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No showdown over KBJ? Recent Supreme Court nominee hearings have been box office Washington events. But there’s little to suggest that, when Ketanji Brown Jackson appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week, the event will be anything but a low-key and temporary distraction from the war in Ukraine. But the likelihood of a confirmation process that fails to capture much attention isn’t just a product of the enormity of what is happening elsewhere in the world. It’s also because, in Brown Jackson, the White House appears to have chosen a difficult-to-get-outraged-about jurist. Yes, she’s liberal (as you would expect), but she’s also steady, reasonable and consensus-oriented in disposition.

In all my years covering right-wing politics, I’ve met an odd cast of characters: ethnonationalists, archeofuturists, transhumanists, sedevacantists, Austrofascists, neo-reactionaries, incels, identitarians, Proud Boys, Groypers, even Jeb Bush. Yet I’ve never met a Putinist. Not a one. Before we go any further, I want to be clear on this point: Putinists don’t exist outside the former Soviet Union. How could they? Putin himself is a pure nationalist. He embraces the whole ball of contradictions that is Russia. He’s equal parts tsarist and Leninist. Whatever hodgepodge ideology you want to call Putinism, it can’t be applied to the United States. You may as well try golfing with a shovel. Now, I’m sure you’ve encountered a Putin fanboy on the internet.

The media are abuzz these days about a purported “return to the 1970s.” Generally speaking, such chatter is not intended kindly, for many today would likely agree with the sardonic assessment of the Seventies made by the editors of New West magazine as that decade wound down: “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.” And not just because of the popularity of bell-bottom pants, platform shoes, and disco music. In the Seventies, we had problems far more troubling — more troubling even than the pop group ABBA. For starters, we saw a quadrupling of real oil prices between 1973 and 1979. We suffered high rates of both inflation and unemployment, which hitherto varied inversely, leading to the creation of the portmanteau “stagflation.

It’s nice to be prescient. On Thursday, in a column titled “Kamala Invades Poland,” I introduced the world to “cackle diplomacy.” “Silly partisan hyperbole!” I nearly heard as the social media-ites had their say. But then the vice president of the United States did me proud. Just a few hours after my column posted, there she was, holding a press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda. Some say the people who run our government sent Kamala Harris to Eastern Europe in order to give her a chance to shine in the sphere of international relations. Watch her performance and tell me what you think. “I am here, standing here. On the northern flank...on the eastern flank...talking about what we what we have in terms of the eastern flank and our NATO allies.