Politics

It was like an Elvis sighting. ‘WHERE’S HUNTER,’ Trump kept bellowing in his tweets. Well, there was the recently reclusive 50-year-old lobbyist Hunter Biden, the black sheep of the family, who almost brought down his pappy’s campaign with his Ukraine shenanigans. He looked youthful with his hair slicked back, dark suit, white shirt, and blue tie, appearing at the Democratic convention together his sister Ashley to endorse him for president. Hunter probably will retreat back into seclusion for the duration of the campaign, but it was a smart move to feature him so prominently, a version of the courtroom tactic of getting the unpleasant facts before the jury before the prosecution can air them.

Joe Biden’s speech was effective in many ways and sure to please his supporters. But anyone who expected him to say something substantive about his policies left empty-handed. He did little more than spin gauzy pictures of a rosy future.First, the good news for Biden supporters. He looked strong, never stumbled, and delivered the speech with remarkable empathy, energy, and modulated tones. His performance showed no traces of the confusion he has shown occasionally or the cognitive decline he has been charged with. He was at his best.Biden also made the best of his strongest quality: he’s a likable guy, whose tragedies have made him deeply sympathetic to others facing their own difficulties. He’s not faking that, and it shows.

Good evening. Ella Baker, a giant of the civil rights movement, left us with this wisdom: give people light and they will find a way. Give people light. Those are words for our time. The current president has cloaked America in darkness for much too long. Too much anger. Too much fear. Too much division. Here and now, I give you my word: if you entrust me with the presidency, I will draw on the best of us not the worst. I will be an ally of the light not of the darkness. It's time for us, for We the People, to come together. For make no mistake. United we can, and will, overcome this season of darkness in America. We will choose hope over fear, facts over fiction, fairness over privilege.

‘Have you guys been following 4Chan?’ asks Marjorie Taylor Greene in a 2017 video. A mysterious ‘patriot’ named ‘Q’, Greene explains, is prophesying the downfall of satanic ‘swamp creatures’ in Washington, DC, Hollywood and other liberal fiefdoms. Is Greene a kind of female Alex Jones? No: she is now a Republican congressional candidate in Georgia and, in all likelihood, headed for the House of Representatives. Only weeks ago, an investigation by Facebook discovered thousands of groups and pages, boasting millions of members and followers, dedicated to QAnon conspiracy theories. In July, Twitter banned more than 7,000 accounts associated with the movement.

In 2004, Democratic senator Zell Miller spoke to the Republican National Convention in New York City. Focusing on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Miller spoke about being a Marine and how partisanship should be put aside for patriotism, especially in a time of war. ‘What has happened to the party I've spent my life working in?’ Miller wondered.His speech brought the house down. I was in attendance and no speech from that convention was more memorable than Miller’s. Compare Miller’s speech to the one given by Republican former governor John Kasich to the Democratic National Convention on Monday night. Miller spoke of patriotism and past instances of statesmen putting aside their partisan strife to work together for a better America.

'I'm in love — but not with anybody here. I'll see you in a couple years,' Billie Eilish crooned during the third night of the Democratic National Convention. The teen vocalist was singing her new single 'My Future’, but the lyrics could just as easily be a rallying cry for the young progressives kicked in the teeth yet again by the Democratic establishment. Democrats love to boast about their youth support and the party’s future generation of leaders, but their convention displays a political party that is fully enamored with the past. It's not wrong for them to make the calculation that young people don't vote and thus they're better off trying to bring in moderates who sat out 2016 or held their nose and voted for Trump.

When 83-year-old New Jersey congressman Bill Pascrell shared a photo of American lawmakers meeting a Chinese trade delegation in Washington in 2018, he probably didn’t expect it to go viral on Weibo. (You wonder, rather cruelly, if the congressman is familiar with the term ‘viral’ at all.) But it did go viral — gleefully and potently viral — on Chinese social media. Why? The picture showed two delegations at a table. The Chinese look young, or at least they do when sat opposite the Americans. They look grizzled in the original sense of the word: like gray-haired old men. This image was cannily juxtaposed on Weibo with another one, taken in 1901 in Beijing, at the close of the Boxer Rebellion.

On night two of the Democratic National Convention, Jack Schlossberg, son of Caroline Kennedy and grandson of President John F. Kennedy, hammered a cynical final nail in the coffin of the more palatable and moderate party that his grandfather once represented.Speaking in a slight lisp, Schlossberg, who was named in 2017 to Vanity Fair’s ‘best dressed list’, intentionally perverted one of the most iconic quotes in American political history.‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,’ John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address on January 20, 1961.On Tuesday evening, the former president’s grandson tossed that old-timey sentiment aside, while still trying to capitalize on JFK’s memory.