Politics Archives

Saturday

November 20, 2021

Kyle Rittenhouse is still no hero

Kyle Rittenhouse did nothing wrong in law, but this does not mean he did the right thing in going armed to Kenosha. Much of the right is celebrating him as a patriot for taking arms against a sea of troubles, and as a poster child for the Second Amendment. He is neither. He is a liability for both of those causes. The right to bear arms is just that: a legal right. Choosing to bear them publicly is another matter: an ethical choice. Rittenhouse’s defense was that he was legally innocent because he was ethically innocent. Despite growing up with guns, he seems to have been unaware of the adult commonplace about bearing them: if you produce a weapon, you should be prepared to use it.

Taylor Millard

Yes, Build Back Better will raise the deficit

The fate of the Build Back Better plan is now in the hands of the Senate. The House approved the gargantuan $1.85 trillion bill on Friday despite efforts from Republicans to delay the vote. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy played the role of Rand Paul or Ted Cruz, railing against the legislation in an over eight-hour-long speech. The Associated Press suggests that McCarthy viewed his talk-a-thon as an opportunity to show his conservative bona fides should Republicans take control of the House in 2022 and he decide to push for the speakership. “This is a tipping point,” McCarthy said on Friday morning as he wrapped up the speech. “This is a point of not coming back. The American people have spoken, but unfortunately, the Democrats have not listened.” Which Americans?

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Does Liz Cheney want to be a Republican?

Last weekend, the Wyoming GOP Central Committee voted not to recognize Liz Cheney as a member of the Republican Party by a margin of 31-29, a vote that was much closer than those taken in some county committees, a number of which made the unanimous decision to disavow her. The action does nothing to reduce Cheney’s power and position as Wyoming’s sole congressional representative, and in any case it seems increasing likely that the lady no longer cares what her constituency Way out West thinks of her. Last weekend Cheney, together with Representative Jim Clyburn, the House Majority Whip, and Chris Wallace of Fox News, each accepted a Jefferson-Lincoln Award bestowed by the Panetta Institute for Public Policy on Dr. Wallace’s Sunday show.

Friday

November 19, 2021

Amber Duke

Justice for Kyle Rittenhouse

The fundamental right to self-defense won today. A jury in Kenosha acquitted teenager Kyle Rittenhouse on all counts related to allegations that he murdered rioters who attacked him. The prosecution’s case rested on the insane lie that legally carrying a firearm is an incitement to violence. Rittenhouse, they argued, was akin to an active shooter and thus deserved Joseph Rosenbaum, Anthony Huber and Gaige Grosskreutz chasing him, trying to take his rifle, hitting him in the head with a skateboard and pointing a handgun at his head.

Kyle Rittenhouse reacts to "not guilty" verdict (Getty Images)

Oliver Wiseman

Kevin McCarthy’s magic minute

A magic minute and magic maths Why did House minority leader Kevin McCarthy deliver a speech that lasted a whopping eight and a half hours last night? After all, his filibuster will not stop the House from passing the Democrats’ $1.75 trillion social spending bill, which will be voted on shortly after lawmakers reconvene this morning. But in much the same way people don’t run marathons to get from A to B, McCarthy’s demonstration of rhetorical stamina was designed to prove a point. “I am a fighter” was the intended message and the GOP caucus was the intended audience. For McCarthy wants the Republicans to win back control of the House next year, and he wants to be the one handed the speaker’s gavel if they do.

Peter Van Buren

The selfish and cynical ‘resistance’

It's bad enough when someone actually thinks reposting an "I Stand With..." meme is an act of woke resistance. But when the problem is enlarged to a societal scale, it hurts us all. Nothing actually broken ever gets fixed, and a deep sense of cynicism is injected into once-believers when they realize they've been conned. We live inside a con job where the appearance of action is mistaken for action. So we are left to wonder about the point, other than setting the stage for more future cynicism, of the Google "doodle" this past Veteran's Day. The illustration showed various vets, all appropriately racially ratioed, drawn half in uniform and half in civilian garb. One's a painter, one's a baker, and the Marine is shown as trans.

Matt Purple

Congress: worst anime ever

Yes, yes, I know Congress has a lot to worry about these days. But have you seen the anime edit videos? Over now to Crazytown's favorite son, Congressman Paul Gosar, who this week found himself on the butt end of a censure hearing. His crime? He had retweeted an anime video that depicted a likeness of himself killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with a sword before also attacking Joe Biden. This was, according to the scrupulously nonpartisan Nancy Pelosi, an "emergency," worthy of a criminal probe, and possibly a threat to the republic as we know it. We're 100 words in and already you may be thinking: what in God's name is wrong with the United States Congress? If so, be assured that this is a perfectly healthy rumination and one you should keep repeating on a near-constant basis.

Thursday

November 18, 2021

Matt McDonald

Infrastructure Republicans aren’t ‘traitors’

Are you a Republican — or did you vote for the infrastructure bill? That’s the binary choice offered to House GOP members by the right-wing of the party. The thirteen representatives who voted to pass the landmark legislation find themselves in the sights of not just their fellow members of Congress, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn, but also former president Donald Trump, whose list of primary targets grows longer by the day. In a Saturday email, Trump called for “good and SMART America First Republican Patriots to run primary campaigns” against both the members who’d voted for the infrastructure bill and the members who had voted to impeach him for causing the January 6 storming of the Capitol. “You will have my backing!” he asserted.

Alexander Larman

How Meghan Markle wins the White House

In October, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, made her most significant political intervention to date. She marked her fortieth birthday by writing an open letter “as a mom” to Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, and asked Congress to legislate for paid family leave for new parents. Markle may have thought she was pushing at an open door: the Democrats were striving to include paid family leave in the Build Back Better Act. But this may not be the only open door Meghan is pushing at. Seasoned observers will notice the Markle trademarks in the letter. There is the folksy appeal to her humble heritage: “I grew up on the $4.99 salad bar at Sizzler... I knew how hard my parents worked to afford this because even at five bucks, eating out was something special, and I felt lucky.

Daniel McCarthy

Who won the Cold War, anyway?

Thirty years ago this December 26, the impossible happened. One of the bloodiest states of the twentieth century (a horrific and highly competitive category) dissolved without violence. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had all but ended months earlier, when Russians took to the streets to defy the communist hardliners who had seized the government from an impotent Mikhail Gorbachev. That popular countercoup was itself largely bloodless: the soldiers called upon to enforce the hardliners’ rule refused to shoot their own countrymen. The Cold War is often said to have ended with the toppling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Had things turned out differently in Moscow two years later, the struggle might well have resumed.

Stephen L. Miller

How Kyrsten Sinema brought Gen X to the Senate

Kyrsten Sinema doesn’t care. She doesn’t care about your tweets. She doesn’t care about the constant vitriol from Jacobin-lite bloggers. She doesn’t care about CNN’s Manu Raju chasing her down the halls of the Capitol to ask her about the filibuster or “voting rights” for the fifth time that day, every day. She doesn’t care about what Chuck Todd is saying about her on Sunday mornings. She doesn’t care what the astroturfed Act Blue-funded activists are saying to her while they film her in the restroom. She doesn’t care about Joe Biden or his faltering presidency.

Alex Perez

Latinas are the shape of things to come

When we focus on the rise of the Hispanic male Republican, we overlook the emergence of his consort and counterpart, the right-wing Latina. Donald Trump made gains across the board with Hispanics in the 2020 election, but the media fixated on “multiracial whiteness” and “toxic masculinity” in the voting choices of Hispanic men. Meanwhile, Trump gained more votes between 2016 and 2020 among Hispanic women than any other sector of the electorate. The woke tell themselves that Hispanic men, with their supposed chauvinism and machismo, control the lives and voting choices of the Latina. But the opposite is the case. The Latina, with her preternatural seduction skills, holds the power in the relationship. If her curves sway to the right, the men, as they always do, will follow along.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Wokeness is the return of white supremacy

There are white people in this country and elsewhere who rank human beings by race, with the whites at the top, blacks at the bottom and everyone else in between. They are convinced that whites have a divine or natural right to rule, and they abhor racial intermarriage. They are a minuscule minority, here and elsewhere. White supremacists hold no government power. Their resources are negligible. They gather in obscure places, online as in person, and their conventions are ridiculous spectacles in which the costumes are as odious as the fantasies are pathetic. It wasn’t always like this. From about the sixteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, the world was theirs to exploit. Western politicians, thinkers and scientists theorized freely about racial hierarchy.

Oliver Wiseman

A radical regulator faces the Senate

Will Biden’s radical comptroller get the nod? You’ve probably never heard of Saule Omarova. A professor at Cornell Law School, she is hardly a household name. She is also Joe Biden’s pick for the job of Office of Comptroller of the Currency and her Senate Banking Committee hearing will be held today. OCC is one of those important jobs that doesn’t generally capture the headlines: its officeholder is the nation’s top banking regulator. Omarova is popular among progressives. Elizabeth Warren has called her “an excellent choice to oversee and regulate the activities of our nation’s largest banks.” But her nomination has earned outsized attention because of some eyebrow-raising details in Omarova’s backstory and her views on economics.

Wednesday

November 17, 2021

Oliver Wiseman

The White House thinks you’re stupid

The White House thinks you’re stupid Whether things are going well or badly, presidents are almost always awarded too much credit or blame for the state of the economy. As the White House is eager to point out, Joe Biden cannot eradicate inflation or solve the supply chain crisis with the stroke of a pen. What he can do, though, is help. He and his advisors can listen, try to understand the struggles of American households and act accordingly. Faced with this option, however, the Biden administration has instead chosen to stick its fingers in its ears. On the massive spending bill that Congress is set to vote on soon, the Biden administration has not swerved. No recent events have persuaded senior Democrats that anything about the legislation needs to change.

Tuesday

November 16, 2021

Oliver Wiseman

The ‘disinformation’ delusion

The disinformation delusion This week sees the release of the Aspen Institute’s report on “Information Disorder.” The commission responsible for the publication assembled representatives of the great and the good, including noted Ginsburg censor Katie Couric and First Amendment hater Prince Harry. This latest blast in the war on “disinformation” trots out the usual arguments in favor of greater supervision over the news we all consume. “Merely elevating truthful content is not nearly enough to change our current course,” they argue. By now the double standards and missteps of those who want to “flag,” ban and de-platform their way to a healthier democracy are well established.

Monday

November 15, 2021

Amber Duke

Rittenhouse prosecution shoots from the hip

There are three basic rules of gun safety: always keep your firearm pointed in a safe direction, always keep it unloaded until you're ready to use, and never put your finger on the trigger until you're ready to shoot. Thomas Binger, the lead prosecutor in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, violated two of those three rules in the courtroom Monday. Binger, who has built most of his case on Rittenhouse's decision to carry a rifle to the Kenosha riots last summer, pointed a rifle at the crowded courtroom with his finger directly on the trigger. It was a stunning bookend to the prosecution's fantastical argument against Rittenhouse, and the latest reminder that those who wish to take away your right to defend yourself with firearms know next to nothing about them.

Lead prosecutor in Kyle Rittenhouse case Thomas Binger (YouTube Screenshot)

Cockburn

Kamala Harris, unprotected

Are you a sexist and a racist? For her supporters, that’s the only possible explanation for why Vice President Kamala Harris is so unpopular. A pair of dovetailing pieces this weekend in Politico and CNN extensively document how hard done by the Veep feels by the Biden administration. CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere and Jasmine Wright write that Harris allies “fume that she's not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined” and that Harris herself “has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she's able to do politically.” Politico says that Harris’s “allies outside of the administration have argued she’s been set up for failure by the portfolio she’s been handed.

Stephen L. Miller

Joe Biden’s sacrificial presidency

The worst kept secret in Washington, DC is that Joe Biden is a one-term president — whether he knows it or not. This weekend, palace intrigue stories from Politico and CNN pitted Vice President Kamala Harris against Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. The kids are fighting over Grandpa Joe’s inheritance before he’s even cold. Biden doesn’t acknowledge this. He’s signaled multiple times that he intends to run for a second term in 2024. He has been trying to capture the White House for over thirty years. He’s not just going to give that up willingly as he managed to go from party punchline to party patriarch in the span of one election. But to believe the choice is up to him is to believe that his staggering fall in poll numbers is imaginary.

Oliver Wiseman

The collapse of Kamala Harris

Rising to the China challenge This evening, Joe Biden and Xi Jinping will meet virtually in a bid to reduce rising tensions between the US and China. The remote tête-à-tête comes at an important time, after a Chinese Communist Party declaration that marks Xi as among the greatest figures in its history, with the outlines of the Biden administration’s China policy now visible, and with no shortage of contentious issues for the two leaders to discuss. Foremost among these issues is Taiwan, the pinch point where Chinese ambitions and the West’s defense commitments are most likely to collide.