Politics

One of my favorite photos of all time comes from a 2012 March Madness basketball game that then-president Barack Obama attended with then-British prime minister David Cameron. The picture captures the two men perfectly. It shows Obama sitting courtside with a hot dog in his hand pointing and lecturing in that quintessential Obama way, while Cameron glowers and appears to contemplate all the places he’d rather be — getting an endoscopy, bombing Libya, anywhere else on the planet, really. The question inherent in that photo isn’t why Obama appeared to be hectoring a European ally: Obama would have hectored the Dalai Lama if given the chance. The question is: what was the most powerful leader on earth doing at a Mississippi Valley State basketball game in the first place?

Donald Trump was over an hour late for his first speech since leaving the White House at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida. The former president finally emerged at 4:47 p.m., kissing the American flag as the PA system blasted Lee Greenwood’s ‘God Bless the USA’. He waited, applauding the crowd for the duration of the song before beginning his prepared remarks at 4:50 p.m. ‘Hello CPAC — do you miss me yet?’ he asked the crowd. Trump quickly laid to rest some of the stories that have swirled since his departure from office. ’We’re not starting new parties,’ Trump said. ‘We have the Republican party…that was fake news.’ He then launched into the issue everyone expected him to tackle: immigration.

The Conservative Political Action Conference is in full swing. The ACU has upped sticks and thrown its annual shindig in Orlando rather than its usual home in National Harbor, Maryland. Former president Donald Trump is to give his first speech since leaving office tomorrow and the leading lights of the Republican party — Ron DeSantis, Kristi Noem, Ted Cruz, Mike Pompeo — have been making their cases to be 2024 nominee (or Trump’s VP) on the main stage. But you know all that. You’ve seen it on Twitter. That’s not what you read Cockburn for. You want to hear about the cocktails, the ruckus, the maskless flirting, all the unbridled diesel-strength freedom the great state of Florida has to offer.

I still believe we are in an emergency and that the pandemic requires attention now. But it seems President Biden and congressional Democrats are having a difficult time understanding what ‘emergency’ means. If they did, they surely would not have pushed legislation that spends almost half of the funds after this fiscal year and 10 percent of it three years from now. The legislation proposed by President Biden is a sleight of hand, pretending to fund the critical components of our recovery — vaccine production and distribution — while doling out taxpayer dollars to groups, industries and special interests that are still sitting on funding from last year’s coronavirus relief bills.

What will the conservative movement look like post-Trump? Establishment Republicans seem eager to shake former President Donald Trump's influence on the party and the new right would like him to be a kingmaker for years to come. But while pundits opine and politicians dream, three young conservatives are building. American Moment, a new nonprofit organization founded by Saurabh Sharma, Nick Solheim and Jake Mercier launched Wednesday. The organization is dedicated to reshaping the political class to reflect populist priorities. Sharma is the former Chairman of Young Conservatives of Texas, Solheim the founder of The Wallace Institute for Arctic Security and Mercier an independent writer and editor.

Why is Neera Tanden, Joe Biden's nominee to head up the Office of Management and Budgets, stumbling where his other cabinet picks have sailed through confirmation? The senators who say they won't vote for her see her as an obstruction to Biden's efforts to govern in a bipartisan manner. 'Neera Tanden has neither the experience nor the temperament to lead this critical agency,' Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said yesterday. 'Her past actions have demonstrated exactly the kind of animosity that President Biden has pledged to transcend.

Immigration, a top issue before and during the Trump presidency, has become much less of a concern for Americans over the past year due to the primacy of the pandemic and the ensuing economic shutdown. That, combined with the press's lackadaisical approach to covering the Biden administration, means there hasn't been enough media scrutiny of Biden's incoherent border policy. Frequently the Biden administration's words do not match its actions, primarily because it does not seem to understand that policies have real-world consequences. For example, after Biden campaigned on loosening Trump's stricter enforcement of immigration law, thousands of Honduran migrants formed a caravan to come to the US in hopes of gaining entry. The Biden team tried to put the genie back in the bottle.

I support Nancy Pelosi’s call for a '9/11-style inquiry' into the mêlée at the Capitol on January 6. I do so not because I think there is any valid analogy between the terrorist attack on the United States by Muslim fanatics on September 11, 2001 and the low-level riot at the Capitol. There isn’t. On 9/11 some 3,000 innocent people were murdered, billions of dollars of property was obliterated and important symbols of American economic and military might were attacked, utterly destroyed in the case of the World Trade Towers, seriously damaged in the case of the Pentagon. On January 6, a pro-Trump rally got out of hand despite the president’s instructions to proceed to the Capitol 'peacefully and patriotically’.

So one disaster wasn’t enough for you, Ted? You had to create a new, very personal one by hightailing it to Cancun together with your wife Heidi and the girls to stay at the oceanfront Ritz-Carlton. Texans may shiver but Ted didn’t quiver. Instead, he made a run for the sun. The irony isn’t rich; it’s gluttonous. For Cruz has made a career out of mocking the establishment in a role as an avatar of the Tea Party. He may have attended Princeton and Harvard Law together with the young swells, but he always made sure to let everyone know that he was made of better stock than them. He was a man of the people, just plain folks Ted, not hifalutin Rafael, who liked nothing better than to spend his weekend nailing an eight-point buck.

Someone needs to tell Joe Biden he is the President of the United States. Yesterday he made his first real appearance before the country at a CNN town hall in Wisconsin. Even with pitched softballs from the host Anderson Cooper and a friendly, carefully chosen audience, Biden looked unfocused, unsure of statements from his own administration and off-balance on the two most important issues facing the country: reopening schools and foreign relations with China.  Candidate Biden was presented to the country as the anti-Trump, the passive-voice grandfather who was going to give America a Werther’s Original and regale us with some great stories and make us all feel better.