Latest from Coffee House

'Tucker Carlson is the new Donald Trump.' So said CNN’s Brian Stelter on his Sunday program, Reliable Sources. Stelter was apparently handed his own TV show based on the principle that at least one CNN host ought to resemble the network’s target audience. Nevertheless, he is correct. Progressivism needs Tucker to be Trump, and so for the moment, he is. To work in cable in the age of Donald Trump was to live life on easy mode. For years, channels tried desperately to hook viewers with endless updates on missing white women, murdered white women or murdering white women. Suddenly, with Trump, none of that was needed. Every day brought a fresh outrage, a new ridiculous statement or tweet or national policy. The news cycle shrank from a week to a day to mere hours in some cases.

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.

The last thing anyone would accuse Joe Biden of is being overstimulated. But the Senate’s rapid approval of his pandemic aid plan, or American Rescue Plan, as it’s officially called, should be more than enough to put a spring in his step. It’s a victory that may even power the Democrats to victory in the midterms. Captious progressive Democrats will complain that the bill isn’t generous enough. They already are. But House Democrats will dutifully line up next week to pass it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to blow this. After four years of the Trump era, sensible Democrats know that this is their chance to spend big even if it isn’t as bigly as the Squad would prefer.

On Wednesday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi dragooned all but one Democrat into voting for her total rewrite of the nation’s election laws: House of Representatives Bill 1, or HR 1. The final vote was 220 to 210. The bill now goes to the Senate. Republicans promise a filibuster there to stop it. Every American should hope they succeed. HR 1 would cement all of the worst changes in election law made in blue states in 2020 and nationalize them. Federal control of elections would be the norm, with states relegated to being colonial outposts that carry out Washington DC’s mandates.  Two amendments to impose yet more federal controls failed before final passage.

Neera Tanden will not be the next director of the Office of Management and Budget. The Biden administration quietly withdrew Tanden’s nomination last night, finally facing up to the daunting odds of her being confirmed. Accounts of this ill-fated nomination vary. Some on the right see Tanden as a sacrifice to distract from the greater threat of HHS nominee Xavier Becerra, described by Nebraska’s Ben Sasse as a 'culture war supersoldier'. The press, inclined to view the world through a Kremlinological lens, interprets it as an indictment of White House chief of staff Ron Klain’s leadership. Klain was by all accounts Tanden’s biggest supporter in the West Wing and shares many of her conspiratorial and bombastic tendencies, especially on Twitter.

Donald Trump is not retiring. He’s not disappearing to live the range life and he has no intentions of remaining quiet over the coming months and years. Acknowledging his loss somewhat for the first time from the CPAC stage this weekend was simply a way of paving a golden road heading into 2022 and 2024. Trump still believes he’s the future of the Republican party, even as a one-term defeated president pushing 75 years old. He clearly still has enthusiasm of the CPAC crowd — but straw polls and speeches will not be the deciding factor for Trump in 2024 so much as the success of candidates he backs heading into 2022 in GOP primaries, designed to upset incumbents Trump considers unfavorable.

Donald Trump was over an hour late for his first speech since leaving the White House at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida. The former president finally emerged at 4:47 p.m., kissing the American flag as the PA system blasted Lee Greenwood’s ‘God Bless the USA’. He waited, applauding the crowd for the duration of the song before beginning his prepared remarks at 4:50 p.m. ‘Hello CPAC — do you miss me yet?’ he asked the crowd. Trump quickly laid to rest some of the stories that have swirled since his departure from office. ’We’re not starting new parties,’ Trump said. ‘We have the Republican party…that was fake news.’ He then launched into the issue everyone expected him to tackle: immigration.

The Conservative Political Action Conference is in full swing. The ACU has upped sticks and thrown its annual shindig in Orlando rather than its usual home in National Harbor, Maryland. Former president Donald Trump is to give his first speech since leaving office tomorrow and the leading lights of the Republican party — Ron DeSantis, Kristi Noem, Ted Cruz, Mike Pompeo — have been making their cases to be 2024 nominee (or Trump’s VP) on the main stage. But you know all that. You’ve seen it on Twitter. That’s not what you read Cockburn for. You want to hear about the cocktails, the ruckus, the maskless flirting, all the unbridled diesel-strength freedom the great state of Florida has to offer.

I still believe we are in an emergency and that the pandemic requires attention now. But it seems President Biden and congressional Democrats are having a difficult time understanding what ‘emergency’ means. If they did, they surely would not have pushed legislation that spends almost half of the funds after this fiscal year and 10 percent of it three years from now. The legislation proposed by President Biden is a sleight of hand, pretending to fund the critical components of our recovery — vaccine production and distribution — while doling out taxpayer dollars to groups, industries and special interests that are still sitting on funding from last year’s coronavirus relief bills.