Politics

'Why are you so hooked on that?' Joe Biden asked a reporter in Iowa Thursday. She’d asked him to label President Donald Trump a white supremacist. 'You want me to say the words so I sound like everybody else. I’m not everybody else. I’m Joe Biden.' 'I’ve always been who I am,' the former vice president said. 'It’s like everybody wants everybody to call someone a liar. And then you say - "I don’t call people liars." I say they don’t tell the truth. You want me to say "liar" so you can put it out and you can say "Biden called someone a liar." That’s not who I am. You got the wrong guy.' https://twitter.com/JTHVerhovek/status/1159561051601612802 Of course, this prompted howls of indignation on social media.

The Democratic party, mired in infighting only a week ago, has reunited over racial division. New Jersey senator Cory Booker stated in a speech on Wednesday in Charleston, S.C., that the recent acts of white nationalist violence received a stimulus 'from the highest office in our land, where we see in tweets and rhetoric, hateful words that ultimately endanger the lives of people in our country.' Joe Biden took direct aim at President Trump: in an impassioned speech in Burlington, Iowa, he declared, 'in both clear language and in code, the president has fanned the flames of white supremacy in this nation.' A day earlier, Fox News host Tucker Carlson tried to douse the controversy over white nationalism by averring that the phenomenon is a 'hoax.

Does anyone in their right mind really think the ‘War on Terror’ waged by the United States since 9/11 has been a successful policy? , The terrorist group the US claimed it was most determined to destroy, al-Qaeda, has surged in strength over the last few years. ISIS sprouted in Iraq and Syria as a direct consequence of the general ‘War on Terror’ posture, which had its most egregious manifestation in the 2003 invasion. Today, the US bombs countries and stations troops all over the world with the nebulous goal of ‘defeating terrorism,’ which of course is just a tactic and can never be truly ‘defeated’ – or so we once thought.Back in the George W.

Sen. Kamala Harris has been positioning herself as a supporter of sex worker rights lately. But listen closely when she talks about the issue and a different story emerges. It's a disconnect that highlights Harris's larger pattern of obscuring her positions, plans, and past. Twice when asked outright about the decriminalization of prostitution — first by Terrell J. Starr of The Root and then during a televised CNN townhall — Harris has answered in a way that's been characterized as supportive. But both times she has described her preferred system as one in which ‘johns’ would still be arrested. That is not decriminalization. Decriminalizing prostitution means neither paying for nor selling sex is illegal so long as it takes place between consenting adults.

There is not much to say about mass shootings. The violence horrifies us, depresses us, we move on — on social media, this process can take a few seconds. The other media routine follows: endless, circular debates on guns are given another spin in the barrel. If the killer is white, somebody important (step up Beto O’Rourke) angrily says it is Trump’s fault. That invites anger in return. Culture wars subsume the story. Sometimes, a frightening viral video emerges, or what hacks call a ‘disturbing insight into the mind of the killer’. These excite our emotions a little longer. Deranged maniacs know that, which is why we now increasingly see their ‘manifestos’ — long pseudo-intellectual declarations of purpose — posted online.

Eric Swalwell, we hardly knew ye. And we might add that what we did know did not leave us pining for more. Swalwell, a fourth-term congressman from California, became the first candidate to drop out of the Democratic primary last month, citing his poll numbers, which were hovering around zero percent. He’ll be remembered mostly for the armory of rakes that he upended into his own face, from his Twitter push poll on banning ‘assault weapons’ that’s still recording a sizable pro-gun majority to the awkward silence that greeted his ‘I’ll be bold without the bull!’ campaign motto to his informing CNN that they might have to leave Georgia over the state’s new abortion law.

Here we go again. Another Trump nominee bites the dust. This time it is Rep. John Ratcliffe, who tried to pass himself off as a seasoned practitioner in the secret world of intelligence. It turned out that the dour Texan didn’t even show for meetings of the House Intelligence Committee he served on, let alone prosecute any terrorists, as he claimed on his résumé. If there was ever a case of all hat and no cattle, Ratcliffe is it.True to form, Trump himself put out a lachrymose message on Twitter, bemoaning the hostility of the news media to his favored pick. Trump babbled, 'Our great Republican Congressman John Ratcliffe is being treated very unfairly by the LameStream Media.

It’s no great mystery why Tulsi Gabbard chose to focus her ire on Kamala Harris last night in Detroit. For months, Harris has gotten away with empty identity-related sloganeering and shallow performative stunts, like the one she pulled on Joe Biden in the previous round of debates – which of course was received rapturously by much of the media, leading to bogus claims of a Harris 'surge.' Meanwhile, left unexamined was the phony central conceit of Harris’s campaign: that she is a ‘progressive prosecutor’ and therefore supremely well-qualified to make the case against Trump. This mantra has long been ripe for a proper dissection, given its utter ridiculousness.

No sooner did Donald Trump announce the resignation of Dan Coats than the handwringing began in Washington. Coats, an establishment Republican, was the only man who could stand up to Trump. He was tough on Russia. He wouldn’t water down intelligence reports. Almost overnight he was converted into a wise man whose wisdom made him a model of rectitude and probity. In reality, Coats is something of a hack who was occupying a position that should never have been created in the first place. George W. Bush capitulated to conventional wisdom in Washington by vastly expanding the national security bureaucracy after September 11. Trump’s apparent instinct to gut the agency has been put on the back-burner. Now he’s substituting an even worse hack in the form of Rep.

‘You would think you were in a Third World country,’ the millionaire white New Yorker of retirement age said of Baltimore’s heavily black Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood in 2015. There is nothing remotely racist about this statement. We know that because Bernie Sanders said it. Yes, the Bernie Sanders who lives in whites-only Vermont and whose inability to connect with a key group of the Democratic base means that he has what the pollsters call an ‘African American problem’. It was, however, disgracefully and irredeemably racist of President Trump to refer to Rep. Elijah Cummings’s Baltimore district as a ‘disgusting rat and rodent infested mess’ and a ‘very dangerous & filthy place’.

Millions of Americans could get a pay hike if a Democrat wins the White House. Most of President Trump’s 20-plus challengers have vowed to raise the minimum wage to $15, up from $7.25 today. Front-runner Joe Biden said the move was long overdue. Elizabeth Warren opined that doing nothing threatens the survival of the American family. And Bernie Sanders – who has long championed raising national pay standards – said it’s time companies pay their workers, 'a living wage.' The idea isn’t new. Wage hikes have already been approved by lawmakers in several blue states including California, Illinois and Massachusetts (Massachusetts’s minimum wage is set to always be higher than the federal average).