THIS IS CNN: CNN’s Jim Acosta Read The Statue Of Liberty Poem, Had A Meltdown When Someone Suggested Immigrants Be Able To Read It, Too.

David Harsanyi provides something close to an old-fashioned fisking.

MARY KATHARINE HAM: This Vanity Fair Lionization Of The Press Is Why Everyone Hates The Press.

The press thinks it’s just observing, but it’s also a character in this drama. It has a picture of itself, honed by none other than Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, speaking truth to power and bringing down a presidency for the good of the American people. During Democratic administrations, the kind that don’t beg for bringing down, the Redfords and Hoffmans of the press are content to take a few years quietly indulging in some small, indy projects, playing an important but smaller role in our democracy. When a Republican president is elected, however, they’re back to big-budget summer blockbusters all day every day.

What is this “Vanity Fair” feature, after all, if not a standard “Vanity Fair” feature usually reserved for an A-list box-office star? The press is happy to be that invigorated, energetic star again, now that America has elected the kind of power to whom it loves to speak truth. There they are, auditioning for “All the President’s Men” in their tasteful Anne Klein dresses and schlumpy suits. At least we are spared the wide ties and plaid pants.

But of course – as Ace of Spades wrote in “The MacGuffinization of American Politics” in the early days of Obama’s second term, the press covered Obama like he was Indiana Jones in search of the Ark of the Covenant:

Watching Chris Matthews interview Obama, I was struck by just how uninterested in policy questions Matthews (and his panel) were, and how almost every question seemed to be, at heart, about Obama’s emotional response to difficulties– not about policy itself, but about Obama’s Hero’s Journey in navigating the plot of President Barack Obama: The Movie.

As with a MacGuffin in the movie, only the Hero’s emotional response to the MacGuffin matters.

Again and again, Matthews and his panel focused not on weighty questions of state, but on what toll these important-sounding MacGuffins took upon the Star of the Picture, Barack Obama.

Matthews was not terribly interested in hearing about the problems with Obamacare, or how Obama planned to address them.

But he was very interested in learning how Obama was coping with the challenges.

Now that The Hero is out of office, and his successor defeated, who in the original cast left? The media! And thus, having vanquished The Hero and his successor, Trump must be the baddie. So naturally, the media have concluded that they’re now the beleaguered good guys, protecting the town (DC in this case, as opposed to the western’s hardscrabble frontier village) from the evil interloper.

Of course, most of us would much prefer that their hero was Jack Webb – “Just the facts, Mr. Spicer/Mr. Miller,” but in the media’s heart of hearts, they see themselves as a cross between Harrison Ford and Redford and Hoffman. As MKH wrote, “At least we are spared the wide ties and plaid pants.”

WELL, MOST OF THE STUFF IN IT IS PRETTY POPULAR: Tom Cotton predicts ‘consensus’ around his new immigration bill.

OF COURSE THE UAE WANTED A TALIBAN EMBASSY: IT’S WHAT THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION WANTED.

The New York Times has obtained a series of apparently hacked emails from the United Arab Emirate’s Ambassador to the United States, Yousef al-Otaiba, showing that the UAE competed with Qatar for the “honor” of hosting the Taliban’s sole foreign diplomatic mission. The source of the emails is unknown—this is only the most recent batch of Otaiba’s emails to be released since an initial HuffingtonPost article in June revealed that they were being shopped around to U.S. media outlets. But the content and timing of the email releases is suspiciously beneficial to Qatar.

The Taliban embassy emails are intended to scandalize the American people, if not the Trump Administration itself, over the UAE’s eagerness to host the Taliban. After all, if the Taliban are the enemy of the U.S. in Afghanistan, and the Qataris are Bad Guys for hosting the Taliban embassy in Doha, then how dare the UAE try to host the Taliban embassy as well? The fact that Saudi Arabia and the UAE cite the Taliban embassy in Doha as evidence of Qatar’s collusion with extremists may now have been revealed as hypocrisy, but the Times downplays the key to understanding this story. The UAE and Qatar competed to open this embassy because that’s what the Obama Administration wanted. . . . In other words, the Obama Administration wanted this office opened, they helped get it open, and it would not have opened were it not for U.S. pressure.

So much of what the Obama Administration did makes for scandal, until you point out to reporters that it was the Obama Administration doing it.

I HAD BEEN ASSURED SINCE 2010 THAT IT WAS WORKING: Dems suddenly scrambling to come up with ObamaCare fix.

I smell a trap for Republicans.

YES. Want renewable power? Clear the path for nuclear energy.

As entrepreneur Peter Thiel asked last year, “What are we contributing to human prosperity and well-being in the mid-21st century?”

A big part of the answer must be significant advancements in clean and reliable energy.

The developing world is increasingly hungry for power for cooking, refrigeration and air conditioning. As the world looks to decarbonize, no single clean energy source will get us there. That isn’t practical or responsible. The answer has to be found through innovating and commercializing a suite of advanced energy technologies, which in America will produce generations of great jobs that help modernize and grow our economy.

If you aren’t serious about nuclear power, you aren’t serious about carbon reduction or renewable energy.

DAVID HARSANYI: It’s perfectly reasonable for the Trump Administration to undo institutional discrimination against white and Asian kids.

This is like standing up against quotas for Jews in the 1950s. To be fair, the New York Times probably would have opposed that, too.

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SOUTH KOREA WILL DEPLOY ADDITIONAL THAAD LAUNCHERS NO MATTER WHAT THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STUDY CONCLUDES: That’s because the environmental impact of a North Korean nuke would be devastating. Better do something.

LADIES’ HOME JIHAD: Burqa Cover Model Graces Magazine Telling Women to Grab Grenades.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: UNC Votes To Block Law School Civil Rights Clinic From Taking On New Clients. A state university can only function for so long in opposition to its own state government. From the comments: “They can still offer litigation clinics. They just can’t run a public interest law firm under the UNC name any longer. They can even start a civil rights clinic. The disinformation campaign against this proposal was disgraceful.”

IRANIAN AL QUDS LEADER BOASTS THAT HIS FORCES HAVE KILLED MANY AMERICANS:

“This, of course, is not only a confession but also outright bragging about how the Quds Force murdered Americans in Iraq,” said Michael Rubin, a Middle East analyst at the American Enterprise Institute. “It was the Quds Force, after all, that smuggled in explosively formed, armor-penetrating projectiles into Iraq for insurgents to incorporate in improved explosive devices.

(Iranian) Gen. Ghaani repeated Tehran propaganda that America carried out the 9/11 attacks in New York and the Pentagon, not al Qaeda.

“America, under the pretext of Sept. 11 attacks, which it carried out itself, invaded Afghanistan and mobilized young Muslims and deployed them to Afghanistan so that they can later attack Iran,” he said.

Obama’s “peace deal” with the ayatollah regime is a very very bad deal.

THE NEXT AIR FORCE ONE:

Under pressure from President Donald Trump to cut the cost of the next Air Force Ones, the U.S. Air Force is finalizing a deal with Boeing to purchase two undelivered 747s in storage in the Mojave desert.

The 747s were “abandoned by a bankrupt Russian airline.”

Let’s see how the benighted minds at CNN interpret this story.

TRANSPARENCY: Judicial Watch: Justice Department Blacks Out Talking Points on Lynch-Clinton Tarmac Meeting.

WHY IS THE WASHINGTON ESTABLISHMENT DOING THE BIDDING OF THE RUSSIANS? Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev: Trump is an ‘incompetent player’ who will be ‘liquidated’ by the US establishment.

Well, there have certainly been enough assassination fantasies over the past 6 months.

IT NEVER LEFT: The Red Menace Is Back.

Read the whole thing.

MATT TAIBBI: There Is No Way to Survive the Trump White House.

The heads – you’re looking at the heads – are beginning to pile up in number. Donald Trump rose to fame as a TV star with his cruel punchline firings of hapless reality-show contestants. As chief executive of the world’s mightiest nuclear superpower, he has now spent most of his first term sowing panic around the world with an ever-tightening pattern of purges and forced resignations.

Like Soviet Commissars promoted during the Great Terror, Trump appointees begin composing their last words from the moment they ascend to high office.

Compared to the comparatively lengthy tenures of notables failures like Eric Holder and Janet Napolitano, it’s difficult to see “You’re fired!” as a bad thing.

NEW FOCUS IN THE AFFIRMATIVE ACTION DEBATE: ASIAN AMERICANS.

By most standards, Austin Jia holds an enviable position. A rising sophomore at Duke, Mr. Jia attends one of the top universities in the country, setting him up for success.

But with his high G.P.A., nearly perfect SAT score and activities — debate team, tennis captain and state orchestra — Mr. Jia believes he should have had a fair shot at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. Those Ivy League colleges rejected him after he applied in the fall of 2015.

It was particularly disturbing, Mr. Jia said, when classmates with lower scores than his — but who were not Asian-American, like him — were admitted to those Ivy League institutions.

“My gut reaction was that I was super disillusioned by how the whole system was set up,” Mr. Jia, 19, said.

Students like Mr. Jia are now the subject of a lawsuit accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-Americans in admissions by imposing a penalty for their high achievement and giving preferences to other racial minorities.

Some of us have been pointing this out for a while.

WAIT, I THOUGHT THAT POEM WAS PART OF THE CONSTITUTION OR SOMETHING: White House aide: Statue of liberty poem not the test for immigration policy.

Top White House policy aide Stephen Miller on Wednesday defended the White House’s new legal immigration legislation in part by saying the famous poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty was added years after the statue’s unveiling.

The poem includes the lines, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Miller was responding to a CNN reporter quoting lines from the famous poem during a White House press briefing where Miller was discussing the White House’s newly proposed immigration proposal that gives preference to English-speakers. . . .

“I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history here, but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty lighting the world, it’s a symbol of liberty lighting the world. The poem you are referring to, which was added later, is not part of the original Statue of Liberty,” Miller said.

Miller then peppered Acosta with historic immigration numbers, asking him what level of immigration would satisfy “Jim Acosta’s definition of the Statue of Liberty poem’s law of the land.”

Poet Emma Lazarus wrote the famous poem,”The New Colossus,” to celebrate the statue’s 1883 unveiling. Eighteen years later, the poem was inscribed on the statue’s pedestal, where it remains as a key fixture of the monument.

Besides, if we don’t base our immigration policy on a 19th Century poem, what possible guidance is there?

And then there’s this: After battle with Jim Acosta, Stephen Miller gets called a Nazi, white supremacist, and Hannibal Lecter.

Remember, these are supposed to be the sane, sensible people who get nuance. Not like those crazy, irrational Trumpies who will lash out at anything.

Related: CNN’s @acosta read a poem, then had a meltdown when Miller suggested new immigrants should be able to read it.

To be a lefty is to believe that the Constitution is a living document that changes with the times, but a poem on a statue binds immigration policy forever.

MEET THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S UNEXPECTED NEW STAR: That and more in Liz Sheld’s morning brief.

KURT SCHLICHTER: “Yeah, we’re a republic, but we also have democratic rules, norms, and traditions. Too bad the Democratic Party doesn’t believe in them.”

Plus: “You elitists think you’re elite? Start proving it. Scratch that. You had your chance, and you failed.”

And: “Donald Trump is a warning. Trump is the best case scenario. If you somehow depose him via your smarmy shenanigans, what comes along next is really going to upset you. You need to understand something. Trump is not our last chance. He’s your last chance.”

Choose the form of your destructor.

NOT JUST IN WASHINGTON: In Washington, War Fatigue Is Setting In.

In the wake of more pressing foreign policy challenges, including North Korea’s missile program and the Syrian civil war, the war in Afghanistan has become a lower priority for the United States. Should Washington give in to its war fatigue and pull its troops out of Afghanistan, it’s unclear just how big the drawdown would be. Either way, the presence of fewer troops will force the United States to turn to other measures, such as a greater emphasis on special operations forces and drone strikes, to maintain in its missions in Afghanistan. If, on the other hand, the Pentagon succeeds in sending more troops, the increase will still be only modest, suggesting the United States is interested in conflict management rather than conflict resolution. Regardless of the path the Trump administration chooses, none seem designed to successfully end the war as it rapidly approaches its 16th year.

On December 7, 1941, the US military was under-sized, badly-equipped compared to its enemies, and woefully under-experienced. Less than four years later, Germany and Japan lay in ruins, and wholly or partially occupied by American forces.

Nazi Germany. Imperial Japan. The Taliban.

One of these things is not like the other — in part because we failed to apply the necessary force. If for whatever reason we’re unable or unwilling to do so, then I’m not sure what we hope to accomplish after more than a decade and a half.

RELATED: Trump Says U.S.‘Losing’ Afghan War in Tense Meeting With Generals.

I’LL BELIEVE IT’S A CRISIS WHEN THE PEOPLE WHO KEEP TELLING ME IT’S A CRISIS START ACTING LIKE IT’S A CRISIS: Al Gore’s Home Devours 34 Times More Electricity Than Average U.S. Household. “Last September alone, Gore devoured 30,993 kWh of electricity. That’s enough to power 34 average American homes for a month. Over the last 12 months, Gore used more electricity just heating his outdoor swimming pool than six typical homes use in a year.”

I don’t want to hear another goddamn thing about my carbon footprint.

IT’S LIKE A SHOULDER-FIRED CLAYMORE MINE, SORT OF: A 41-Round Shotgun? Kel-Tec KSG-25 — Full Review.