#Harris’ ‘twisted’ Lincoln fable and other commentary

Kamala Harris argued at her debate that President Trump shouldn’t have nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, citing Abraham Lincoln’s example, notes Tyler O’Neil at PJ Media. Yet Harris was “less than honest”: She claimed Lincoln refrained from naming someone 27 days before the 1864 election, saying Americans “deserve to make the decision about who will be the next president” and that person can pick the next justice. “Yet Lincoln said no such thing,” corrects O’Neil. And he only delayed because the Senate was not in session; when it convened on Dec. 5, Lincoln tapped Salmon P. Chase, and the Senate confirmed him that day. “Harris twisted history” — to dodge a “more pertinent question”: whether she and Joe Biden support court-packing.

Foreign desk: Stopping the Ayatollahs’ Nukes

No matter who wins the election, we’ll soon have to negotiate with Iran, predicts ex-CIA officer Sam Faddis at The Washington Times. Fortunately, Team Trump has already shifted matters “in our favor.” Sanctions have sent the rial into free-fall, unemployment “skyrocketing” and inflation “out of control.” Still, the ayatollahs need “to feel military pressure,” too — and to know we’ll “take whatever steps necessary” to keep them from getting nukes. So let’s end talk of “withdrawing from Iraq.” Update plans to strike Iranian nuclear facilities. Conduct exercises with regional partners. Review missile defenses. Joe Biden would return to the “nullity” of the past deal, an “incalculable” disaster. Yet if we set the proper preconditions, we’ll be able to deal with Iran “from a position of strength.”

2020 watch: Pence’s Debate ‘Clinic’

At Wednesday’s debate, Mike Pence gave “a clinic” on “how to rope-a-dope your opponent,” Marc Thiessen writes at The Washington Post, anticipating Kamala Harris’ “every line of attack.” When she blasted President Trump’s handling of the pandemic but failed to name anything Joe Biden might have done differently, Pence snarked that the Biden-Harris plan “looks a little like plagiarism, which is something Joe Biden knows a little bit about.” When Harris attacked Trump’s foreign policy, Pence pointed out that the Obama-Biden team’s hesitation cost the military an opportunity to save Kayla Mueller, an ISIS hostage. “For the record,” Pence also noted, Harris never answered the question on court-packing. “Trump should study Pence’s performance” — and “emulate” it in any future faceoffs with Biden.

Culture critic: Fight Against ‘Literary Apartheid’

Though the 2018 film “ ‘Love, Simon’ tenderly and accurately portrayed many aspects common to the gay teenage experience,” some have criticized Becky Albertalli, author of the novel it was based on, for writing about gays even though she’s straight, sighs James Kirchick for Tablet. Indeed, Albertalli was even pressured to come out as bisexual in an essay that “reads like a hostage note.” It seems that since the LGBTQ+ community has “achieved a cultural influence once thought impossible, much of what passes for gay activism today is driven by an impulse which is the very opposite of freedom: control.” Kirchick urges marginalized groups to encourage authors to create characters of “every imaginable permutation of human identity,” because “to insist otherwise would usher in nothing less than a system of literary apartheid.”

Iconoclast: Facebook’s QAnon Overreach

Facebook has taken its censorship to the next level by vowing to remove posts linked to the conspiracy-theory group QAnon “even if they contain no violent content,” reports Matt Taibbi. It’s one more example of “the seeming about-face of the old-school liberals who were once the country’s most faithful protectors of speech rights.” With media distribution largely in the hands of giants like Google and Facebook, “what content we do and do not see is now dependent upon upper-class intellectual fashions, and the whims of politicians, media employees and executives at tech firms.” QAnon has indeed spread misinformation ranging from “trivial to deadly serious,” but “whatever the right method is for dealing with dangerous content in the Internet era — and it’s clear we need a better one — this isn’t it.”

— Compiled by Ashley Allen & Adam Brodsky