Politics

The first thing you see when you climb out of the Rio Grande into Eagle Pass, Texas, is the homely site of the municipal golf course. Nine holes along the river expanded to eighteen via different tees, the pruned grass of the course is scuffed and torn from the hundreds of thousands of footsteps that have crossed it just this year, rubber soles that trekked from Central and South America to get to this godforsaken patch of green that signifies the US of A and everything it holds for the migrant who dreams of a new life. As welcomes go, it’s no sparkling torch of Lady Liberty.

A primetime address in the Oval Office is the pinnace of presidential speechifying. Ronald Reagan used the room in 1986 to console the nation after the Challenger blew up on live television. George W. Bush declared the global war on terrorism there. Donald Trump leveraged the weight of the Resolute Desk as he talked to Americans about a deadly but mysterious virus called Covid-19 for the first time.   Tonight, it was Joe Biden’s turn. The topics, the wars in Ukraine and Israel, couldn’t be more different with respect to the players, the stakes or the circumstances leading up to them. Even so, Biden tried to convince the American people on the idea that the two wars were one and the same.

Karol Markowicz has a piece today about cancel culture and the college students who signed on to reprehensible anti-Israel or even pro-Hamas statements, driving donors to pull funding for major higher ed institutions and even leading some professors to say flat-out: don’t hire the people who signed these. I’ve written repeatedly about the difficulty and sloppy definition of the term “cancel culture,” and why I think most people struggle to define it and just fall back on their priors: if someone I like is getting yelled at, it’s cancel culture; if someone I don’t like is getting yelled at, it isn’t.

Campaign finance data for the third quarter was released this weekend and the numbers aren’t looking good — Ron DeSantis is trailing far behind Donald Trump, Mike Pence’s cash-on-hand is dangerously low and Tim Scott somehow has more money than any candidate bar Joe Biden and Trump.   One group is doing great though — the 1776 Project PAC, a conservative activist organization, which raised $683,915 from July to September. They even came out ahead of two 2024 hopefuls, raising more than both GOP candidate Asa Hutchinson and Cornel West, the professor and activist running as an Independent. Cockburn wonders if the fact that a small conservative group is walloping the field will make some candidates realize it's finally time to drop out of the race.   https://twitter.

“We must move forward,” Representative Jim Jordan wrote in a letter to his Republican colleagues as he works to lock up the votes he needs to become speaker, lay out an agenda of empowering rank-and-file lawmakers and expand the fragile House majority. Following a surprise call for a weekend-long recess, Jordan has been herding the cats in his conference. After facing what seemed like long odds to secure the gavel on Friday, Jordan made several key strides, securing backing from former foes like Representatives Vern Buchanan, Ken Calvert, Mike Rogers and Ann Wagner, the latter a fierce ally of his rival last week, Steve Scalise. Right now, Jordan is the only announced candidate for speaker — and pulling former critics on board is a sign of some much needed Jordanmentum.

This Friday October 13, governments around the world received a warning from Israel: look out for yourselves, look out for your Jewish citizens, as terrorism may reach your soil.The Israel National Security Council and Ministry of Foreign Affairs recommended that all Israelis abroad remain cautious, “keep away from the demonstrations and protests and — if necessary — check with local security forces regarding possible protests and disturbances in the area.”“Against the background of Operation Swords of Iron,” the agencies said in a joint statement, “Hamas leadership has called on all of its supporters around the world to hold a ‘Day or Rage’” against Jews around the globe.

Welcome to Thunderdome, where this week the 2024 election had its first real sea change in priority and policy focus thanks to the horrific, detestable and utterly evil attacks on Israel by Hamas. The general rule in politics is that foreign policy doesn’t matter for voters, and that’s been true in... actually, wait a minute... not even the majority of presidential elections in the past half century! In 1980, 1984, 1988, 2004, 2008 and 2016, foreign policy played an outsized role in the candidate selection of Republicans and Democrats, and you could even argue that Joe Biden’s false promise of foreign policy normalcy was decisive in 2020.

George Santos, the histrionic New York congressman, is under investigation once again. This time it doesn’t matter whether he is a drag queen or not, as the courts, not journalists, are leading this investigation.According to a new indictment filed Tuesday, the congressman stole the identities of his campaign donors, using their credit cards to send tens of thousands of dollars to his war chest. The twenty-three-count indictment comes after one filed in May charging Santos with various offenses, including lying to Congress about his wealth and embezzling money from his campaign.The new indictment claims the congressman charged over $44,000 to his campaign without the authorization of donors.

The Democratic Party is in a state of rhetorical paralysis. This weekend, as Palestinian terrorists streamed across the Israeli border, the White House maintained hours of thunderous silence. On Saturday, the Biden administration released a few limp paragraphs to the effect that “terrorism is never justified” and “Israel has a right to defend itself and its people.” This, after an uninterrupted outpouring of financial and oratorical support for Ukraine, is weak tea. But as the head of a party that is being overrun in not-so-slow motion by a vigorous young coterie of anti-Israel extremists, what more could Joe Biden say?