Politics

Royal summits are often lavish affairs shown to us lowly peasants through photo spreads in Us Weekly and People. Cockburn was surprised therefore to learn of a clandestine meeting between three members of the Californian aristocracy in the British tabloid the Sun. According to the newspaper, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle had a video meeting with California governor Gavin Newsom two weeks before the 2020 election. The Sun points out that Newsom was ‘under pressure to replace California senator Kamala Harris…with another black woman.’ Perhaps the purpose of the Zoom chat was innocent enough — as podcasters, Harry and Meghan are essential workers in the Golden State and deserving of the governor’s thanks.

Both political parties have always had oddballs entering their ranks, elected officials who probably aren’t fit for the job. Sometimes these situations can end in disgrace — such was the case when Republican congressman Steve King lost his committee assignments over racist comments which led his own party to back his primary challenger. But it’s often easier for parties to protect their own. So it is with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a newly sworn-in firebrand conservative representing Georgia’s 14th Congressional District. Greene checks some of the more traditional Tea Party/populist boxes, but she also brings some quirks all of her own. She’s a well-known adherent of the QAnon conspiracy theory.

There’s something about Marjorie. That would be Marjorie Taylor Greene, a freshman Republican congresswoman from Georgia who has filled a void as big as Donald Trump’s hair in the media since the Orange Man left the White House to hit the links full-time. Greene is by all accounts bonkers, or at least appears to have driven herself mad in a way that is all too common in the Trump era. She also seems to be a real nasty piece of work, at least in terms of how she comports herself with ideological — if that is even the right word — foes. The last four years have created a phenomenon by which people work themselves into a lather about Trump and 'doom scroll' to confirm their wildest hopes and worst fears. Add in a year of social isolation and voila!

President Biden has stirred some controversy in recent days by his apparent preference for the word 'equity' over the word 'equality' in dealing with social issues. Most notably he issued an executive order on housing on January 26, framed as a step toward realizing his 'agenda for advancing racial equity’. The White House 'Fact Sheet' mentions 'equity' 11 times, and 'equality' not at all. In his 'Remarks by President Biden at Signing of an Executive Order on Racial Equity,' the President employed 'equity' 10 times, stumbling once where he began to say 'equal…' Elsewhere, Vice President Harris has helpfully explained, 'There’s a big difference between equality and equity. Equality suggests, "Oh, everyone should get the same amount.

Christopher Gadsden’s famous 'Don’t Tread on Me’ flag needs to updated to 'Don’t Deprogram Me’. That’s the latest threat; if you supported the wrong candidate, you won’t just get trodden on, you’ll get therapy. Is it just me, or does being trodden on sound preferable? 'There are millions of Americans, almost all white, almost all Republicans, who somehow need to be deprogrammed. It’s as if they are members of a cult,’ Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson said of Trump supporters on January 12. Former CBS news anchor Katie Couric agreed. 'How are we going to really, almost, deprogram these people who have signed up for the cult of Trump?’ she asked Bill Maher.

Many Trump supporters are rightly upset over the Republican establishment’s abandonment of the 45th president. But those calling for the the establishment of a new ‘patriot party’ are making a grave error and could inadvertently guarantee Democratic party victories long into the future. Whether the senators, congressmen, governors and party chieftains like it or not, the Republican party has been recast as the ‘America First’ party by the most recent inhabitant of the White House. They may all want to go back — but the genie is out the bottle. The Trump agenda is still both popular and dominant in Republican primaries. There is no reason for conservatives to leave what Sen.

To this day, my iPhone still changes the word ‘too’ to ‘TPP,’ a reminder that about five years ago I must have texted frequently about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Although my phone still can’t figure out that I’ve never once intended to write the word ‘ducking’, this annoying correction happened again the other day when I happened to be watching old footage from the 1999 World Trade Organization riots in Seattle. The scene looked nearly identical to antifa’s summer of discontent just a few months ago, with largely Caucasian, black-clad, masked-up youth throwing a temper tantrum in one of our nation’s central business districts. Even those rioters’ chants were identical to today’s far-left. ‘Whose streets? Our streets,’ they bleated in the video.

What’s the worth of the 'word as a Biden'? President Joe Biden seems sure that his family name is as good as gold. He repeatedly tells the American people that they should trust him because, well, he’s a Biden! ‘I give you my word as a Biden: When I'm president, I will lead with science, listen to the experts and heed their advice, and always tell you the truth,’ Biden tweeted back in March 2020. He used the line again after taking office, tweeting, ‘I gave you my word as a Biden — and I kept that word.’ But what’s the actual value of a Biden word? The American people still haven’t received an additional $1,400 to bring the total of their recent stimulus check to $2,000.

‘He’s keeping us safe.’ So goes the mantra of the COVID-19 pandemic. In places like New York and California, shutdowns were excessive, harsh and mostly redundant. But what the leadership in those states offered was the perception of safety. And people bought it. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom was caught dining out at his state’s top restaurant with a large group of lobbyists in November. He needed to show he meant business in fighting the virus, even as he himself engaged in pleasure. So he closed all dining, indoor and outdoor. California had to fight. California had to win. California has a higher seven-day case rate now than it did then, and much fewer ICU beds available, yet the stay-at-home order is lifted and restaurants can open for outdoor dining once again.

The fog of the Trump wars is lifting, the road from COVID-19 rising before us, the outlines of the 21st-century American system emerging. Like the bankruptcy in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the change has happened ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’ The age of the democratic republic is over, the age of the American oligarchy beginning. Oligarchy is the ‘rule of the oligos’, the few: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a self-sustaining elite. It sounds quaint, classical even, as though it couldn’t happen here because it already happened there. But it has, in fact, already happened here. Augustus Caesar, who made himself Rome’s first emperor in 27 BC, would recognize the symptoms of our American novelties.

With Rob Portman’s announcement that he will not seek a third term in the US Senate, the two questions of the hour are: can Democrats do what they did in Georgia to take the seat? And who will run for his seat? The first is easy to answer: no. Ohio isn’t Georgia, as it lacks a mega-city such as Atlanta where Democrats can run up huge numbers. With the population exoduses out of Democratic strongholds Cleveland, Toledo and Akron-Canton over the last 20 years married to the conversion of blue-collar Democrats to Trump Republicans, winning statewide in Ohio for the first time would be very hard for Democrats. Plus, the Democratic bench in Ohio is wafer thin, with only Rep. Tim Ryan being possibly viable statewide.

Joe Manchin could be the most powerful man in the Senate. The senior senator from West Virginia is the last Democrat hanging onto federal office in a state that twice voted for Donald Trump by 40 points, but he doesn’t always toe the party line. Of the ‘defund the police’ movement that gained traction on the Left over the summer, Manchin says, ‘Defund my butt.’ If you were unsure about federal funding of his posterior, he went on to elaborate: ‘We do not have some crazy socialist agenda, and we do not believe in defunding the police.’ Manchin described a Democratic proposal to continue trying to impeach Trump after the 45th president leaves office as ‘so ill-advised’. Yet he did not vote to acquit Trump in his Senate trial last year.

January 20, 2021 saw Joe Biden become the second Catholic to be inaugurated as president. His installation was hailed by many as an historic moment of progress for Catholics in American public life. The New York Times today labeled him 'perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century'. To be sure, his campaign for the White House made every effort to play up his religion, a far cry from the almost apologetic tone John Kennedy was made to strike more than 50 years ago. Some too, perhaps inevitably, have compared Biden to Al Smith, the New York governor who in 1928 became the first Catholic to lead a party ticket for the White House. But make no mistake, Biden is no Smith — indeed, they differ wildly on their vision for religion and the public square.