Latest from Coffee House

Wednesday

6 Apr 2022

It’s still Obama’s White House

Barack Obama returned to the White House this week, and his presence was a straight up blast from the past. The 2010s might not be our most culturally defined decade, but surely the Age of Barry still has a few touchstones worth recalling. That was back when it was cool to say “there’s an app for that,” all the way back when the Speaker of the House was...actually it was still Nancy Pelosi. And it was back when everyone, and I do mean everyone, could not shut up about Obamacare. Sure enough, Obama was back in Washington to once again revel in the passage of his signature health law, even if it had just undergone yet another round of tweaks to make it work this time for real.

Cockburn

Democrat gets bitten by fox — and hypes the CDC

Authorities have finally done something about the aggressive, rabid critters that lurk around our nation’s capital and slink from their dens on the Hill to assault honest people for no good reason. Cockburn has encountered all sorts of such creatures on various Capitol Hill pub crawls, but the type the police just decided to address was neither a blundering elephant nor an indignant jackass. Neither was it a Blue Dog, one of those endangered porcupines that rarely appear in the Swamp, nor even a squawking chicken hawk. It was a red fox. A cute little lady fox with a majestically bushy tail, black-tipped ears and feet, white markings on her chest and muzzle, and shining black eyes. People first started posting images of the fox on Monday.

Bill Wirtz

Is France set for another Le Pen-Macron showdown?

The first round of voting in the French presidential election will happen Sunday — and despite expectations of the last few years, the run-up appears increasingly anti-climactic. But not all is said and done in the campaign. Over the last few weeks, Emmanuel Macron has extended his lead in the opinion polls, bolstered by the uncertainty of the war in Ukraine. The most recent poll has Macron ahead at 28 percent, in front of far-right candidate Marine Le Pen at 23 percent, and far-left contender Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Far-right independent hopeful Éric Zemmour (9 percent) and Republican nominee Valérie Pécresse (8 percent) had experienced boosts in the campaign’s early stages, which have both since died down.

Oliver Wiseman

Barack is back

Barack is back Reunions with old friends can be nourishing, joyful occasions. But they can also be awkward: uncomfortable reminders of past differences, full of signs of how far you have drifted from one another. Barack Obama’s return to the White House for the first time since leaving office to pal it up with his one-time right-hand man felt more like the latter — though it was President Biden who appeared more uncomfortable than his old boss. At an event to lavish praise on the Affordable Care Act, Obama’s biggest legislative achievement, the 44th president jokingly referred to Biden as the “vice president” before adding: “That was a joke.

Tuesday

5 Apr 2022

Daniel DePetris

Don’t blame the West for its Ukraine hesitance

As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the UN Security Council today with all the anguish you would expect from a wartime commander-in-chief, he could nonetheless be relatively pleased about several things. Sure, Zelensky and his advisers are constantly making the point that Ukraine needs bigger and better weapons to resist Russia’s invasion, but the West has been quite responsive to Kyiv’s requests. The Biden administration’s latest weapons shipment, announced last week, adds to the $1.6 billion in military aid the US has sent to the Ukrainian military since the war broke out on February 24.

Oliver Wiseman

The loneliness of Merrick Garland

The loneliness of Merrick Garland Merrick Garland is not a popular man. The attorney general has been disliked on the right ever since he issued a memo last year villainizing parents protesting school board meetings. But he now faces growing criticism from the left for what many Democrats consider an overly ponderous approach to January 6 prosecutions. Having spent the Trump years lamenting a loss of norms and claiming to want positions of power to be filled with sober, responsible characters, Democrats are growing impatient with an attorney general who follows exactly that approach. Why, they ask, hasn’t there been more butt-kicking and name-taking with regard to the riot at the Capitol? And, in particular, why isn’t Trump feeling the heat? Among the “lock him up” crowd?

Monday

4 Apr 2022

William Nattrass

How many refugees can Eastern Europe take?

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees have already streamed into Slovakia, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Head north to Poland, and the numbers go from the unprecedented to the jaw-dropping: two and a half million refugees have entered the country with a total population of 38 million since the war in Ukraine began. In the Czech Republic, where I live, official estimates put the current number of refugees at over 300,000, a figure expected to rise to between 500,000 and 600,000 in the coming months. In a country of less than eleven million, that’s five percent of the population. In Poland, a proportion closer to ten percent is possible. At the moment, most of the Czech Republic’s refugees are concentrated in Prague.

Oliver Wiseman

Fresh shock at Russian atrocities

Russian atrocities shock Washington Washington was, once again, focused on events in Ukraine this weekend. And for good reason. Horrifying evidence of possible war crimes emerged in Bucha and other towns near Kyiv that had been under Russian occupation. The images of mass graves, evidence of torture and the bodies of civilians, shot with their hands tied behind their back, sparked fresh outrage more than a month into the war. “Concentrated evil has come to our land,” said Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in a televised address this weekend. “Murderers. Torturers. Rapists. Looters. Who call themselves the army. And who deserve only death after what they did.

James Snell

Hungary’s Orbán remains a thorn in everyone’s side

Viktor Orbán has just won another election. The Hungarian prime minister has secured a hefty majority in his country’s legislative elections, and in his victory speech, Orbán revealed once again that he is a thorn: in the side of Europe most obviously but, if need be, in the side of all. I’ll leave for others the discussion of Hungarian democracy — whether Orbán has so manipulated national life that his continued electoral successes are unimpressive, even fraudulent. But Orbán, in his own mind, thought an “overwhelming force” ranged against him. “We never had so many opponents,” Orbán said.

Sunday

3 Apr 2022

Charles Lipson

The next phase of the Ukraine war

The fog of war doesn’t just apply to generals, sergeants, and privates. It applies to strategists and outside observers, including the best-informed journalists on the ground. All are swamped by a confusing barrage of information, some accurate, some not, none of it complete or definitive. That’s why, after over a month of fighting in Ukraine, it helps to step back, consider the basic outcomes, and try to project what will happen next. Remember, though, the “fog of war” applies to these assessments, too. First, let’s clear away Russian misinformation. The Kremlin’s recent claim that their main goal was never to seize Kyiv but always to take eastern Ukraine is simply false.

Saturday

2 Apr 2022

Grayson Quay

Of partisan razors and Byzantine bakers

Last week, conservative media company the Daily Wire announced it would begin selling shaving supplies under the brand name Jeremy’s Razors. Why is a media company selling razors? Because Harry’s Razors, a longtime Daily Wire sponsor, recently dropped the partnership due to “misaligned values.” In the launch video for Jeremy’s Razors, Daily Wire co-CEO Jeremy Boreing mocked the woke razor companies with which he plans to compete. “[Michael Knowles] went and said that boys are boys and girls are girls, and that was just too much for Harry's,” Boreing said. “And it's not just Harry's, either. Gillette razors used to be the best a man could get. Then they decided that men are too toxic, unless you're the kind of man who teaches his daughter to shave her beard.

Friday

1 Apr 2022

Stephen L. Miller

Did China just take out an NBA player?

It sure looks like basketball player Enes Kanter Freedom has been blackballed by the NBA for his candor over the league's cozy relationship with China — concentration camps filled with ethnic Uighurs in Xinjiang and all. Freedom, who earlier this year began wearing human rights messages on his game shoes illustrated by Chinese dissident artist Badiucao, became a vocal critic of the NBA's cherrypicking of human rights issues. That included directly targeting the league’s star and arguably most recognizable athlete on the planet, LeBron James. In 2019, after Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey spoke out against China and in support of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong in a series of now-deleted tweets, China suspended all NBA broadcasts within its borders.

Peter Van Buren

Breaking news: Clarence Thomas’s wife has opinions

In one of its most desperate moves yet, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is considering subpoenaing Ginni Thomas, wife of Clarence Thomas. The Committee wants to review a handful of texts Ginni sent about the Capitol riot, which they feel may influence her husband’s decisions from the bench. The connection is weak, along the lines of Trump being the one who actually slapped Chris Rock. But the need to come up with a new crisis to return attention to the events of January 6 post-Ukraine is real. The genesis of this "crisis" begins with the Hail Mary plans to use the January 6 Committee to rescue Democrats from near-certain midterm electoral defeat.

Oliver Wiseman

Biden sings the border blues

Biden’s border blues Democrats used to talk a lot about America’s southern border. The Trump administration’s handling of migrants crossing into the US was central to their moral case against the former president. But after Biden entered office, it didn’t take long for border security to become a major political liability for the president and his party. In fact, there are now few things the administration appears more uncomfortable talking about than the border. Consider, for example, the great Kamala Harris non-border visit debacle of 2021. Or the unease with which Biden officials this week entertained the possibility of lifting the pandemic-era measures that border agents have been using to turn away tens of thousands of migrants.

Thursday

31 Mar 2022

Taylor Millard

How Congress broke the budgeting process

That the federal budget process is broken is the worst kept "secret" in Washington. The White House and Congress know it. The think tanks know it. A 2010 study from the progressive Center for American Progress called the budget process “not a pretty picture.” The conservative Heritage Foundation said in 2005 that the process “stifles debate, prevents cooperation, and frequently breaks down.” Proposals come along every few years to fix the problem, but nothing ever gets done. “The fundamental reason why the federal process is broken is because Congress doesn’t have a budget,” says Kurt Couchman, a senior fellow at Americans for Prosperity. “Congress doesn’t do a budget. Congress does appropriation bills, there are 12 of them.

Oliver Wiseman

Why Biden won’t save the Democrats

Why is Biden’s pivot to the center so half-hearted? Every so often, a snippet of news, an anecdote or data point crops up and puts the obsessions and hang-ups of America’s political class in perspective, instead offering a clarifying reminder of what voters actually care about. The latest NBC news poll is one such piece of evidence. In a helpful framing of voters’ priorities ahead of the midterms, the survey asks whether support for a list of policies will make them more or less likely to back a given candidate. The most popular policies (i.e.

Grace Curley

What if Hunter Biden actually gets indicted?

More news is breaking daily on America’s favorite pipe artist. But if you looked at Hunter Biden’s inner circle, you wouldn’t see a group of people bracing for impact. In fact, you would see photos of Hunter Biden’s wife Melissa Cohen frolicking with friends on the beach in Rio de Janeiro and sipping out of coconuts. You would see the president in the fake White House set rolling up his sleeve for his second televised booster shot. But don’t let the Biden family’s schedule fool you: Hunter is in trouble — and they know it. The Washington Post published a piece this week titled, “Inside Hunter Biden’s multimillion-dollar deals with a Chinese energy company.” The company in question is CEFC China Energy conglomerate.

Wednesday

30 Mar 2022

Casey Chalk

There’s no such thing as a ‘global citizen’

Watchers of the news might be forgiven for thinking the Biden administration is worried about the election-year optics of more migrants at our southern border. The International Committee of the Red Cross is predicting high waves of migration through Mexico and Central America. The Department of Homeland Security last week requested help from the Pentagon. Also last week, the administration announced that asylum officers, rather than just immigration court judges, will be permitted to adjudicate the claims of immigrants seeking asylum at the border. In addition to these initiatives, I’d suggest another policy: do away with birthright citizenship and dual citizenship.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Time to invoke the 25th Amendment against Biden?

President Biden’s senile verbal blunders over the past few days have prompted renewed speculation over his mental competency. It's even been suggested that now is the time to consider invoking and activating the 25th Amendment. The Wall Street Journal recently printed a short sharp edit on the subject, noting that should the president go, he would be replaced by the vice-president, thus rescuing the government from the nursing home and delivering it into the hands of the idiotic. The Journal’s editors prefer the status quo. They are probably right to do so.

Cockburn

Sex, lies and Madison Cawthorn

Madison Cawthorn is paying the price for trying to seem cool on a podcast. The North Carolina congressman carried himself with the air of a high school kid with a “girlfriend” who “goes to a different school” as he spilled the beans on how similar Capitol Hill was to the depiction in House of Cards. Cawthorn described being invited to orgies by older members of Congress and seeing politicos taking cocaine. “I look at all these people, a lot of whom I’ve you know looked up to through my life… then all of a sudden you get invited to- ‘well hey we’re gonna have a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come!’… and you’re like ‘w-what did you just ask me to come to?

Slavoj Zizek

Secret bioweapon labs are Putin’s MacGuffin

Some commentators have already noted the strange homology between Russia’s evocation of “secret bioweapon labs” in Ukraine and the US evocation of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, which in both cases were used to justify military attack. It’s not that the US was unsure if Saddam had WMDs; they positively knew he did not have them, which is why they risked a ground offensive in Iraq, rather than sticking to air bombing. The nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction perfectly fulfill the role of a “MacGuffin” in Alfred Hitchcock’s films. A MacGuffin is “an object, event, or character in a film or story that serves to set and keep the plot in motion despite usually lacking intrinsic importance,” per Merriam-Webster.

Oliver Wiseman

Susan Collins and the return of ‘bipartisanship’

Biden’s magic budget fools no one It’s easy to get too excited about a president’s budget. OK, maybe not. But it’s certainly possible to read too much meaning into the fiscal plans issued by the White House. So it is with Joe Biden’s record-setting $5.8 trillion budget, published this week. As Jonathan Bydlak writes for the site, the documents aren’t the law, and even in a functioning Washington, they are only the start of the budget process. In a dysfunctional Washington, they are good for little more than messaging. What is the message of Biden’s budget? “Its significance is limited to telling us what we already know: the administration wants to spend — a lot,” writes Bydlak. The White House has spun this budget as a pivot to the center.

Stephen L. Miller

Do House Democrats want cities to die?

The Democratic Party is out of the office. Quite literally. Nancy Pelosi, who controls administrative policy in the House, this week extended the in-office moratorium and proxy voting through the middle of May. Pelosi says she based the policy on the recommendation of the sergeant-at-arms who wrote that there is still an ongoing “public health emergency due to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 remains in effect.” Quite the contrast to the president’s message. Pelosi's extension follows reporting from the Washington Free Beacon last week that most Democratic offices in DC remain shut, citing Covid-19 pandemic and workplace restrictions as the reason.

Tuesday

29 Mar 2022

Sohrab Ahmari

The flawed idealism that united the right

Modern American conservatism is composed of three distinct traditions: libertarian economics, foreign-policy hawkism and social traditionalism. This “fusion” was born of a contingent historical moment, the Cold War, when the Soviet threat forced different social classes and their ideological spokesmen to band together in common cause. There was no eternal principle demanding that these groups tie their destinies together — a fact that became apparent with Donald Trump’s rise, which divided the three camps along various axes of alliance and enmity. Fusionism is dead. Well and truly dead.

Anthony J. Constantini

Don’t let Russia end the old world order

While most Americans believe that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is morally wrong, there is in some corners a pervasive sense of annoyance with the conflict. The real enemy, some say, is China, and they believe that America should not focus on the last vestiges of 20th-century conflicts at the expense of losing focus on those of the 21st. They see NATO and the rest of the Cold War infrastructure as representative of a dying world. Instead of propping up this order, they argue, America should be hard at work building a new order to take on China. The goal of a new American-led, anti-China world order is a necessary one. The currently existing old order is ill-fitted to combat China, which indeed will be America’s main 21st-century enemy.

Cockburn

End the mask mandate mania now

This is a public service announcement from Cockburn: the mask mandates have got to go — for everyone’s health. Even America’s most progressive cities have lifted their face mask restrictions after the cresting of the first Omicron wave — but some of their denizens are hooked on the taste of government boot, and are going mad at the prospect of being weaned off it. Cockburn was sent a video by his nephew earlier this week showcasing this phenomenon: a masked Washington local cussing out unmasked teens at a DC Metro station. Masks are, for some unscientific reason, still required on public transport in the nation’s capital — despite not being needed in schools, gyms, stores, bars, restaurants…you get the picture.

Oliver Wiseman

Biden-Reagan comparisons are ‘preposterous’

The ‘preposterous’ comparison between Biden and Reagan Among the most shameless displays of water-carrying for Joe Biden since his Saturday regime-change gaffe is the suggestion, floated by some apparently without embarrassment, that the president’s Warsaw address resembles a speech made by one of his predecessors in Berlin in 1987. According to Sunday’s Politico Playbook AM, “some foreign policy experts are already comparing [Biden’s speech] to Ronald Reagan’s famous ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall’ address.” On Twitter, Bill Kristol liked Biden’s call for regime change to Reagan’s memorable line, arguing that both were considered “gaffes” by the foreign policy establishment.

Monday

28 Mar 2022

Peter Van Buren

Has Biden lost his mind on Ukraine?

Has Joe Biden gone loco over Ukraine? In Warsaw, Biden proclaimed of Russian president Vladimir Putin, “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Biden also called Putin a "butcher." Then, in a meeting with the Polish president, Biden said the US regards NATO’s Article 5 as a “sacred commitment.” Biden called Warsaw a “sacred place” in the history of Europe and in “humankind’s unending search for freedom.” Biden went on to describe the conflict in Ukraine as "a battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression, between a rules-based order and one governed by brute force.

Douglas Murray

The American right shouldn’t look up to Putin

A fracture of the international right may seem minor given everything that is going on right now. But it is worth loitering over. Because in recent years an interesting divide has grown among conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic. On one side are the Cold War warriors and their successors, who have continued to view Vladimir Putin’s Russia as a strategic threat. Meanwhile, a new generation has arrived at a different view. While the West has deranged itself with assaults on its own history, on biology and much more, an assortment of conservatives has come to see Putin as some kind of counterweight. A bulwark — even an admirable corrective — to the madness of our own societies.

Daniel DePetris

Biden’s ad-libs are making the world less safe

Joe Biden, by his own admission, is a man who sometimes goes off script. Whereas some presidents seek to bottle up their emotions and remain reserved for the cameras, Biden wears his emotions on his sleeves. The president proved that yet again during his visit to Poland over the weekend, where he let loose on Russian president Vladimir Putin at the conclusion of a speech: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.” Many in the West would privately agree with Biden’s assessment.

Oliver Wiseman

The gaffe heard around the world

The gaffe heard around the world Michael Kinsey famously wrote that “a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” When Biden went off-script in his address in Warsaw this weekend, he didn’t state an “obvious truth” about the world as it exists, but as he would like it to be. “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” Biden said of Vladimir Putin in a moment of irresponsible candor. Clean up on aisle Biden! The White House row-back was about as swift as Will Smith’s right palm: “The president’s point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region,” said one White House official. “He was not discussing Putin’s power in Russia, or regime change.

Harry J. Kazianis

Why Biden’s slip-up is so revealing

The White House might have issued the fastest correction of a sitting US president’s remarks in history this weekend. But it doesn’t matter one bit. The bottom line is Joe Biden — and most of the civilized world — wants to see Vladimir Putin out of power in Russia. More to the point: they want to see his regime changed and him most likely Gaddafi'd for his sins. And, to be frank, who can blame them? There is just one problem: getting rid of Vlad means World War Three. And I can tell you from gaming out such a conflict countless times in simulators, such a conflict leaves tens of millions of people dead. But let’s step back for a moment. I'm going to cut the president a little bit slack for saying out loud what we are all thinking.

Saturday

26 Mar 2022

Taylor Millard

Is Ron DeSantis a friend to liberty?

There’s a “Draft Ron DeSantis” campaign afoot within the Republican Party as some conservatives attempt to find a standard bearer not named Donald Trump. The Florida governor has attained popularity among vocal right-wing activists due to his resistance to drawn-out coronavirus mitigation measures beyond his initial “stay at home” and bar and restaurant closure orders and the banning of alcohol sales at bars. His public squabble with Rebekah Jones, the creator of his state health department’s Covid-19 dashboard, led to more praise from conservatives when her whistleblower story started showing cracks. DeSantis’s likability rose further after a “pay-to-play” implication by CBS last year turned out to be false.

Charles Lipson

No more dithering over Ukraine

The extraordinary skill, courage and effectiveness of Ukraine’s fighting forces have given the US and NATO an extraordinary opportunity to reestablish military deterrence in Europe and show the Kremlin that unprovoked military aggression will be repelled and ultimately defeated. But President Biden and NATO leaders are dithering. They are simply not acting with the urgency needed to fully support Ukraine’s military. It’s the same failure they displayed for the year prior to the invasion, when Putin was building up tens of thousands of troops along Ukraine’s border. Even now, the US and NATO are hesitating to provide the full complement of essential weapons to Ukraine, including air-defense systems, MIG fighters and a lot more drones, anti-tank and anti-ship weapons.