Latest from Coffee House

Tuesday

31 Dec 2019

What could go right for Trump in 2020?

It’s starting to dawn on Democrats that Donald J. Trump might stand on the steps of the Capitol in January 2021 to swear his oath of office for the second time. A new Gallup poll indicates that he and Barack Obama are tied as the most popular men in America. So what are the four things that might help further smooth Trump’s oath to reelection? First, despite the preposterous pearl clutching of Freddy Gray on this website, Trump’s hardline against Iran could pay off. He’s steadily raising the military and economic pressure on Tehran. Contrary to all the naysayers, Trump could end up showing that Iran, not America, is the paper tiger.

Bill McMorris

Raising the smoking age to 21 is an act of cowardice

I warned every Republican about the moral hazard that Donald Trump posed to America from the moment he rode down that golden escalator. In 2008, following generations of discrimination, American voters made history by electing a cigarette smoker to the Oval Office. Why erase all that progress by replacing him with a tobacco-free teetotaler? The American people did not listen, and so, on December 20, the federal government raised the smoking age from the mindless 18 to the criminal 21.Like all great betrayals, this one was bipartisan. Every horrible cause needs its useful idiots, so Trump turned to tobacco states for political cover. Sen.

Amber Duke

Good riddance to the Newseum

The Newseum is officially closing its doors today after 11 years of operation in the nation’s capital and you won’t find me shedding a tear.Some journalists hailed the First Amendment-focused museum as a beacon of hope during a time when the media was facing dangerous attacks in America, like being called 'fake news' or only being allowed to ask one question during a press conference.But the Newseum was hardly the tribute to press freedom that it purported to be; rather, it was a money-hemorrhaging, unfocused building of stuff with a severe identity crisis.The most dynamic and engaging exhibit at the Newseum was arguably the lineup of front pages from the country’s most storied newspapers that sat just outside the front entrance.

Monday

30 Dec 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

What could go wrong for Donald Trump in 2020?

What are the four things that can go blooey for President Trump in the next year? First, he can get mired in a new Middle East war — the very thing he promised to avoid. The much-ballyhooed pullout from Syria turned out to be none at all. Now turmoil in Iraq, not a North Korean nuclear launch, turns out to be the Christmas present Trump didn’t want to receive. American strikes against the Kataib Hezbollah militia have got Iraq and, by extension, Iran, in a hugger-mugger. Trump could be on a slope toward further escalation with Iran that is as slippery as an oil slick. The hawks in Trump’s administration will exult; his nationalist followers, blanch. Second, there’s the economy. So far it’s humming along on a sugar high of tax cuts and deficit spending.

Dominic Green

An American pogrom

An American pogrom is going on in the New York metropolitan area. I use the word deliberately. A pogrom — the word comes from Russian — is a murderous assault on Jews, either incited by or connived at by the authorities. The machete attack that wounded five people in a rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York on Saturday night follows eight reported attacks in the week of Chanukah, the massacre at a kosher store in Jersey City earlier this month, a stabbing in Monsey, and a rising tide of assaults over the last three years.There is more than enough Jew-hatred to go around in our sick times. I have no doubt that soon enough we will be back to parsing the digital stormtrooping of the white nationalists or the apocalyptic perversions of the Islamists.

Saturday

28 Dec 2019

Dominic Green

Want to know the secret of ‘Jewish genius’?

There I was, watching my old VHS copy of The Boys from Brazil, idly reading the lab reports on the swabs I took from my gentile neighbor’s kids when he wasn’t looking, and revising the bassoon part of a concerto I’ve been working on, when I saw something alarming trending on Twitter. Not ‘eugenics’, but ‘Bret Stephens’.‘What’s he done now?’ I asked in six languages, two of them not from the Indo-European language family.In today’s New York Times, Bret Stephens discusses Norman Lebrecht’s excellent new history of the Jews in modern times.

Wednesday

25 Dec 2019

Dominic Green

The hope of Chanukah

The neighbors got together for drinks and carols at the weekend. As an English Jew, I love the carols — all those old-time bangers from the time when midwinter really was bleak, all those Zionist lyrics about ‘royal David’s city’ and kings in Israel. I consider it a mitzvah, a religious obligation, to spread the joy, because there’s not enough joy to the world these days, so I play the piano, this year in an impromptu trio with an Irish American fiddler and an English literary critic who, it transpires, toots a mean descant on the trumpet. We spread the joy as a farmer spreads muck, but it’s the spirit that counts. Without rehearsal or premeditation, we turned ‘Silent Night’ into a Dean Martin drunk song.

Tuesday

24 Dec 2019

Peter A. Coclanis

The 1619 Project is the 2019 Project — and the 2020 Project

It is increasingly clear that the 1619 Project, foisted on the American public in August by the New York Times, was ill advised. Fatuous, tendentious and tedious, 1619 is more advocacy than history, and is intended mainly to stoke the woke and to keep race on the front burner in the upcoming 2020 elections. No close observer of the Times over the past few years would have expected otherwise, for in its domestic coverage it reads at times more like a Midtown edition of the Amsterdam News than a national newspaper of record. While still indispensable in some ways, its editorial slant and, indeed, news coverage have become unmoored.

Sunday

22 Dec 2019

Roger Kimball

The ‘impeachment’ of Donald Trump

Did we just witness an historic event, the impeachment of only the third president in the entire history of the Republic? Or was this a case of accusatio interrupta: impeachment interrupted by an untimely withdrawal from Nancy Pelosi? The speaker of the House, unhappy at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s obvious contempt for the House proceedings, has suggested that she might not file the charges with the Senate. In which case, the Senate could not hold a trial. In which case, Donald Trump could neither be exonerated nor convicted. In which case, he would not have been impeached by the House, but only 'impeached'. It’s amazing what semantic potency can reside in a pair of quotation marks.

Patrick Allitt

Lessons from the Johnson impeachment

The first time Congress impeached a president was in 1868. The president was Andrew Johnson, a man almost as surprising to find in the White House then as Trump is now. Johnson, a Tennessee Democrat with a taste for hard liquor, had been the only southern senator to stay loyal to the Union when the Confederate slave states broke away in 1861, provoking the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln was a Republican but he ran for re-election in 1864 as a 'Unionist', and adopted Johnson as his running mate, hoping to pick up northern Democrats’ votes. The scheme worked and Lincoln won. Johnson was so drunk at his swearing-in as vice-president early in 1865 that his speech made no sense and he had to be led away by embarrassed friends.

James Adams

Automation and the future of modern warfare

There is an epic moment in the latest Gerard Butler movie Angel Has Fallen where he gets to save the life of the US president (again). The bad guys launch a swarm of dozens of micro drones able to detect and kill dozens of Secret Service agents, destroying anything and anyone that might get in the way of their mission to kill the president.It’s a chilling moment in the movie that clearly demonstrates just how powerless mere mortals will be in the face of superior technology that can operate independently of any direct human control.As with so much in Hollywood these days, movie truth is remarkably close to a reality that has been prefaced since 1984 when the first Terminator movie appeared and suggested the idea of autonomous robots as terrifying killing machines.

Saturday

21 Dec 2019

Ben Sixsmith

Joe Kennedy and the perils of media hubris

‘Dear Ellie and James,’ said Rep. Joe Kennedy in his remarks to the House of Representatives as he voted to impeach Donald Trump, ‘this is a moment you'll read about in your history books.’ Kennedy's children will leave school in less than 20 years. Is 9/11 in the ‘history’ books? The young Kennedy — a handsome but slightly goofy looking man — was struggling and straining to convey gravitas. He closed his eyes. He paaaaaaaused. His pitch rose up at the beginning of a sentence and went down as he finished it. Frankly, it was a farcical display of posturing; a botched performance that made Nicolas Cage in The Wicker Man look like Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood.

Tyler Grant

The impeachment process we deserve

Like a bona fide member of Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has opted to seize defeat from the jaws of victory. Pelosi, a stern purveyor of the truth and the criminal justice system, has indicated that she will withhold the Articles of Impeachment leveled against President Trump until '[Congressional Democrats] see what [Senate Republicans] are doing … so far, we have not seen anything that looks fair to [Democrats].'Fairness — the building blocks that American politics are built upon — requires an interesting examination into what exactly a fair political impeachment trial would look like on the Senate side.History tells us the Senate has been known to curate a world-class community theater show.

Friday

20 Dec 2019

Slavoj Zizek

The thin line between Zionism and anti-Semitism

One of the main reasons Labour lost the election in the UK was a well-orchestrated campaign of character assassination against Jeremy Corbyn, who was rated Top Anti-Semite of 2019 by the Wiesenthal Center (ahead of actual terrorists!). There is nothing new in this. It is a small part of the worldwide offensive whose victims include many Jews critical of Israeli politics — such as the 'propagandist for Hamas' Gideon Levy, who wrote in Haaretz on December 8: 'Laws labeling anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism and the anti-occupation movement as anti-Semitic, are passed with overwhelming majorities.

Chadwick Moore

Meow! Claws out for Mayor Pete at LA Democratic debate

It may be only the third time in American history the president has been impeached but it’s the first time no one gives a damn, not even the Democratic party itself. If that preamble didn’t perfectly set the tone for the last Democratic debate of the decade, a bubbling labor union dispute that nearly shut down the event at Loyola Marymount University this week in Los Angeles, certainly did. Couple that with the troublemakers who vandalized the LMU hillside monogram with large ‘Trump 2020’ letters, visible from the busy Pacific Coast Highway.Also ahead of the debate, a mopey splash on CNN’s front page, one of two networks to broadcast it, bemoaned ‘the smallest and least diverse Democrat debate.

Thursday

19 Dec 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Why is Trump so nervous about impeachment?

President Trump paraded his latest acquisition, Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a defector from the Democratic to the Republican party, at a meeting in the Oval Office this afternoon. Van Drew, who wore a dark blue three-button suit, crimson red tie and white shirt with gold cufflinks, not only dressed in Trump regalia but pretty much sat by mutely — other than to proclaim his 'undying loyalty' — as his new master bragged about poll numbers that he claimed showed him clobbering his Democratic rivals. Kellyanne Conway and Vice President Mike Pence were on hand as witnesses for the induction ceremony.Though he may be simmering about impeachment, Trump continues to make an outward show of bravado. All he needs, if a Washington Post report is accurate, is a 7 percent solution.

Charles Lipson

Pelosi’s impeachment delay is an unforced error

One of our perennial school pranks was to place a whoopee cushion secretly on the chair of an unsuspecting teacher. When she sat, she would launch the resounding clap of flatulence. That, metaphorically, is what just happened to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Unfortunately, she placed it on her own chair. The embarrassing noise sounded when she announced she would delay sending the House’s Articles of Impeachment to the Senate.This delay was a nakedly partisan ploy — and a major error of political judgment. Every day it continues will cost Democrats in the general election.Why?First, the Democrats should be emphasizing only the constitutional necessity of impeachment.

Karol Markowicz

American anti-Semitism is everyone’s problem

If there is one positive thing to come out of the attacks on Jews in Jersey City last weekend, it’s that the pretense that anti-Semitism has a home in one part of American society but not in others is over. That doesn’t, of course, mean that some won’t try to keep the delusion alive but four dead in a kosher market at the hands of Black Hebrew Israelites will have to complicate their argument. For a long time, the left was able to provide cover for the frequent attacks on Jews in America by saying it was only white supremacists engaging in these attacks.

F.H. Buckley

Donald Trump is a Tory

People are seeing a comparison between Boris Johnson’s Conservatives and Trump Republicans. In the Wall Street Journal, Dominic Green tells us that both are populists, as if the Brits were emulating Americans. But it’s the other way around. We’re emulating the Brits. On the right, we’re enjoying a Tory Moment. Trump put together a coalition that was right-of-center on social issues and middle-of-the-road or left-of-center on economic issues. It was, as I explained at the time, the sweet spot in American politics, the place where presidential elections are won. Previously, we’d been asked to choose between extreme social liberals on the left and free market libertarians on the right, and the voters were tired of this. Trump gave them what they had been looking for.

Tamara Berens

Bernie Sanders is no anti-Semite, but his best friends are

Like Britain’s disgraced Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders panders to anti-Semites. Bernie isn’t one himself. He supports the existence of a Jewish state and has even acknowledged that anti-Zionism can overlap with anti-Semitism. He comes from a family of Holocaust survivors and spent a stint on a kibbutz in Israel. But in his presidential bid, Bernie is mainstreaming radical anti-Semitism.Last week, four Americans were murdered in an anti-Semitic shooting at a kosher market in Jersey City whose intended target may have been a Jewish school. At first, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Sanders ally, thought there might be political gains in this attack.

Wednesday

18 Dec 2019

Stephen L. Miller

2019 was the year of the ill-advised celebrity interview

If we learned anything from the #MeToo movement, it is that powerful men in media and Hollywood believed themselves to be living in their own personal movies rather than the harsh truth of reality. They were the stars, directors, and producers, and they would always get the girl — even if the girl wanted nothing to do with them, or was actually just a potted fern in a restaurant.This explains why these A-List abusers keep sitting down for tell-all interviews against (one would hope) the better advice of their legal counsel. Rather than the sick perverts that they are, these men see themselves taking on the role of Frank Mackey in Magnolia, whose tough, sexist exterior will eventually melt away to reveal his wounded inner-heart to the audience, thus garnering our sympathy.R.

Saturday

14 Dec 2019

Jonathan Fenby

The Chinese trade deal is a Christmas gift to Xi

If Donald Trump wanted to deliver a seasonal gift to his ‘good friend’ Xi Jinping, the ‘Phase One’ trade deal reached this weekend fits the bill pretty well. From the viewpoint of the Beijing leadership, it vindicates the Chinese refusal to budge during the long months of trade negotiations despite the threat of escalating duties. What has resulted is less the kind of overall trade agreement originally aimed at by the Trump administration and feared by China as interference in its economy — and more of a purchase agreement accompanied by reduced tariffs.

Friday

13 Dec 2019

Ross Clark

Trump’s Chinese tariffs are simply a scare tactic

Ever since Donald Trump began his trade war with China there have been two possibilities: firstly, that he intends tariffs to form a permanent feature of the landscape in relations between the US and China: a protectionist device designed to protect American jobs indefinitely; or secondly, that he sees his tariffs as a shock tactic devised to draw China into talks which it would otherwise be loathe to join, and with the ultimate aim of freeing up trade. The latest development, halving a set of tariffs which had been in place since September and canceling another set which had been due to come into place this week, points heavily to the latter.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Can anyone lay a glove on Donald Trump?

Donald Trump just got another spot of good news. The Supreme Court has cut him a break by taking up three cases directly relating to his financial records and will not resolve them until June 2020. So much for the prospect of his congressional invigilators quickly obtaining his records and embarrassing Trump or worse over his past financial transactions, including with Russia.The Court’s decision offers a reminder that Trump, for all his shenanigans, has a well-oiled machine behind him that is determined, in one way or another, to ensure that he ends his term as he began it — unchallenged, unmolested and unbowed. In two weeks, when he kicks up his heels at Mar-a-Lago, his Southern White House, he should be able to golf and chill to his heart’s content.

Thursday

12 Dec 2019

The Spectator

UK election live blog: Boris Johnson vs Jeremy Corbyn

Will Boris Johnson get the majority he needs to 'get Brexit done'? Or has he followed in the footsteps of Theresa May?

Ben Sixsmith

Greta Thunberg is Donald Trump’s mirror image

The TIME magazine ‘Person of the Year’ award is in essence an excuse to have a big old argument. Every year, TIME recognizes an individual who has earned a great deal of attention, in an attempt to attract some of the excess to their publication. In winning ‘Person of the Year’, then, Greta Thunberg sits alongside not just Gandhi, Lech Wałęsa and Pope John Paul II but a rogues’ gallery that runs from Putin and George W. Bush to Hitler and Stalin. If they are going to have this dumb, opportunistic award, then, it makes sense to give it to Thunberg. Who has been at the heart of more controversy? Don't say Donald Trump. Hardly anyone is interested enough to even try understand the impeachment scandal outside the US. The Hong Kong protesters?

Matt McDonald

Kamala Harris is not your vice president

Little over a week on from the sad demise of the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, the California senator is the bookies' favorite to be the Democratic vice presidential candidate. Yes, despite her candidacy's high-point coming at the expense of Joe Biden in the first debate — shivving the front-runner for holding a stance on busing remarkably similar to her own — there have been rumblings about her being the right woman to balance his ticket. In most presidential elections, the vice presidential candidates do not matter — arguably the only one to move the needle in the past 50 years was Sarah Palin, and not in a good way. But 2020 could be different, especially if Joe Biden ends up as the Democratic nominee.

Dominic Green

Trump’s ‘Jew shenanigans’

The worst brings out the best. Joe Seals, a police officer and father of five, was killed defending the law and his fellow Americans in the anti-Semitic assault on the kosher market in Jersey City. And the best brings out the worst. In footage from the aftermath of the killings, African American residents are pleased by a mass murder on their doorstep.‘If they got shot dead, that’s great,’ says one.‘Get the damn Jews the fuck out of here,’ says another.‘My children are stuck at school because of Jew shenanigans,’ a woman says. ‘I blame the Jews.’America was meant to be different for the Jews. In a sense, it is. In Europe, the majority of assaults upon Jewish people or schools or synagogues seem to be committed by Muslim immigrants.

Wednesday

11 Dec 2019

Daniel McCarthy

How Democrats lost the Impeachment War — and probably 2020

The Democratic party is dying from its hatred of President Trump. The impeachment fiasco is just the latest symptom. After weeks of testimony, Democrats have not been able to come up with any charges more concrete than 'abuse of power' and 'obstruction of Congress.' Abuse of power is certainly a serious thing — but only if it’s real. Partisans think that almost anything a president from the opposing party does amounts to an abuse of power. For impeachment to amount to anything more than partisan harassment, an actual crime ought to be found somewhere along the line: an act of wrongdoing objectively contrary to the law.

Tuesday

10 Dec 2019

Cockburn

The Washington Post gets the British elections wrong

Cockburn was back in the old country this week, stuffing small brown envelopes with money and slipping them through the letterboxes of wavering Conservative voters before making his personal Brexit back to DC to read the articles of impeachment. As the wheels went up and the gin and tonic went down, he reclined in Club with the newspapers, and also the Washington Post.‘Americans should be jealous of British elections,’ was the headline. Henry Olsen, the Post’s in-house Deplorable, covers ‘populism and American conservative thought’.

Monday

9 Dec 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Sturm und Drang at the impeachment hearings

Is it time to bag impeachment? That may have been the subliminal signal that GOP counsel Steve Castor was trying to send when he showed up at the impeachment hearing with a Fresh Market reusable bag instead of a briefcase. 'Live, eat, shop, reuse,' was the message emblazoned upon his shopping bag. The North Carolina grocer has wholly embraced Castor, declaring that it is his 'official briefcase maker.'Castor may have wanted to live and let live, but it wasn’t a message that Democrats or Republicans were eager to embrace. Instead, the hearing ground on in the usual furrows, with Louie Gohmert calling the inquiry a 'kangaroo court' and threatening the impeachment of Joe Biden if he wins in 2020. Meanwhile, Democratic counsel Daniel S.

Paul Wood

Where did the money come from for Rudy Giuliani’s Ukraine operations?

Donald Trump is about to become only the third US president to be impeached —or charged with a crime — by Congress. The other two were Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, for firing his secretary of war in defiance of the House of Representatives; and Bill Clinton, for Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky (technically for perjury and obstruction of justice). Johnson and Clinton were acquitted in their trials in the Senate, as Trump almost certainly will be too. And, as Johnson and Clinton’s impeachments just confirmed their supporters or opponents’ opinion of them, so Trump will emerge as exactly the person we always thought he was. But there may be surprises along the way. The case against Trump is deceptively simple.

Will Lloyd

Dave Rubin is here to solve ‘95 percent’ of the internet’s problems

The dream of a free internet — if it was ever more substantial than a fantasy — is crumbling. This decade began with the Arab Spring and the belief that technology powered movements for liberty across the globe could triumph over despotism. Instead the decade closes with the growing realization that technology is driving events in unpredictable ways. Confused, people are left feeling less not more in control of their lives. And a sketch is being made — however faintly — for a new form of despotism: Big Tech. Big Tech is unaccountable, opaque and deeply embedded within the lives of billions. Since 2016 it has been dumped on from both the left and the right, and former Big Tech workers.

James Adams

How to disappear completely

Coming soon to as neighborhood near you: cameras everywhere. On every traffic light, intersection, telephone pole and storefront, with tracking software that uses facial, gesture and heartbeat recognition. That identity data is combined with web search history, conversations with Alexa and Siri, Amazon purchases and Twitter. A complete individual profile, with a score measuring social reliability, can be constructed and shared with law enforcement and intelligence agencies.This might sound too dystopian to be true.