Democrats

By the middle of January, I’d read some version of the headline “Biden Can Still Rescue His Presidency” so many times that it seemed an algorithm had taken over from the editors. The New York Times placed it above a column by Bret Stephens, a prominent anti-Trump conservative and a member of the pundit pack that earnestly wished the president Godspeed when he entered the White House more than a year ago. Stephens, like most of his colleagues, argued that Biden was “flailing — and failing” — because of what the paper’s news pages have described as a “legislative agenda in shambles.

I’ve been thinking about where I was on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, and my memories of the event are quite depressing. What have we learned? As a research fellow at the Cato Institute at that time, I was working with other analysts preparing research, authoring commentaries, publishing op-ed articles and giving interviews to the broadcast media, warning about the consequences of the coming American military conquest in the Middle East. It's not polite to toot one’s own horn, but we were right.

Many of our political leaders are historically illiterate. This is especially concerning given that some of these politicians have been around since the dawn of time. They've lived through much of the history they now seem to know so little about. While heaping praise on Biden’s decision to nominate the first black woman to the Supreme Court, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer decided to spread misinformation. Luckily his misinformation was just a rant on the Senate floor and not on Spotify. Otherwise, Neil Young might have had some words for him. "Until 1981, this powerful body, the Supreme Court, was all white men. Imagine. America wasn't all white men in 1981, or ever.

“It’s time for us to do what we have been doing and that time is every day" was the much ridiculed answer from Vice President Kamala Harris in an interview with NBC News on Thursday. It has been lampooned in almost every corner of the media and memed all over the internet, and rightly so. Harris has been plagued her entire electoral career by a sense that she isn't prepared. This time the test is the pandemic, which is a major problem for her and Joe Biden almost a year into their administration. It's a term they were elected to almost exclusively on the promise of “shutting down the virus.” But viruses are a non-political problem, despite Biden's politicizing it during the 2020 election.

Was there an ayahuasca retreat for normie Democratic pundits last weekend that Cockburn didn’t get an invitation to? He asks because recent days have seen the proliferation of hot takes best explained by the ingestion of psychedelics. In particular, Cockburn is confused by a series of kooky suggestions as to who might make good Democratic presidential and vice-presidential candidates next time around. In the Wall Street Journal, Douglas E. Schoen and Andrew Stein say that Joe and Kamala have become too unpopular to run again and that it might be time for a “change” candidate: a tough broad who goes by the name of Hillary Clinton. Yes, that’s right: Hillary could be back.

A piece in Politico titled “Democrats fall flat with ‘Latinx’ language” dropped yesterday, and as is always the case with such stories, activists and pundits took to Twitter to decry or defend “Latinx.” What was interesting this time around, however, is that some big-name progressives came out against the term. Fernand Amandi, an MSNBC analyst and the principal at Bendixen & Amandi International, the polling outfit quoted in Politico, tweeted: https://twitter.com/AmandiOnAir/status/1467843020838080512?s=20 According to the poll, only 2 percent of Hispanics refer to themselves as Latinx; 68 percent prefer Hispanic and 21 percent identify as Latino/Latina.

President Joe Biden during his 2020 campaign vowed not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 a year. That promise recently hit an iceberg in the form of a new excise tax on nicotine. Kentucky Congressman John Yarmuth inserted the tax into the tome-like Build Back Better Plan bill last week. Yarmuth’s amendment appears to focus on e-cigarettes, vape juice, and other non-tobacco items by classifying them as extracted nicotine products with a max levy of over $50. That’s like the current tobacco tax. It’s unknown how much revenue Yarmuth hopes to raise, though the original Build Back Better Plan included $96 billion in tobacco and e-cigs taxes. Any nicotine tax will hit the lower and middle classes harder than anyone else.

Top Democrats took a media victory lap last weekend, crowing about the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that finally cleared the House on Friday night after months of false starts and intra-party squabbling. The vote came only after Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her latest Hail Mary, attempted to satisfy progressive lawmakers by also allowing a procedural vote on the massive social spending bill craved by liberals. Even then, Pelosi was forced to rely on a handful of Republicans to secure a majority. Predictably, the White House was eager to spin the bill’s passage as major win for the Biden agenda, claiming it would energize voters and pave the way for trillions more in government spending just in time for the holidays.

There is a spot of Washington DC, a few blocks of downtown not far from the White House, where a cigarette is your only hope. The buildings are garish blocks of glass — 'like someone overturned a giant ice cube tray,' as one wag put it — while the color palette runs from charcoal gray to navy gray. The place can feel like ennui embodied, and all the worse when rain darkens the air and the streets fill with the soulless din of tires swishing through puddles. It can wear on you, this drab slice of middle-managerial noir. But at least for me, there is one thing that can brighten it up: cigarette smoke. I might catch it off a passerby or light up a Marlboro myself. But either way I feel paradoxically improved. I think, at least someone here is having a good time.

After a month-long mail-in vote, the campaign to recall California governor Gavin Newsom is ending. If Newsom obtains a majority, which is very likely, he will keep his seat and run for election next year. But coming on the heels of his 2018 landslide, the recall attempt — whatever the outcome — is a blow, revealing massive discontent with his performance, and more broadly, with progressive policies. Newsom — and suddenly the entire Democratic party, it seems — seeks to turn the vote into a referendum on so-called Democratic and Republican values. Last week on the campaign trail, Vice President Kamala Harris implausibly claimed that restrictions on 'women’s rights, reproductive rights, voting rights, worker’s rights' are at issue.

It’s a national disgrace, a catastrophe nearly two decades in the making. In a just society, everyone involved would be severely punished, but in the fallen state of modern America there will be no consequences, only more humiliation. Cockburn refers, of course, to Twitter, that monstrous invention where America’s politicians, journalists, ‘experts’, and ordinary people compete with one another to see who can be the most profoundly pathetic, unimpressive, and cringeworthy. Naturally, the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan allowed every player to put in their best performance.

A funny thing happened to me this Fourth of July and, at the risk of having every jaded member of the blue-check Twitterati respond, ‘I’ll take things that didn’t happen for $200, Alex,’ I’m going to tell the story. My aunt and uncle invited me and my husband to join them in their annual excursion to the Fourth of July celebration at the Hollywood Bowl. This has become a ritual for us and as it was the first event at the Bowl since the pandemic, everyone was in a festive mood. For the occasion, I wore American flag leggings and a headband that spelled out U-S-A. On springs. As we settled into our box, we chatted with the women drinking wine and eating tapas next to us. Standard small talk. How excited we were to be back at the Bowl. What a gorgeous night it was.

Protesters have been setting fire to yet another American city today to tell us that black lives matter. This latest eruption is in response to a disturbing video that shows a black man being shot repeatedly in the back by police as he reaches into his car in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The man in question is called Jacob Blake. He is reported to be in a serious condition, but still alive in hospital this morning. An investigation into the shooting is taking place, but the mob smashing up Kenosha doesn’t care about that — it cares about rage and destruction. We see the now familiar liturgy of so-called protest: cars on fire; windows shattered; shops looted and tagged with ‘BLM’ and ‘ACAB’ (All Cops Are Bastards) graffiti.

We were four minutes in, somewhere on the outskirts of Mideast foreign policy, when the boredom began to take hold. ‘They couldn’t find some of Iowa’s world-renowned meth to spice this stage up at bit’, I muttered, as I cracked open another beer and wondered who I crossed at The Spectator that I’m asked to watch these damn Democrat debates each month. Just 19 days before the Iowa caucuses, we finally reached the inevitable: Andrew Yang getting the boot, as the white savior party shed the last of its racial minority aspirants, having decided that none was qualified to take the helm this cycle. Better luck in 2024, blacks.

The Democratic party is dying from its hatred of President Trump. The impeachment fiasco is just the latest symptom. After weeks of testimony, Democrats have not been able to come up with any charges more concrete than 'abuse of power' and 'obstruction of Congress.' Abuse of power is certainly a serious thing — but only if it’s real. Partisans think that almost anything a president from the opposing party does amounts to an abuse of power. For impeachment to amount to anything more than partisan harassment, an actual crime ought to be found somewhere along the line: an act of wrongdoing objectively contrary to the law.