Politics

Just before 11 p.m. on Tuesday June 1, 18-year-old Kennedy Hobbs of Jackson, Mississippi stopped at a gas station off of Medgar Evers Boulevard to gas up. She had graduated from Murrah High School in Jackson that same day and was on her way to a graduation party. While at the gas station, she made a phone call. While talking, she was shot multiple times by an unknown person and died on the scene. Details are murky and police are still investigating, but at this time it doesn’t appear that Hobbs knew the shooter. Like many other cities, Jackson, whose population is almost 82 percent black, has experienced a surge in violent crime over the past two years. Its murder rate is one of the highest in the country.

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.

It’s a good thing that Vogue’s nauseating profile of Jill Biden — sorry, I mean Dr Jill Biden, EdD — wasn't published in North Korea. The censors in North Korea long ago cottoned on to smartypants writers who think they can get away with mocking the Dear Leader or government policy by being ironical, sarcastic, or speaking tongue-in-cheek. Irony is illegal in North Korea because it can so easily be a cover for mockery. As of this writing, Merrick Garland, Dr Biden’s attorney general, has yet to make irony a sign of domestic terrorism or white supremacy, though whether that is an oversight or is simply something he hasn’t gotten round to yet is unclear. I have it on the authority of anonymous sources close to the principals that Gene.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s office harbors a 'chaotic' atmosphere where staffers are treated 'like shit', according to a Politico report published Wednesday. The Beltway gossip rag cited nearly two dozen 'current and former vice presidential aides, administration officials and associates of Harris and Biden’. Many sources blame Harris and Tina Flournoy, her chief of staff and longtime consigliere, for the toxicity and dysfunction. For example, Harris's recent trip to the US-Mexico border reportedly blindsided staffers responsible for handling travel arrangements, forcing them to complete everything at the last minute. 'People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it's an abusive environment,' said the one unnamed source.

President Biden’s White House, like his jaw, is made of glass. But you have to give the 78-year-old credit: he never stops throwing stones. As he took the podium on Wednesday to introduce his new ‘anti-crime’ bill, Joe’s hypocrisy was dazzling. The man who once told his wife that if she were ever concerned for her safety, she should take a ‘double-barrel shotgun and fire two blasts outside the house’, lectured the American people on ghost guns, ‘F-15s’ and nukes. With his usual mix of slurring and smugness, Biden mocked gun owners with dismissive jokes about their right to bear arms.

Nothing could be more predictable than media coverage of the catastrophic building collapse in Surfside, Florida. Cable news will feature it because the story is both shocking and eye-catching. Their obvious problem is that the cable channels have hours of air-time to fill and precious little real information, beyond dreadful pictures and interviews with bereaved friends and family and others who escaped the tragedy. To save hours of watching this low-information disaster footage, the best thing is to read the story on your favorite website and watch very little TV. That is true of every breaking-news news story where real information is scarce at first.

Isn’t normality great? That’s been Joe Biden’s selling point from the beginning, ‘normality’. Back in March 2020, the former conservative Bill Kristol announced that Biden represented the ‘simple’ choice for the ‘normal American’. Biden wasn’t Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders — but especially, just between us, he wasn’t Donald Trump — ergo, etc. Achilles was the ‘swift-footed’. Ronald Reagan was ‘the Great Communicator’. Joe Biden is — what? People talk about ‘gaffes’, but that is unfair. A ‘gaffe’ is a clumsy social error, a faux pas. Emitting gibberish when you can’t remember the most famous line of the Declaration of Independence is not the same thing as committing a gaffe.

President Joe Biden will honor Pride Month this Friday — just before meeting with the leader of a country where the maximum penalty for sodomy is death. Biden 'will deliver remarks to commemorate LGBTQ+ Pride Month,' the White House announced this week. And later, 'the President will welcome Afghanistan president Ashraf Ghani and Afghanistan High Commission for National Reconciliation chair Abdullah Abdullah to the White House to highlight the enduring partnership between the United States and Afghanistan as the military drawdown continues’. Staffers will undoubtedly rush to box up the rainbow neck beads and Pride flags when Biden steps off stage to avoid an awkward bump in the hall when Ghani rolls up to the West Wing.

The Republicans need to separate the MAGA from the message. The Democrats are already doing this. While congressional Republicans pander to MAGA, which is now a racket for conspiracy theorists and the con artists who exploit them, the Biden administration is lifting Trump’s policies and stealing the Republicans’ thunder. Trump’s ‘America First’ has become Biden’s ‘Made in America’. The Democrats now offer almost everything that Trump promised — and sometimes more. At home, infrastructure spending, rebuilding the industrial base and reshoring essential supply chains; plus subsidies for the wallet-sapping disaster that is Obamacare.

The future of the GOP is the same as the future of the Democratic party. That is because the parties are not two things, but (to compare low things with high) somewhat akin to that union described in the Catholic creed: ex patre filioque procedit: ‘it proceeds from the father and the son’, one substance, two faces (well, three, really, but we can leave that to one side). As I have had occasion to observe elsewhere, the current political disposition of the United States is not a two-party system. It is at most a one-and-a-half party system. There is a regime party, which basically calls the shots. And there is a junior, adjunct party that has different branding but sells mostly the same goods under different labels.