Politics

The Washington Post issued a mammoth correction this week on a story about Donald Trump's search for election fraud. The paper had admitted that they misquoted the former president twice. WaPo’s botched story is a cautionary tale of what happens when political biases cloud reportage and a reminder of why public trust in the media is so low. The original story, which was reported in January and written by Amy Gardner, broke the news that Trump had a December phone call with Georgia's top election investigator about the 2020 presidential election results. The scoop was sourced to an 'individual briefed on the call', who claimed Trump urged the official to 'find the fraud' and promised she'd be a 'national hero' if she did so.

Over the weekend, the two-hundred-and-forty-second woman to accuse Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment came forward. That number is no less true for being inaccurate. It seems you can’t open a newspaper these days without reading about some horrible Cuomo come-on at an Albany Christmas party or a Manhattan cocktail hour. How’s it going for Democrats seeking a left-wing foil to Donald Trump? They seem to have gotten all of the vices with none of the humor. Of course, Cuomo deserves his due process like everyone else. But the accusations do seem credible and certainly fit with his hard-charging bull-in-a-bodega persona. There’s also the matter of the governor’s other scandal, which has been swept under the rug despite it involving the mass death of old people.

If your facts don’t care about my feelings, then my feelings aren’t obliged to care about your facts. The facts in Joe Biden’s energetic, inspiring and exhilarating address to the nation last night were frequently as unsteady as the speaker. But the feelings that Biden expressed were, unlike the previous president who must not be named, unimpeachable. He knows how it feels, he said with that now-customary surge of anger, as if he’s not fully in control of his frontal cortex. And we know how it feels when someone says they know how we feel. Consider everything fixed: COVID, racism, opioids, deficits, the collapse of the schools, the children at the border. The Therapeute-in-Chief is here, dispensing serotonin the way Barack Obama dispensed drone strikes.

Eighteen months ago, liberals attempted to link the spike in anti-Semitic hate crimes to white supremacist actions. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and the ADL highlighted the activities of white supremacist groups in upstate New York, despite all of the assaults being in the New York City metropolitan area, overwhelmingly perpetrated by black men. This culminated with black men killing Jews in Jersey City and Monsey, New York. Attempts were then made to rationalize them away rather than focusing on the anti-Semitic beliefs of black-nationalist groups, including the Nation of Islam. The same dynamics seems to be unfolding with the current spike in anti-Asian hate crimes.

As I write, jury selection for the murder trial of Derek Chauvin is about to begin in Minneapolis. You remember Derek Chauvin, right? He is the (former) policeman charged with the murder of St George Floyd, race martyr (also drug addict, woman abuser, and career criminal). Chauvin and his three colleagues disgusted civilized opinion last spring when a bystander’s video clip of Officer Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck was released. Nine minutes. Chauvin kept Floyd pinned to the ground for some nine minutes. ‘I can’t breathe,’ Floyd can be heard crying. An ambulance eventually came to whisk Floyd off to hospital. Too late. Floyd died, murdered by the brutish policeman who cruelly, gratuitously, asphyxiated him by kneeling on his neck, cutting off his air supply.

The last thing anyone would accuse Joe Biden of is being overstimulated. But the Senate’s rapid approval of his pandemic aid plan, or American Rescue Plan, as it’s officially called, should be more than enough to put a spring in his step. It’s a victory that may even power the Democrats to victory in the midterms. Captious progressive Democrats will complain that the bill isn’t generous enough. They already are. But House Democrats will dutifully line up next week to pass it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to blow this. After four years of the Trump era, sensible Democrats know that this is their chance to spend big even if it isn’t as bigly as the Squad would prefer.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday in one of the most important cases for voting rights in decades. Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee centers on two Arizona measures aimed at voter integrity. The first prevents individuals from casting their ballot in the wrong precinct and the second prohibits ballot harvesting. The question at stake is whether these measures and others like them violate Section Two of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits election rules from disenfranchising minorities. The DNC's lawyers seem to argue that any election safeguard measure is discriminatory. If Biden thinks people of color don't know how to use the internet, then the DNC thinks they can't follow election laws.

On Wednesday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi dragooned all but one Democrat into voting for her total rewrite of the nation’s election laws: House of Representatives Bill 1, or HR 1. The final vote was 220 to 210. The bill now goes to the Senate. Republicans promise a filibuster there to stop it. Every American should hope they succeed. HR 1 would cement all of the worst changes in election law made in blue states in 2020 and nationalize them. Federal control of elections would be the norm, with states relegated to being colonial outposts that carry out Washington DC’s mandates.  Two amendments to impose yet more federal controls failed before final passage.

Neera Tanden will not be the next director of the Office of Management and Budget. The Biden administration quietly withdrew Tanden’s nomination last night, finally facing up to the daunting odds of her being confirmed. Accounts of this ill-fated nomination vary. Some on the right see Tanden as a sacrifice to distract from the greater threat of HHS nominee Xavier Becerra, described by Nebraska’s Ben Sasse as a 'culture war supersoldier'. The press, inclined to view the world through a Kremlinological lens, interprets it as an indictment of White House chief of staff Ron Klain’s leadership. Klain was by all accounts Tanden’s biggest supporter in the West Wing and shares many of her conspiratorial and bombastic tendencies, especially on Twitter.

It’s hard to keep them all straight, but among the many diktats emitted by the Biden administration during its first days in office, one deserves special commendation for its brazen mendacity. I mean the ‘Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government’. The key word, as we’ve heard over and over again these last few weeks, is ‘equity’. The diktat (a more accurate term for what is happening than ‘Executive Order’) promises ‘a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all’ by ‘affirmatively advancing,’ well, ‘equity’. If you think you discern a little whiff of tautology, you’re right. You are also right if, on second sniff, you catch the acrid scent of contradiction.

‘I wonder if you might do a “notebook” on living in Chicago at the moment,’ my London-based editor inquired via email. ‘The latest crime figures are quite shocking.’ I asked which shocking crime figures he had in mind. We have quite a selection. More than 4,000 people were shot in Chicago in 2020 and a few dozen short of 800 were murdered — an increase of more than 50 percent on 2019’s tally. For the past few years almost as many people have been slain in Chicago as in New York and Los Angeles combined, although those cities taken together have four times the population. Then again, perhaps my editor was thinking of carjackings, up 283 percent in January compared to a year ago.