2020 election

Joe Biden has faced questions on his mental and physical acuity throughout his presidential bid. For example, he first said he is cognitively tested ‘all the time’ and then clarified to say he has not had a formal cognitive test But there is a larger issue lingering over the 77-year-old — Joe Biden has not been tested for COVID-19. Joe Biden receives Secret Service protection and intelligence briefings similar to that of the President. So why is he refusing to be tested regularly, as the President is, for a highly contagious virus that has killed 173,000 Americans? As of August 19, COVID-19 has claimed the lives of approximately 41,000 Americans aged between 74 and 85. Joe Biden is an American aged between 74 and 85.

Members of media hailed the all-digital Democratic National Convention and convention coordinator Stephanie Cutter, the former Obama adviser famous for smearing Mitt Romney as a killer. The Washington Post’s conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin gushed that the week-long Zoom show should be nominated for an Emmy. Honest onlookers, however, would notice that there wasn’t an explanation as to why the event had to be held this way: China.

There’s an infamous anecdote from an old New York magazine story, in which then-New York mayor Michael Bloomberg arrived at a party, ‘gestured towards a woman in a very tight floor-length gown standing nearby and said, “Look at the ass on her.”’Presumably Mr Bloomberg exuded similar bluntness during his negotiations to speak at this year’s Democratic National Convention. When you’re the 19th richest man in the world, you can stroll into a room and say what you want. Money talks, and therefore so does Michael Bloomberg.

When 83-year-old New Jersey congressman Bill Pascrell shared a photo of American lawmakers meeting a Chinese trade delegation in Washington in 2018, he probably didn’t expect it to go viral on Weibo. (You wonder, rather cruelly, if the congressman is familiar with the term ‘viral’ at all.) But it did go viral — gleefully and potently viral — on Chinese social media. Why? The picture showed two delegations at a table. The Chinese look young, or at least they do when sat opposite the Americans. They look grizzled in the original sense of the word: like gray-haired old men. This image was cannily juxtaposed on Weibo with another one, taken in 1901 in Beijing, at the close of the Boxer Rebellion.

It’s no fun to see Bill Clinton in a virtual vacuum. He’s a people person, a glad-hander, a back-rubber, a donor-stroker, a bottom-fondler. But on Tuesday night, Clinton was a prisoner of Zoom. The big dawg had no legs to rub against.Clinton probably felt as bad about it as his audience. No extended ovation and whooping. No chance to mingle in the green room and offer a White House internship to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Not even an over-long embrace of Rosalynn Carter or a back massage from Jeffrey Epstein’s 22-year-old masseuse after an arduous journey on a private jet to Africa.Tuesday Night was Legacy Night at the Democratic convention, which is not in Milwaukee even though it claims it is.

Kamala Harris is no radical. Indeed, no matter how vaguely inclusive the label ‘progressive’ may be, Harris’s long record as a California prosecutor makes it difficult to shoehorn her professional career under that rubric. The real Kamala Harris is a liberal careerist with no deep convictions whose ability to woo wealthy supporters allowed her to win a seat in the Senate.Harris’s story bears extensive similarities to that of Barack Obama. Born biracial to two academically-gifted parents, a contentious divorce found young Kamala being raised by her mother in a linguistically foreign country — French-speaking Montreal, rather than Indonesia. And, like Obama, Harris’s younger sister is named Maya.

Kamala Harris’s selection as the Democratic vice presidential nominee has been touted as the remarkable success story of a daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica. It is that. But it also represents the dramatic ascendency of a subset of the Democratic party that used to be dismissed as the ‘loony left’ of politics: the ‘San Francisco Democrats.’ The phrase ‘San Francisco Democrat’ was coined by Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan’s UN ambassador, who brandished it as a weapon at the 1984 GOP convention in Dallas. San Francisco was where the Democrats nominated Walter Mondale to challenge Reagan.