US aiding Palestinian terrorists, Senate’s chance to cut waste and other commentary

Mideast beat: US Aiding Palestinian Terrorists

Two killers who stabbed and shot a security guard in a Jerusalem suburb “were Palestinian Authority police officers,” fumes The Wall Street Journal editorial board, and Ramallah’s pledge to investigate “is good for a laugh.”

In fact, the Palestinian Authority “glorifies terrorism by its security forces,” as a new Palestinian Media Watch study documents; the PA and Fatah openly “boast” about PA security officers’ involvement in terrorism.

And though the “Taylor Force Act stops direct U.S. economic aid to the PA” for paying rewards to terrorists or their families, US support for the security forces “is another matter.”

Notably, the State Department has yet to say how much exactly Washington sends the PASF, but “taxpayers and the public deserve to know.”

DC watch: Senate’s Chance To Cut Waste

“This week, the Senate will vote to rescind $9.4 billion of spending Congress previously appropriated,” cheers the National Review’s editors.

The rescissions bill “would ax funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and various foreign-aid accounts.”

For starters, PBS and NPR’s “progressive bias is pervasive and well documented.” But the feds shouldn’t be funding TV and radio outlets, anyway.

The bill also cuts billions in “development assistance, which has a shoddy track record of fostering economic growth in poorer countries,” a “fund to promote clean energy technologies abroad” and “an account created in the 1990s to help former Soviet states transition away from communism. (Mission accomplished.)”

“If Republicans are remotely sincere about limiting the federal government’s scope, they should pass the bill without delay.”

From the left: Cheer Progress Against Terror

The end of the TSA’s airport shoe-removal policy is a “marker of underappreciated progress,” argues Vox’s Bryan Walsh: “The threat of devastating terror attacks in the US” and abroad “has greatly receded.”

Improved “screening for threats,” such as the use of “multi-view computed topography (CT) scanners” and “biographic vetting” of every traveler “against the Terrorism Database” has been key.

The once “highly organized international terror cells” intent on attacking the West have been cut down.

True, an attack could still “take place somewhere in the US”; the TSA decision is, “at best, a partial victory, one that has come with costs and that could be reversed at any time.”

Yet “even a partial victory is more than many of us would have expected.”

Conservative: Butler-Shooting Questions Remain

It’s been a year since Thomas Matthew Crooks tried to assassinate President Trump in Butler, Pa., but “little is still known about Crooks and his motives,” laments Salena Zito at the Washington Examiner.

Crooks fired “at the crowd and at then former President Donald Trump,” hitting Trump in the ear and mortally wounding “local retired fire chief Corey Comperatore.”

Crooks’ father “said in hindsight that the signs of his son’s mental health decay began six months before” the shooting.

“One year later, several agents have been suspended, a decision announced this week, but” Corey’s wife, Helen, “says she wants more information.”

Among “people who attended the rally” and in “the suburban neighborhood of Bethel Park, that sentiment is shared.”

From the right: Brennan’s Record of Scandals

Former CIA Director John Brennan professes to be “clueless” about the Justice Department’s investigation of him, but his bluster, scoffs Victor Davis Hanson at American Greatness, is hollow, because Brennan “knows full well” that “his fingerprints are on some of the greatest scandals of the last decade.”

Brennan, “who has a record of serially lying to Congress, the public, and the media,” testified in 2017 to having no knowledge of the provenance of the “now-infamous bogus Steele dossier,” and denied it played a key part in CIA “intelligence assessments.”

But behind the scenes, Brennan was among the dossier’s “most ardent advocates” and “chief architects” of the lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a Russian op.

His record is one of “chronically lying, leaking, and weaponizing the government.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board