Latest from Coffee House

Latest from Coffee House

All the latest analysis of the day's news and stories

The meritocrat and the aristocrat

What a pair are Jeffrey Epstein and Prince Andrew — like peanut butter and petroleum jelly, like pepper and road salt. With Epstein conveniently self-strangulated, it's Andrew's turn to face the music now, as a US judge ruled on Wednesday that the civil case against him can proceed. Andrew stands accused of sexually assaulting a then-underaged American named Virginia Giuffre. He's alleged to have violated her multiple times, in New York, in London, and on Epstein's eponymous Pedo Island. So while the grand old duke of York might have 10,000 men, they're about to square off against one of the most hellish forces ever to prowl this earth: American lawyers. And cheers to the unwashed hordes in this case.

Sloganeering on the world stage

Sloganeering on the world stage When is a foreign policy not a foreign policy? When it’s a slogan. In his piece for the January issue of The Spectator, Christopher Caldwell argues that the Biden administration is conducting marketing rather than diplomacy on the world stage. Its main catchphrase is “America is back.” Caldwell likens Biden to Charlie Wales, the hero of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “Babylon Revisited”: “Charlie returns to Paris after the stock-market crash. ‘He was not really disappointed to find Paris was so empty,’ Fitzgerald writes. ‘But the stillness in the Ritz bar was strange and portentous. It was not an American bar any more — he felt polite in it, and not as if he owned it. It had gone back into France.

China is the new evil empire

History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. In the 1980s, the gravest threat to America’s freedoms came from the Soviet Union, which President Ronald Reagan called the Evil Empire. That rhymes with today’s equally serious threat from Communist China, the New Evil Empire. Xi Jinping rules China with absolute power, like an emperor. He has complete control over China’s sole political party, the CCP, the government, the economy, the military, the police, the judiciary, and the media. Even over religion: Christian churches must display Xi quotes instead of the Ten Commandments.

andrew

Prince Andrew must answer to America

The Duke of York is heading to a New York courthouse. US District Court Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled today that Virginia Roberts Giuffre’s lawsuit against Prince Andrew may proceed as a matter of law. Ms. Giuffre’s victory means the judge finds her claims legally cognizable. As the case moves into civil discovery, Ms. Giuffre must prove all the relevant facts she alleges to be true. Prince Andrew has denied all Ms. Giuffre’s claims. In a 2021 lawsuit filed in New York’s federal courts, Giuffre sued Andrew for committing battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

hillary clinton laws

Run, Hillary, run!

Was there an ayahuasca retreat for normie Democratic pundits last weekend that Cockburn didn’t get an invitation to? He asks because recent days have seen the proliferation of hot takes best explained by the ingestion of psychedelics. In particular, Cockburn is confused by a series of kooky suggestions as to who might make good Democratic presidential and vice-presidential candidates next time around. In the Wall Street Journal, Douglas E. Schoen and Andrew Stein say that Joe and Kamala have become too unpopular to run again and that it might be time for a “change” candidate: a tough broad who goes by the name of Hillary Clinton. Yes, that’s right: Hillary could be back.

The demagogue went down to Georgia

Demagoguery in Georgia Fiery. Impassioned. Emphatic. These are the kind of words being used to describe Joe Biden’s speech on voting laws in Atlanta yesterday. Dishonest would be a more accurate adjective. The president went down to Georgia and delivered a barrage of exaggerations, falsehoods and hyperbole on the health of American democracy. There was his outright misrepresentation of his opponents. “Not a single Republican has displayed the courage to stand up to a defeated president to protect America’s right to vote. Not one,” he claimed. Of course, multiple Republican senators have stood up to Trump, Mike Rounds being the most recent example. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski even supports a major Democratic voting rights bill.

America still won’t risk a war with Russia over Ukraine

Anybody who thought this week’s intense diplomacy between American, European, and Russian officials would magically resolve the ongoing crisis in Ukraine should lie down until the feeling passes. Crisis diplomacy isn’t a walk in the park; if anything, it’s a slow-moving car ride through rush-hour traffic, with plenty of speed bumps along the way. On Monday, January 10, Washington and Moscow met for a round of discussions in Vienna to sound each other out and present their list of seemingly endless grievances. After eight hours of talks, both delegations left the room with, coincidently, similar assessments as to how it all went.

Leave Ted Cruz’s daughter alone!

Ted Cruz’s thirteen-year-old daughter Caroline found herself in the sinister gaze of a blog called LGBTQNation this week. Cockburn is very disappointed in its writer Bil Browning, clearly another graduate of the Jeffrey Epstein School of Journalism: a well-funded progressive institution whose students consider it perfectly acceptable to treat teenagers as if they’re adults. The reason for Browning’s story is to further spread the deeply newsworthy information that Cruz’s daughter “has reportedly come out as bisexual on social media” — and has condemned the Texas senator’s “far-right political views.” A teenager rebelling against her parents? Stop the presses!

A bad start to Biden’s voting push

A bad start to Biden’s big voting push The second week in January doesn’t tend to be an especially memorable time. Americans are letting go of a half-hearted New Year’s resolution, contemplating their Christmas credit card bills and finding an excuse not to do their tax return just yet. Insofar as politics penetrates the early-January torpor, it’s likely in relation to the headache of high prices or a Covid-induced classroom closure. For Joe Biden, however, this week is going to prove “a turning point for this nation.” That is what the president will say in Georgia today.

The coming war with…um…Canada?

We begin today by heading north, past Vermont, over Winterfell, above the Arctic Circle, beyond the part of the map labeled “monsters be here,” and into Canada. There do we find a writer named John Ibbitson, who recently published a piece for the Toronto Globe and Mail warning that American democracy may not be long for this world. “If the next presidential election reveals the U.S. hurtling toward possible violence and autocracy,” Ibbitson asks, “should Canada try to intervene?” Before an entire nation of 330 million bursts out laughing, consider that Ibbitson isn’t suggesting Canada militarily intervene on American soil. Still...for us Yanks, that is the image that springs to mind, isn't it?

wilson

E.O. Wilson and the climate cult

Famed ant specialist and sociobiologist E.O. Wilson passed away on December 26, age ninety-two. He came to national attention in 1975 with the publication Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, which is one of those books that steamrolled into public consciousness. It may not have been as revolutionary as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, but not for want of trying. Wilson had something new to say about how evolution works and it provoked responses every bit as harsh as those Darwin encountered a century earlier. He was especially reviled by his Harvard colleague Richard Lewontin, one of the founders of molecular evolutionary theory, who saw no validity at all in Wilson’s interpretation of social structures as embodying evolutionary strategies.

The media suddenly notices the CDC is clueless

For over a year, the national news media has held up the CDC and its director, Rochelle Walensky, as paragons of public health. It's no coincidence they've now suddenly had a moment of clarity as it pertains to the CDC adjusting its pandemic protocols. This epiphany is happening primarily at CNN, with ratio king Chris Cillizza coming around to reality on Twitter and declaring that blue staters, journalists, and Democratic politicians catching Covid isn’t a moral failing and shouldn’t be shamed (the Washington Post made a similar statement). This past Sunday, CNN hall monitors Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy actually went after the CDC, saying it appears the agency has become “a punchline.” That segment also featured Dr.

rochelle walensky mask
drive-by

Are drive-by shooters victims of ‘systemic racism’?

SEATTLE — From Roger Baldwin of the ACLU to the Supreme Court’s late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, many Americans have tried to address inequality in the nation’s justice system. Now Washington State’s part-time legislators believe they have discovered a new way. Later in January, Washington’s state assembly will debate House Bill 1692. If passed, the law would significantly reduce the criminal penalties for the drive-by shootings that have become something of a boom industry here in the Northwest, where violent assaults are up 80 percent on five years ago. It would do so by prohibiting state prosecutors from adding the word “aggravated” to any murder charge involving a perpetrator in a moving vehicle.

vaccinated

It’s not looking good for vaccine mandates

The waning efficacy of vaccine mandates Predicting Supreme Court decisions might be a risky business, but the court hardly sounded enthusiastic about the Biden administration’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rule mandating either vaccination or weekly testing for businesses with 100 or more employees in oral arguments on Friday. The OSHA rule was under scrutiny in one of two mandate-related cases heard that day. The other deals with the requirement for healthcare employees at facilities that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding to be fully vaccinated. While liberal justices seem to be persuaded by the logic of the OSHA mandate, the court’s conservative majority were skeptical that it was in OSHA’s power to enact such a sweeping rule.

The real villains of January 6

It’s often said that memory is a fickle thing. Today, that fickleness has become a danger to the republic. If you turned on any of the major news networks over the past week, with the possible exception of Fox News, you’d have seen wall-to-wall coverage of the anniversary of the January 6 attack on the United States Capitol building. What’s concerning about this is all the misplaced lamentations. The travesty of the day was not the riot itself, though the assault was obviously horrific and a symbol of America’s democratic backsliding into an illiberal abyss. But the rampage was never an actual existential threat to the United States government and calling the attack an “insurrection” isn't accurate.

Antony Blinken’s soundtrack to failure

Antony Blinken, the secretary of state and first guitarist, has broken with the tired protocols of the past, faced the complexities of the multipolar twenty-first century world, and issued a Spotify playlist. This may be a better way of reaching new audiences than bombing them. But shouldn’t public figures be judged on their records, not their record collections? “The thread that runs throughout my life is probably music,” Blinken told Rolling Stone last year as he meditated his mixtape. Hitler would probably have said the same about painting had Rolling Stone been around to profile the Viennese amateur who was turning the art world upside down.

ted cruz

What was Ted Cruz thinking?

At least since the 2016 election, one of my favorites politicians — one of the few I could stomach at all — was Ted Cruz. He is certainly one of the smartest and most articulate members of Congress — not, I know, a high bar, but Ted really is someone with deep rhetorical gifts, an illuminating grasp of constitutional principles and a steely eyed appreciation of political realities. After a very brief flirtation with Scott Walker, my favored candidate for president in 2016 was Ted Cruz. I endorsed him publicly and even labored on the outskirts of his campaign for a couple of months. But it was not to be. His announcement that, should he win the Republican nomination, he would pick the egregious Carly Fiorina as a running mate made me raise an eyebrow.

Goodbye Bill de Blasio, New York-hating communist

At the stroke of midnight on January 1, Bill de Blasio — New York’s bumbling, mildly sinister but profoundly incompetent mayor — got laughed out of office as his second term came to an end. Don’t let the door hit ya, the city collectively sneered...despite voting for the man twice. The new administration couldn’t even wait until morning to flip the official @NYCMayor Twitter account. One minute after midnight, it changed all its pictures over to ones of Eric Adams, before the man had even been officially sworn in. An image of the smiling new mayor loomed over de Blasio’s final message: a photo of he and his wife walking in shadow down a long hallway with their backs turned on a city they abandoned long ago.

bill de blasio
mass formation paralysis woke war words english

America is in a state of mass formation paralysis

Unless you happen to live under a rock, this week you became aware of Dr. Robert Malone. He’s a virologist and immunologist who has become a lightning rod of controversy — and for good reason. Alongside laying claim to the invention of mRNA vaccines, Dr. Malone has spoken about a hysteria that has swept the United States, something he refers to as mass formation psychosis. Although I agree with many points Dr. Malone has made, and I believe that many of the pieces written about him have been needlessly vicious, the idea of mass formation psychosis is plain wrong. Let me explain why. Psychosis, an abnormal condition of the mind, renders a person unable to differentiate between the real and the imaginary.

Biden’s 2024 warning to Republicans

Biden issues a 2024 warning to Republicans Joe Biden rarely mentions Donald Trump by name. That was the case in his speech at the Capitol yesterday, even though the president pinned the blame squarely on his predecessor, who, he said, isn’t “just a former president, he’s a defeated former president.” Asked after the speech why he didn’t used the T-word, Biden said that “he did not want to turn it into a contemporary political battle between me and the president. It’s way beyond that. It’s way beyond that.” The irony of Biden’s “he who must not be named” policy is that the president is at his most animated and politically potent when he is talking about his predecessor.

potemkin

Joe Biden’s Potemkin presidency

The one-year anniversary of the January 6 riots unfolded in a manner as dramatic as it was predictable. The Pearl Harbor and 9/11 comparisons were uttered before noon — not by some media hack on MSNBC, but by our own vice president. Democrats, led by Speaker Pelosi, stood on the steps of the Capitol adorned with face masks and holding fake candles to hold a prayer vigil. At one particularly bizarre point during the day’s ceremonies, Pelosi introduced playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, who in turn introduced cast members from his hit musical Hamilton to sing a virtual rendition of "Dear Theodosia.” If that last sentence confuses you, don't worry: I’m also not sure exactly what I just wrote.

north korea

Why we keep getting North Korea wrong

Kim Jong-un is focused first and foremost on managing his country’s lingering food crisis. But that doesn’t mean the thirty-seven-year-old dictator has any intention of siphoning off resources from North Korea’s weapons programs. He made that abundantly obvious this week, when Pyongyang conducted its second ballistic missile test using hypersonic technology in four months. According to North Korean media, the missile traveled 435 miles to the east, hitting the designated target. The response to the latest test was predictable. South Korea called an emergency meeting to discuss the launch. The US State Department quickly issued a statement to reporters reminding them that the tests are a violation of multiple UN Security Council Resolutions (as if North Korea cared).

WATCH: Lin-Manuel Miranda marks January 6…with Hamilton song

Cockburn realized this January 6 commemoration stuff was serious when he saw that even Lin-Manuel Miranda found time in his schedule to put in an appearance at the Capitol today. Actually, who knows if he was free? Miranda, the creator of Hamilton and high priest of Obama-era cringe, delivered a pre-recorded message to the American people and performed, with other cast members from the show that made him famous, the song “Dear Theodosia.” You might be wondering whether this struck the right tone for what was Cockburn was told was going to be a somber commemoration of one of the darkest days in American history.

lin-manuel miranda hamilton
trump speech capitol

Biden’s Capitol speech shows how much he needs Trump

Joe Biden delivered. There was no somnolence, no quiescence. Instead, Biden lashed into his predecessor in unprecedented fashion to offer the most important speech of his presidency. It was a well-struck blow. Donald Trump cannot take Biden’s speech detailing his serial infamies lying down. Biden’s remarks were calculated to nettle, inflame and enrage Trump into further tipping his hand, such as it is. Biden, who was careful never to dignify him by mentioning his actual name, depicted Trump as a dissembler, a knave, a poltroon, a “remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain” of Shakespearian proportions who is scheming, as far as possible, to subvert American democracy, whenever and wherever he can.

Mob rule, one year on

Mob rule There was no shortage of discussion of January 6, 2021 in the twelve months that followed. The few hours during which a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol have been exhaustively raked over by newspaper reporters and deployed as a talking point by television pundits. The riot is regularly nodded to by Democratic politicians as justification for everything from an overhaul of voting laws to increased infrastructure spending. Even those on the part of the right who would rather pretend it never happened occasionally find themselves having to explain, contextualize or acknowledge events in the US Capitol a year ago today. And yet, the actual events of January 6 have a way of getting lost in the endless, unedifying and often bad-faith January 6 discourse.

january 6 capitol riot

The Capitol riot transformed right-wing activism in America

The invasion of Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021 represented the rise and fall of pro-Trump anti-governmental activism in a matter of hours. Its sensational success ensured its immediate collapse as the power of law enforcement came down on its head. Anyone involved must have experienced emotional whiplash. At the time, as millions of us watched on social media, there were smiles, and pranks, and a sense of deranged pageantry. “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” seemed to be the mood, perhaps accompanied in some cases by, “What can we do next?” Soon, many of the participants had an answer as they were booked into extended spells in jail. One year on, the organizations involved in the “Stop the Steal” rally and the subsequent rioting are in pieces.

Time’s up, Prince Andrew

Jeffrey Epstein is dead and Ghislaine Maxwell stands convicted of numerous human trafficking crimes, but many of their alleged co-conspirators remain at large. Victims on both sides of the Atlantic claim they were preyed upon by the high and mighty but the predators remain unindicted and, as yet, unaccountable. Among the most high-profile of these alleged abusers is Prince Andrew, Duke of York, and ninth in line to the British throne. The Duke, the third child of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, faces a civil lawsuit by Virginia Roberts (now Giuffre), whom Epstein recruited as a sex slave when she was still a minor. Roberts claims that Epstein and Maxwell trafficked her to Andrew in March 2001. She then met and danced with Andrew at a London club.

A New York senator declares war on the First Amendment

A new year, a new assault on free speech in America. New York Senator Brad Hoylman claims that legislation he's introduced into the state senate targets Big Tech algorithms to keep them from promoting “controversial and harmful content.” Yet the bill seeks to “protect” public health by making almost any social media comment going against Hoylman’s beliefs illegal. Hoylman passes himself off as a defender of the public good by vowing to take on Big Tech, which he accuses of profiting by deliberately stoking controversy. He specifically mentions anti-coronavirus vaccine posts “as a false statement of fact or fraudulent medical theory that is likely to endanger the safety or health of the public.

Biden wants to forget all about North Korea

If you don’t follow North Korea for a living as I do, you likely have forgotten all about the so-called hermit kingdom and its portly pariah of a leader, Kim Jong-un. Sure, there are the occasional headlines. Kim has lost a whole bunch of weight. The country is locked down as it has no way to combat Covid-19 and would never let in the international community to distribute vaccines. And, of course, there was last night's missile test. But even then the media does not seem to care much when it comes to North Korea. The reasons are quite obvious: with the Omicron variant sweeping the world, even a regime such as North Korea's has trouble breaking into the news cycle.

Abolish the CDC

Abolish the CDC “You do you.” That would be my three-word summary of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s updated guidance for people who catch Covid. The latest advice is a response to a backlash that followed its recent decision to cut its recommended isolation time from ten to five days and advise that if you’re asymptomatic you don’t need a negative test to leave quarantine. The CDC flip-flop is yet another reminder that the agency is hardly involved in a dispassionate issuance of “the science.” The new guidance is little more than a sop to the Covid-cautious. It’s also a perfect example of the organization’s inability to provide Americans with the clear, straightforward guidance that they need.

The China Olympics are a moral failing

The international community has failed regarding China and the 2022 Olympics. It's a moral failing above all, but it's also an administrative and symbolic failing. Beijing's worldwide abuses of human rights, international trade, military aggression toward neighbors and, of course, the unleashing of the Covid-19 pandemic has been allowed to fester, and gone unpunished. In return, China has been granted an international nod of approval by getting to host the 2022 International Olympic Games in Beijing, with the blessing of the International Olympic Committee and European and Western democracies. Sure, there are the diplomatic boycotts that have been issued by several countries, including the United States.