‘I was a young Republican. Now I want nothing to do with either party.’
Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe
As a conservative teenager, “I gravitated to the GOP,” says Jeff Jacoby. Gradually, “the Reaganesque style of Republicanism” was overshadowed by “intolerant” culture warriors. Like millions of others, “I find myself politically homeless today,” equally “turned off by the Democrats’ toxic obsession with race and gender” and “the Republicans’ shrillness on immigration.” Maybe America will move on to “something better,” like it did when the Federalist Party and “the Whigs finally breathed their last.”
‘Biden can’t count on Trump’s unpopularity anymore’
Doug Sosnick in The New York Times
President Joe Biden is hoping Donald Trump’s unpopularity will carry him to reelection in November, says Doug Sosnick. So America will get “daily reminders for the next nine months of how chaotic the next four years will be if Mr. Trump is elected.” But if Biden, 81, can’t “convince enough voters that he is up to the presidency into his mid-80s” it won’t “really matter” how people feel about Trump.
‘Stop pressuring girls to be “cookie bosses”‘
Karin Klein in the Los Angeles Times
The “relationship between Girl Scouts and cookies” has changed, says Karin Klein. The sales no longer seem to be the “low-key experience of my childhood,” when I asked neighbors to buy a box and raised “a few bucks for the troop.” In “these helicopter-parent days,” they have become a “high-pressure” activity to learn “entrepreneurial skills,” with rewards as incentives. Isn’t scouting supposed to be a “healthy counterweight to materialism and peer pressure”?
‘Pakistan’s shocking election result shows authoritarians don’t always win’
The Washington Post editorial board
The Pakistan army’s effort to block former Prime Minister Imran Khan from power “has backfired,” says The Washington Post editorial board. Authorities jailed the cricket-star-turned-politician in August, and added more charges days before last week’s general election. “It’s hard to win an election from prison,” but the populist leader’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party led all rivals. Khan’s party might be squeezed out of the coalition government, but voters “registered growing distrust of the army and its proxies.”
Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
