Cocaine

Cockburn finds Madison Cawthorn — the first-term Republican congressboy from North Carolina, defeated in a GOP primary last night — an interesting study. His behavior reminds Cockburn of a Capitol Hill freshman fraternity pledge who just can’t seem to get the rules of the house down. Cockburn never seems to see Cawthorn’s name in the headlines for anything but scandalous reasons: his past is riddled with sexual misconduct allegations, bizarre vacations that involved dressing in lingerie and taking seductive photos with white wine, and dubious claims surrounding his “derailed” career at the Naval Academy (where he wasn’t accepted) and about the aftermath of an accident that led to his paralysis (he’s seeking $30 million in a lawsuit related to the incident).

More news is breaking daily on America’s favorite pipe artist. But if you looked at Hunter Biden’s inner circle, you wouldn’t see a group of people bracing for impact. In fact, you would see photos of Hunter Biden’s wife Melissa Cohen frolicking with friends on the beach in Rio de Janeiro and sipping out of coconuts. You would see the president in the fake White House set rolling up his sleeve for his second televised booster shot. But don’t let the Biden family’s schedule fool you: Hunter is in trouble — and they know it. The Washington Post published a piece this week titled, “Inside Hunter Biden’s multimillion-dollar deals with a Chinese energy company.” The company in question is CEFC China Energy conglomerate.

Madison Cawthorn is paying the price for trying to seem cool on a podcast. The North Carolina congressman carried himself with the air of a high school kid with a “girlfriend” who “goes to a different school” as he spilled the beans on how similar Capitol Hill was to the depiction in House of Cards. Cawthorn described being invited to orgies by older members of Congress and seeing politicos taking cocaine. “I look at all these people, a lot of whom I’ve you know looked up to through my life… then all of a sudden you get invited to- ‘well hey we’re gonna have a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come!’… and you’re like ‘w-what did you just ask me to come to?

President Joe Biden often likes to tout his involvement in passing the Violence Against Women Act. So, naturally, the president was on hand to speak about the issue this week at an event marking the bill’s reauthorization. With his trademark eloquence, Biden emphasized how the reauthorization took aim at revenge porn, which he described as “a new civil rights cause of action for those whose intimate images were shared on a public screen.” “I bet everybody knows somebody,” the president explained, “that in an intimate relationship, what happened was the guy takes a revealing picture of his naked friend, or whatever, in a compromising position and then blackmails.” True enough, Mr. Biden.

Have you heard about ‘Woke Coke’ – ‘Wokaine’, if you will? Apparently drug dealers are now targeting the WaWs (Woke And Wealthy) with gear at £200 a gram (when I quit six years ago, £70 was the going price) and a promise that your particular little bindel of joy is 'environmentally friendly' and 'ethically sourced’ from ‘well-paid farmers.’  Reading about it this week, I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or call the police and report myself for historical crimes against humanity. I don’t regret much in my long, louche life. But if I could go back in time and undo one thing, I’d return to 1985 when I started taking cocaine and thereafter took it pretty much every day for thirty years.

It’s Notting Hill Carnival this weekend. Two days of skanking, dutty dancing and daggering (the dance, rather than the weapon). No carnival experience would be complete without rum punch and jerk chicken, or for that matter crime, cannabis and cocaine. Drugs are part of the fun at Europe’s biggest street festival. There were 76 drug arrests at the festival last year, and 88 arrests made before the party even started as part of a dawn raid seizing machine-guns and crack. Not that partygoers are about to let a little thing like the law get in the way of their bank holiday. A survey earlier this summer from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs claimed London is the city with the highest concentration of cocaine in sewage in Europe.

The Lord Sewel scandal makes me feel proud to be British. For here, thanks to some glorious John Wilkes-style dirt-digging by the Sun — in your face, Leveson! — we have a proper political scandal. This ain’t no yawn-fest about MPs claiming the cost of a Kit-Kat or accidentally favouriting a gay-porn tweet: sad little pseudo-scandals which in recent years have tainted the good name of ignominy. No, the fall of Sewel is a full-on, drugged-up, peer-and-prostitutes scandal, of the kind Britain used to be pretty good at before the square Blairites and cautious Cameroons took over. The disgracing of Sewel is a reminder of British politics at its saucy best. Sewel, I salute you.