Worth Reading August 15, 2022

The China Diary by Matt Daley

The China Diary returns with two articles that capture commentary on Speaker Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan. The first, published before her trip, is by a commentator in the Global Times, a tabloid subsidiarity of the Peoples Daily controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. The author makes a wide range of threats, and presumably is acting as a surrogate for the CCP.

The second article, written after Pelosi’s trip by an experienced and thoughtful former Singapore diplomat, provides an important regional perspective “how Pelosi’s Taiwan visit made things worse.”

Worth Reading

Just before the FBI search of Mar-A-Lago, JDQB recommended a podcast by John Podhoretz and friends at Commentary in which they speculate about how the Republicans could blow it, a process which may be starting already.

WDM offers this essay, in a publication and by a writer he respects, as an example of comments that this is a “Banana Republic” moment.

In an interview on FoxNews, Raymond Arroyo speculates that the search is all about 2022, intended to tempt Trump into announcing he will run again so as to increase Democrat chances of keeping control of Congress in 2022 and the Presidency in 2024. Arroyo provides a number of clips to illustrate his point about partisanship replacing journalism.

Some commentators mentioned by Arroyo were gleeful that the Trump would be found in violation of a law which included, among other penalties, a lifetime bar on holding public office. JDQB comments that in this case the Constitution wins and allows Trump to run again, as explained in this article.

WDM thinks that an essay in a more distant newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, provides a balanced summary of the political and legal issues involved in the decision to execute the search warrant. That is, the issues that would matter if this be something other than a political maneuver.

JDQB pretty much sums up the character of this and past debates with a column in the Wall Street Journal that begs both sides to become less self-righteous in their reactions to this and other recent events.

MPD returns us to another ongoing crisis, the war in Ukraine. For those interested, these maps provide a good, detailed review of the last three months of the war.