Politics Archives

Tuesday

January 25, 2022

Cockburn

Nancy rides again

Long live the gerontocracy: Nancy Pelosi will seek reelection in 2022. The House speaker, who turns eighty-two in March, announced her move in a Twitter video. “While we have made progress much more needs to be done to improve people’s lives,” Pelosi said. “Our democracy is at his because of assaults on the truth, the assault on the US Capitol and the state-by-state assault on voting rights.” “This election is crucial: nothing less is at stake than our democracy,” the speaker continued. “But as we say: we don’t agonize, we organize! And that is why I am running for re-election to Congress and respectfully seek your support.

Alex Perez

Nikki Fried, clueless Florida Woman

Nikki Fried, Florida’s commissioner of agriculture and Democratic candidate for the state’s governorship, recently compared Governor Ron DeSantis to Hitler. Fried’s deplorable comparison, sadly, was right in line with an erratic gubernatorial campaign laced with desperation and idiocy. Fried has attempted to position herself as Florida’s savior from the supposedly despotically inclined DeSantis. The problem for her — and for anyone who runs against DeSantis for that matter — is that over the course of the pandemic the incumbent has become an extremely popular political superstar. An increasing number of Floridians want him to continue transforming the state as he sees fit.

Oliver Wiseman

Get real on Russia

Get real on Russia To listen to some voices in Washington’s foreign policy debates, the United States is on the brink of a ground war with Russia in Eastern Europe. The claim tends to come from self-styled realists and restrainers, that is to say, those who claim a hard-nosed focus on national interests and inoculation against the utopianism and wishful thinking that has got America into trouble overseas in the past. “America can’t and mustn’t go to war with Russia over Ukraine,” argues Sohrab Ahmari in the Washington Post, swinging at a straw man with the ferocity of a five-year-old demolishing a piñata at a birthday party. Rod Dreher senses an “eagerness for war with Russia among Americans.” Really?

Rachel K. Paulose

Sarah Palin takes the New York Times to court

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin is taking the New York Times Company (NYT) to trial in February for alleged defamation. Palin, according to her lawsuit, filed suit in order “to hold…NYT accountable for defaming her by falsely asserting what they knew to be false: that Governor Palin was clearly and directly responsible for inciting a mass shooting at a political event in January 2011.” Palin is alleging that NYT “falsely stated as a matter of fact to millions of people that Gov. Palin incited Jared Loughner’s January 8, 2011, mass shooting at a political event in Tucson, Arizona, during which he shot thirteen people, severely wounding United States congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and killing six others.

Monday

January 24, 2022

Jay Caruso

Can Matt Gaetz survive a real world scandal?

The music blares, sparks fly from the pyrotechnics show, and the star walks out, pumping his fist and soaking in the cheers of the adoring crowd. A WWE wrestling event? No, it’s Congressman Matt Gaetz at AMERICAFEST, a Turning Point USA conference in December in Phoenix, Arizona. Gaetz was not there to deliver a substantive policy speech, educate the crowd about the dangers of inflationary spending or warn about Russia’s geopolitical machinations in Ukraine. Instead, the thirty-nine-year-old MAGA firebrand delivered the goods his audience expected.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Energy is the most important issue in the world

One issue more than any other will dominate airtime and influence policy in 2022: energy. Americans are seeing the highest prices at the pump in seven years. Since Biden took office, average gas prices are up by more than $1 a gallon. In November, gas prices in Mono County, California hit more than $6 per gallon, forcing some residents to drive to Nevada (where gas taxes are lower) to buy fuel. The price of natural gas in the US is at its highest in seven years, and up more than 180 percent in the last year alone. In Europe, the situation is even worse. Europe’s gas reserves are at record lows. In Germany, which already had the EU’s highest energy prices, bills are up 30 percent in a year.

Rupert Darwall

Biden’s big energy bust

"For too long, we’ve failed to use the most important word when it comes to meeting the climate crisis,” President Biden declared in his presidential address to Congress in April 2020. “Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.” Investments in jobs and infrastructure, the president pleaded, have often had bipartisan support in the past. In November, he got nineteen Republican senators to vote for his $1 trillion infrastructure bill, but the main planks of Biden’s climate plan were in the $2.2 trillion Build Back Better Act. The House passed it in November, only for it to fail in the Senate, thanks to opposition from the most powerful man in Washington, at least when it comes to passing legislation.

Roger Kimball

New Rome, new home

I believe that Maximinus Thrax, whose brief reign ran from 235 to 238 AD, was the first Roman emperor never to have set foot in Rome. The Thracian brute started a trend. As the years went by, more and more Roman emperors gave the city a miss. Diocletian (284-305), who brought the crisis of the third century to an end, hated the city. Some later emperors settled on Ravenna as the seat of power for the Western empire. Constantinople emerged as HQ for the East. Rome retained a certain ceremonial significance but was increasingly irrelevant to the business of empire. The turn away from Rome happened for many reasons.

Charles Lipson

Does the Orange Man have the juice?

The Democrats face so many problems that it’s hard to remember the Republicans face a big one of their own. Donald Trump is not just a problem for Republicans. He’s a problem for the Republic. The problem is not Trump’s policies, whether you agree with them or not. Their populist/nationalist thrust differs from traditional conservativism, but his policies are coloring within the traditional lines of American politics. Many of them — tax cuts, immigration enforcement, increased military spending, credible threats against foreign adversaries — worked well and received enthusiastic popular support. Trump’s emphasis on state and local solutions over centralized ones was a welcome return to standard Republican practice.

Daniel McCarthy

The multinational that ate Virginia

This time next year, Republicans expect to be back in control of Congress. They are already celebrating, as 2022 sees Glenn Youngkin newly sworn in as governor of Virginia. For a wide swath of GOP activists and consultants (and not a few voters, too), Youngkin is the face of a Republican Party that can win — with or without Donald Trump. Youngkin had Trump’s endorsement last November. Youngkin was as eager to promote this as his Democratic opponent was, but the endorsement helped rather than hurt him. Trump voters’ residual skepticism toward a nominee who had recently been head of the Carlyle Group — a private equity firm long synonymous with insiderdom and globalism — was overcome by the rise of Critical Race Theory as a pivotal campaign issue.

Stephen L. Miller

The failure of hashtag diplomacy

The adults are back in charge! The State Department and its secretary Antony Blinken are tweeting out Spotify playlists! Spokesman Ned Price is sending hashtags and emojis in support of Ukraine! Meanwhile, nonessential American personnel have been ordered to evacuate their posts in Kiev. But surely they'll find a good hashtag to use on their way to the helicopters and airports. In all seriousness, this is a dangerously unserious administration that appears to be attempting to TikTok their way out of a crisis. Here’s hoping Vladimir Putin is checking his Snapchat for updates from Jen Psaki and the Jonas Brothers. What the Biden administration is trying to do is to recreate the wonder of the Obama years and their way-too-online Millennial social media strategy.

Cockburn

The media opens fire on Ron Klain

Cockburn has never been a fan of White House chief of staff Ron Klain. The man simply inhabits a different universe: Klain thinks inflation is no big deal while Cockburn is currently subsisting off of the free peanuts at his local bar; Klain's favorite hobby is Twitter while Cockburn's is seeing how long he can drink gin on the White House Ellipse before the cops chase him off. Yet even Cockburn has been surprised at the ferocity with which Washington has turned on Klain over the last week. A slew of articles, most of them from mainstream media sources, have identified Klain as the reason the president's policy agenda has stalled.

Oliver Wiseman

Memo to vaccine mandate opponents: please just be normal

Want normalcy? Then please just be normal Is there a more self-defeating bunch out there than hardline opponents of vaccine mandates? Yesterday, the National Mall played host to an anti-mandate rally at which prominent anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. compared the plight of the unvaccinated to the Holocaust. “Even in Hitler’s Germany…you could hide in the attic like Anne Frank did,” he said. He then rambled on about Bill Gates’s satellites. Another speaker, Del Bigtree, warned that “Unlike the Nuremberg Trials that only tried those doctors that destroyed the lives of those human beings, we’re going to come after the press.

Lewis M. Andrews

How working from home threatens authoritarian regimes

One of the few good things to come out of the pandemic has been the option to work from home (WFH). According to a Stanford University study of 17,000 employees, 50 percent of respondents who stayed at their jobs without commuting wanted to keep working from home at least part-time after Covid. And a September 2021 survey by OwlLabs, a video conferencing platform, found that one in three people who have worked remotely since the outbreak would likely quit if they could not continue to do so. While undoubtedly pressured by the current worker shortage to accept WFH as an employment benefit, companies have come to appreciate how decentralized staffing can improve productivity and substantially lower overhead.

Saturday

January 22, 2022

Roger Kimball

Malik Faisal Akram and our shoddy security state

It wasn’t so long ago that an official at London’s Heathrow airport, warned by the scanner through which my luggage was passing, uttered an Archimedean Eureka! (or words to that effect), pounced on my suitcase and abstracted an incriminating bottle of shampoo, which he confiscated. “Over the limit, Sir,” he exclaimed, as a colleague asked me to step aside and extend my hands to be tested for evidence of contact with explosive materials. It’s not only in England, of course, that functionaries subject the populace to their petty tyranny. It’s the same drill in the US. “Oh, but it’s to keep you safe, you know, that’s why we spend billions on our intelligence services and elite crime fighting units, equipping like armies so they can protect us from the bad guys.

Friday

January 21, 2022

Amber Duke

I did everything wrong and still haven’t caught Covid

"I am vaccinated — two Moderna shots, then boosted with a Pfizer booster," Fox News's Geraldo Rivera said as he announced he tested positive for Covid two weeks ago. "I thought for sure that I was immune...I ate some humble pie." The View's Whoopi Goldberg expressed similar surprise when she caught the virus, saying, "It was a shock, because I'm triple vaxxed, I haven't been anywhere, I haven't done anything." "It's one of those things where you think, I've done everything I was supposed to do... Yeah, it doesn't stop Omicron," she added. There have been scores of high-profile people admitting over the past month that you can "do everything right" and still catch Covid-19.

Oliver Wiseman

Are we past peak Trump?

Are we past peak Trump? When it comes to prognostications over Donald Trump’s future role in US public life, everyone comes to the question with enormous amounts of baggage. On the one hand, there’s a great deal of motivated reasoning from those desperate for the former president not to be the Republican nominee in 2024. They jump on any sliver of evidence that Trump isn’t the omnipotent ruler of the American right and tell themselves everything is going to be OK. On the other, there are those who look at recent US political history and conclude that betting against Trump is generally a bad idea. It is an understandable view. From Access Hollywood to January 6, Trump has time and again disproved suggestions that his latest transgression has sealed his fate.

Taylor Millard

Congress’s half-baked assault on Big Tech

A major anti-Big Tech bill is heading to the floor of the Senate after a frustrating markup session in the Judiciary Committee. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act, as it's called, majorly changes how online retailers can sell and promote their own branded wares and apps. It even bans Amazon and Google from suggesting their own products over those of a third party. Supporters from both sides of the aisle are portraying the bill as a great leveler of sorts. They believe it helps consumers and the so-called “little guy” against the Big Tech companies.

Thursday

January 20, 2022

Matt Purple

Our puritanical left-wing elect

Some cross-magazine skirmishing to contend with this week. Over at Commentary, Christine Rosen has written an essay in which she accuses the Atlantic of having a “nervous breakdown.” Per Rosen, one of America’s oldest and most trumpeted periodicals has turned into a ward of left-wing neurotics, quaking in fear over the pandemic, climate change, attractive color schemes, you name it. “The Higher Perspective of the Atlantic," she writes, “is an elite species of panic.” Call it the great Atlantic panic — it's kind of like the Satanic panic except instead of devil worshippers there’s just David Frum muttering as he checks his WiFi router for evidence of Kremlin interference. Anyone who’s read the Atlantic lately knows Rosen is exactly right.

Oliver Wiseman

Joe Biden, election truther

Biden’s ‘reset’ dismays Ukraine... Actions speak louder than words, even when it comes to press conferences. An email sent by White House press secretary Jen Psaki after Biden’s marathon Q&A with reporters yesterday to clarify the president’s comments on Ukraine and Russia confirmed what was obvious to anyone watching: that Joe Biden’s freewheeling discussion of what Vladimir Putin might do in Ukraine was a disaster. Biden said that Russia will be held accountable if it invades Ukraine, adding that his “guess” is that Putin will “move in.” But he said that the consequences Russia faces depends on what it does. “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion, and then we end up having to fight about what to do and not do,” he said.