David Brooks

Monday

Cosmo Landesman

How to know when to let friends go

London When an old friend says to you, “we must meet up for lunch sometime,” you can be sure of one thing: you will never meet for lunch. Why? Because your friendship is over. The clue is in the word “sometime.” It’s a rain check that never gets cashed. It’s what friends say to each other when they feel obliged to see a friend they don’t really want to see — but they don’t want to dump either. We all have friends like these: I call them the Undead friends, when the friendship is neither fully alive nor totally dead. You don’t delete them from your contact list — just your social life. This will lead to the odd spasm of guilt but don’t worry; we all do it. And it gets done to us too. There are people you think of as your great friends.

friends

Friday

Cockburn

Eric Clapton raises beaucoup bucks for RFK, Jr.

Rocker and guitar legend Eric Clapton recently held a fundraiser concert for Robert F. Kennedy Jr., raising a whopping $2.2 million for the Democratic presidential candidate. The Cream and Yardbirds alum previously took heat from the media for coming out against the Covid vaccine mandates after claiming to experience adverse reactions that may have prevented him from playing guitar ever again. Cockburn can’t say he's shocked that Clapton found a friend in RFK, who has similarly taken plenty of heat for his position on the jab.  A Democrat in need is a friend indeed Sometimes it helps to have friends in high places — and in this case, control of Congress may hinge on one New Yorker’s push to get his buddy elected.

rfk jr.

Monday

Amber Duke

Joe Biden and Terry McAuliffe’s ‘conservative’ friends

Former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, in the recent Virginia gubernatorial debate against Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin, touted an odd endorsement: founder of the Weekly Standard and editor-at-large of the Bulwark, Bill Kristol. 'I left a huge surplus when I left office. And that's the reason so many Republicans have endorsed me — over two dozen prominent Republicans. Tonight, I have the leading conservative in America here, Bill Kristol, who has endorsed my campaign for governor,' McAuliffe said. https://twitter.com/greg_price11/status/1442999842771546113 Any right-leaning politico couldn't help but laugh at the notion that Kristol is the nation's 'leading conservative’.

terry Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe (R) (D-VA) (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Wednesday

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Reports of the GOP’s death are greatly exaggerated

David Brooks, the center-right Cassandra of the New York Times, reckons that a GOP apocalypse is coming. The data predicted as much in 2016, when all the smart pollsters predicted a Clinton landslide, and I predicted as much when mourning the fact that Trump was the new Republican standard-bearer. But tinsel didn’t rain forth from Hillary’s near-anointing at the Jacob Javits Center. The end of the world is deferred, yet again. Trump is not conservative in the strict sense of the word; he’s a libertarian and a libertine. So you could plausibly argue that despite Trump’s victory, conservatism did not win in 2016. You could even argue that conservatism didn’t really compete at all in 2016, or, if it did, that it lost.

gop death