Politics

Back in the summer of 2015, all the cleverest people made fun of Donald Trump for obsessing about China. One of them even made a video compilation of the candidate saying 'China' over and over again on the hustings. Ha ha ha. It seems distinctly less funny now. There is a reason that the novel coronavirus is popularly denominated the Wuhan flu or CCP virus. As Bill Gertz observed in How China's Communist Party Made the World Sick, 'the world does not need to prove that the communist regime in Beijing was responsible for the escape of the coronavirus from a lab' in order to cast a jaundiced eye upon its many malefactions.

This COVID-infected campaign season has brought more than its fair share of surprises. Virtual conventions, turnover at the top of the Trump campaign, sudden swings in previously steady polls. It’s a year like no other, Still, one pillar of presidential electioneering remains: Joe Biden needs to pick a running mate.The vice presidency is a peculiar office: at once vestigial and essential. The office has few defined duties. We’ve all read the quote of John Nance 'Cactus Jack' Garner — FDR’s first VP — who described it as 'not worth a bucket of warm piss’. Yet as Garner’s successor’s successor Harry Truman showed, who a candidate picks to play second fiddle can be one of a presidential aspirant’s most monumental decisions.

Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he is demoting his current campaign manager Brad Parscale to the role of senior adviser and will be putting Bill Stepien in charge of the campaign. The shakeup comes less than four months before Election Day and follows a series of polls showing former vice president Joe Biden with a formidable lead over Trump. The move is not altogether shocking — rumors swirled around DC weeks ago that Trump was growing increasingly unhappy with Parscale's ability to run the campaign amid the coronavirus shutdown and the nationwide riots. The failed rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma only soured the President's view of Parscale further.

Is the Death Star about to implode? Trump campaign manager (at least at this writing) Brad Parscale bragged some weeks back that he was about to pull the big guns out to demolish the Biden campaign — a 'juggernaut campaign (Death Star)'. It was a weird comparison considering the Death Star goes down for the count in two Star Wars movies. But then again, Parscale is also the guy who stated that millions were pining to show up at Trump’s ill-fated rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Since then, Trump canceled another rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, claiming that bad weather had forced his hand. Not much is going well for Trump, who seems about as stable as Emperor Palpatine these days.

The decluttering crusade of home-organizing guru Marie Kondo has taken on a life of its own. Kondo’s effort to shame us into tidying up our drawers, closets and desk spaces began as a harmless inanity. But it’s now intruding nefariously into every realm of existence. First, we were told that folding our underwear would spark joy in our lives. Now, we face a proliferation of magazine articles advising us to declutter ourselves of ‘unnecessary’ or ‘toxic’ friends. Clearly, not all friendships are healthy. But these assessments appear driven by market forces: they focus on what you can gain from a friend in terms of efficiencies and profit. Where does it stop?

The Supreme Court has ruled in June Medical Services, LLC v. Russo that the dismemberment and removal of unborn human lives was more important than a woman’s right to a high standard of care. From now on, no reasonable person can view the pro-life movement’s strategy — voting Republican, often with noses held and hoping that some future conservative majority will defend life — as anything but a failure. The foul spirit of Anthony Kennedy’s ‘mystery’ has possessed John Roberts and will no doubt possess some other ‘conservative’ host after him. Matthew Walther suggests a new strategy for the pro-life movement: if you believe that the Court’s rulings on abortion are illegitimate, you should act on your belief.

‘I understand black lives matter. But that’s not my movement, right now. My movement is to let them know that was my son. Horace Lorenzo Anderson was my son.’ And his son is dead. In a gripping, gut wrenching, heartrending, half-hour interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News, Horace Lorenzo Anderson, Sr tearfully beseeched social justice warriors and anyone watching that his son’s black life mattered, too. Horace Jr. was just 19 years old when he was shot and killed at Seattle’s Capitol Hill Ongoing Protest (CHOP), the police-free, six-block city encampment created with the blessing of Democratic officials.

In an opinion column for the New York Times, Thomas Friedman proposes that Joe Biden debate Donald Trump only if the President meets two conditions. Trump must release his tax returns and agree to a non-partisan panel of fact-checkers. The fact-checkers, he says, should point out the debaters’ errors in real time and conclude the event by summarizing their findings. Among really bad ideas, this one is a prize-winner. Let us count the reasons why. Trump’s failure to release his tax returns is a legitimate issue to debate, not a precondition for one. Biden is free to raise it on the campaign trail and debate stage, just as Hillary Clinton did. Remember, the voters have already dealt with this issue once.

It’s a difficult time to be a pollster. For roughly 40 years, phone surveys have been the go-to polling method. Now, the internet is marking its territory.Just six percent of Americans answered phone surveys in 2018, continuing a steady decline in the new millennium that experts attribute to increasing instances of spam calls. Pew Research found little correlation between polling response rates and accuracy, but there are lingering concerns over the cost of these studies.‘For phone surveys the trend line up in cost and trend line down in participation are problematic,’ Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research at Pew, told me. ‘In five to ten years, if not sooner, those trends may not be sustainable.

Does anyone actually remember George Floyd? What started out as a noble cause to curb police brutality in urban and African American communities has morphed into a corporate crusade of ne'er do wells tossing out woke distractions to keep the Instagram millennial mafia off their backs, as well as the looting for likes and posing for photos on the hoods of police cars, all in the hopes of a viral snap for Instagram, TikTok or Twitter. We’ve seen hordes of entitled white women from Georgetown in Lululemon Yoga gear shrieking at black police officers about their privilege and r/Chapo antifa larpers tearing down statues of Ulysses S. Grant or berating older black people about their history. And let’s not forget that goddamn racist elk statue in Portland.