Politics Archives

Thursday

March 24, 2022

I’m done being a crazy Covid lady

I was seven months pregnant in March, 2020. I had miscarried before, and it had taken a little while to conceive, so even before the world became anxious about reports of a novel coronavirus, I was a nervous wreck. When the pandemic came in earnest, I was utterly overcome. I had been working on a live news show. Every day in late February, and even at the very beginning of March, we were telling Americans to wash their hands, but that everything would be okay. Local politicians and medical experts came on the show to tell people it was all going to be fine. This was The Before. One day, I came into the studio during a commercial.

Matt McDonald

Down with the Senate theater kids

Many failed actors work as waitstaff, or move back in with their parents. Some spiral into heroin addiction, prostitution or death. But it could be worse: a number end up in the United States Senate. This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee lent further credence to my long-held belief that anyone who declares an interest in running for political office should be committed to an asylum. The hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson bore closer resemblance to a remedial acting class than the inner democratic workings of a somewhat serious country. The right have been gorging on the clip of Democratic presidential hopeful Cory Booker giving it the full Olivier in his remarks to the judge.

Cockburn

When Clarence Thomas mocked Cory Booker

Cockburn has never thought much of Senator Cory Booker. At a time when Republicans are forever being accused of demagoguery and playing to the cheap seats, Booker does the same thing, only from the other side and with a smile firmly in place. That practiced enthusiasm was on full display Wednesday when Booker "questioned" Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. And by "questioned," Cockburn means "tossed flower petals on the ground before her while weeping uncontrollably." This clip, in which Booker praises Jackson's record and lauds her for being the first black woman nominee to the Supreme Court, went viral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk-0eryw1u0 Certainly Cockburn can understand why Jackson's nomination struck a personal chord with Booker.

Oliver Wiseman

Biden touches down in a changed Europe

Biden touches down in a changed Europe According to national security advisor Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s trip to Europe is an “opportunity to coordinate on the next phase of military assistance to Ukraine. He will join our partners in imposing further sanctions on Russia and tightening the existing sanctions to crack down on evasion and to ensure robust enforcement.” The president is in Brussels today for a NATO pow-wow and will head to Poland tomorrow. On this trip, as with the rest of the Biden administration’s diplomatic response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the emphasis is on unity. This White House has, more than anything else, sought to present a united front with European allies throughout the crisis. But are the cracks in that unity starting to show?

Wednesday

March 23, 2022

Peter Van Buren

The real Russiagate smoking gun

Hard as the programmers try and tell us there is only one story at a time — Ukraine for now — or that a trite phrase like “but her emails” dismisses one of the most important political events of our time, something sinister happened in the United States which demands our attention. If we remain distracted, it will happen again in 2024. We are looking for two smoking guns now in connection with Russiagate. Today's Part I will show that Hillary Clinton herself sat atop a large-scale conspiracy to use the tools of modern espionage to create and disseminate false information about Donald Trump. Part II to follow will show that the FBI was an active participant in that conspiracy. In the mainstream media vernacular, we are bearing witness.

Gilbert T. Sewall

Will the West Coast walk away from wokeness?

California’s June 7 primary election is heating up, fueled by broad voter distress over crime and public safety. Major contests in Los Angeles and San Francisco will be testing the force of progressive and moderate factions inside the Democratic Party. Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, appointed ambassador to India, is passing the Democratic establishment baton to Representative Karen Bass, a former head of the Congressional Black Caucus. Bass is a serious five-term party regular. But her promises to fix municipal decay — as with other Democratic assurances — ring entirely hollow. Garcetti, a man of ample mind and mixed record, crumbled on vagrancy and crime, and leaves office as a failure. Real estate developer Rick Joseph Caruso is making a law-and-order run for the job.

James Snell

Madeleine Albright was an idealist overpowered by cynics

People die at random, of course, but it seems poignant that Madeleine Albright has died at the very moment the liberal post-Soviet world has met its own, more violent, end. Her term as Bill Clinton’s secretary of state coincided with the moment America, the most powerful nation in the history of the world, sat, unknowingly, at its own apogee. The Soviet Union was newly gone. America stood peerless and unchallenged. The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the twenty years of War on Terror that followed, were still unthinkable. China’s GDP rivaled Italy’s, not America’s. Even offhand, Albright could describe America as the “indispensable nation.” Charles Krauthammer had called it early — this was the “unipolar moment.

Cockburn

WATCH: Dr. Oz insults hard seltzer, vests and finance bros in attack ad

The Dr. Oz team has gone where — Cockburn sincerely hopes — no other campaign has ventured before (or will again): on the attack against “bros.” Former hedge fund CEO David McCormick is challenging Oz for Pennsylvania’s US Senate seat, and Oz’s latest attack ad (they’ve been airing more relentlessly than MyPillow commercials in Pennsylvania) is particularly off-putting. It doesn’t so much deride McCormick himself as it does a whole class of people. A fairly inoffensive one, at that. https://twitter.com/DrOz/status/1506694900087197696?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw The ad begins with two thirty-something guys (“Chad” and “Tad”) identifying themselves as “finance bros.

Vice President Kamala Harris (Getty Images)

Cockburn

Kamala Harris is the worst kind of diva

Vice President Kamala Harris might not be the Queen of the White House, but she's still demanding some R-E-S-P-E-C-T à la the Queen of Soul. Harris — who is often affectionately referred to as "President" and "First Lady" by the actual president, Joe Biden — is the subject of another news story detailing the exhausting way she treats staff. According to a forthcoming book by New York Times correspondents Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, Harris felt slighted by White House aides not standing up when she entered a room like they did for Biden.

Oliver Wiseman

Jackson’s patriotic rebuke

Judge Jackson’s patriotic rebuke to the left As confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson enter their third day, coverage has focused more on the questions she has been asked than the answers she has given. Whether it’s Josh Hawley’s scrutiny of Jackson’s sentencing for sex offenders or Ted Cruz quizzing her on Critical Race Theory, the most bad-blooded argument over this week’s Senate drama has concerned the legitimate parameters of these presidential hopefuls’ questioning. To bypass that mostly unedifying debate, and instead to focus on Jackson’s answers, has been a heartening experience. Ever since she was introduced by Biden at the White House last month, Jackson has seemed a reassuringly earnest, patriotic and accomplished figure.

Tuesday

March 22, 2022

James W. Carden

James Clapper is still a shameless liar

Last week, the New York Times decided that now might be a good time, amid the cacophony of war abroad and soaring inflation at home, to come clean about the Hunter Biden laptop story. On March 16, the Times published a report on the junior Biden’s messy tax affairs in which, a full twenty-four paragraphs in, they acknowledged the authenticity of the emails and files contained on the now-infamous laptop.

Tony Woodlief

The myth of our coming national divorce

Viewed in one light, last week’s overwhelming rejection by the New Hampshire state legislature of a bill to put secession to a vote was a resounding win for unity in a fractious time. But it probably won’t be the last time we see such a proposal in a state house. A fatalistic argument from one of the bill’s thirteen supporters explains why: “National divorce is going to happen. It’s inevitable, and we have a chance to get ahead of this.” He may be right, if polls are to be believed. Last fall, a survey out of the University of Virginia brought the depressing news that 40 to 50 percent of Biden and Trump voters claim “it’s time to split the country.” Commentator David French declared the finding unsurprising, because Democrats and Republicans “loathe each other.

Matt Purple

Old man yells at gas prices

President Joe Biden has lashed out at fossil fuel companies, accusing them of using high gas prices to “pad their profits at the expense of hardworking Americans.” These are the same fossil fuel companies, by the way, that two years ago were charging a measly average of $1.84 a gallon. They’re also the same fossil fuel companies that in 2020 donated $1.6 million to Biden’s presidential campaign. But no matter. If nothing else, Biden’s inveighing against Big Oil takes me back to my more youthful days when progressives were less afraid to run hard against what they called “the polluters.” Back then, every oil derrick was a seething Deepwater Horizon just waiting to explode and blackface the local terns and herons.

Oliver Wiseman

The Republicans have a candidate problem

The Republicans have a candidate problem Republicans are worried about Eric Greitens. And rightly so. The front-runner in the Missouri Senate primary faces alarming accusations of violence from his ex-wife. In a sworn affidavit filed yesterday as part of a custody lawsuit, she details multiple allegations of serious physical and psychological abuse. Greitens was hardly squeaky clean before Monday’s affidavit. He resigned as the state’s governor in 2018 following allegations of sexual assault. The latest accusations have led to calls for him to drop out of the race to fill the vacancy created by Roy Blunt’s retirement.

Monday

March 21, 2022

Bobby Miller

The Ohio Senate race becomes a clown show

Two men stare down as they prepare to brawl in a made-for-TV spectacle. The cameras spotlight their faceoff as the referee restrains them from coming to blows prematurely. No, this wasn’t a promotional for the UFC heavyweight world championship live on HBO at the MGM Las Vegas. This was the GOP Ohio Senate Forum hosted by FreedomWorks. The Buckeye State has produced some of America’s greatest statesmen. It’s given us eight presidents and giants of the Senate from Robert A. Taft to the retiring Rob Portman. Now it's given us a car full of clowns. A few months ago, I wrote about how the Republican primary contest for Ohio's Senate seat was descending into madness. It’s now entered the realm of complete absurdity.

Zoe Strimpel

Andrew Sullivan searches for spirituality

It was daunting preparing to meet Andrew Sullivan, considered one of the cleverest, most fearless journalists of his generation. There is the academic pedigree: the scholarship at Oxford — where he was also president of the union and a celebrated actor — followed by the PhD in political theory at Harvard, where he produced an iconic treatise on the work of British mid-century philosopher Michael Oakeshott, performed the entirety of Hamlet all by himself — "a whacked-out mid-1980s" version — and modeled for Gap. And there is the journalistic firepower. At twenty-eight, in 1991, Sullivan became the youngest ever editor of the New Republic, America's most august political magazine.

Oliver Wiseman

Biden’s European balancing act

Biden’s European balancing act Joe Biden will head to Europe later this week for a series of emergency meetings with Western leaders. In addition to attending a trio of summits in Brussels — one between NATO leaders, one for the G7, and a special session of the European Council, Biden will travel to Poland. Of the trip to Ukraine’s neighbor, Jen Psaki said in a statement Sunday: “He will hold a bilateral meeting with President Andrzej Duda. The president will discuss how the United States, alongside our allies and partners, is responding to the humanitarian and human rights crisis that Russia’s unjustified and unprovoked war on Ukraine has created.

Saturday

March 19, 2022

Roger Kimball

Why not Trump in 2024?

I see that my National Review friends are writing their letters to Santa a bit early. Some, like Rich Lowry's recent paean to Ron DeSantis, are asking for that shiny new firetruck all the cool kids want. Others, like Charles Cooke’s febrile King Lear-like anti-Trump expostulation (“never, never, never, never, never”) hearken back to NR’s infamous "Against Trump" issue and are mostly negative: “No coal, please, Santa, and especially No More Trump!” I remember when I first heard the expression that Donald Trump “lived rent-free in the heads of his opponents.” “Vivid,” I thought, “and quite right.” Jennifer Rubin, Bill Kristol, Max Boot — the list of people obsessed with the forty-fifth president of the United States is long.

Cockburn

NY Post shames intel officials who flacked for Hunter Biden

Take Cockburn's hand and let him whisk you back to the halcyon days of fall 2020. The presidential campaign was in full swing and the New York Post had just gotten its hands on a scoop: Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, had left his laptop at a repair shop in Delaware. On its hard drive was a treasure trove of damning emails and pictures, including one that appeared to show Hunter passed out in bed with a crack pipe in his mouth. The Post published its story, the Biden campaign yelped, and the establishment duly lost its mind. The Post's Twitter account was suspended. And perhaps most damningly, fifty-one intelligence "experts" signed a letter warning that the laptop story could be Russian disinformation.

Peter Van Buren

The Hunter Biden disinformation campaign

Democrats are obsessed with the idea that when they lose elections it must be because of outside forces, usually some sort of Russian. But what we know now is that if anyone has been manipulating our once precious democracy, it has been the Democrats. The latest findings by the Durham investigation make clear that the 2016 Clinton campaign paid for and implemented a massive disinformation strategy to falsely link Donald Trump to Russia, and then worked the intelligence services of the United States and the mainstream media to drive that narrative deep into the American psyche. When Trump won, Democrats used that same strategy to try and drive him from office.