Society

Why did Pope Francis refuse to meet Secretary Pompeo in Rome this week? The obvious answer is that he didn’t want to confront the diabolical consequences of renewing the Vatican’s 2018 deal with the Chinese Communist party. These go beyond the harassment of loyal Chinese Catholics who now find themselves forced by the Pope to recognize party stooges as their own bishops. We’ve never seen the text of the Vatican-Beijing pact, and we won’t be informed about the terms of its renewal, but it’s clear that somehow President Xi has also secured Francis’s silence on China’s genocidal campaign against the Uighurs.

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.

Cockburn dislikes the latent misogyny behind the rise of this term ‘Karen’, which is used to describe any white woman who is caught being aggressive on social media. Then again, Karens don’t have to be female; plenty of men fit the term perfectly. One of them is the President of France.Yes, Emmanuel Macron lost his rag again on Wednesday, this time berating a French journalist who dared to try to cover the President’s complicated maneuvers in Lebanon.

President Trump spoke mildly in defense of Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse on Tuesday, saying that the 17-year-old seemed to be defending himself when he shot three people, killing two of them. NPR, fresh off of interviewing In Defense of Looting author Vicky Osterweil, had something stern to say about that, tweeting 'President Trump declined to condemn the actions of the suspected 17-year-old shooter of three protesters against police brutality in Kenosha — claiming, without evidence, that it appeared the gunman was acting in self-defense.’ https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1300614359236964358 Without evidence!

Let nobody say the outgoing president of Liberty University is not an intellectual.Cockburn will not belabor you with the full tragedy of Jerry Falwell Jr. Who is he kidding, you already have read (though not seen, mercifully) all the details.Falwell’s rapid downfall is a testament to the dangers of hubris. At the tender age of 44, Falwell was handed the presidency of a university his father had already built. He was paid roughly $1 million a year for this privilege. To keep the job indefinitely, Falwell didn’t need to do much. Even taking photos of himself half-undressed with a woman half his age at a yacht party, and entering into a ménage à trois with a pool boy, would have been completely fine.

I can’t claim to know what Jake Auchincloss was thinking when he asked, 10 years ago, why it was acceptable for Pakistanis to burn the American flag but not Americans to burn the Qur’an. But I can make an educated guess. Auchincloss, currently front-runner in the race to succeed Rep. Joe Kennedy in the Massachusetts Fourth Congressional District, was a 22-year-old Harvard student when protests erupted across the Muslim world after an American Christian preacher threatened to burn the Muslim holy book. It was the ninth anniversary of 9/11 and Terry Jones wanted to memorialize that somber event in a way sure to attract attention.

When Joe Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate, the Religion News Service reported that she ‘now considers herself a Black Baptist.’ Black with a capital ‘B’, note. The upper-case letter is one of the shibboleths of identity politics: it’s Black, not black, lives that matter. In other places we read that Sen. Harris is just Baptist, with no mention of race — but we can be certain that if Harris describes herself as Black Baptist, it is with a capital letter. The lower-case designation ‘black’ has been regarded as disrespectful in the African American community since long before BLM. (The legendary civil rights activist W.E.B.

Is there nothing Karlie Kloss can't do? The Midwest-born supermodel and minor member of the Trump Expanded Cinematic Universe has proven herself to be something of a polymath since hanging up her Victoria's Secret Angel wings in 2015. The 29-year-old heads up a coding program to get more young women involved in STEM, hosts the Bravo show Project Runway and, as The Spectator revealed earlier this year, helps craft government healthcare policy through her father Kurt and brother-in-law Jared Kushner. But besides fashion, Kloss's true passion is investing. It's something she must have picked up from her husband, Josh Kushner. Clearly Kloss has an eye for a canny deal, as she's set to splash the cash in the famously lucrative world of legacy print media.