Trump’s Ilhan Omar trap for Democrats and other commentary

By Post Editorial Board

Ilhan Omar AFP/Getty Images

Iconoclast: Dems Are Falling Into the Ilhan Omar Trap
Many of President Trump’s tweets backfire, but his attack on Rep. Ilhan Omar has “succeeded to perfection,” says David Frum at The Atlantic. Heading into 2020, Trump wants to make Omar the face of the Democratic Party — and now “he has provoked Democrats to comply.” Many of the party’s presidential candidates have offered “full-throated endorsements” of Omar, with only Amy Klobuchar offering any caveats. So, having promised not to let Trump “drive us apart” from Omar, Democrats are “stuck with responsibility for the reckless things the representative from Minnesota says.” Fact is, Democrats seem “almost defenseless” against her “propensity to provoke.” Now, after Trump’s attack, “Omar will become even more internally uncriticizable and unmanageable, without becoming any more careful or responsible.”

Policy wonk: City Council OK To Be Stoned at Work?
In what City Journal’s Steven Malanga calls a “virtually unprecedented” move, the New York City Council has just banned employers from testing job applicants for marijuana use as a condition of employment. No other jurisdiction, he notes, “has so broadly banned pre-employment testing.”

The move not only “ignores substantial and growing evidence from scientific journals of pot’s negative effects, especially on younger people,” it “disregards the costs that marijuana use can inflict on a workplace.” Because in states that have legalized marijuana, “going to work high or getting high on the job becomes more common.” Legislators should take the advice of former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who runs one of the city’s largest companies, and who calls efforts to legalize pot “perhaps the stupidest thing anybody has ever done.”

Juan Guaido: China Should Switch Sides in Venezuela
China is the world’s largest oil importer and Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves — which is why, suggests interim Venezuelan President Juan Guaido at Bloomberg, economic ties between the two “will inevitably grow.” And also why Beijing, “whose leaders know exactly what’s happening here,” must “help facilitate the political transition” that Venezuelans “so urgently need.”

Venezuela, he notes, “is suffering a devastating humanitarian crisis”: Basic services like electricity and water “have collapsed,” and the inflation rate is on target to reach 10 million percent. It has also become “one of the most dangerous and corrupt nations in the world.” The “moment has come,” he says, for China to stop supporting Nicolás Maduro and “add its voice to the chorus” of nations recognizing Guaido as president to ensure a “peaceful transition of power.”

From the right: Pelosi Wants It Both Ways on AOC
When it comes to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her “band of freshman socialists,” contends Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will either celebrate them or condemn them, “depending on the audience.” On “60 Minutes” Sunday, Pelosi dismissed AOC and her allies as “like five people” and stressed that “we have to hold the center.” Yet she also posed gleefully with Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rep. Jahana Hayes on the cover of Rolling Stone.

Apparently, Pelosi “is trying to present the Democratic Party as mainstream when speaking to a broader audience,” even as she tries to “appease and ride the wave of energy brought along by the young and resurgent Left at the same time.”

Conservatives: College Grads’ Edge on Entry-Level Jobs
As James Piereson and Naomi Schaefer Riley point out at National Review, Enterprise Rent-a-Car offers “more entry-level jobs for college graduates than almost any other employer in the United States.” But the company “does not concern itself with questions such as where its trainees went to college, what they majored in, or even how well they did when they were there.” It simply accepts a college degree as “an easy way” of telling employers that an applicant has “a basic grasp of the English language, some rudimentary math skills and the ability to show up on time in clean clothes.”

Plenty of high-school grads are qualified for the same jobs — but finding them “is more time-consuming than just looking at a résumé and seeing a bachelor’s degree.”

— Compiled by Eric Fettmann