Politics

Mob rule There was no shortage of discussion of January 6, 2021 in the twelve months that followed. The few hours during which a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol have been exhaustively raked over by newspaper reporters and deployed as a talking point by television pundits. The riot is regularly nodded to by Democratic politicians as justification for everything from an overhaul of voting laws to increased infrastructure spending. Even those on the part of the right who would rather pretend it never happened occasionally find themselves having to explain, contextualize or acknowledge events in the US Capitol a year ago today. And yet, the actual events of January 6 have a way of getting lost in the endless, unedifying and often bad-faith January 6 discourse.

Jeffrey Epstein is dead and Ghislaine Maxwell stands convicted of numerous human trafficking crimes, but many of their alleged co-conspirators remain at large. Victims on both sides of the Atlantic claim they were preyed upon by the high and mighty but the predators remain unindicted and, as yet, unaccountable. Among the most high-profile of these alleged abusers is Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and ninth in line to the British throne. The Duke, the third child of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, faces a civil lawsuit by Virginia Roberts (now Giuffre), whom Epstein recruited as a sex slave when she was still a minor. Roberts claims that Epstein and Maxwell trafficked her to Andrew in March 2001. She then met and danced with Andrew at a London club.

Biden's inflation nothingburger Joe Biden seems to have decided who is to blame for inflation: big business. After months of mixed messaging and empty spin on one of American voters’ top concerns, the administration has settled on its pre-existing commitment to antitrust action as the best medicine for rising prices. In its latest antitrust move, the White House yesterday unveiled a package of measures designed to target market concentration in the meat processing industry. Biden announced that he would be sending $1 billion to independent meat processors and enforcing stricter rules for “Made in America” labeling. Other measures include a streamlined process to report anti-competitive behavior and greater transparency in the cattle market.

The first workday of 2022 and already Washington, DC has been paralyzed by snow. That isn't saying much, given that half an inch is enough to shut things down around these parts. As a kid growing up in Connecticut, I remember countless snowy mornings when I'd wake up early, pad downstairs, turn on the listings, only to be devastated to learn that school was only delayed by half an hour. Cut to DC, where they'll close the schools because it's cold outside. So it goes in our thin-blooded nation's capital. And in fairness, the fact that many federal employees are still working from home has mitigated the paralysis somewhat. Still, a city needs to move in order to work, and it's there that the literal gets at something figurative.

Mom, can you come pick me up? They’re talking about a national divorce again. This time, it’s the Party of Lincoln fantasizing about separation. Marjorie Taylor Greene sparked the latest round of divorce discourse amid speculation about visitation rights for blue-state transplants to red America. She mused that proposals for punitive taxes and a “cooling off period” of suspended voting privileges for new arrivals were “all possible in a National Divorce scenario.” Right on cue, blue-checkmark cholesterol levels shot into the stratosphere. To her credit, Greene clarified that she was “clearly…not in favor of divorce” in a thread she posted the next day. “You know what is necessary about threatening a divorce?

If you think politics was insufferable in 2021, just wait until the New Year. The midterms are around the corner, so before the incessant campaign ads begin, I’d like to suggest a few New Year’s resolutions for our political class. Let’s start at the top with the president of the United States, Joe Biden. Perhaps Joe, who as usual is on vacation in Delaware, could begin 2022 off by firing his speechwriters. I have long suspected that saboteurs lurk in the White House. Who in his right mind would put the word “Galapagos” into a Biden speech? There is a double agent in the Biden-Harris administration who is trying to trip up the 79-year-old — so whoever it is needs to hear two of the last president’s favorite words: “You’re fired.

The thing about an annus horribilis is that eventually it's supposed to end. Yet this has not been the case with 2020, which incidentally, according to the Chinese calendar, was a Year of the Rat, proving that the universe can be just a bit too literal sometimes. Dashed were the hopes that 2021 would be a fresh start, that the endless problems of 2020 would dissolve into the ether like so much smoke at a mostly peaceful protest. Instead this year began like it was going to be even more 2020 than 2020 was. Six days into 2021 and we'd already suffered an event so jarring that it's now denoted by just a date.

After five days of deliberation spanning the Christmas holiday, a federal jury in the Southern District of New York today found Ghislaine Noelle Marion Maxwell guilty of five of six counts of human trafficking for her actions over ten years in multiple US states.

We’ve all learnt to wash our hands more carefully over the last couple of years, but no one has soaped his dirty digits as fastidiously as Joe Biden. His announcement that “there is no federal solution” to Covid-19 puts him up there with history’s greatest handwashers. Like Pontius Pilate, Biden is leaving it to the mob: “this gets solved at the state level.” Unlike the procrastinating procurator who surrendered his responsibilities to the jeering Judeans, Biden’s got it right. But it won’t save him from the jeers — and nor should it. Biden won the presidency on a promise of the federal solution that he now says doesn’t exist. It didn’t exist in 2020, either.

After months of yelling about how important at-home testing kits are, Joe Biden forgot to buy them. Oops! In his address on Tuesday, the president told Americans, “We also need to do better with at-home testing. So, I’m announcing today: the federal government will purchase one half billion — that’s not million; billion with a 'B' — additional at-home rapid tests, with deliveries starting in January.” But according to the New York Times, the half billion with a “B” tests are some ways out: “Mr. Biden’s administration has not yet signed a contract to buy the tests, and the website to order them will not be up until January.” The president’s potential successor Pete Buttigieg once wisely said that there are two kinds of Christmas shoppers.

Vice President Kamala Harris has been quoted as saying her media coverage would be better if she were a white man. She is absolutely right. She wouldn’t have bad coverage. She wouldn’t have any coverage at all. That’s because she would still be a minor senator from a big state, not the second-highest official in the Executive Branch. She was selected only because she has the identity-politics markers so important to Democrats. It should be obvious by now that Harris is a terrible politician. When friendly reporters toss her softballs, she swings, misses and blames them. When she is given hard policy assignments, she swings and misses those, too. (In her defense, her main assignment, immigration, is President Biden’s failure, not her’s.