Latest from Coffee House

Saturday

26 Mar 2022

Biden’s Warsaw speech was both baffling and moving

Poland “Biden fell asleep.” Perhaps a thousand jokesters posted this and similar jibes in the livestream comments as we waited for the president to speak from Warsaw. Thousands of Poles, and doubtless many Ukrainian refugees, were gathered around the Royal Castle in the center of the Polish capital to wait. Biden trotted out — old but amiable and very much awake. In fact, after spending two days meeting refugees, Ukrainian representatives and Polish politicians, he looked surprisingly sprightly. God help me for saying this but I have a soft spot for the president.

Friday

25 Mar 2022

Matt Purple

Ben Sasse is right: no cameras in the Supreme Court

Senate carpool dad Ben Sasse recently made headlines when he went on a rant against installing TV cameras inside the Supreme Court. "A huge part of why this institution doesn’t work well is because we have cameras everywhere," Sasse said of Congress. He warned that televising the Supreme Court might cause it to go the same way, that it might incentivize, as he delicately characterized Congress's conduct, "jackassery." There's an entire anthology waiting to be written on Sasse's use of creative swearing in the Senate (after the January 6 riot, he waxed poetic about "kicking Hitler's ass and going to the moon"). Yet the senator from Nebraska is absolutely right.

Cockburn

Catholics and Marxists mingle at the Compact launch party

Small literary and political journals are having a moment. The latest to enter the fray, Compact, aspires to be a sort of post-liberal melding of big-government conservatism with left-wing economics. An invite for the launch party arrived via email last week and, as you know, Cockburn tries to never miss a party, especially in our shattered post-Covid social milieu. Getting out of his Uber, your correspondent was reminded of the new world we live in, as his Ukrainian driver asked why he was being dropped off at a place called KGB Bar. Cockburn mumbled some answer that made no sense about socialists in New York finding it clever and sheepishly slunk out of the car. The selection of KGB Bar certainly wasn't a mistake.

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Judge Jackson’s refusal to define a woman was disqualifying

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.

Bill Zeiser

Beware the risks of tyrannical tech

“Just think about it. Our whole world is sitting there on a computer. It’s in the computer, everything: your, your DMV records, your, your social security, your credit cards, your medical records. It’s all right there. Everyone is stored in there. It’s like this little electronic shadow on each and every one of us, just, just begging for someone to screw with, and you know what? They’ve done it to me, and you know what? They’re gonna do it to you.” — Sandra Bullock as Angela Bennett, The Net, 1995 A few weeks ago, I called the local Domino’s. The man who answered asked whether my address is an apartment or a private residence. I live in a fairly remote Michigan community of about 8,000 people.

Oliver Wiseman

The Covid test

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.

Grace Curley

Covid is over — if you’re famous and good at sports

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.

Thursday

24 Mar 2022

Chadwick Moore

Anthony Weiner rises again

Fresh out of the clink and appearing on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News last month, Anthony Weiner, the former congressman from Brooklyn and failed New York City mayoral candidate, didn’t try too hard to convince viewers he was a reformed man. “You pled guilty, Anthony, to sending obscene materials to a young girl, a fifteen-year-old girl,” Hannity began the interview. “Have you changed? Are you a different person?” “I think so,” Weiner — dazed, skittish, fractured — replied. “I don’t think anyone can go through that type of experience, and I think this is probably true of people who have been through other types of adversity, I don’t think you go through that type of experience and don’t emerge changed.

Peter Van Buren

How Hillary Clinton colluded with US intelligence

Part I of this article demonstrated that a conspiracy to smear Donald Trump with false allegations of collusion with Russia took place, with Hillary Clinton at its head. This second part will show the FBI was an active participant in the conspiracy. The FBI smoking gun has been hiding in plain sight. In June 2018 Inspector General for the Department of Justice Michael Horowitz released his report on the FBI’s Clinton email investigation, including FBI director James Comey’s drafting of a surprise press release announcing no prosecution for Clinton, written before the full investigation was even complete.

Harry J. Kazianis

How bad could a Russian cyberattack be?

When I have designed wargames around a NATO-Russia conflict, I often left out cyberattacks for a simple reason: it was just too complicated. Too many unknowns make an accurate simulation impossible. The number of targets, scale of the attack, damage done, how the attack could be carried out and its ramifications were beyond calculation for a mere simulation on the scale I was running using just consumer-based computer technology. Honestly, nuclear war seemed easier to think about, and that says a lot. But that should give us pause. Our world is basically a giant computer now, with cloud-based networks controlling virtually every aspect of our lives, from sewage and water treatment plants, to our electrical grid, to our smart homes, and on and on we go.

Matt McDonald

Down with the Senate theater kids

Many failed actors work as waitstaff, or move back in with their parents. Some spiral into heroin addiction, prostitution or death. But it could be worse: a number end up in the United States Senate. This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee lent further credence to my long-held belief that anyone who declares an interest in running for political office should be committed to an asylum. The hearings for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson bore closer resemblance to a remedial acting class than the inner democratic workings of a somewhat serious country. The right have been gorging on the clip of Democratic presidential hopeful Cory Booker giving it the full Olivier in his remarks to the judge.

Cockburn

When Clarence Thomas mocked Cory Booker

Cockburn has never thought much of Senator Cory Booker. At a time when Republicans are forever being accused of demagoguery and playing to the cheap seats, Booker does the same thing, only from the other side and with a smile firmly in place. That practiced enthusiasm was on full display Wednesday when Booker "questioned" Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. And by "questioned," Cockburn means "tossed flower petals on the ground before her while weeping uncontrollably." This clip, in which Booker praises Jackson's record and lauds her for being the first black woman nominee to the Supreme Court, went viral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk-0eryw1u0 Certainly Cockburn can understand why Jackson's nomination struck a personal chord with Booker.

Oliver Wiseman

Biden touches down in a changed Europe

Biden touches down in a changed Europe According to national security advisor Jake Sullivan, Joe Biden’s trip to Europe is an “opportunity to coordinate on the next phase of military assistance to Ukraine. He will join our partners in imposing further sanctions on Russia and tightening the existing sanctions to crack down on evasion and to ensure robust enforcement.” The president is in Brussels today for a NATO pow-wow and will head to Poland tomorrow. On this trip, as with the rest of the Biden administration’s diplomatic response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the emphasis is on unity. This White House has, more than anything else, sought to present a united front with European allies throughout the crisis. But are the cracks in that unity starting to show?

Wednesday

23 Mar 2022

Peter Van Buren

The real Russiagate smoking gun

Hard as the programmers try and tell us there is only one story at a time — Ukraine for now — or that a trite phrase like “but her emails” dismisses one of the most important political events of our time, something sinister happened in the United States which demands our attention. If we remain distracted, it will happen again in 2024. We are looking for two smoking guns now in connection with Russiagate. Today's Part I will show that Hillary Clinton herself sat atop a large-scale conspiracy to use the tools of modern espionage to create and disseminate false information about Donald Trump. Part II to follow will show that the FBI was an active participant in that conspiracy. In the mainstream media vernacular, we are bearing witness.

Gilbert T. Sewall

Will the West Coast walk away from wokeness?

California’s June 7 primary election is heating up, fueled by broad voter distress over crime and public safety. Major contests in Los Angeles and San Francisco will be testing the force of progressive and moderate factions inside the Democratic Party. Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, appointed ambassador to India, is passing the Democratic establishment baton to Representative Karen Bass, a former head of the Congressional Black Caucus. Bass is a serious five-term party regular. But her promises to fix municipal decay — as with other Democratic assurances — ring entirely hollow. Garcetti, a man of ample mind and mixed record, crumbled on vagrancy and crime, and leaves office as a failure. Real estate developer Rick Joseph Caruso is making a law-and-order run for the job.

James Snell

Madeleine Albright was an idealist overpowered by cynics

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.

Cockburn

WATCH: Dr. Oz insults hard seltzer, vests and finance bros in attack ad

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 (Getty Images)

Cockburn

Kamala Harris is the worst kind of diva

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.

Oliver Wiseman

Jackson’s patriotic rebuke

Judge Jackson’s patriotic rebuke to the left As confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson enter their third day, coverage has focused more on the questions she has been asked than the answers she has given. Whether it’s Josh Hawley’s scrutiny of Jackson’s sentencing for sex offenders or Ted Cruz quizzing her on Critical Race Theory, the most bad-blooded argument over this week’s Senate drama has concerned the legitimate parameters of these presidential hopefuls’ questioning. To bypass that mostly unedifying debate, and instead to focus on Jackson’s answers, has been a heartening experience. Ever since she was introduced by Biden at the White House last month, Jackson has seemed a reassuringly earnest, patriotic and accomplished figure.

Charles Lipson

How will the battlefield stalemate end in Ukraine?

The simplest description of the war in Ukraine is this: stalemate, accompanied by constant, deadly bombardment. For the Ukrainians, that bombardment is aimed at the Russian military. For the Russians, it is aimed mostly at civilian targets, a deliberate strategy that is also a war crime. Russian artillery shells, cluster bombs and cruise missiles are killing tens of thousands of Ukrainian civilians and destroying their homes, schools and businesses. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s counterattack is imposing huge, irreplaceable losses on Russia’s army, killing soldiers, destroying their equipment and liquidating incompetent military leaders who come to the front to untangle the mess. Russia’s initial war plan failed, abysmally.

Tuesday

22 Mar 2022

James W. Carden

James Clapper is still a shameless liar

Last week, the New York Times decided that now might be a good time, amid the cacophony of war abroad and soaring inflation at home, to come clean about the Hunter Biden laptop story. On March 16, the Times published a report on the junior Biden’s messy tax affairs in which, a full twenty-four paragraphs in, they acknowledged the authenticity of the emails and files contained on the now-infamous laptop.

Tony Woodlief

The myth of our coming national divorce

Viewed in one light, last week’s overwhelming rejection by the New Hampshire state legislature of a bill to put secession to a vote was a resounding win for unity in a fractious time. But it probably won’t be the last time we see such a proposal in a state house. A fatalistic argument from one of the bill’s thirteen supporters explains why: “National divorce is going to happen. It’s inevitable, and we have a chance to get ahead of this.” He may be right, if polls are to be believed. Last fall, a survey out of the University of Virginia brought the depressing news that 40 to 50 percent of Biden and Trump voters claim “it’s time to split the country.” Commentator David French declared the finding unsurprising, because Democrats and Republicans “loathe each other.

Matt Purple

Old man yells at gas prices

President Joe Biden has lashed out at fossil fuel companies, accusing them of using high gas prices to “pad their profits at the expense of hardworking Americans.” These are the same fossil fuel companies, by the way, that two years ago were charging a measly average of $1.84 a gallon. They’re also the same fossil fuel companies that in 2020 donated $1.6 million to Biden’s presidential campaign. But no matter. If nothing else, Biden’s inveighing against Big Oil takes me back to my more youthful days when progressives were less afraid to run hard against what they called “the polluters.” Back then, every oil derrick was a seething Deepwater Horizon just waiting to explode and blackface the local terns and herons.

Oliver Wiseman

The Republicans have a candidate problem

The Republicans have a candidate problem Republicans are worried about Eric Greitens. And rightly so. The front-runner in the Missouri Senate primary faces alarming accusations of violence from his ex-wife. In a sworn affidavit filed yesterday as part of a custody lawsuit, she details multiple allegations of serious physical and psychological abuse. Greitens was hardly squeaky clean before Monday’s affidavit. He resigned as the state’s governor in 2018 following allegations of sexual assault. The latest accusations have led to calls for him to drop out of the race to fill the vacancy created by Roy Blunt’s retirement.

Monday

21 Mar 2022

Teresa Mull

Going out on a fossil fuel bender

Covid rates are abating just in time for surging gas prices to eclipse the pandemic as our crisis du jour, and people from both sides of the political aisle are crying out in unison: something must be done! The current energy crisis debate consists of a few camps: one group professes that they can’t abide fossil fuels being used at all, while another can’t imagine living without them. The third group makes up the middle of the Venn diagram, and though a paradoxical state of mind, it contains the most members. Choosing a winner from among the prevailing arguments is no simple task.

Bobby Miller

The Ohio Senate race becomes a clown show

Two men stare down as they prepare to brawl in a made-for-TV spectacle. The cameras spotlight their faceoff as the referee restrains them from coming to blows prematurely. No, this wasn’t a promotional for the UFC heavyweight world championship live on HBO at the MGM Las Vegas. This was the GOP Ohio Senate Forum hosted by FreedomWorks. The Buckeye State has produced some of America’s greatest statesmen. It’s given us eight presidents and giants of the Senate from Robert A. Taft to the retiring Rob Portman. Now it's given us a car full of clowns. A few months ago, I wrote about how the Republican primary contest for Ohio's Senate seat was descending into madness. It’s now entered the realm of complete absurdity.

Will Collins

Where Europe ends and the war begins

On a nondescript bridge in the northeastern Hungarian town of Záhony, the European Union ends and the war begins. Even amid the turmoil in Ukraine, the local border crossing is strangely quiescent. The flood of cars from the early days of the war has slowed to a trickle, and big eighteen-wheelers continue to cross over from Hungary into Ukraine. There are only two signs that something is amiss: a small notice on the door of the nearby Penny Market asking customers to help Ukrainian refugees, and a massive billboard of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s stern face, promising voters that he will keep Hungary safe and peaceful.

Zoe Strimpel

Andrew Sullivan searches for spirituality

It was daunting preparing to meet Andrew Sullivan, considered one of the cleverest, most fearless journalists of his generation. There is the academic pedigree: the scholarship at Oxford — where he was also president of the union and a celebrated actor — followed by the PhD in political theory at Harvard, where he produced an iconic treatise on the work of British mid-century philosopher Michael Oakeshott, performed the entirety of Hamlet all by himself — "a whacked-out mid-1980s" version — and modeled for Gap. And there is the journalistic firepower. At twenty-eight, in 1991, Sullivan became the youngest ever editor of the New Republic, America's most august political magazine.

Oliver Wiseman

Biden’s European balancing act

Biden’s European balancing act Joe Biden will head to Europe later this week for a series of emergency meetings with Western leaders. In addition to attending a trio of summits in Brussels — one between NATO leaders, one for the G7, and a special session of the European Council, Biden will travel to Poland. Of the trip to Ukraine’s neighbor, Jen Psaki said in a statement Sunday: “He will hold a bilateral meeting with President Andrzej Duda. The president will discuss how the United States, alongside our allies and partners, is responding to the humanitarian and human rights crisis that Russia’s unjustified and unprovoked war on Ukraine has created.

Saturday

19 Mar 2022

Roger Kimball

Why not Trump in 2024?

I see that my National Review friends are writing their letters to Santa a bit early. Some, like Rich Lowry's recent paean to Ron DeSantis, are asking for that shiny new firetruck all the cool kids want. Others, like Charles Cooke’s febrile King Lear-like anti-Trump expostulation (“never, never, never, never, never”) hearken back to NR’s infamous "Against Trump" issue and are mostly negative: “No coal, please, Santa, and especially No More Trump!” I remember when I first heard the expression that Donald Trump “lived rent-free in the heads of his opponents.” “Vivid,” I thought, “and quite right.” Jennifer Rubin, Bill Kristol, Max Boot — the list of people obsessed with the forty-fifth president of the United States is long.

Cockburn

NY Post shames intel officials who flacked for Hunter Biden

Take Cockburn's hand and let him whisk you back to the halcyon days of fall 2020. The presidential campaign was in full swing and the New York Post had just gotten its hands on a scoop: Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, had left his laptop at a repair shop in Delaware. On its hard drive was a treasure trove of damning emails and pictures, including one that appeared to show Hunter passed out in bed with a crack pipe in his mouth. The Post published its story, the Biden campaign yelped, and the establishment duly lost its mind. The Post's Twitter account was suspended. And perhaps most damningly, fifty-one intelligence "experts" signed a letter warning that the laptop story could be Russian disinformation.

Peter Van Buren

The Hunter Biden disinformation campaign

Democrats are obsessed with the idea that when they lose elections it must be because of outside forces, usually some sort of Russian. But what we know now is that if anyone has been manipulating our once precious democracy, it has been the Democrats. The latest findings by the Durham investigation make clear that the 2016 Clinton campaign paid for and implemented a massive disinformation strategy to falsely link Donald Trump to Russia, and then worked the intelligence services of the United States and the mainstream media to drive that narrative deep into the American psyche. When Trump won, Democrats used that same strategy to try and drive him from office.

Peter Wood

The reporter who covered up the Ukrainian famine

Now would seem to be an excellent time for the Pulitzer Committee to withdraw the award it bestowed on Walter Duranty in 1932 for his reporting on events in the Soviet Union. I know I am far from the first to call on the Pulitzer Committee to withdraw the award. I know as well that the Pulitzer Committee responded to one such call in 2003 by declaring that it could find no “clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception” in Duranty’s 1931 reports from the Soviet Union published in the New York Times in 1931. Those thirteen reports on which the original award was based, admits the Pulitzer statement, amount to work that “measured by today's standards for foreign reporting, falls seriously short.” And time has moved on, etc., etc.

Friday

18 Mar 2022

Harry J. Kazianis

Why the Ukraine war might not end

One thing anyone who studies foreign policy for a living knows is that fairytale endings never happen in war. I suspect Ukraine will follow this sad trend. Why should we expect anything different? War never conforms to humanity’s desire for the good guys to defeat the bad guys. Indeed, great power politics grounded in realpolitik but shaped by mankind’s sense of morality is a mixture that yields tragic results. The demand for closure, clean endings to conflicts where the antagonists get punished, is rarely fulfilled. Wars only have happy endings in the movies. In fact, some wars never seem to end, as the combatants are left unfulfilled — or just haven't been weakened enough.