Politics

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.

It’s no fun to see Bill Clinton in a virtual vacuum. He’s a people person, a glad-hander, a back-rubber, a donor-stroker, a bottom-fondler. But on Tuesday night, Clinton was a prisoner of Zoom. The big dawg had no legs to rub against.Clinton probably felt as bad about it as his audience. No extended ovation and whooping. No chance to mingle in the green room and offer a White House internship to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Not even an over-long embrace of Rosalynn Carter or a back massage from Jeffrey Epstein’s 22-year-old masseuse after an arduous journey on a private jet to Africa.Tuesday Night was Legacy Night at the Democratic convention, which is not in Milwaukee even though it claims it is.

If there's been one hallmark of the Trump campaign's messaging against Joe Biden, it's that the former VP is the real racist. Biden repeatedly misrepresented Trump when he claimed that the President called neo-Nazis and white nationalists 'very fine people'. He also was wrong to accuse Trump of xenophobia when he shut down travel from China following the coronavirus outbreak. The Trump campaign hasn't just pointed out these falsities, but launched a counteroffensive aimed at proving that Biden is actually the candidate who has a problem with race.

Kamala Harris is no radical. Indeed, no matter how vaguely inclusive the label ‘progressive’ may be, Harris’s long record as a California prosecutor makes it difficult to shoehorn her professional career under that rubric. The real Kamala Harris is a liberal careerist with no deep convictions whose ability to woo wealthy supporters allowed her to win a seat in the Senate.Harris’s story bears extensive similarities to that of Barack Obama. Born biracial to two academically-gifted parents, a contentious divorce found young Kamala being raised by her mother in a linguistically foreign country — French-speaking Montreal, rather than Indonesia. And, like Obama, Harris’s younger sister is named Maya.

Kamala Harris’s selection as the Democratic vice presidential nominee has been touted as the remarkable success story of a daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica. It is that. But it also represents the dramatic ascendency of a subset of the Democratic party that used to be dismissed as the ‘loony left’ of politics: the ‘San Francisco Democrats.’ The phrase ‘San Francisco Democrat’ was coined by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, who brandished it as a weapon at the 1984 GOP convention in Dallas. San Francisco was where the Democrats nominated Walter Mondale to challenge Reagan.

More than half of registered voters support President Trump using executive action to bypass Congress and extend coronavirus relief measures, according to a new poll. Trump opted to sign a series of executive orders this past Saturday rather than wait for Congress to reach an agreement on legislation as a prior relief package was set to expire. Democrats and the White House met repeatedly over the past couple of weeks, but despite making 'progress' both sides said they were still too far away to be even close to making a deal. A new poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies and provided exclusively to The Spectator found that 51 percent of voters agreed that it was right for Trump to take executive action under these circumstances, while just 24 percent disagreed.

SeattleSo the revolution devours its children. On Tuesday, Seattle’s police chief Carmen Best announced her retirement just hours after the city council had voted to strip her department of roughly 130 of its 1,400 officers, with more such cuts promised in the future. Best, 54, was Seattle’s first black police chief. She had served in the department for 28 years. Announcing her departure, Best remarked: ‘It’s not about the money. And it’s not about the demonstrations in our city. Be real. I have a lot thicker skin than that.’‘It’s really about the overreaching lack of respect for the men and women who work so hard, day in and day out,’ Best added.

News of Kamala Harris’s selection as Joe Biden’s running mate was greeted by everything but the popping of champagne corks by my right-wing friends at lunch. The consensus of the policy wonks, policy makers, businessmen and journalists at my table was that Harris is good news for Donald Trump. ‘She’s unlikable’ and ‘she’s a cop’ were the instant reactions — though if Harris really were a cop, and not a former prosecutor, she might find some support among Americans horrified by the riots in Chicago, Portland and everywhere else that’s succumbed to left-wing Democratic control. I expected Harris all along, ever since Biden imposed a sex test on his list of potential running mates.