Politics

Cockburn is going to get ahead of things and announce it right now: ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is doomed. Accept it, and the pain will be lessened. Over the weekend, conservatives were piqued (as they almost always are) when the track and field athlete Gwen Berry turned her back on the American flag as the national anthem played. How could she dare sully the integrity of the women’s hammer throw in this manner? Dan Crenshaw says Berry should be booted off the Tokyo Olympic team. Ted Cruz asked why the left ‘hates America’. They should have just let it lie. Instead, the GOP has let Berry’s stunt become a multi-day controversy. And in doing so, they have sealed the anthem’s fate.

John McCain's foul-mouthed blonde scion is leaving ABC's housewife daytime program, The View. The show's token conservative firebrand, Meghan McCain, announced Thursday she would depart as a co-host at the end of the season. Cable junkies will remember McCain for her combative commentary and entertaining rows with her post-menopause colleagues. 'I'm just going to rip the bandaid off,' McCain declared. 'I am here to tell all of you, my wonderful cohorts and viewers at home: this is going to be my last season here at The View.' After four years of service, McCain revealed it was not easy to leave the show and exchanged bland girl-power pleasantries with her coworkers.

What kind of man was Donald Rumsfeld? A successful one, by almost every measure. Ivy League scholar-athlete, captain of Princeton’s football and wrestling teams. Successful candidate for office, easily reelected to Congress twice before he left to join the Richard Nixon administration. There he proved a success at navigating both the federal bureaucracy and the internal politics of the scandal-consumed administration. He survived Nixon’s resignation and soon became Gerald Ford’s chief of staff — and after that, the youngest man ever to serve as secretary of defense, taking charge of a newly-minted all-volunteer force whose morale and discipline were in shambles after Vietnam.

Joe Biden has released a new statement on gun control and it’s about as concise and coherent as you would expect. Here’s an excerpt per a White House transcript: ‘Those who say the blood of lib- — “the blood of patriots,” you know, and all the stuff about how we’re going to have to move against the government. Well, the tree of liberty is not watered with the blood of patriots. What’s happened is that there have never been — if you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.’ There’s the silver-tongued devil we all know and love.

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced to over 22 years in prison by Judge Peter Cahill on Friday for the murder of George Floyd. Prosecutors had asked the imposing punishment be closer to 30 years. State guidelines recommend a 12-and-a-half-year sentence for a first-time offender. Cahill went beyond the guidelines, citing Chauvin’s ‘abuse of a position of trust and authority and also the particular cruelty’ to Floyd. A 22-year sentence tends to be associated with more grizzly offenders. Last year, 17-year-old Jered Ohsman was sentenced as an adult by a Hennepin County District Court — the same court that sentenced Chauvin — for killing 39-year-old Steven Markey during a botched robbery.

We did it, Joe! After weeks of pressure, Vice President Kamala Harris is finally going to visit the US-Mexico border. The administration's border czar will travel to El Paso, Texas, on Friday. 'Earlier this year, the President asked the Vice President to oversee our diplomatic efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras,' VP spokeswoman Symone Sanders said in a statement Wednesday. 'As a part of this ongoing work, the Vice President traveled to Guatemala and Mexico earlier this month and will travel to El Paso on Friday.' Harris long resisted taking the trip down south, but her position became increasingly untenable with each disastrous interview and skyrocketing numbers of illegal border crossers.

J.D. Vance is the man Republicans have been praying for since the day Donald Trump stormed to the party’s presidential nomination five years ago. He has a lot of the traits conservatives liked about Trump: Vance, too, is a political outsider with proven appeal to an audience beyond politics, thanks to his bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Like Trump, Vance offers himself as an avatar for the people who have been discarded by globalization and demonized by a left-wing media and education establishment. And he is as radical as Trump — maybe more so — in his willingness to reject the merely liberal side of American conservatism. Trump defied elite orthodoxy on trade and immigration. Vance adds proposals to curb the tech companies and tax Ivy League endowments. But if J.D.