Politics

Tell me how you judge Brett Kavanaugh, and I’ll tell you who you vote for. In a divided polity, Kavanaugh cuts a Janus-faced figure. He’s that rarity, a Bushie who made good in the Trump era, but also he’s the favorite jurist of immigration restrictionists. He’s the almost too wholesome basketball dad, but he’s also the sex-predator threat to American womanhood. His swearing in was widely seen as a victory for conservatives, and raised fears of on the left that the bench was tipping right. But many on the right feared his triumph would be Pyrrhic: too much political capital had been spent on a justice with a record to the left of Antonin Scalia. ‘Trust the process,’ former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told me last year on Kavanaugh.

I am embarrassed to admit that when William Barr became Donald Trump’s Attorney General a couple of months ago, I did not remember that he had been here, done that as George H. W. Bush’s Attorney General back in the previous century. They did have television back then, however, and students of history, as well as students of politics, can profit from watching Barr’s original confirmation hearings, presided over – drum roll, please – by a younger, much more acute Joe Biden, who, like the poor, we seem to have always with us. It’s a long clip, but very much worth sampling, especially for the adroit, no-nonsense performance of William Barr and mildly challenging but still respectful performance of Joe Biden. What a difference a few decades make!

The Republicans are the party of racists and religious bigots, and the Democrats are the party of anti-racists and religious tolerance. That’s why 21 Democrats from the almost entirely Democratic Congressional Black Caucus refused to comment when it emerged in 2018 that in 2005 they had met secretly with Louis Farrakhan. He, of course, was at it again on Thursday night, eliciting a vast and telling silence from CBC members with racist incitement against ‘Satanic Jews’.

Who’s the biggest loser? Joe Biden’s third try for the White House might look as doomed as Hillary Clinton’s run in 2016, but so far, Biden has followed a different and more promising trajectory. Instead, it’s Bernie Sanders who’s shaping up to be the Dems’ high-profile also-ran. Clinton peaked in popularity — and polling — ahead of her 2015 announcement. Her status as the assumed nominee helped her clear the field. Only the villain from The Wire dared challenge her in the establishment lane at any length; big names like Biden, John Kerry and Andrew Cuomo all preferred not to obstruct the Clinton succession.

The media verdict is clear: the Democrats abhor President Trump’s foreign policy, and the Democrats aren’t really going to talk about it. ‘Democrats want to challenge Trump’s foreign policy in 2020. They’re still working out how,’ reports Vox. ‘Democrats are playing down foreign policy. It’s shrewd — and it may be a mistake,’ opines the Washington Post. ‘Why Aren’t Democratic Presidential Candidates Criticizing Trump’s Foreign Policy?’ wonders Reason magazine. And on it goes. Behind the scenes, however, it’s a frenzy, with the hiring of foreign policy advisers way up. For the Democrats, 2016 was a two-horse race, with a heavy front-runner in the familiar form of Hillary Clinton.

Ah Biden, Sleepy Joe, the gaffe machine from Scranton, Penn. He’s familiar to everyone, but an unknown quantity as a presidential candidate for 2020. Yes, he has failed before, twice. Yes, he’s doddery. But he keeps coming top in the polls and we keep being told that President Trump fears him the most. One thing is certain, however: for as long as Biden’s campaign goes on, he’ll boob and boob and boob again. His ability to say something stupid is mind-boggling. And in a perverse way, it is one of his strengths as a candidate. His near-senility makes him strangely memorable. Recall the Summer of Trump in 2015, when the Donald blew up the news cycle at least once a day with some outrageous remark?

The world, or at least Twitter, awoke Saturday morning to an extraordinary series of retweets from the site’s most infamous user, @realdonaldtrump. Among those he retweeted: Paul Joseph Watson, the controversial Alex Jones adjacent; Lauren Southern, the right-wing internet celebrity and filmmaker, and for good measure, an account called ‘Deep State Exposed’ which seems most intent on exposing Islam’s quest for global dominion. https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanet/status/1124097191952441349 ‘Lmao [laugh my ass off],’ said Southern, in a missive, again, retweeted by the president of the United States.

Did House Democrats actually want Attorney General William Barr to show for Thursday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing? No chance. The Committee knew at latest Sunday that Barr did not plan to appear under the additional strictures Democrats had decided to impose on a typical House hearing. They could have sent a subpoena. Instead, they waited for Thursday to advance the #ChickenBarr narrative and assert that the Attorney General is somehow evading the withering interrogation Democrats had planned. Democrats hoped a Barr questioning would provide their dozens of presidential contenders with viral YouTube moments.

William Barr took paternity of the Mueller report during his testimony before Congress today, declaring ‘It’s my baby.’ All that was missing was him breaking out into song, ‘I’ll say yes, sir, that’s my baby/No sir, I don’t mean maybe/Yes sir, that’s my baby now.’ Indeed it is.Barr may be Attorney General, but there was no Solomonic splitting of the baby. Barr fought a battle with an invisible Robert Mueller for possession, claiming that his old pal’s letter to him complaining about ‘public confusion’ as a result of the rollout of the report was, in fact, ‘snitty.

Since the release of the Mueller report, with each passing day comes a new and increasingly strident demand to impeach Donald Trump. The New York Times, Washington Post, and various prestige magazines are cluttered with such demands, casting impeachment as an imperative for the survival of American democracy. Mueller might have affirmatively concluded that no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia ever came close to being established, but that hasn’t stopped Democrats and their journalist allies from barreling full-steam ahead down this rabbit hole.