Politics

Boris Johnson’s call to arms Boris Johnson started a speech in Washington urging continued support for Ukraine this morning with three words: “God bless America.” The former British prime minister (and one-time Spectator editor) is in town in his burgeoning role as a freelance champion of the Ukrainian cause — and he began with a message of thanks for the leading role taken by the United States in arming and supporting Ukraine’s fight against Russia. When in power, Johnson was one of the Western leaders most committed to backing Ukraine. Now, freed from the constraints of Downing Street, he has chosen to spend his new-found free time helping the Ukrainian cause — even if that puts him at odds with his successor, Rishi Sunak.

Racism has become an unfalsifiable proposition. Such is the central take-away from the race industry’s tortured reaction to a brutal police beating in Memphis, Tennessee. Five Memphis officers responded to what was initially reported as a car driving the wrong way down a street. The officers’ tactics during the stop of driver Tyre Nichols, captured on video, were an abomination: while shouting contradictory commands, the officers immediately escalated their use of force without apparent cause. It was Nichols who tried to deescalate the chaos — a responsibility usually put on officers, not on suspects. The cops struggled without coordination to cuff him, while delivering gratuitous kicks, punches to the face and baton strikes.

Republicans are losing the debt-limit standoff  Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy will meet on Wednesday for talks on the debt ceiling. Just don’t call this powwow a “negotiation.” Biden has said he will only sign a clean bill — i.e. a no-strings-attached increase to the limit on federal borrowing. And so, as far as the White House’s public position is concerned, there’s nothing to negotiate. A statement from the White House on Sunday described the meeting as “a discussion on a range of issues” and said that Biden “will ask what the Speaker’s plan is” and “if he intends to meet his Constitutional obligation to prevent a national default.” Biden took the same tough line last week, pledging to “veto everything they send me.

It should be obvious by now that too many classified documents are floating around Florida, Delaware, and Indiana. They were removed without authorization and stored improperly under Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Mike Pence respectively. Most of them, it seems, were hurriedly packed by government aides during an administration’s final days, even as the president and vice president were busy handling their official responsibilities. National security law doesn’t distinguish between the accidental and deliberate mishandling of classified documents, but the public does. They know the president and vice president bear heavy, official burdens until the moment they are replaced.

Mitch Daniels visited Washington this week to test the ground on the Senate side of Capitol Hill. "I’m worried about winning it and regretting it for six years," he told Politico. And well he might. The former Indiana governor and Purdue University president is debating whether to run for the seat of incumbent Indiana Senator Mike Braun, who after just one term decided he'd rather be back as governor in Indianapolis than stay in the cooling saucer for even one more minute. Daniels may find it equally abhorrent to join a body as a junior senator at the age of seventy-three. Either way, a run by him would immediately thrust the Indiana Republican primary into the national narrative, framed as a war between the pre-Trump and post-Trump GOP.

If you thought the California nightmare was bad enough, things are about to get much worse. It pains Cockburn to tell you that Representative Adam Schiff is running to replace Dianne Feinstein in the US Senate. His announcement follows hot on the heels of his being booted from the House Intelligence Committee and the resulting wave of media attention. https://twitter.com/adamschiff/status/1618626586303160325 In the opening lines of his video announcement, Schiff says he “always believed that what’s right matters, that the truth matters — and that decency matters.” This is the same Adam Schiff who for years promised he had the goods on Trump’s Russia collusion, that some new conclusive evidence had been found that Trump was a Russian catspaw.

John Nance Garner, a Texan who served as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s vice president for eight years, famously quipped that the vice presidency was “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” Garner wasn’t necessarily wrong. But the groundbreaking election of Kamala Harris was supposed to transform the office. After all, she was the first woman, the first black person, and the first South Asian VP. Little else mattered. She was a badass, and if you didn’t acknowledge her intersectional excellence, you were a sexist, racist goon. Even many on the right thought Harris might play an outsized role as VP, given President Biden’s cognitive frailty. As we’re now halfway through Harris’s first term in office, it’s a good time to take stock of all that's gone wrong.

Shortly after reports surfaced that President Joe Biden's team had found classified documents at his office at the Penn Biden Center this past November, the mainstream media rushed to "contextualize" the story. "Contextualize," in this case, means they justified Biden's mishandling of classified materials and drilled into readers that he was much more responsible in regard to the matter than former president Donald Trump. Biden, they said, had possession of far fewer documents overall and was much more cooperative with the Department of Justice in turning them over to the proper authorities once his team found them. Needless to say, these media attempts to downplay Biden's mishandling of classified materials relative to Trump's have not aged well.