Why we should fear space aliens, Christmas in Iraq and other notable commentary

The recent New York Times blockbuster investigation into government spending on UFO research has Slate’s Jacob Brogan wondering: Why why trouble trouble before trouble troubles us? “If the available evidence even begins to suggest that intelligent aliens are really capable of visiting us, we probably shouldn’t be dedicating our resources to chasing down their exploratory craft,” he writes. “To the contrary, if we believe there’s even a chance they’re coming, we should be doing everything we can to hide from them.” That’s because, even if they don’t do so “maliciously,” they’d likely view us as “insects” and call in the exterminator. He quotes scientist David Brin that “encounters between cultures of greatly differing technological sophistication rarely go well.” So if we’re going to run expensive programs on extraterrestrials, they should be “focused on the ones most likely to keep us safe.”At National Review, Yuval Levin debunks the Washington Post report about a supposed drive by Trump appointees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to ban the use of “evidence-based,” “fetus,” “diversity” and four other terms. In fact, some of the phrases were targeted in a Department of Health and Human Services “budget-proposal style guide” that merely covers submissions to Congress. “They’re not words that are banned in the department,” Levin explains. That’s because they appear to have been singled out by bureaucrats for fear that using them would endanger GOP funding. Then, “in the course of a meeting among career officials at the CDC,” other phrases were added. And the whole thing is a tale not of how “retrograde Republicans ordered career CDC officials not to use these terms” but rather of how “career CDC officials assumed retrograde Republicans would be triggered by such words.”In The Wall Street Journal, William McGurn notes the plight of Iraqi Christians, in Kurdistan and elsewhere, “whose number has fallen from 1.4 million before the 2003 US invasion to roughly 200,000 today.” The defeat of ISIS, which slaughtered and enslaved non-Muslims, “is an understandable source of joy” for them. “But though the beheadings, immolations and even crucifixions” by ISIS “may be more sensational, the colonialism of Shia Iran is also squeezing Iraq’s Christian communities today.” Indeed, “In our own land we Christians are exiles,” says the Chaldean archbishop of Erbil, Bashar Matti Warda. “We relate to the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt.”“Conservatives who have determined that [President] Trump’s achievements outweigh the sacrifices associated with his presidency” are wearing “blinders,” argues Noah Rothman at Commentary. For all the good news, Trump’s “drawbacks” are “myriad”: His pushing of culture-war issues like NFL kneelers leaves conservatives “consumed with the notion that their prohibitive political dominance is illusory because the culture is arrayed against them.” And “his habit of giving aid and comfort to the worst elements of American society,” from Steve Bannon and the alt-right to Sherriff Joe Arpaio, “is contributing to the odor about the GOP.”With excellent chances to take the House and a shot at winning the Senate in 2018, Democrats need to start considering what they’d do with control of Congress, warns Noah Millman at The Week: “Opposition to President Trump and the burgeoning wave of Bannonite trolls does not constitute a governing agenda.” Back in the minority, the GOP “will comfortably revert to scorched-earth opposition mode,” so that if Dems haven’t defined their agenda “well in the public’s mind . . . then the Republicans will define it for them.” For example, don’t just denounce the tax-cut bill, but talk up “an alternative use of $1.5 trillion” — such as a pledge “to cancel the tax cut and spend every dollar on essential infrastructure.” Then they can “dare the president to veto the very thing he touted as making him different from traditional Republicans.”