McCarthy has achieved other than making Republicans look ridiculous.
• U.S. district judge Tanya Chutkan is very generous. In her gag order against Donald Trump in the January 6 case, she allowed that the former president and leading candidate for the Republican nomination in 2024 could still criticize the Biden administration and his GOP rivals. That the judge felt it necessary to include that proviso tells you all you need to know about her ill-advised, quite possibly unconstitutional attempt to police Trump’s speech about the case. The prosecution against the former president is unavoidably political: Everything from the 2020 election, Trump’s conduct in its aftermath, and his prosecution is a matter of intense political debate. To limit what he says about the case necessarily involves drawing arbitrary lines about what a political figure may say about a politically relevant matter—even if Trump’s statements are, true to form, careless, stupid, and incendiary. Chutkan’s order shouldn’t stand.
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now running for president as an independent. There’s a logic to it: The anti-vaccine, anti-Ukraine crusader no longer fits in with the modern Democratic Party. He says that “the Biden administration is riddled with neocons, war hawks, Wall Street people, and former corporate lobbyists.” In polls, Kennedy had the support of between 10 and 20 percent of Democratic-primary voters as he struck out on his own—about where he was when he started. That would not normally be a terrible showing against an incumbent president, but it’s a disappointment given how many Democrats don’t want to see Biden run for another term. Kennedy could now prove to be a bigger headache for Donald Trump, if he’s the Republican nominee, than for Biden. According to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, Biden beats Trump by three percentage points (49–46) in a head-to-head matchup, but his margin rises to seven points (44–37) if you throw Kennedy into the mix. He will likely struggle to get his name on the ballot in every state and fund a real national campaign. Trump’s allies, who loved Kennedy when he was Biden’s primary rival, will also turn on him viciously. But with so many swing states, and national polling numbers so close, Kennedy can’t be ignored—which is just how he likes it.
• Nearly 81-year-old President Biden is “vibrant,” according to Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen. The president is “very involved,” she said, and “you can see the benefit of deep experience and understanding of global issues.” Yellen herself is 77. Her term as Federal Reserve chairwoman ended when she was 71. She could have had a dignified retirement, writing a big book on monetary policy. Instead, she took a job that requires spinning the news for Joe Biden.
• Rite Aid had been going out of business in slow motion for years before it finally filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. It was at one time the largest pharmacy chain in the U.S., but more recently it has suffered from mismanagement, accounting scandals, and lawsuits over its alleged wrongdoing in filling opioid prescriptions. Over the past six years, it has lost about $3 billion. Walgreens offered to buy the chain in 2015, and Rite Aid shareholders approved the merger, but regulators said no, fearing excessive market concentration. So instead Walgreens bought about half of Rite Aid’s locations in 2017; it is the leftover part that is going bankrupt now. Why is this result any better for the pharmacy market than the merger would have been? The diminished Rite Aid stood no chance against national behemoths Walgreens and CVS, and they all face competition from pharmacies in grocery and big-box stores, not to mention from the internet. Letting the 2015 deal go through would have saved a lot of trouble.
• A high-speed-rail project connecting London and Birmingham, with spurs to Manchester and Leeds, was first proposed in the U.K. in 2010. It was initially estimated to cost £32.7 billion. Thirteen years later, the project is nowhere near completion, with construction on the London-to-Birmingham portion having begun only in 2020. The estimated cost is now over £100 billion. Sound familiar? California approved a high-speed-rail project in 2008 that was supposed to connect Los Angeles and San Francisco at a cost of $33 billion. Zero miles of track have been laid, construction has begun only on the segment between Merced and Bakersfield, and the estimated cost has risen to $128 billion. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak decided enough was enough and announced that only the London-to-Birmingham segment of his country’s rail boondoggle would be built. California is on a slower train to a similar destination.
• Milford, Conn., calls itself “a small city with a big heart.” In the spirit of that motto, the residents of the harbor town on the Long Island Sound should elect Jack Fowler as city clerk on November 7. Over three decades, Jack and his family—wife Sharon and their five children—have poured themselves into their community. During one 16-year stretch, there was always at least one Fowler enrolled at Jonathan Law High School. When Jack attended the local Republican nominating convention and realized that no one had stepped forward to challenge the Democratic incumbent, he saw it as his duty to enter the race. We know that Jack would serve Milford with energy, diligence, and selflessness, because we’ve seen those qualities up close. For 33 years, including twelve as publisher, Jack was a dedicated member of the staff at National Review. But he is not merely an experienced executive. He’s a good man and a happy warrior, and he believes fervently in localism and in citizens’ running their own affairs. A vote for Jack Fowler is a vote for accountable, human-sized government. Milford couldn’t find a better man with a bigger heart if it tried. Jack Fowler for city clerk.
• Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, received his red hat from Pope Francis only a few weeks ago. Just 58, he is one of the youngest cardinals. His job means he oversees more than 300,000 Catholics spread across Israel, Jordan, Cyprus, and the Palestinian territories. He is the first resident cardinal in Jerusalem’s history, and his incardination dramatically enhanced the connection between that city and Rome, and therefore between Israel and the Holy See. After the massacre of Israelis on October 7, Pizzaballa offered himself in exchange for Jewish hostages in Gaza. “I am ready for an exchange,” he said to the local press. “Anything, if this can lead to freedom, to bring the children home. No problem. There is total willingness on my part.” The statement immediately eased tensions between the Israeli state and the Christian churches in Israel, known to be critical of the political status quo. Hamas is unlikely to take the cardinal up on his offer. Nonetheless, it was a welcome expression of solicitude for the innocent and hope for a just peace. It gives credibility to words Pizzaballa preached recently about Jerusalem: “We will never give up our love for what this city represents: It is the place of Christ’s death and resurrection, the place of reconciliation, of a love that saves and overcomes the boundaries of pain and death.”
• Kevin Phillips led three lives: prophet, apostate, and historian, all informed by his vocation as a pollster. In The Emerging Republican Majority, he tracked shifts in the electorate—chiefly white southerners and northern ethnics bolting the Democratic Party—that forecast the rise of Richard Nixon. Watergate stalled this realignment. Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich resumed it, but Phillips was no longer aboard: Wall Street and Evangelicals became his new targets, in works such as Arrogant Capital and American Theocracy. Disappointed by the present, he turned to the past. The Cousins’ Wars and 1775: A Good Year for Revolution retold the stories and backstories of America’s founding. As in his political books, Phillips paid minute attention to how ethnicity, religion, and locality affected the allegiances of different colonies and states. As a historian he had blind spots—the Declaration of Independence and the acres of political tracts that preceded it were mere sound effects to him—but he added to the serious literature on his subjects. Dead at 82, R.I.P.
• “I can’t recall any player in any sport who ever had such a knack for being in the right place at the right time,” Red Smith said of Brooks Robinson after the 1970 World Series, neglecting to mention that the Orioles third baseman also had lightning reflexes, range, and a great arm. All those assets combined during a famous blink of the eye in Game One. At the crack of the bat, Robinson raced to his right and snagged a bullet of a grounder destined for left field, robbing Cincinnati, the Big Red Machine, of an easy double. Then his long, off-balance throw across the diamond hit the first baseman’s glove, improbably, a microsecond before Lee May could reach the bag. After more defensive feats and a solid offensive performance, including a game-winning home run, Robinson’s World Series MVP trophy was awarded practically by acclamation. In 23 seasons with Baltimore, he won 16 Gold Glove awards and played in 18 All-Star games. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1983. Genial and esteemed by fans, teammates, and opposing players, he remained in retirement an unofficial ambassador of Major League Baseball. Dead at 86. R.I.P.
• “I often have this feeling after I write a poem,” Louise Glück said in an interview published last year, that “something very bad has to happen, because it seems such amazing good fortune to have written a poem.” Her biography suggests that she got the sequence backwards. Anorexia and epilepsy impeded her education at Sarah Lawrence and Columbia, where she studied with the poets Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz. She suffered from mordant self-criticism but then was motivated by it. She combined direct, unaffected diction with subtle rhythm and unforced literary and mythological allusion to express an inner life with uncommon precision and vigor. She had resolved not to be a teaching poet but became one anyway, at Goddard College, Williams, Yale, and Stanford. Her more than a dozen poetry collections earned her just about every prize a writer could dream of: Nobel, Pulitzer, Bollingen, National Book Award. “Unreachable father,” she wrote in “Matins,” a short poem with one foot in the creation account in Genesis, “We never thought of you / whom we were learning to worship. / We merely knew it wasn’t human nature to love / only what returns love.” Dead at 80. R.I.P.
The Hamas War So Far
Israel’s attack on the homes and headquarters of the terrorists who tortured and slaughtered some 1,400 of its citizens proceeded apace. The expected ground invasion of Gaza was delayed, however, by bad weather and, reportedly, by fears that Iran’s northern proxy, Hezbollah, would attack Israel from Lebanon. Two American carrier groups went to the eastern Mediterranean; Israel bombed airports in pro-Iranian Syria.
Hamas supporters in the West meanwhile opened a vigorous propaganda front. Demonstrations arose in American cities with heavy Middle Eastern populations, such as Dearborn, Mich., and on college campuses. One major university after another sported a chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, a pro-Hamas group, accompanied by a cheerleading professor. Dishonorable mention goes to Russell Rickford of Cornell, who declared that the Hamas terror attack had left him “exhilarated.”
Savoring torture, rape, beheading, and burning to death may have been a bridge too far. Donors who have slumbered through every mutation of anti-Western and racially charged activity angrily closed their wallets. But it will take more than a few slow fundraising appeals to root out decades of anti-Western and anti-Israeli agitation under the guise of decolonization.
In Europe, solidarity with Hamas took the form of mobs, riotous or merely intimidating. France summarily banned pro-Palestinian demonstrations; the army had to be called out to reinforce the police. Only the capitals of Central Europe were free from chaos; national resistance to the open-borders policies of the European Union helped keep them so.
In this climate Hamas claimed that Israel had bombed the al-Ahli al-Arabi hospital in Gaza, causing 500 deaths. Media worldwide, and pro-Palestinian members of Congress led by Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) and Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), immediately propagated the claim. Photographs soon showed that the parking lot had been struck, not the hospital; films and intercepted Palestinian communications showed that the weapon was not a bomb but an errant missile fired by the Palestinian terrorists themselves (almost one-third of their weaponry falls short on their own people). Angry marches roiled Middle Eastern cities; American embassies and consulates were attacked. In a war of any length there will be many more such stories, eagerly swallowed by those who pre-believe them.
President Biden flew to the maelstrom, meeting with an embattled Benjamin Netanyahu. His rhetorical support of Israel has been strong. “I want you to know you’re not alone. We’ll continue to have Israel’s back as you work to defend your people.” (Other Democrats, notably two New Yorkers, Mayor Eric Adams and Representative Ritchie Torres, expressed kindred sentiments.) To a journalist who wondered whether the United States could back Ukraine and Israel at the same time, Biden said, “We’re the United States of America, for God’s sake.” It was almost Reaganesque. In an Oval Office address Thursday evening, Biden told Americans that he would send Congress an “urgent budget request”—reportedly on the order of $100 billion—“to fund America’s national-security needs” and assist Israelis and Ukrainians in the defense of their homes. He correctly linked Iran to Russia’s war effort, and he singled out Iran’s patronage of Hamas and Hezbollah.
It is not a bad start. But standing with Israel is only going to get harder. Does Biden have a plan to roll back the new anti-American axis?