Politics

‘While it is true I was abusive to my ex-girlfriend,’ writes Aaron Coleman, the improbable candidate for a seat in the Kansas State House, ‘I do not agree with the characterization being made about our experience in the hot tub the day after Christmas.’ This is such a morbidly evocative sentence. Abusive. Hot tub. Day after Christmas. It is a novel in 30 words.Coleman, who is 19, first came to prominence when he was found, in the aftermath of an underdog triumph in a Kansas primary, to have committed acts of bullying and ‘revenge porn’ five years previous. ‘He got one of my nudes and blackmailed me with it,’ said a victim:‘And told me if I didn’t send him more he would [send] it to all of my friends and family...

BaltimoreRepublicans are an oddity in Baltimore. Perhaps some older Americans remember Spiro Agnew, but that’s more or less it — until now.About a year ago, Kim Klacik was a local GOP leader in Baltimore County. Today, she has nearly 400,000 Twitter followers along with an endorsement from President Trump in her campaign for Maryland’s 7th district. What exactly sparked this fame? Klacik showcased the rat-infested, crime-ridden streets of Baltimore for the nation.‘Do you care about black lives?’ Klacik asked in a viral campaign video. ‘The people that run Baltimore don’t. I can prove it. Walk with me.

The Atlantic has stunk up an otherwise beautiful Labor Day weekend with a uniquely ugly story. Anti-Trump editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg claims that Donald Trump snubbed a World War One American cemetery in France because ‘it’s filled with losers’, and the Doughboys buried there are ‘suckers’. Goldberg also asserts that ‘Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain’ on November 10, 2018.President Trump categorically rejected the Atlantic’s tale. He called it a ‘total lie. It’s fake news. It’s a disgrace.’‘I was ready to go to a ceremony,’ Trump told journalists at Joint Air Base Andrews Thursday night.

At the Republican National Convention last month, Donald Trump was repeatedly described as the ‘most pro-life President ever’. According to some rather sensational leaked official notes in Sunday’s Daily Telegraph, however, Trump has said he regards abortion as ‘such a tough issue’. Addressing the then British prime minister Theresa May, who is childless, Trump said in January 2017: ‘Imagine some animal with tattoos raping your daughter, and then she gets pregnant.’ Aside from the staggering crassness of this remark to a woman who is on the record about her inability to have children, it also suggests that Trump is not as pro-life as many in his party would have voters believe.

Though Joe Biden has now accepted that violence is occurring in many major American cities and has started blaming Donald Trump for it, many of his supporters haven't gotten the memo. A new trend among some high-profile left-wingers is to gaslight Americans by posting daytime photos of well-to-do areas of cities undamaged by the riots as proof that the riots aren't real. Meanwhile, tear gas and fires engulf entire blocks at nighttime. Josh Campbell, a former FBI agent and CNN contributor, kicked off the trend by tweeting September 1: 'Good morning from wonderful Portland, where the city is not under siege and buildings are not burning to the ground. I also ate my breakfast burrito outside today and so far haven’t been attacked by shadowy gangs of Antifa commandos.

For decades, Washington think tanks were vital to a virtuous revolving door. Young policy professionals, both Democrats and Republicans, would serve time in government, then remove themselves to think tanks where they further honed their professional skills and rethought issues, then go back into government at a slightly higher level. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 put a spike in that revolving door, shattering its mechanism. Not only were Democrats barred from the Trump administration, but so were the most talented of Republicans who, having assumed Trump would lose, declared themselves in opposition to him and thus disqualified themselves from work in his administration.

Does Nancy Pelosi’s unfortunate trip to a hair salon have any news value? Or is it much a hairdo about nothing? Compared to the big stories of the day, it hardly matters. The country faces violent disorder, we’re unsure who will become our next president and millions of people are trying to get back to work and school. To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, 'It doesn't take much to see that the problems of one person getting a shampoo and blow-out don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.' But even in this crazy world, Pelosi’s misstep deserves some attention because it so perfectly encapsulates a larger, more troubling problem. Insiders like Pelosi are allowed to play by a different set of rules than the rest of us.

The unthinkable happened on Tuesday night: a Kennedy lost an election in Massachusetts for the very first time. Thirty-nine-year-old Rep. Joe Kennedy, III, the only prominent member of his storied family’s fifth generation, lost his primary bid for his state’s Senate seat. He was bested by incumbent Sen. Ed Markey, 74, who has held it since John Kerry resigned to become Secretary of State in 2012. Together with his 36 previous years in the House of Representatives, Markey has served in Washington longer than his freckled opponent has been alive. Given Massachusetts’s solidly blue politics, Markey will certainly win reelection in November, leaving him in the Senate until he is an octogenarian, while young Joe will be consigned to political oblivion as of January.

After months of trying to spin the nationwide unrest as 'mostly peaceful' or ignoring it entirely, Democrats have discovered some fresh messaging: the riots are violent and they're Trump's fault. Joe Biden seized on this new storyline during a campaign speech in Pittsburgh on Monday, telling voters that Trump is 'stoking violence in our cities.' 'This president long ago forfeited any moral leadership in this country. He can’t stop the violence — because for years he has fomented it,' Biden asserted. This is one of the most dastardly and dishonest schemes the Democrats have ever cooked up.

Bill Clinton, in a speech heralding China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2000, remarked that ‘by joining the WTO, China is not simply agreeing to import more of our products. It is agreeing to import one of democracy’s most cherished values, economic freedom. The more China liberalizes its economy, the more fully it will liberate the potential of its people — their initiative, their imagination, their remarkable spirit of enterprise. And when individuals have the power, not just to dream but to realize their dreams, they will demand a greater say.’It is by now glaringly obvious that this vision didn’t come to pass. For far too long, ‘End of History’ hubris dominated western engagement with China, and hubris led to nemesis.

I never understood why Plato wrote so harshly about democracy. Was he simply bitter over the death of his beloved mentor Socrates? And could his criticism of direct democracy in ancient Athens apply to a representative democracy like ours? Right now, the United States is looking increasingly Athenian. Plato characterized the birth of Athenian democracy as a rejection of expertise. The masses, previously content to defer to experts who knew what was good for the city, were led to believe that they could determine the good for themselves — and that the ‘good’ was whatever they subjectively found pleasurable.

I’m not an election prognosticator. I have no magic insight telling me what will happen on November 3, 2020. Frankly, I have zero idea. But what I do have is a great memory and some polling data that suggests Joe Biden’s media-assisted campaign is headed for an eerily similar crash landing to the one that happened in 2016. The media has once again sealed itself in a suffocating bubble, within which the impossible Trump victory can’t happen. The Democrats find themselves strapped to a low-energy candidate who is a bystander as social upheaval scorches battleground states. It has the look and feel of fall 2016. Democrats, start panicking now. First, Joe Biden’s poll numbers are starting to tighten.

Over the past week, Washington, DC has turned into a truly dystopian nightmare. Diners at several area restaurants, including the famous Martin’s Tavern in Georgetown, were accosted by a Black Lives Matter mob that bullied them into raising their fists in solidarity with the movement. Restaurant patrons who refused to comply faced further verbal abuse and harassment. The trend continued outside the White House on Thursday night. Attendees of President Trump’s acceptance speech during the Republican National Convention were thrown to the wolves as they left the event, and were chased and screamed at as they made their way back to their hotels. Kentucky senator Rand Paul and his wife Kelley received some of the most aggressive harassment.