Politics

The West wakes up As Lenin probably didn’t say, “there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen.” The last seven days have felt like such a week. Vladimir Putin’s naked aggression and Ukraine’s heroic resistance have shocked the West into action and, in doing so, transformed the world. Only a few days ago, Joe Biden was cool on some of the harsher sanctions being discussed and European leaders were squabbling over carve-outs from the package of punitive measures being prepared for Russia. But, in the last seventy-two hours, all that has changed. Galvanized by Ukrainian bravery and Russian folly, Europe and America have reached for the toughest sanctions on the table.

Bewilderment, a novel by Richard Powers issued last September, has been praised to high heavens by Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, Naomi Klein, and reviewers at NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The New Republic, among others. This ought to be enough to warn any sensible reader to stay far away from its pages and to resign promptly from any reading group that nominates it for collective perusal. But I am not always sensible. The title lured me, for what better word to describe our Zeitgeist?

Biden picks Brown Jackson The president has chosen Ketanji Brown Jackson, a judge on the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court, multiple outlets have reported. Biden had interviewed two other candidates: Leandra Kruger, a judge on the California Supreme Court, and J. Michelle Childs, the South Carolina judge backed by Jim Clyburn and Lindsey Graham. With Russian troops laying siege to the Ukrainian capital, some will question the timing of this announcement. And with all eyes on Eastern Europe, the ceremony promises to be one of the most low-key in recent memory. The White House has good reason to expect a reasonably smooth nomination process.

War in Europe When Joe Biden addresses the American people later today, he will find himself in a changed world. His Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin outlined an imperialist vision of Russia fit for a czar on Monday. In the early hours of this morning, he backed up that nineteenth-century sentiment with nineteenth-century action: the start of a full-scale great power conquest of a sovereign neighbor. The events of the last twelve hours are something that my own end-of-history generation was brought up to believe would never happen in our lifetimes. And yet here we are. More recently, we were told that modern warfare was all cyber attacks and disinformation, deep fakes and propaganda.

The Canadian truckers might have been driven out of Ottawa, but a copycat protest is brewing in the United States. Cockburn hears that police are preparing for demonstrations that could gridlock the DC area, and they could start as soon as Wednesday. Honk honk! The truckers are coming to Washington — just in time for President Biden's State of the Union address next week. Cockburn has been a fan of truckers ever since he decided to see whether he could hitchhike across America using only Jim Beam trucks (he could, as it turns out). But in this case, the big riggers may be in need of a friendly correction.

Let's connect the dots between John Durham, Russiagate, the FBI, and Hillary Clinton. They strongly suggest the Clinton campaign ran a sophisticated, multi-prong coordinated intelligence operation against Trump with either the active or tacit support of the FBI. In the case of prong one, the dossier, the Clinton campaign hired MI6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The hiring was through its law firm, Perkins Coie, which hired Fusion GPS, which hired Steele to hide the funding source. The use of the law firm as a cutout allowed Hillary to deny that she'd funded the dossier, and the media to claim for a year or more that it was actually the Republicans themselves who paid for it.

During the entire past two years of Covid hysteria I never stopped traveling. “Work from home” wasn’t a privilege awarded to me. My love of logic and language was perpetually bothered by a frequent airline announcement: “Federal law requires” mask mandates, a statement most untruthful. There is no law. Congress passed no new legislation; there is only regulation, the demon spawn of power-hungry politicians and a bloated bureaucracy. For those who can’t be bothered with the democratic process of elected officials proposing bills and deliberating, voting and enacting legislation, the immeasurable, and not enumerated, power of the bureaucratic state is an attractive work-around.

You don’t have to be obsessed with racial calculations to consider the possibility that the next presidential election in the United States could be fought between two American-born women with roots in India: Nikki Haley in the red corner and Kamala Harris in the blue, the Republican Sikh and the Democratic Tamil Brahmin (on the side of the sainted mother who raised her), duking it out for leadership of what’s left of the Free World. The probability of this happening dwindles by the day, of course, as Vice President Harris makes it ever clearer that she’s too lightweight for the White House, and that nominating her for president would be electoral suicide for the Democrats. (Besides, hubris may drive Joe Biden to run again.) As for Ms.