Politics

'The gym bag, I don’t know where it went. I handed it to him. It was gone and then his hands were on me and underneath my clothes. And then he went down my skirt, but then up inside it and he penetrated me with his fingers.' That's how former Senate aide Tara Reade described a 1993 encounter with her former boss Joe Biden on a podcast last month. A Biden spokesperson says the account is 'false’, but Reade's claim is supported by a friend and her younger brother, who both say she told them about the alleged assault shortly after it happened. But most establishment media outlets, such as the Washington Post, didn’t give her allegation more than a passing mention. Biden managed to give seven interviews to the press without being asked about Reade's claims once.

Is the Trump White House fired up? Not exactly. White House spokesman Hogan Gidley tried to douse the speculation that Anthony S. Fauci is about to be sacked for his incautious remarks on CNN’s State of the Union about the merits of an earlier shutdown: 'This media chatter is ridiculous. Dr Fauci has been and remains a trusted adviser to President Trump.'The problem is that the White House has issued similarly indignant statements in the past, only to watch Trump’s wrath turn pustular on Twitter. Any future transgressions are not likely to be forgiven. For now, Trump, who prevented Fauci from responding to a question about hydroxycholoroquine a week ago at a news conference, has sent a warning shot in Fauci’s direction.

It was just a matter of time before the coronavirus was leveraged as a tool of race politics. With the US presidential campaign in suspension, Democratic broadsides against America’s white supremacy have lost a valuable outlet. Now, however, the media, politicians, and race activists have found a new theme: 'Black Americans Bear The Brunt' of COVID-19 deaths, as the New York Times put it.America’s medical personnel have gone overnight from being heroes to being bigots. Three failed presidential contenders — Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker, joined by Reps. Ayanna Pressley and Robin Kelly — have asked the CDC and the FDA to investigate doctors’ 'implicit biases'.

More and more people, I suspect, are padding about muttering lines from Psalm 13: 'How long, O Lord,...How long must I take counsel in my soul/ and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?' These are good questions. As of April 9, 2020, however, we do not have a reliable answer. You might think that the reason we don’t have an answer to these questions is because we don’t really know the insidious strength of the enemy, the new coronavirus that, with the help of the Chinese back in December and January, has made its way around the world, sickening hundreds of thousands, from Prime Minister Boris Johnson on down. I think that is only part of the answer.

Before the world went into quarantine, I had the chance to take part in a small way in some interesting discussions about the present and future of US foreign policy. Some of these involved Trump administration officials and think-tank honchos; others brought together US and European diplomats and scholars. Chatham House rules were in effect, but identifying who said what is less important than giving a sense of how hard it is for conversations on these topics to break out of old habits of thought and ideological preconceptions. The academics and policy minds of America’s most respectable think tanks, for example, still assume that the most morally edifying solution to a world problem is also the most practically effective one.

It is a time of airless boredom and mooted catastrophe. A time of robot graduations and Zoom funerals. Statesmen fall ill; serviceable lungs are envied; a sense of being in the wrong place at the wrong time has been globalized. Striding gallantly into the breach, fresh from the hygienic world of Science and Facts, is Dr Anthony Fauci. Lean and owlish, sage and institutionalized, Fauci does not stand to offer a desperate nation much it doesn’t already know — wash your hands everyone. Rather, as the subject of intensifying ribaldry, Dr Fauci may join heroes of a simpler time: Elba, Beckham, Hemsworth, The Rock.Dr Fauci (born 1940) is the subject of a petition to be crowned sexiest man alive for People magazine’s 2020 issue.

Alyssa Milano has rebranded herself as a Twitter activist and Democratic party booster since her acting career peaked with the late 90s TV hit Charmed. Thanks in part no doubt to her husband’s powerful connections in the entertainment industry (he’s a managing partner at CAA, a top-tier rep agency in Los Angeles) she’s leveraged her voice onto cable news, podcasts and into political campaigns. She is the celebrity perhaps most responsible for the mainstreaming the #MeToo movement. Her zenith as an activist came in 2018, during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. Milano was the most recognizable face behind the justice during the controversial confirmation hearings in which he faced thinly-sourced and circumstantial sexual assault allegations.