Politics

Read about the latest political news, views and analysis

Tuesday

Cockburn

Unpicking the armed IRS agent hysteria

For a profession more hated than telemarketers and meter maids, last week the Internal Revenue Service put up a job ad that sounded so cool it even made Cockburn consider it. The IRS is in the market for a Special Agent, specifically one that can fire a gun and is “willing to use deadly force if necessary,” for its law enforcement division, Criminal Investigation (CI). The agency is set to double in size and is recruiting more staff following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, a Democratic spending bill which President Biden is set to sign today.

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Peter Van Buren

The five stages of Mar-a-Lago grief

Another week, another silver bullet misses Donald Trump. Once more we suffered through the same endless roll of waves of crimes, accusations, near-indictments and just bad words to which we'd become accustomed during the Trump presidency. We went from "Trump has classified material under lock and key at Mar-a-Lago" to a group of people paying $1,800 to fly a banner reading "ha ha ha ha" over the resort to mock a Trump staying 3,000 miles away in New York. On cue, the regulars on MSNBC and CNN brought out their running-dog former CIA and FBI officers to tell us tick-tock, the walls are closing in, this time it will stick, Trump is going down, he'll be in jail before he runs again for office. If we can't stop him with the electoral system, we'll use the judicial system. This. Is. The.

Saturday

Peter Van Buren

What is a classified document, anyway?

What is a classified document? Donald Trump seems to have lots of them — and the FBI sure wants them back. In the wake of my first book critical of the State Department’s Iraq Reconstruction program, Diplomatic Security began a deep dive into my life in an attempt to find something over which to prosecute me. A colleague passed on a bit of personnel gossip via his official email to my Yahoo! Account — and the chase was on. Diplomatic Security claimed I was in possession of “classified” material at home and referred my case to the Justice Department. The email in question was simply labeled “For Official Use Only,” or FOUO, a standard tag then automatically applied to all email sent by State in the unclassified system.

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Friday

Charles Lipson

Cleaning house at the FBI and Justice Department

The two most striking features of the FBI’s unprecedented raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home are its bold intrusiveness and the public’s mistrust of the Bureau’s honesty and integrity. The Department of Justice could have used low-profile subpoenas to force Trump to turn over any documents, including the most sensitive ones. It didn’t. Instead, it sent carloads of federal agents to search the former president’s house. That raid was also unusual in a second sense. Although mishandling federal documents is a felony, it happens with some frequency, alas, and is almost never subject to full-scale raids. The blowback has been a Category 5 storm. The damage has grown because the FBI and Department of Justice remained silent for three days, refusing to explain their actions.

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Oliver Wiseman

The uselessness of the CDC

The CDC confirms its own uselessness More than a year after Joe Biden declared victory in the battle against Covid, the CDC has called it: the pandemic is over. Well, sort of. Announcing the publication of revised guidance yesterday, CDC epidemiologist Greta Massetti insisted that the updated advice “acknowledges that the pandemic is not over, but also helps us move to a point where Covid-19 no longer severely disrupts our daily lives.” Ignore Massetti’s throat-clearing. The guidance’s marked change in tone speaks for itself. All social distancing recommendations have been dropped and those exposed to the virus are no longer advised to quarantine for those exposed to the virus. Testing to screen for Covid is no longer recommended for people who do not have any symptoms.

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Roger Kimball

Where is the FBI’s Rubicon?

Everyone knows that in January 49 BC Julius Caesar, about to lead part of his army across the Rubicon river, said “Alea iacta est,” “the die is cast.” Except that, according to Plutarch, what he really said was “Ἀνερρίφθω κύβος,” “let the die be cast,” and he did not so much say it as quote it, since the already-proverbial line came from the Greek playwright Menander. Anyway, in bringing an army across the stream that separated cis-Alpine Gaul from Italy proper, Caesar had committed treason. In crossing the Rubicon he had crossed a line, sparking the civil war that engulfed Rome and formalized the end of the Republic that had, as Caesar himself noted, been dead in all-but-name-only for decades.

Thursday

Peter Van Buren

Merrick Garland is the Mar-a-Lago mystery man

Get it yet? The point of the raid on Mar-a-Lago and the January 6 hearings is all about one man. Nope, not Donald Trump: Merrick Garland. Either the FBI is trying to get Garland to indict Trump for something, and failing that to indict the highest ranking person near Trump, or Garland is already on the case himself. The reason for this is that nothing else worked. Democrats pointed the full national security apparatus at Trump, with the FBI doing yeoman-like work. They turned Robert Mueller loose with unlimited resources for a full year, going as far as to suggest Trump had obstructed an investigation that found him innocent. Alice in Wonderland stuff, that.

Wednesday

Eli Lake

The FBI kills a mosquito with a howitzer

Since the FBI raided Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago compound on Monday, the Democratic Party’s resistance leaders have been tumescent. Former Justice Department officials are going on television to give an expert gloss to the prospect of the 45th president finally getting prosecuted. Former solicitor general Neil Katyal, for example, told MSNBC on Monday evening that if he was the former president’s lawyer, he would tell him to prepare for prison time. Marc Elias, the Democratic Party lawyer who commissioned the infamous Steele Dossier, went on Twitter to suggest the raid might mean Trump was guilty of destroying government property and thus ineligible to run in 2024. It feels like 2017 all over again. And that is what makes this latest episode of Get Trump a farce.

David Marcus

Don’t blame Texas for New York’s immigration ‘crisis’

To hear New York mayor Eric Adams tell it, you would think that a crisis has gripped the streets of our nation’s largest city as busloads of illegal immigrants arrive from Texas. Some of the new arrivals, courtesy of Texas Governor Greg Abbott — who wants to send a message about the very real crisis in his state — have been met in person by the mayor. He claims the city is now scrambling to take care of them. It’s a lie. Thus far, Abbott has sent 75, maybe 100 illegal immigrants to New York, a city of 9 million people, a city which, in fact, already has a population of 500,000 illegal migrants. Are we really to believe that a few dozen more from Texas has our system at the breaking point?

Cockburn

Keeping up with the Pelosis

As Cockburn scrolled through the gossip about Kim Kardashian's latest breakup (this time with Pete Davidson), he couldn't help but think of her show, a sloppy soap opera/reality TV series where drama runs with tear-stained makeup. Sound familiar? Cockburn couldn't help but think of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. After all, lately there's been enough drama in her family to fill at least three seasons of runtime (at a conservative estimate, of course). Pelosi, having successfully returned home from her long-awaited trip to Taiwan, is now engaging in another slap-fight with Xi Jinping. In an interview on NBC’s Today, she said of the trip, “Yes, it was worth it,” and “[Xi] is in a fragile place...he’s acting like a scared bully.

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Cockburn

A tale of two Andrews

In a surprise twist that even Cockburn never saw coming, Andrew Yang and Andrew Cuomo, Democrats both, have denounced the recent raid on former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. The Thousand-Dollar-Yang tweeted out a long piece that declared that, while Yang didn’t want Trump as president, he did have serious concerns about what happened at Mar-a-Lago: A fundamental part of his [Trump’s] appeal has been that it’s him against a corrupt government establishment. This raid strengthens that case for millions of Americans who will see this as unjust persecution. It seems like this was authorized by a local judge and a particular FBI office without buy-in or notification of higher levels of government. But literally no one will believe that or make a distinction.

Oliver Wiseman

The known unknowns at Mar-a-Lago

Known unknowns at Mar-a-Lago I’ve felt rather left out in the thirty-six hours or so since Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago house was raided by the FBI. The rest of Washington is partaking in an orgy of certainty, reveling in their confidence of the legal meaning and political ramifications of the extraordinary development when very little is known beyond the basic facts. This is either concrete proof that we are, or are not, living in a banana republic. The raid is either a desperate establishment attempt to stop the Trump juggernaut from rolling to victory in 2024, or it has just saved him from political extinction. These many contradictory claims about the event are made with staggering certainty.

Paul du Quenoy

The view from Palm Beach of the Mar-a-Lago raid

“Everyone here is simply stunned and the universal cry is ‘We are now a third-world country!’” Juliette de Marcellus, a long-time Palm Beach resident who stayed in town this summer, emailed me. The day before, dozens of FBI agents and three Justice Department attorneys raided (or “searched,” as the servile legacy media put it) the home of our island community’s most famous resident, former President Donald J. Trump. Palm Beach slows down considerably in the summer, though the first two years of the pandemic saw many residents and visitors stick around rather than face crime and Covid in northern locales. This year, the Island’s annual season petered out around May 1, with restaurant reservations and parking spots suddenly opening up and traffic noticeably thinning out.

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Cockburn

Conspiracy theory: did Alex Jones’s lawyers leak his messages on purpose?

Alex Jones’s defamation trial exploded in spectacular fashion a week ago today, following the revelation that the Infowars founder’s lawyer had sent the full contents of Jones’s phone to the attorney representing the Sandy Hook parents suing him. Footage of Jones learning this while on the witness stand sallied forth across Twitter in a flurry of blue-check hysteria. NBC disinformation reporter Ben Collins tweeted: “Wow. Sandy Hook parents' lawyer is revealing that Alex Jones' lawyers sent him the contents of Jones' phone BY MISTAKE. “'12 days ago, your attorneys messed up and sent me a digital copy of every text’ Jones has sent for years. “’You know what perjury is?’ the lawyer asks.” https://twitter.

Tuesday

Amber Duke

Is this the right’s answer to woke corporatism?

Woke corporatism has taken over America. Nike nixed a sneaker launch featuring the Betsy Ross flag after noted anthem-kneeler Colin Kaepernick claimed it was offensive. Coca-Cola and other companies threatened to boycott doing business in Georgia over the state's new election security legislation. Levi's allegedly booted its president over her anti-school closure views during the pandemic, and nearly every major retailer features pro-Black Lives Matter or Pride Month messaging on its storefronts and websites. It can seem impossible as a conservative to avoid giving your hard-earned money to businesses that hate you. Even for moderate or apolitical consumers, it can be frustrating and tiresome to be hit with a wave of political messaging when you're just trying to purchase a product.

A Nike store in Manhattan (Getty Images)
Teresa Mull

Democrats pick a bad time to punish the energy industry

With its new Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the government is pulling one of those infomercial tricks where they throw in a third bottle of OxiClean ABSOLUTELY FREE! Acting as if the cost of everything hasn’t already been calculated and passed onto the consumer. The IRA, you see, contains a “Methane Emissions Charge” that will impose a $900-a-ton tax on oil and gas producers that will increase to $1,500 after two years. The left is patting itself on the back for their valiant work to cut greenhouse gas emissions drastically by 2030. But here’s the thing: the energy industry is already working hard to cut emissions; it’s in their interest to do so. And when the government fines them for not capturing enough methane, guess who gets to foot the bill?

Cockburn

Liz Cheney is no Obi-Wan Kenobi

Cockburn was finishing a bottle of brandy the other day when he nearly spat out his drink. A columnist from the Washington Post, Jonathan Capehart, compared Liz Cheney to Obi-Wan Kenobi. Capehart said on PBS: I keep thinking about the scene in Star Wars: Episode IV, when...Obi-Wan says to Darth Vader, "If you strike me down, I will come back more powerful than you can imagine." And to me, Liz Cheney is Obi-Wan Kenobi. If she loses...she could very well come back more powerful than Donald Trump has imagined. After laughing hysterically for the better part of four hours, Cockburn decided to weigh Capehart's point. Unfortunately he was forced to conclude that Liz Cheney is nothing like Obi-Wan Kenobi. Here's why.

Monday

Andrew Donaldson

The gerontocracy goes on a spending spree

Like characters in a dystopian novel, the elderly bore the worst of it. Dianne Feinstein, whose friends were already whispering about how there she really was, was found walking back and forth between her private room and common area, which she was required to come to over and over again just to get through the 16-hour ordeal. Chuck Grassley, only a year younger, confessed to taking 10-minute naps and struggling to stay awake, while lamenting how he missed his family. Patrick Leahy, 84 and coming off hip surgery, was lucky. He received more comments about the Batman sticker on his wheelchair than he did questions about why he was even there in the first place. “Pat, I’m glad you’re here,” the comparatively juvenile Tim Kaine (64)  remarked. “We shouldn't have to suffer alone.

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William Murchison

So he thinks he’s Reagan now, does he?

“We are Reagan,” a Biden “confidant” tells Axios. After how many hallucinogens, the story doesn’t say. Pretty many would be a fair guess. The story wherein occurred the remarkable comparison never rose more than a foot or so from the ground, likely due to its fantastic nature. Nor was the “confidant” ever identified, possibly to spare his or her children's playground embarrassment. Any comparison of Joseph Robinette Biden and Ronald Wilson Reagan, if it ventures beyond their service in the White House, is about as nutty as comparisons ever get. It might repay us to ask the basis of such a claim, however fruitless.

Oliver Wiseman

Biden’s big effing deal

Biden’s big effing deal  In a timeless line from Annie Hall, Woody Allen tells a joke about two elderly women complaining about the restaurant at a Catskill resort. The food is terrible… and such small portions. Democratic praise for the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed the Senate this weekend, resembles an upbeat reworking of the famous quip. This legislation is amazing… and so tiny! For now, the president seems content to stick to simple lines about “delivering for working families.