Latest from Coffee House

Friday

28 Jun 2019

The Democrats are too fake for 2020

Joe Biden bled last night. Kamala Harris slashed him to ribbons over his opposition to busing and his kind words for long-ago segregationist colleagues. But Harris, who has a knack for turning left-wing dogmas into vivid images and personal stories, made only the most generic of pitches on her own behalf in her closing statement. Most of the other officeholders on stage were similarly uninspired. Bernie Sanders was a bracing alternative to Hillary Clinton four years ago. But his message is now just repetition—nothing makes him a different or better candidate than he was in 2016, even as the country has changed profoundly and the field of rivals he now faces is nothing like the one-on-one race with Clinton.

Thursday

27 Jun 2019

James Adams

Will Trump enter the hypersonic nuclear arms race?

The Pentagon is urgently reviewing just how and when the president might launch nuclear missiles as a dangerous new nuclear arms race breaks out. Hypersonic missiles are capable of flying at around 12,000 miles per hour, or Mach 20. That would reduce the US response time to as little as five minutes — too short for the president to enter the launch codes into the ‘football’ (actually a briefcase) that is never more than a few feet away. Instead, some officials argue that Artificial Intelligence should manage the US response. AI could gather information about launches, likely targets, and the most effective counter-responses — and be empowered to launch nuclear missiles without human intervention.

Curt Mills

Cory Booker’s southern strategy

You don’t get to pick which war you fight in. When Cory Booker burst onto the national scene earlier this decade as the do-good mayor of Newark, New Jersey, most thought he was presidential timber. He agreed. Doubtless he believed his best case scenario was landing on the 2016 ticket as Vice President, with a subsequent White House bid of his own. But by the time Booker joined the Senate in 2013, his odds were lengthening. Questions swirled about his management of Newark — or if he even truly lived there. And by the time Donald Trump seized the White House, Booker became better known for garnering buffoonish headlines — he wasn’t a future president or a thoroughbred. He was ‘Spartacus’.

Sarah-Madeleine Torres and Bradley A. Thayer

China’s Belt and Road Initiative is neo-Imperialism

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is touted by Beijing as an attempt at multinational economic cooperation and development, comprising everything from foreign direct investment to the development of infrastructure. However, the purpose of the BRI is not economic or cultural but strategic, and is an effort to mask the expansion of Chinese power. In its strategic intent, the BRI should be considered an imperial project alongside the likes of the British East India Company (EIC) or the Dutch East Indian Company, Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC). With the BRI, China is exercising the 'imperial excuse', just as the EIC and VOC did centuries ago.

Jacob Heilbrunn

Wednesday’s debate was a warm-up act

Are the Democrats running against Mitch McConnell rather than Donald Trump? McConnell’s name was invoked several times last night as a synonym with malice and treachery. And Trump? Not so much. The candidates seemed to want to deal with Trump by elision rather than confronting him directly. But Trump himself weighed in on the proceedings from Air Force One to blow a loud raspberry: 'BORING!' This wasn’t quite fair. The differences between the candidates, who amounted to a warm-up band for tonight’s main performance, was a study in the contrasts that mark the Democratic party. Tim Ryan and John Delaney sought offer up the unadulterated old time gospel of the Democrat of yore.

Roger Kimball

A pathetic exhibition of virtue-signaling in Miami

A genuine liberal education is as much an education of the emotions as it is an education of the intellect. The truly educated person experiences the right emotions at the appropriate times in the appropriate intensity for the appropriate reasons. Aristotle explains all this in the Nicomachean Ethics. Knowing this, I felt badly watching the 'debate' among the first tranche of 10 Democratic aspirants to be their party’s nominee for president in 2020. I felt, I must admit, an immoderate excess of schadenfreude — tinged with revulsion, it is true, but the element of pleasing disdain predominated. I am not proud of it. I merely record the fact. But consider my provocation.

Tuesday

25 Jun 2019

Matt McDonald

Spare a thought for the single-digit 2020 Democrats

Who was the last person you felt genuinely sorry for? A newly unemployed blue-collar worker who’s been ‘innovated’ out of a job by mechanization, perhaps. Or that elderly widower in an old folks’ home whose family never seems to visit. Maybe even a single mother in the Rust Belt, trapped in the bleak throes of opioid addiction. There’s enough suffering in this country to go around – it’s not hard to pick someone. Then ask yourself this: what about the real victims? Those struggling through the hardship of sleepless nights and non-stop travel, met with at best indifference, at worst disdain wherever they go. When have you given them a moment’s thought?

Chadwick Moore

A mental health professional diagnoses cable news anchors

The 'Goldwater rule' is the informal name of the American Psychiatric Association’s guideline that it is unethical for psychiatrists to give ‘a professional opinion about public figures whom they have not examined in person, and from whom they have not obtained consent to discuss their mental health in public statements.’ It’s named after 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, who sued a magazine and won after it published a story claiming over a thousand mental health experts said he was unfit for office. ‘Fuck that,’ reflected psychologist and Yale professor Bandy X. Lee when she looked at the Goldwater rule in 2017.

Caroline McCarthy

The Democratic debates drinking game

Now that former Pennsylvania congressman Joe Sestak has entered the race, there are now 24 Democratic candidates for the presidency (excluding Mike Gravel, who’s not running to win). That’s right – one candidate for every can of beer in a case. Or every hour in a day. Or both. Mercifully, all 24 won’t be onstage for the party’s first official debates, but there are nevertheless so many contenders who met the criteria for participation that the event has been split up into two nights.The prospect of a two-dozen-candidate field in a primary for an election which ultimately won’t be decided for over a year would make anyone want to grab the nearest adult beverage. So we created a drinking game for you.

Monday

24 Jun 2019

Freddy Gray

Michael Wolff: the Mueller indictment document ‘sits on my desk’

On Friday, I had the pleasure of recording a podcast with Michael Wolff at his hotel in Mayfair. Wolff is on a tour for his book, Siege, the sequel to Fire and Fury, his mega-bestseller about the Trump presidency. We talked Trump, the Trump-Russia inquiry, media screw-ups, Steve Bannon and Boris Johnson. You can listen here: https://audioboom.com/posts/7295917-michael-wolff-the-mueller-indictment-document-sits-on-my-desk Perhaps the biggest bombshell in Siege is Wolff’s claim that Mueller laid out an indictment of the president, a long document detailing how such a move would work. Mueller’s office has denied the document’s existence. But Wolff insists he has it ‘in my hands … I tell you: it sits on my desk.

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

AOC: ignorant or anti-Semitic?

When my grandmother Masha was liberated by the British Army from the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, she was 19 years old and weighed 83 pounds. It was the last of more than half a dozen camps she would survive before finally being freed. The first camp that she, her mother, and her then-11-year-old sister arrived at was in Estonia. She saw an unfamiliar sight: Jewish women like herself with their heads shaven, wearing strange prison pajamas infested with lice. She once explained to an interviewer from the Jerusalem Post that at the Stutthof concentration camp she had to convince her mother, my namesake, to 'hide in the outhouse during a roll call: exposing the swollen leg to the camp’s savage SS women would have been her mother’s death knell’.

Michael Tracey

The Bernie Sanders paradox

Anton Gunn was holding court at the South Carolina Democratic Convention this weekend, eager to regale journalists with tales of the vaunted Barack Obama primary campaign in 2008. Obama’s landslide victory in South Carolina over Hillary Clinton that year propelled him to indomitable front-runner status, and Gunn, per his own telling, was the very first person Obama hired in the state. 'The first time he landed in South Carolina, I picked him up in my car and I drove him to his first event,' Gunn said.

Friday

21 Jun 2019

Libby Emmons

Sex work with Teen Vogue

Sex work is real work, says Teen Vogue, that bastion of female-forward journalism — and apparently a valid career move. Calling prostitution ‘sex work’ and approving of sex work are part of the progressive political platform. The push back against reactionaries who believe women should not be sell their bodies is swift and fierce. Teen Vogue is spearheading a change in how girls see themselves, their sexuality, and their bodies. Tlaleng Mofokeng, the doctor who wrote ‘Why Sex Work is Real Work’, argues for countries to adopt a system where it's illegal to buy sex, but not to sell it. Prostitution is not in decline, and until sex-doll brothels really take off, it's unlikely to be.

Curt Mills

The untenability of President Bolton

The president of the United States weighed retaliatory airstrikes on the Islamic Republic of Iran before pulling back at the eleventh hour, he confirmed Friday morning. 'We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights when I asked, how many will die. 150 people, sir, was the answer from a General. 10 minutes before the strike I stopped it,' Donald Trump tweeted. He said the planned response was not 'proportionate to shooting down an unmanned drone,' referring to the recent malign activity from the regime. 'I am in no hurry,' he caveated. 'He just tweeted it out,' Alex Ward, defense reporter at Vox, joked. Ward refers to a swirl of chatter that engulfed Washington Thursday night.

Daniel McCarthy

Is Roy Moore the post-Trump future?

When America’s educated elite imagines what the Republican party will look like after Donald Trump, whether he’s defeated next year or leaves office in 2025, they think in terms of the past. The Grand Old Party will once more be the party of Mitt Romney and the Bush dynasty, those formerly reviled figures now celebrated by the center-left as decent Republicans in contrast to Trump. They are the obvious and inevitable alternative to him. Aren’t they? If you don’t have Mr Hyde, then you must have Dr Jekyll. If you topple Saddam Hussein, then you obviously get a tolerant, pluralistic liberal democracy. America’s educated elite is not really in truth well-educated at all, and it has the moral sophistication of a Star Wars movie.

Mark Perry

Making Centcom great again

Back in October 1983, the US invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada. American medical students had been taken hostage by a Cuban-supported military junta, and Ronald Reagan ordered the US military to rescue the students, defeat Grenada’s small militia, depose the junta and put the island in the hands of its Governor-General. The intervention, Operation Urgent Fury, was an overwhelming victory for the United States – and the Reagan administration. But the Grenada operation was a mess. As the story goes (albeit, through many iterations), during the intervention an Army commander needed support from offshore Navy assets. The soldier could see the ships but had no way to reach them.

Thursday

20 Jun 2019

Curt Mills

Charlie Kirk abandons America First

‘I have loyalty to ideas,’ said Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, a network of young conservatives that has seen liftoff in the Trump era. ‘Of course I love the Grand Canyon. I love the Rocky Mountains. And I love Boston. And I love Chicago. But if all that disappeared, if all I had was ideas, and we were on an island, that’s America. That’s Israel.’ ‘And that’s what people have to realize,’ Kirk continued. ‘America’s just a placeholder for timeless ideas. And if you fall too in love with, oh, the specific place, and all this...that’s not what it is.’ For good measure, Kirk added: ‘Israel would be the exception. There is a holy connection to this land.’ You heard the man.

Ben Sixsmith

The case for locking Joe Biden in a cupboard

Most candidates for the Democratic nomination are struggling to be noticed in a crowded field. Elizabeth Warren details policy proposals. Bernie Sanders rails against the establishment. Beto O’Rourke stands on tables and flails his arms.Joe Biden, on the other hand, has not had to do a lot to garner attention. The career politician and former vice president has a big enough and successful enough brand that he was guaranteed to be the favorite merely by existing. American liberals love to soak in a warm bath of nostalgia for the innocent, pre-Trump Obama era, and if they cannot have Barack back, Joe is the next best thing.

Freddy Gray

Give Tucker Carlson a Nobel prize!

The strong favorite for the Nobel Peace Prize this year is Greta Thunberg, a girl who lectures grownups about climate change. In a sane world, the award would go to somebody who stops wars. In 2019, that somebody should be Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson. Carlson is a Fox News host, which means the smart people who give out awards will never take him seriously. In the last few weeks, however, he may have done more to advance the cause of peace than any other human on the planet. Anyone with half a brain can tell that some of President Trump’s cabinet and his advisers are itching to bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran — as the late, hawk Saint John McCain so delicately put it, to the tune of the Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann.

Wednesday

19 Jun 2019

Curt Mills

Trumpworld Orlando, where dreams come true

Why did Donald Trump choose Orlando, near Disney World, for his campaign kickoff Tuesday night? Because he appears to be living in a fantasy land.Trump reached the White House by promising a border wall, a national industrial policy and a restrained foreign policy. He has delivered near none of those things, but the Mickey Mouse president is running for re-election anyway.Trump repeated some familiar cartoons on Tuesday, ridiculing Hillary Clinton a mere three years after defeating her. But it was a night for the hits. He also served up an old slapstick favorite, claiming that the media deflate his crowd sizes. The New York Times confirmed the number in attendance to be north of 20,000. Trump's goofy claim that there were 'over 100,000 requests' to get in remains unconfirmed.

Katie Yoder

2020 Democrats have taken nearly $200k from Planned Parenthood

Abortion promises to be a major talking point in 2020. While President Trump has pointedly condemned legislation allowing late-term abortion, his Democratic opponents refuse to name any limits on abortion, except to say 'it’s a decision the woman makes.' They also happen to have a monetary relationship with the nation’s largest abortion provider. According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), 12 Democrats looking to secure the nomination in 2020 have received a combined $191,300 since 1990 from Planned Parenthood while serving as federal candidates. Here’s the breakdown of funding given by Planned Parenthood to Democrats eyeing 2020, listed by candidate and year: Sen.

Tuesday

18 Jun 2019

Curt Mills

Trump swaps one defense contractor for another

Donald Trump dispensed with the services of his acting Defense chief Patrick Shanahan on Tuesday, amid scathing media coverage and ongoing tensions with Iran. Shanahan had filled the post on an interim basis since the sudden protest resignation of James Mattis in December. Trump had demurred for months on formally giving Shanahan the job, drawing out the interregnum long enough to raise questions of legality. Trump formally endorsed Shanahan in the spring, but soon after began second-guessing his own choice, reportedly asking several people on his June junket to Europe what they thought of his new Defense pick.

Michael Heath

The death of political cartoons isn’t funny

The New York Times is dropping its political cartoons. Well, what a surprise! Making people laugh has never been easy. I’ve been supporting ex-wives and making a living from banging out cartoons since 1953, God help me. I started with selling drawings to the British music magazine, Melody Maker. They printed them and paid me two guineas a time, which was worth £2 and 2 shillings, or about $5.50. You could buy a house for five quid then, and you could afford to get married, God help me! There were lots of magazines and newspapers around then and I worked for most of them: Lilliput and Tatler are still going but jokeless. Punch’s editor Malcolm Muggeridge said that if I kept sending my work in I’d soon become a regular, (then, added ‘God help you!’).

Monday

17 Jun 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Donald Trump is far from finished

Donald Trump is on the skids. It won’t take much to knock him out. So far, Democrats appear to be sticking with Joe Biden rather than casting more than flirtatious glances at other, more left wing candidates. Not so fast. As Henry Olsen reminds us in the Washington Post today, Trump is far from finished. The heck with the popular vote. The only votes that count are getting to 270 in the electoral college. Trump squeaked by in 2016. He could do it again. Trump, after all, may be most dangerous when he appears to be on the ropes. Tomorrow night Trump will kick off his re-election campaign in Orlando, Florida. He’ll be pumped. Fox News says that his supporters are already lining up to see the great man. Trump has a lot to prove.

James Adams

The sexbot apocalypse

A romantic dinner for two, five years from now: Karen is sitting across the table from Ryan. Sipping her oaky but floral Chardonnay, she reflects on just how great life is these days. Ryan is everything she ever wanted in a man. His skin tone is exactly the color and feel she was looking for. His conversation is interesting, ranging sensitively from Tolstoy to cheeseburgers. Thanks to facial recognition, he always knows her mood. It’s almost uncanny how he’s always there to give just the right amount of empathy, just at the right time, or even slightly earlier. He knows her likes and dislikes, her interests and her expertise. At last, she has found her intellectual equal. And the sex.

Sunday

16 Jun 2019

Cockburn

The New Republic’s useful idiot tour

'To live in Havana', Graham Greene once wrote, 'was to live in a factory that turned out human beauty on a conveyor belt.' To work as Cockburn does, as an underfed Grub Street hack, is to work in an industry that turns out pointless emails on a conveyor belt. Every now and then though a real diamond rolls out of the coal chute. On Friday The New Republic invited its readers on a Caribbean jaunt – to Raúl Castro’s Cuba. Under the heading 'Discover Cuba and Support the Cuban People' the email read: 'While Trump petulantly restricts travel to Cuba, The New Republic invites you to discover the culture, society and politics of the island, and most of all bolster the people of Cuba when they need it most.

Friday

14 Jun 2019

Roger Kimball

Godspeed, Sarah Sanders

Donald Trump, the president of the United States, announced yesterday on Twitter that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary, would be departing her job at the end of the month. He later, at a press conference about a new program to help felons reenter the work force, praised her as a 'magnificent person' who has done 'an incredible job.' Taking the podium, Ms Sanders expressed her admiration for the president and his agenda and said, tears in her eyes, that working for him had been 'the honor of a lifetime.' Pretty straight forward, right? Wrong. The press hates Sarah Sanders. Like its hatred for Donald Trump, the detestation is reflexive, visceral, and in the deepest sense aesthetic, a matter of immediate feeling.

Thursday

13 Jun 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Come on: we all know Kellyanne Conway is above the Hatch Act

Donald Trump can no more remove Kellyanne Conway from his administration than the Louvre could banish the Mona Lisa. She has been a stalwart defender of Trump both during his campaign and presidency. There are few members of the Trump camp that possess her talent for the zinger. While the old fighters like Jeff Sessions, Steve Bannon and Corey Lewandowski fell by the wayside, Conway has proven the supreme survivor. Even Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump announced on Thursday afternoon on Twitter, is headed back to Arkansas.

Alan Tonelson

Trump was right to threaten Mexico with tariffs

Let's not mince words. President Trump and his loyalists were dead right. His threat of tariffs pushed Mexico to work harder to stop the Central American caravans, and the migrants who hope to exploit immigration law loopholes in order to receive asylum in the United States. And the bipartisan, Trump-loathing political, business and media establishments were all dead wrong. They warned that his strong-arming would ignite a trade war, disrupt the thick web of supply chains linking the American and Mexican economies, and risk a recession. Equally off-base was the establishmentarians' angst that Trump's gambit would endanger the revamp of the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) that he has sought and which Mexico and Canada recently signed.

Freddy Gray

Phony Betomania has bitten the dust

Remember Betomania? It seems an age away, yet just three months ago, Beto O’Rourke was still being hailed as the Democratic messiah. There was all that gush about how his campaign in Texas inspired the country, even though he lost. There was the mad drooling over his Medium and Instagram posts. There was that appalling, emetic Vanity Fair cover through which he revealed he was running: ‘I was born to be in it.’ There was that competing rally with Trump on the Texan border, where he stood for openness as opposed to bigotry.He was cool, he was cute, he was impeccably progressive on issues such as climate change, gun control and LGBTQ rights. But he wasn’t too dangerously threateningly left to freak out the elites.

Wednesday

12 Jun 2019

Will Lloyd

When did Congressional testimony become performance art?

Watching parts of the Watergate hearings again recently, I was struck by just how dry they are as a spectacle. This momentous national occasion, with all its historic consequences, appeared to be conducted with all the torpor of a group of chameleons sunbathing on a tree branch. If you were to compare Alexander P. Butterfield’s restrained, emotionally strangled testimony with Jon Stewart’s showboating appearance before a House Judiciary Committee yesterday, you would think an enormous change in human nature had occurred in the decades between then and now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeQXopJ5U-Q Stewart was attending a hearing for a bill that would protect the health benefits of 9/11 first responders.

Harry J. Kazianis

Ignore the scorn, Trump has been proved right on North Korea

Don’t believe the Trump-haters when they trash the Singapore summit between America and North Korea, which we mark the first anniversary of today. This was a win for everyone who wants to see a stable peace on the Korean Peninsula. And the alternative remains too horrific to imagine. Some will say the summit accomplished nothing but a vague statement of goals and principles, with nothing delivered and no schedule for future deliveries. The pundits will pontificate that Trump was duped, that he shied from going toe-to-toe with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un – and that Washington has done the worst thing possible, and legitimized a state whose human rights record is surely the worst of any on the planet. That’s just wrong.

Dylan Gallimore

The media’s shameful PR campaign for Elizabeth Warren

In recent weeks, Elizabeth Warren has emerged as the mainstream media’s favorite candidate – for now, at least. Warren’s polling has largely been stagnant over the course of the race for the Democratic nomination, but you wouldn’t know it from the fawning coverage – coverage that just so happens to consistently echo the Warren campaign’s exact talking points. The New York Times asks ‘Elizabeth Warren is running an ideas-first campaign. Will it work?’ The Washington Post writes, ‘Warren’s nonstop ideas reshape the Democratic presidential race — and give her new momentum.

Tuesday

11 Jun 2019

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump is Joe Biden’s best campaign aide

They warn generals not to fight the last war. The same admonition might apply to presidential races. Donald Trump was out on the White House lawn attacking Joe Biden with his usual battery of epithets — ‘dummy,’ ‘loser,’ and so forth — and it sounded like déjà vu all over again. Even as he derides Biden as ‘slower than he used to be,’ it is Trump who is starting to look as though he’s losing his mojo. In 2016, Trump ran a guerrilla campaign in which he was able to sneak up on the enemy, first the Republicans vying for the nomination, then Hillary Clinton. No one took Trump that seriously.