Politics

The dim reaper is at it again. We need, President Biden tells us, to wear masks forever, to avoid ‘more cases and more desks...deaths...look...’ Look, fat: the number of desks has fallen in Texas and Florida, where mask-wearing in public is optional, while desks are rising in New York and New Jersey, where mask-wearing in public is required. It looks like COVID-19 works just like public-school teachers: differently in red states and blue ones. Biden uses the phrase ‘mask mandate’ like it’s already been approved, in the way that voters grant a mandate to an elected authority. But it hasn’t been voted for or approved. It’s a proposal from a president who parrots whatever the CDC tell him. It’s up to the state governors to approve or disapprove his suggestion.

What makes a tragic death a major news story? The races of the perpetrators and the victims, of course. As the media goes all in on critical race theory, many journalists have decided to only provide obsessive coverage of horrific crimes when they can be used to advance the idea — as so eloquently explained by NBA star LeBron James — that minorities are being 'literally hunted' by evil white people. Proof of this phenomenon has never been so clear as in the past several weeks. It all started when a white man was charged with killing eight people — including six Asian women — at three different massage parlors in the Atlanta area.

Talk about mojo! It was a calm, genial and persuasive Joe Biden that appeared before the press yesterday afternoon, easily batting away the queries that were lobbed at him. The big takeaway was that, yes, as Sarah Baxter of the Sunday Times of London alone among the media has intuited, Biden is in for bigger game than one term. He made it clear yesterday that he’s going for the full monty, two terms or bust. Otherwise, Biden didn’t really make any news — which is itself newsworthy. No gaffes. No miscues. No fumbles. It was smooth sailing for him. Yet Biden’s opponents refuse to concede that he’s on a roll. They’re almost making it too easy for him. My chum Dominic Green, for example, deemed Biden’s performance worse than lackluster.

Just a sec. Let me check my notes. Ah, right. Hurgh. 'My message to the American people is: help is here. Hope is on the way.' 'Can I go home now?' he asked with his eyes. Joe Biden looked like he wanted to call an end to his first presidential press conference before he even got started. But he soldiered on. Having prepared for a few weeks to talk to — what, seven? Eight? — carefully selected members of the press, he was not about to give up on this chance to bask in some adulation. And boy was the adulation ever on offer. 'Was it because you were such a a nice man that you had more success than the awful Voldemort who proceeded you?' oozed one female correspondent. No that’s not a direct quote. The original was more embarrassing.

If you lay down with dogs you get fleas. If you make your bed with demented conspiracy theorists, you become mentally ill. This is the unfortunate position that certain sections of the American right have found themselves in following the presidential election last year. Lots of Americans had — and still have — suspicions about the massive surge in mail-in voting in November. It’s hard to blame them. The 2020 election was a very strange one on any number of fronts. But no sane person can possibly now deny that the Trump campaign, in its attempts to prove the election a fraud, engaged in and with some serious charlatanry.

‘Is something neurologically wrong with Donald Trump?’ Yes, was Professor James Hamblin MD’s answer after the headline trumpeted in the Atlantic in January 2018. Yet in the election year that followed it was Biden who was being hidden in the cellar while Donald Trump embarked on an exhausting series of campaign rallies, giving largely unscripted bravura performances to his fanatical followers. Meanwhile on the rare occasion when his handlers let him out, Biden stumbled. On one occasion he forgot which state he was in. Shockingly, America’s Democrat-dominated media stayed silent about Biden’s failing health throughout the presidential campaign.

The bodies of the victims hadn’t gone cold, the families had barely begun grieving, when the familiar cottage industry of activists and journalists jumped in to speculate and spread misinformation on social media. What drove someone to slaughter eight people in three Asian massage parlors in Atlanta on Tuesday? A clear storyline took hold: this was white supremacy at work. A young, white man murdered six Asian women and two 'others' made the framing a foregone conclusion. Not even new information from the investigators could slow down the risk to judgment. Atlanta police chief Rodney Bryant said that it was too early to classify the shooting as a hate crime and FBI director Christopher Wray affirmed that it 'does not appear to be racially motivated’.

Thoughtful observers of life often comment on the richness of the English language, its huge polyglot vocabulary, its precision, it sinewy expressiveness. It is doubtless politically incorrect to say so, but English has also shown itself to be a conspicuous ally of political liberty. I have commented on this in the past, noting that 'there seems to be some deep connection between the English language and that most uncommon virtue, common sense'. Speakers of English can be plenty extravagant, it may go without saying, but there is something about English — exactly why, I do not know — that acts to tether thought to the empirical world.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced Tuesday that President Joe Biden will hold his first solo press conference on March 25, over two months after taking office. The administration scheduled the conference after weeks of journalists pointing out that Biden was the first president in 100 years to not hold formal court with the media within his first 33 days on the job. But sadly, unless the White House opens up the press conference to a wider array of journalists, this is just theater. The Biden administration has been responsible for an unprecedented crackdown on media access to the White House, which it has largely blamed on the COVID-19 pandemic.

Joe Biden won’t go to the border, but the border is coming to him. The Northern Irish border, that is. On Wednesday, Biden, Kamala Harris (pronouns: she/her) and Nancy Pelosi marked St Patrick’s Day by talking with Irish politicians from both sides of their border. Afterwards, the Irish prime minister, Micheál Martin, thanked Pelosi for her ‘continued support’ on Brexit. It’s bordering on the ridiculous. Biden’s administration refuses to admit that it has a moral and humanitarian crisis on its southern border, but it makes time to create problems on the border between two close allies, Britain and the Republic of Ireland. The administration insists it isn’t taking sides on Brexit, but the truth is that it already has.

OK, I’ll stick my neck out — Meghan Markle is never, ever going to be president of the United States of America. If I’m wrong, kill me. I mean it. No grudges — set me on fire, chop off my head, take me out with a drone missile marked #Loveislove. I wouldn’t want to live. We hear this week, through amusingly dubious sources, that Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex is ‘considering running’ for the White House ‘if Joe Biden rules out a second term’. The British tabloids are talking about ‘mounting speculation’ which is what they say when they know they are publishing gibberish for clicks.

Over the weekend, the two-hundred-and-forty-second woman to accuse Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment came forward. That number is no less true for being inaccurate. It seems you can’t open a newspaper these days without reading about some horrible Cuomo come-on at an Albany Christmas party or a Manhattan cocktail hour. How’s it going for Democrats seeking a left-wing foil to Donald Trump? They seem to have gotten all of the vices with none of the humor. Of course, Cuomo deserves his due process like everyone else. But the accusations do seem credible and certainly fit with his hard-charging bull-in-a-bodega persona. There’s also the matter of the governor’s other scandal, which has been swept under the rug despite it involving the mass death of old people.

If your facts don’t care about my feelings, then my feelings aren’t obliged to care about your facts. The facts in Joe Biden’s energetic, inspiring and exhilarating address to the nation last night were frequently as unsteady as the speaker. But the feelings that Biden expressed were, unlike the previous president who must not be named, unimpeachable. He knows how it feels, he said with that now-customary surge of anger, as if he’s not fully in control of his frontal cortex. And we know how it feels when someone says they know how we feel. Consider everything fixed: COVID, racism, opioids, deficits, the collapse of the schools, the children at the border. The Therapeute-in-Chief is here, dispensing serotonin the way Barack Obama dispensed drone strikes.

Eighteen months ago, liberals attempted to link the spike in anti-Semitic hate crimes to white supremacist actions. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and the ADL highlighted the activities of white supremacist groups in upstate New York, despite all of the assaults being in the New York City metropolitan area, overwhelmingly perpetrated by black men. This culminated with black men killing Jews in Jersey City and Monsey, New York. Attempts were then made to rationalize them away rather than focusing on the anti-Semitic beliefs of black-nationalist groups, including the Nation of Islam. The same dynamics seems to be unfolding with the current spike in anti-Asian hate crimes.