Politics

Asked by Senator Marsha Blackburn during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s recent hearings whether she could define the word “woman,” Judge Katanji Brown Jackson replied, “Can I provide a definition? No, I can’t. I’m not a biologist.” That's an interesting standard. Can Judge Jackson define a human being? Can she affirm that she is one? Apparently not. Only a biologist could do that — or a woke progressive liberal, and zie would be wrong. The Judge may possess certain credentials that would make her a worthy addition to the Court. Yet intellectual honesty, common sense, independence, and moral courage do not seem to be among them. A few members of the press took notice of her idiotic response, as did a sizable number of the Twitterati.

The Covid test A spike in Covid cases in Europe has professional Covid worriers worrying. Is America ready, asked the New York Times this week, quoting an epidemiologist lamenting that the country has chosen to “forget” rather than “do the hard work” since the last peak. Another accuses policymakers of “wearing rose-colored glasses instead of correcting our vision.” If a new wave does arrive on these shores, professional pandemic-watchers will complain about our complacency and accuse policymakers of once again falling short. The real question though, is what the rest of us will do. Thankfully, the signs point to the hypochondriacs being ignored. A new Pew poll finds that voters see Covid as just the fifteenth most important issue.

New York mayor Eric Adams lifted the vaccine mandate for all of the workers in New York City on Thursday. It was a unifying moment for a city in desperate need of some good news. Just kidding! Eric Adams did not lift anything. Instead, Bill De Blasio’s successor offered a group of New Yorkers an exemption from having to take the Covid-19 vaccine. According to CBS, “New York-based performers and athletes who play for New York's home teams will be exempt from the city's vaccination mandate for private businesses.” This is great news for wealthy Yankees players and insufferable celebrity attendees of this year’s Met Gala. After all, nothing says VIP treatment like being able to make your own medical decisions. Now for the bad news.

People die at random, of course, but it seems poignant that Madeleine Albright has died at the very moment the liberal post-Soviet world has met its own, more violent, end. Her term as Bill Clinton’s secretary of state coincided with the moment America, the most powerful nation in the history of the world, sat, unknowingly, at its own apogee. The Soviet Union was newly gone. America stood peerless and unchallenged. The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the twenty years of War on Terror that followed, were still unthinkable. China’s GDP rivaled Italy’s, not America’s. Even offhand, Albright could describe America as the “indispensable nation.” Charles Krauthammer had called it early — this was the “unipolar moment.

The Dr. Oz team has gone where — Cockburn sincerely hopes — no other campaign has ventured before (or will again): on the attack against “bros.” Former hedge fund CEO David McCormick is challenging Oz for Pennsylvania’s US Senate seat, and Oz’s latest attack ad (they’ve been airing more relentlessly than MyPillow commercials in Pennsylvania) is particularly off-putting. It doesn’t so much deride McCormick himself as it does a whole class of people. A fairly inoffensive one, at that. https://twitter.com/DrOz/status/1506694900087197696?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw The ad begins with two thirty-something guys (“Chad” and “Tad”) identifying themselves as “finance bros.

Vice President Kamala Harris might not be the Queen of the White House, but she's still demanding some R-E-S-P-E-C-T à la the Queen of Soul. Harris — who is often affectionately referred to as "President" and "First Lady" by the actual president, Joe Biden — is the subject of another news story detailing the exhausting way she treats staff. According to a forthcoming book by New York Times correspondents Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, Harris felt slighted by White House aides not standing up when she entered a room like they did for Biden.