#We can read, you know and other commentary

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and rival Bernie Sanders have joined forces to push a progressive agenda.
EPA

“The Democrats’ pundit class” is painting Joe Biden as “a soothing moderate,” notes National Review’s Dan McLaughlin, while at the same time “loudly telling the Bernie/Warren/AOC wing of their party” that he will push its “radical agenda” if he wins. And it’s “all out in the open,” with columns headlined, “How Joe Biden is moving left while still being seen as a moderate,” “Joe Biden’s Platform Is More Progressive Than You Think,” “How Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders joined forces to craft a bold, progressive agenda” and many more. The very people “champing at the bit to implement” these left-wing ideas are “hoping that voters won’t notice until the election is over” — but they “do know we can read,” don’t they?

DNC review: Dems Stoop to a New Low

“Politics ain’t beanbag,” but what happened at the DNC this week was “beyond detestable,” rails Joseph Curl at The Washington Times. Not when Michelle Obama claimed “children are torn from their families and thrown in cages,” presumably by President Trump & Co. Or when convention speaker Ashley McCray advocated the “destruction of capitalism.” Or Gov. Cuomo, who “utterly failed” to stem COVID in New York, saying it was the president’s fault. “No, the truly reprehensible moment came from a speaker” who blamed Trump for her 65-year-old father’s COVID death after visiting a bar. “Democrats have now dropped to a new low,” fumes Curl. They’ll blame the president for “every single death of an American” from COVID-19. And they’ll keep doing it right “until Election Day.”

Education beat: Remote Learning Is a Joke

Virtual schooling is “not fine,” Emily Gould thunders at The Atlantic: “It’s horrible, a form of psychic torture.” Gould coached her “5-year-old son Raffi through virtual schooling in the spring,” and saying it “didn’t go well would be an understatement.” Online learning was “jarring” for Raffi, who “cried, screamed, hit his parents, hit his brother, broke things and spat a cup of juice.” At the same time, he wanted to “talk to his classmates directly, to hug them and hold hands with them and fight with them.” His virtual kindergarten in the fall will probably be another “battle” — and even “the best-case scenario,” while not as “horrifying,” will be “definitely sad” for him. As for Gould: “I’m not sure how long or how hard I’m prepared to fight.”

Foreign desk: Trump’s Resounding Realism

President Trump has been “remarkably successful” in foreign policy, thanks to “his ability to identify America’s national interest clearly and pursue it without regard to outdated ideological investments,” argues Daniel McCarthy at The American Conservative. The Israel-United Arab Emirates deal he brokered is the latest example of his “realistic diplomacy,” which “is not about making everyone happy.” Trump killed Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani, “whose life’s work was the exportation of war and terror,” but didn’t retaliate against Iran for downing a US surveillance drone, refusing to “engage in needless killing in the service of ideology or pride.” He’s succeeding where his predecessors of both parties failed “because he is transactional, not ideological, and he looks out for the American interest — which is peace through stability — rather than trying to bring about peace through perfection, as ideology and technocratic hubris demand.”

Media watch: The Death High That Wasn’t

The pandemic is “no excuse for journalism as sloppy and misleading” as an Aug. 13 ABC News coronavirus-death report that “simply wasn’t true,” warns Reason’s Nick Gillespie. In it, “the anchor solemnly intones that the ‘United States is reporting the highest number of deaths in a single day.’ ” In reality, as the onscreen graphic showed, the deaths “represent the deadliest day ‘since mid-May’ ” — something “a less-than-attentive viewer” will miss. A “similarly misleading” Bloomberg News headline Sunday claimed about a “10 times more infectious” coronavirus strain, which turned out to be the strain already prevalent in Europe and the US. Now more than ever, establishment media are issuing “a hodgepodge of anxiety and apocalypticism.” The rest of us need to “inoculate ourselves” against it.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board