Society

Last week we learned that Pope Francis has torn up the Catholic Church’s teaching that same-sex civil partnerships are gravely immoral. This week he will be rooting for the pro-abortion candidate in the US presidential election. These two surreal developments are causing distress bordering on spiritual despair to conservative American Catholics. Whether you feel any sympathy for them depends on your point of view. The Pope, it is safe to say, is unlikely to lose any sleep over the matter. Francis dislikes the United States in general and its president in particular. That’s not surprising; so do most Argentinians. What is surprising is the depth of his contempt for conservative American Catholics.

American journalism has lost its bearings, and we are all paying the price. For the past four years, egged on by President Trump, mainstream news swiftly descended past the first circle of hell — subtle partisanship — and reached a far darker, hotter one: blatant favoritism, stories killed for purely partisan reasons and occasional propaganda masquerading as solid news.Journalism’s decline mirrors that of other American institutions, but it has compounded the social damage. A thriving democracy depends on free and open debate and informed debate depends on trustworthy news. For most Americans, that trust has evaporated.The Washington Post is exactly right when it says, ‘Democracy dies in darkness.

Donald Trump made a lot of promises during the 2016 campaign. Four years later, it has been mostly a relief to see them all broken. There's the ‘big, beautiful’ border wall, still largely a figment of the President's imagination (as was Mexico's interest in paying for it.) A plan to replace the Affordable Care Act, supposedly just around the corner for years, clearly does not exist. And despite much bloviating to the contrary, multiple Hillary Clinton sightings in the months and years following the election confirm that she is not, in fact, locked up. But perhaps most importantly, Trump made a lot of noise about extricating America from endless wars — instead, he's left us embedded in a brand new one. The Culture Wars are our new Forever War.

It’s been a full week since the New York Post published their first story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which is currently in FBI possession. The purported contents of the laptop which were released selectively in several news stories by the Post include private emails and photographs. These have yet to be proven as forgeries or inauthentic. Swiftly cable news pundits and liberal-leaning journalists began wondering whether the laptop, the repair service in Delaware, or the source of the leak to the Post were part of a foreign campaign to influence the presidential election. But the DNI, FBI, DOJ and State Department all said there was no evidence to support those theories.

Jeffrey Toobin is a man much wronged. On Monday, the New Yorker writer was suspended by the magazine for which he’s written for two decades, and took a leave of absence from CNN, where’s he served as a legal affairs analyst since 2002. What possible sin could he have committed that forced these pillars of the media establishment to sideline a bonafide star with the presidential election less than two weeks away and Team Joe Biden needing every hand on deck? Toobin masturbated during a Zoom video conference in which he and his colleagues fantasized about forcibly removing Donald Trump from office and throwing him in jail. In other words, Toobin is being punished for having the precise response that the exercise was designed to elicit.

It's been a bad couple of years for Jeffreys... Veteran New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Toobin has been suspended from the magazine after he 'exposed himself during a Zoom call last week', according to VICE. Toobin, who also serves as a CNN legal analyst, must have been reaching for the tissues as he described the incident as an 'embarrassingly stupid mistake' and offered an apology to his 'wife, family, friends and co-workers' in a statement. Cockburn is perhaps most surprised that Toobin is the first significant figure to be caught out during a video-conference, seven months into the COVID pandemic. What took us? Naturally, Twitter users have been having a field day with the story: https://twitter.com/rysimmons/status/1318266346610765829 https://twitter.

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.