Hold the Christmas songs, please, and other commentary

Culture critic: Hold the Christmas Songs

“Seeking to cheer up the population,” observes “Candid Camera” host Peter Funt in The Wall Street Journal, music- and video-service firms are “betting” Christmas-themed entertainment is what’s needed right now. In September, one Ohio radio station branded itself “The Valley’s Christmas Station.” That felt like “a stretch ahead of the first frost.” Larger stations across the country reportedly went to “all-holiday offerings soon after Halloween.” In his youth, recalls Funt, “no outlet dared cue” Christmas fare until after Thanksgiving. “Like many people, I’m seduced by songs of the season.” Yet when they blared “from my car radio on Election Day, it was unsettling and out of place.” And while he’s “looking forward to a ‘Holly, Jolly Christmas,’ ” for the next few weeks at least, “I’d prefer a silent night.”

Doctor: Cuomo’s Deadly Vaccine Politics

Gov. Cuomo says “he has been ‘talking to other governors across the nation’ to stop vaccine distribution by the Trump administration until the Biden administration comes in,” fumes Joel Zinberg at City Journal. The governor claims Trump “would rely on private-market mechanisms like hospitals and pharmacies to distribute the vaccine, . . . [leaving out] ‘all sorts of communities that were left out the first time when COVID ravaged them,’ ” because their neighborhoods have “no Rite-Aid or CVS.” In fact, “pharmacies are relatively common in urban areas”; other factors, such as more comorbidities, explain higher minority death rates — and anyway, Trump’s plan includes sending vaccine “to state, tribal, and local health authorities.” Delaying distribution “would be a steep price to pay for the sake of partisanship.”

Conservative: How GOP Can Win Black Voters

If the GOP wants to “improve its performance with black voters,” it needs to do more than claim the mantle of the “Party of Lincoln,” advises Bloomberg’s Robert A. George. Exit polls show that Trump’s policies “resonated especially with black men,” but the handling of the election by Trump and his party are “blowing up whatever green shoots of goodwill they may have planted in the African-American community.” Black voters treat “the sanctity of the vote [as] a dealmaker and a deal-breaker,” and Republicans can “get black voters to listen” by taking a solid stance on voting rights.

Pandemic journal: COVID Isn’t Trump’s Fault

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes is the latest in a long line of Democrats to accuse President Trump of perpetuating “mass slaughter” in his handling of COVID-19, promoting a “baseless, morally repugnant smear of the president and Republicans,” seethes Georgi Boorman at The Federalist. Despite the fact that nearly every nation “recorded dozens to thousands of deaths, no matter what they tried,” many Democrats “are bitterly clinging to a myth” that no one would have died in America if Trump hadn’t been president. They conveniently ignore how “the Trump administration has done a lot in the name of fighting the pandemic” while Joe Biden initially opposed Trump’s travel ban. Then, too, “presidents are ordinary, fallible human beings, only as good as their character and the information they’re given.” Boorman concludes: “Hayes and his ilk would do well to remember this, and stop blaming every president they hate for deaths each reasonably tried to mitigate.”

Censorship watch: Suppressing Trans Science

All author Abigail Shrier did in her new book “Irreversible Damage” was ­expose “the sudden, severe spike in transgender identification among adolescent girls,” she recounts at Quillette. “I fully support medical transition for mature adults,” but, as a cultural journalist, she detected a real phenomenon: “Between 2016 and 2017, the number of females seeking gender surgery quadrupled in the United States. Thousands of teen girls across the Western world are not only self-diagnosing with a real dysphoric condition they likely do not have; in many cases, they are obtaining hormones and surgeries.” The response: threats at her publisher, Amazon declining to run ads, an initially successful attempt to get the book de-listed on Target’s Web site — and an all-but-total review blackout. “This is what censorship looks like” in this century.

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board

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