Society

Hunter Biden is now the subject of multiple stories involving serious corruption. Whether he committed any crimes is a question for prosecutors and the courts. Whether he was paid handsomely for his family’s political clout is a question for voters.You wouldn’t know that from ABC's pathetic town hall with his father Joe Biden on Thursday night. They spoke with him for 90 minutes and didn’t ask a single question about the shocking emails published by the New York Post. That’s either journalistic malpractice or public-relations work. After all, the emails raise profound questions that the candidate needs to answer. They appear to show his son, Hunter, repeatedly using his last name to fill his pockets.Hunter’s family is his only asset.

The lockdown is dead...long live the lockdown?In an interview last Thursday on Spectator TV, WHO special envoy David Nabarro warned seven months too late that the ubiquitous global response to the coronavirus pandemic might be a bit of an oopsie-daisy: https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1314573157827858434 ‘We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,' Nabarro said. ‘Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer... It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.’Now, there was nothing astonishing about Dr Nabarro’s claims.

Two-hundred-and-thirty-three. That is the combined age of the three co-chairs of the Commission on Presidential Debates, an organization which has become embroiled in several eyebrow-raising incidents in the past three elections. (Candy Crowley anyone?)The debates haven’t revealed much this election season. Trump is being Trump and Biden is allowed to skate by without answering questions. In fact, the most consequential revelation has been how ill-equipped the Commission for Presidential Debates is for the moment, and for the future. The Commission finds itself as the focal point of the debates, thanks to their choices of moderators and their on-the-fly rule changes.

The New York Times put many lives in danger in June when it published an op-ed from Republican senator Tom Cotton, advocating for President Trump to send the National Guard into several riot-torn cities. At least that’s what several of the paper’s employees claimed, both in an open letter to the paper’s editor and the editor of the opinion board. Cotton wrote threatening words such as ‘Some elites have excused this orgy of violence in the spirit of radical chic, calling it an understandable response to the wrongful death of George Floyd. Those excuses are built on a revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters. A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants.

Remember the Ukraine impeachment drama? No? Cockburn can hardly blame you. But believe it or not, less than nine months ago, the Ukraine ‘scandal’ was supposed to be the greatest in American history. Donald Trump was impeached. Mitt Romney gave some embarrassing speech.Not even a year later, it’s the story never happened. Neither impeachment nor Ukraine were mentioned a single time at the Democratic convention. The party isn’t just tired with the story. They seem earnest about keeping it dead.But now, thanks to the US Senate, they’ll need an assist from the press.A newly released report by the Senate Intelligence Committee resurrects the Ukraine story by reviving focus on Joe Biden’s ne’er-do-well son Hunter Biden.

When Ruth Bader Ginsburg succumbed to cancer, #RestInPower immediately trended. The ACLU, New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand, actress Reese Witherspoon and the ostensibly Jewish uber-left activists of Bend the Arc all used the woke neologism in their tributes.The play on words likely originated in the 1990s rap. It entered mainstream usage after the 2016 election when the left lost its mind. Even in a culture that’s increasingly — pathetically — obsessed with politics, politicizing death feels like a new low. Ginsburg’s final rite of passage signals a rejection of Jewish and Christian customs along with democratic norms, and a return to paganism and violence.

Oooff! If you’re to go by Twitter — not always a good idea — there’s one thing not to like about Amy Coney Barrett, Donald Trump’s potential nominee to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg and that’s her religion: Catholicism. The Washington Post’s Ron Charles quoted her saying that ‘a legal career is but a means to an end...and that end is building the kingdom of God’. Cue for others to pile in to the effect that there’s meant to be a separation of church and state in the US, and others witheringly observing that it’s not far to go from here to overturning Roe v. Wade. You can expect the quote to be widely circulated in the next few days.

Yet another woman has accused President Trump of unwanted sexual advances. Model Amy Dorris alleged in a Guardianinterview on Thursday that the President groped her body and attempted to kiss her while they attended the 1997 US Open. She provided photographs of the event that, at the very least, prove the two had some form of contact with each other, whether the President recalls it or not. Dorris provided corroboration, in that she told friends at the time who also went on record. Given the President’s reputation, his remarks on tape to Billy Bush and the photographic evidence, Dorris’s accusation is believable, if not entirely credible. There are problems with her story.

If you show up, people will vote for you. That was the lesson from crucial swing states like Wisconsin and Michigan last time around, where Donald Trump lapped Hillary Clinton almost at a 3-to-1 pace in the closing weeks of the 2016 election. Swing voters may not appreciate the President’s rank candor and blustery attitudes, but at least he turns up. Right now Joe Biden is up six points nationally and is hoping to coast to an electoral victory on auto-pilot.This time around, Team Harris-Biden has paid fealty to Wisconsin, through in-person appearances. The campaign also has Florida in its sights, where recent polling shows Biden in dire trouble with the southern part of the state’s Latino population.

At his short Thursday news briefing, President Trump laid out the many successes that the United States has enjoyed in its battle against the Chinese virus compared with the record in Europe and other parts of the world. Trump’s decision to end air travel between China United States at the end of January was roundly derided as overkill and 'xenophobic' by the entire Democratic establishment from Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi on down. But that decision is now widely credited with saving tens of thousands of lives.

The national media is now less trusted than President Trump to provide accurate information and analysis about COVID-19, according to a CBS poll of registered voters. Think about the sheer hubris and raw effort that must have taken! All those months of politicizing public health, downplaying the spread of the virus through protests and riots, doubting coronavirus treatments, and trying to get Anthony Fauci to bad-mouth the President, have finally paid off. Take a bow everyone. In terms of trust, the national media ranked dead last at 35 percent, behind the President, the CDC and the governors of those polled in individual states. Trump, a man who essentially suggested people go stand out in the sun for a bit to help treat a COVID infection, came in five points higher.

This week, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg dropped what could be his biggest piece since he won a major award for drawing bogus links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. The piece claims that during a 2018 visit to France President Trump canceled a visit to an American war cemetery, dismissing the dead who lie there as 'suckers' and 'losers' unworthy of passing beneath his presidential shadow. Outsiders have expressed skepticism of the story for many reasons. For starters, in Goldberg’s account, Trump also questioned America’s pointless and enormously costly involvement in World War One. If Trump really said that, it would be an unprecedented display of historical knowledge and insight on the President’s part.