War historian: Will New NSA Get Leeway He Needs?

Selecting Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster as national-security adviser is President Trumps most imaginative decision to date, says Fred Kaplan at Slate. The question is, will Trumps inner circle let McMaster do his job? Hes widely viewed as the Armys smartest officer and has strong ties to Defense Secretary James Mattis. He has also made a career of speaking truth to power, often instinctively, without the slightest talent for fawning to his superiors. But hes spent little time in Washington and will need an excellent deputy. So if current deputy K.T. McFarland and a few others dont resign in the coming days, it may be an ominous sign that McMaster was given less leeway than hell need to do the job right.

Security expert: Trump Doesnt Need Public Opinion

Critics who never accepted Donald Trumps presidency are setting speed records raising the issue of impeachment or the specter of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him, notes James S. Robbins in USA Today. But their real fear, he says, isnt that Trump cant do the job, but rather that he is using the power of the presidency to do exactly what he said hed do, and quickly. Whether the public approves depends on which poll you read. Yet the question of the reliability of the polls is not as important as the fact that Trump does not care what they say. If he fretted about polling, he never would have been elected in the first place. Thats because Trump is not the kind of needy, approval-driven president who even feels it necessary to consult public opinion when naming his dog.

From the right: Why Jane Roe Defended the Unborn

Norma McCorvey, the Roe of the landmark Roe v. Wade abortion ruling, died Saturday at age 69. And as Nicholas Frankovich notes at National Review, she underwent a midlife conversion from pro-choice to pro-life activism when she became a Catholic. In speeches, she noted that she never actually had an abortion (she gave birth while the case was being litigated) and confessed that she was lying when, to bolster her case, she asserted that her pregnancy resulted from rape. She also complained that abortion-rights lawyers and activists had used her as a pawn. So McCorvey spent the last two decades of her life defending the dignity of unborn children and, in the process, herself.

Conservative take: Sports Writing Has Gone All Liberal

Michael Brendan Dougherty at The Week agrees with those who contend that nowadays sports writing is basically a liberal profession, practiced by liberals who enforce an unapologetically liberal code. You can see it, he says, in the way sportswriters police a consensus against the Washington Redskins name, or for on-field political activism. They no longer speak for the common fan they speak at the common fan, or even just at a caricature of a fan that they assembled from the most voluble sports talk radio callers and the obscure Twitter accounts that jeer their work. But this narrowness, he says, puts them in an antagonistic position not just with fans, but with the entire sports culture beyond journalism.

Culture critic: Late-Night TV Is No Longer Funny

Once upon a time, says Rachel DiCarlo Currie at Acculturated, late-night comedians told jokes. Now, apparently, they destroy people. It started with Jon Stewart; the chief destroyers now are Samantha Bee, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers and Trevor Noah. All this destruction, she notes, tends to be highly subjective because if you dont subscribe to the progressive worldview, you probably will not agree that these people effectively destroyed their mostly conservative targets. In fact, its politics, rather than genuine comedy, that drives the laughs: Its a culture that too often confuses snark with wit and sneering with reasoning a culture that values a good takedown more than a good argument.

Compiled by Eric Fettmann

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The liberal takeover of sports writing, how 'Jane Doe' switched sides, and other comments - New York Post