#Tapping Tanden burns Bernie-ites and other commentary

From the left: Tapping Tanden Burns Bernie-ites

Neera Tanden, Joe Biden’s pick to run the Office of Management and Budget, “is famous for two things,” notes Matt Taibbi at his TK News site: “Having a puddle of DNC talking points in place of a cerebrum, and ­despising Bernie Sanders.” For years, she’s spent “awe-inspiring amounts of time on Twitter bludgeoning Sanders and his supporters as a deviant mob of Russian tools and covert ‘horseshoe-theory’ Trump-lovers.” The Democratic establishment “has always despised Bernie . . . far more than it hated Republicans, and for good reason”: His victory would displace “hundreds, if not thousands, of Clintonite hacks” from their “cushy Washington sinecures.” Now “Biden’s team feels like absolute continuity with the last three decades of Wall Street-friendly Democratic politics.”

Libertarian: Don’t Cry for Cash-Strapped States

If you “shed tears” for states and cities begging for a federal bailout, “let them be crocodile tears,” snarks Veronique de Rugy at Reason. State and local governments already got “huge” COVID-19 aid from Uncle Sam, plus regular funding that covers 30 percent of state budgets. “Governments should prepare for emergencies by cutting spending during flush times.” If their “rainy-day funds” prove inadequate, they should tap their own residents for more. Places like New York and Illinois “need to be bailed out during every emergency” yet fail to address this issue during good times. “So the next time you hear a sad story about states and cities that have to cut composting programs,” absent federal aid, “cheer up. The lesson will serve them well.”

From the right: How To Stop Paris for Good

Before he leaves office, President Trump can do one thing to forestall Joe Biden’s destructive green agenda: ensure the Paris climate accord, which Biden wants to rejoin, lacks “any binding legal power,” Steve Milloy argues in The Wall Street Journal. How? By preemptively submitting the accord to the Senate, where “Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should schedule a quick vote.” That way, a federal court can’t “subsequently resurrect a legislatively tossed treaty,” as happened with President Barack Obama’s DACA immigration order — rescinded by Trump but revived by an activist judiciary. The result: Trump would “make it difficult” for Biden “to bind his successors to his executive actions.”

Culture critic: Darth Vader, RIP

“David Prowse, the bodybuilder from Bristol, England, who played Darth Vader in the original ‘Star Wars’ trilogy, died of COVID-19” on Saturday, reports the National Post’s Colby Cosh. “Darth Vader is a staple of global culture, a byword for cinematic evil,” and so “the most famous person to succumb to the pandemic by some distance.” Yet most people don’t “think of Dave Prowse as Darth Vader,” since so many contributed to the character who was famously voiced by James Earl Jones. Prowse got the job thanks to “his physique. He stood 6-6 and worked out; at that time, and especially on that side of the Atlantic, this made him as unusual as any circus performer.” But “Prowse had to do the work” in “a fussy, awkward outfit” and “learned all of Vader’s dialogue.” And the “ancient traditions of the acting profession” hold “the performer who first plays a role, and not the writer or the director, is referred to as its creator.”

Conservative: Give Up the Voter Fraud Story

President Trump on Sunday escalated his voter-fraud claims, speculating on Fox News that “the US Department of Justice and FBI may be ­involved in the effort to steal the election from him,” writes National ­Review’s Jim Geraghty. But contrary to Trump’s endless tweets, “his legal team’s much more limited efforts, disputing much smaller numbers of votes, have almost entirely failed.” Trump urges Republicans to vote in the Georgia Senate runoff, but what “is the point of voting if the elections are rigged, as the president insists?” For the good of his party, the president needs to put an end to the whole “stolen-election narrative.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board