Barack obama

Cockburn’s rug-cutting days are behind him. An unfortunate misunderstanding with the wife of an Ecuadorian chargé d’affairs during a Georgetown salsa class means he now steers well clear of the dancefloor. But he learned enough in his time to know that Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for Virginia governor, has a strong claim to the title of worst boogier inside the Beltway. The Macker’s moves gained fresh attention when the former governor, floundering in his bid for another stint in his old job, started shaking his hips alongside Joe Biden at a rally in Arlington this week. Everyone else on the stage seems to know what to do: stand, smile and wave. Pretend we’re not bombing in the polls, pat each other on the back, hold our hands in the air.

Isn’t it odd how progressives constantly emit platitudes like words matter, yet can never resist a chance to indulge in hyperbole of the highest order? On Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, former navy officer and current MSNBC crank Malcolm Nance made the absurd claim that 40,000 people stormed the Capitol on January 6. Though conservative pundit Ben Shapiro aggressively rebutted this falsehood, Nance did not back down. So what if he was lying? Insisting that ‘40,000 people’ entered the Capitol sounds a lot more dramatic — or melodramatic — than ‘1,000 people’ and it helps bolster Nance’s asinine storyline. The late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (a Democrat) used to say, ‘You’re entitled to your own opinions, but not to your own facts.

I lost my invitation and, besides, the pilot of my private plane was on holiday, so I had to miss the intimate, scaled-back get-together that Barack Obama convened to celebrate his 60th year gracing our planet with his awesomeness. I didn’t feel too badly, though — no paralyzing waves of 'FOMO' — because all my friends in the media made me feel I was almost there. There were all those leaked snaps and videos, for one thing, showing the Prez dance-dance-dancing the night away, nary a mask in sight. In truth, that was the one thing I liked about this obscene, Gatsby-esque spectacle. The Obamas, and presumably their guests, had been vaccinated.

President Joe Biden hit the golf course for the second time since taking office on Sunday, continuing something of an American presidential tradition. Unlike his predecessors, however, Biden appears to be a duffer. It's possible that at one point in time Biden was a decent golfer. He's been a member of Wilmington Country Club in Delaware since 2014 and reportedly had as low as a 6 handicap. That's a bit hard to believe as former president Barack Obama said he had an 'honest 13' handicap after playing 300 rounds of golf. A video of Biden on the links this past weekend further confirms that his golf game has gone the same direction as his mental acuity. The clip shows Biden well to the left of the green behind a short stone wall.

It’s hard to keep them all straight, but among the many diktats emitted by the Biden administration during its first days in office, one deserves special commendation for its brazen mendacity. I mean the ‘Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government’. The key word, as we’ve heard over and over again these last few weeks, is ‘equity’. The diktat (a more accurate term for what is happening than ‘Executive Order’) promises ‘a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all’ by ‘affirmatively advancing,’ well, ‘equity’. If you think you discern a little whiff of tautology, you’re right. You are also right if, on second sniff, you catch the acrid scent of contradiction.

One of my favorite photos of all time comes from a 2012 March Madness basketball game that then-president Barack Obama attended with then-British prime minister David Cameron. The picture captures the two men perfectly. It shows Obama sitting courtside with a hot dog in his hand pointing and lecturing in that quintessential Obama way, while Cameron glowers and appears to contemplate all the places he’d rather be — getting an endoscopy, bombing Libya, anywhere else on the planet, really. The question inherent in that photo isn’t why Obama appeared to be hectoring a European ally: Obama would have hectored the Dalai Lama if given the chance. The question is: what was the most powerful leader on earth doing at a Mississippi Valley State basketball game in the first place?

Does Joe Biden write his own speeches? Surely not. Yet his campaign says Biden was his own speechwriter for the address he made to the nation a week after the election, when he stressed his campaign theme: ‘We must restore the soul of America.’ The Soul of America is the title of a book by the historian Jon Meacham and the New York Times figured out that Meacham had helped with the speech. The campaign’s national press secretary, TJ Ducklo, was forced to concede that, yes, Biden had ‘consulted a number of important, and diverse, voices as part of his writing process, as he often does’.

Although the electors for the presidential election of 2020 do not cast their votes until December 14, and their votes are not certified — and hence the election is not officially ratified — until December 23, it is eminently possible that by the time you read this the world will know whether the election was won by Donald Trump or Joe Biden. That is emphatically not the case now, in mid-November. The media narrative would have you believe otherwise. According to the received script, Biden won on November 3, or at least in the wee hours of November 4, when mail-in ballots, tens of thousands of them, began appearing like manna from heaven.

Americans have never been sure of their standing in the world, and the world has never been sure of Americans’ standing. In their first century as a nation, Americans believed that their principles made their civilization not just different but also better than Europe’s. Meanwhile, the intellectual and political leaders of Europe were unconvinced that America was a civilization at all. In their second century as a nation, other, older civilizations were obliged to admit that Americans were not just different: they were better at modern life. The Americans achieved this recognition first by the force of their industrial and military power, and then by the flattery that other civilizations could become equally forceful and seductive by adopting the American way of life.

Writing in mid-October, anno domini 2020, it is sobering to speculate that when the results of a certain upcoming political contest are finally decided, an item that has captivated the public’s attention for nearly four years might be about to evaporate without trace. I refer, of course, to that great long-running entertainment, the Trump-Russia Collusion Delusion. As I write, the latest morceaux are the revelations from John Ratcliffe, the newly installed Director of National Intelligence, to the effect that Russian intelligence believed that Hillary Clinton had approved a plan ‘to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services’ during the 2016 presidential campaign. Why? Typical campaign dirty tricks, in part.

'I'm in love — but not with anybody here. I'll see you in a couple years,' Billie Eilish crooned during the third night of the Democratic National Convention. The teen vocalist was singing her new single 'My Future’, but the lyrics could just as easily be a rallying cry for the young progressives kicked in the teeth yet again by the Democratic establishment. Democrats love to boast about their youth support and the party’s future generation of leaders, but their convention displays a political party that is fully enamored with the past. It's not wrong for them to make the calculation that young people don't vote and thus they're better off trying to bring in moderates who sat out 2016 or held their nose and voted for Trump.

I almost gave tonight’s DNC performance a miss. How could they top the fey chap pretending to be a bat while miming to a poor rendition of Buffalo Springfield’s 'For What It’s Worth' as a collage of kneeling athletes in 'Black Lives Matter' t-Shirts flitted by behind him? It was...special. I’d say that the chap who tweeted that it was 'the moment Trump won reelection' was right, except that there have been so many such moments: positive ones like President Trump’s magnificent speech at Mount Rushmore last month, as well as negative ones like the Biden campaign’s pick of Kamala Harris as his running mate. One wag said that that decision was a huge in-kind donation to the Trump campaign. That sounds right to me.