Democrats

Life after liberalism

Liberalism is dying, and the American right is ascendant. That’s the lesson of the last six or eight years of national politics. Barack Obama should have been the beginning of a generational renewal for the Democratic Party. Instead the Democrats have been prisoners of their past. They looked backward in 2016 and nominated Hillary Clinton. After she failed, they reached even further back to nominate Joe Biden, a man born during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. Biden is not simply old; he’s nostalgia personified. He’s a throwback to a time when Democrats were less radical, when the party of FDR and JFK, and even of Bill Clinton, could lay claim to being an everyman’s party.

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The great White House replacement

I like it when I can endorse the other side. It makes me feel like I’m part of the big happy family of man instead of just another snarling partisan. So it was with gratitude that I absorbed David Axelrod’s recent observation about Joe Biden on CNN. Pay attention now: Axelrod was the chief strategist for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and what he doesn’t know about the emotional weather of the left is not worth knowing. “There is this sense that things are kind of out of control,” quoth Axelrod when asked about the Big Guy™, “and he’s not in command.” Right you are, Dave! My only question is: what took you so long? Of course, Axelrod’s devastating admission was not a disinterested or impartial judgment. Nothing Obama’s main men say is that.

The War on Normal

The eagerly anticipated midterm elections, now in a countdown, will no doubt reveal vast electoral dismay and division. Inflation, recession, crime, and border invasions are half of it. The Democratic-inspired War on Normal is the other. However impressive GOP victories might be, the fifty-year-old progressive hegemon will endure. Identity hustles, handouts, lawlessness, and cultural rot won’t disappear after the midterms. Disparate impact, non-binary fantasies, and Supreme Court oppositionists in primal breakdowns will persist. Beyond November, cunning propagandists with opportunities at thought control unprecedented in human history will seek to discredit their adversaries. Militants will intimidate authorities. The commercial republic and its assets are the prize.

Democrat flips the bird at the congressional baseball game

Cockburn watched in awe from the cheap seats at the Congressional Baseball Game last night as the Republicans swept the Democrats 10 to nil — hopefully a forecast for the midterms. Clutching his $12 Michelob Ultra, Cockburn was on the edge of his seat all night. One of the feats of athletic prowess was Democrat Representative Linda Sanchez’s lead-off walk in the sixth inning. Walks, for non-baseball fans, require almost zero work on behalf of the batter. When she took her base, she decided to throw decorum out the window as she flipped off the Republican dugout. After her no-work walk, a pinch runner came to take her place. The congresswoman didn’t have to swing or to run — pure Democrat athleticism! https://twitter.

Inflation destroys the small town soul of America

My friend Dave Sr. owns the diner up the road and runs it with his son, Dave Jr. The family business is coming up on its fortieth anniversary, and Dave Sr., who’s eighty now — though you’d never guess it — reflected to me recently on the mom ‘n pop shops that have disappeared over the last fifty years or so. He and another local old-timer counted dozens that used to dot the two-lane road between our town and the next town over. “Now, I don’t think you can count more than five or six [small businesses]!” Dave Sr. said. “And they all made a living out of these places. Between government intervention and red tape and so forth, people are afraid to get into small business.” Running a small business is the epitome of the American Dream.

Biden gets it right on marijuana

Several far-left Democrats are “extraordinarily disappointed” in the Biden administration. The Justice Department recently denied their request to de-schedule cannabis from its Schedule I classification within the Controlled Substances Act. “Schedule I” is applied to drugs with “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker led the charge on behalf of stoners back in November 2021, and last month, the DoJ told them that “cannabis has not been proven in scientific studies to be a safe and effective treatment for any disease or condition.

Is losing God making America miserable?

The number of Americans who believe in God has reached an all-time low, according to a Gallup survey that’s been tracking our nation’s “values and beliefs” since 1944. For a God fearin’ woman such as myself, it’s a disheartening statistic. But we are told never to abandon hope, and recent events — the Supreme Court rulings against abortion and in favor of prayer, a million swing voters switching their registrations to Republican, Keeping Up with the Kardashians finally airing its last season — betoken a more God-centered future. Gallup reports: The vast majority of US adults believe in God, but the 81 percent who do so is down six percentage points from 2017 and is the lowest in Gallup’s trend.

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Democrats are stuck with Biden

The New York Times and the Washington Post sent up flares last weekend: one way or another, they said, Joe Biden is on borrowed time. The last man standing who ended up the answer to Anyone But Trump turned out so inadequate for the job that Deep State media gave him a vote of no confidence and said he should go. The Times wrote a scathing summary of What Everyone Knows: that Biden at 79 is a wreck. In their words, the man "is testing the boundaries of age and the presidency." He can barely walk unassisted. He has zombie moments on stage. He is fully dependent on wife Jill to nudge him onward, redirect him, get him back on the TelePrompTer — and even then he will read anything there, including stage directions, Ron Burgundy-like. Not a pretty picture.

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Doug Schoen’s hacky ‘Hillary can win’ columns, ranked

Cockburn spent this morning mentally reliving the trauma of the 2016 election after reading the latest installment of Doug Schoen’s shilling campaign for another Hillary bid for the presidency. Schoen, a Democratic pollster and former employee of Clinton's, has an entire CV of pro-Hillary op-eds to his name. Here now is the definitive ranking of his pro-Clinton hack jobs. 5. ‘The Hillary Moment,’ November 21, 2011 This daring ode, the first in the series, speaks of his deep infatuation with the Queen of Chillin’ in Cedar Rapids long before she sparred with The Donald. Here, he begs for Obama to step down after his first term lest he lose to the Republicans — a take that didn't age well after 2012. “Mrs.

The end of Roe is a victory for Conservatism, Inc.

On a day many Americans on both sides of the abortion issue thought would never come, the Supreme Court reversed the "settled law" of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Justice Samuel Alito's finding for the court will have massive ramifications for American politics, culture, and law. The opinions are worth reading in their entirety — particularly the concurrences of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Clarence Thomas, the former for warning states that may seek to subvert federalism, the latter for its monumental achievement of criticism of substantive due process. It will take time to digest this ruling responsibly as a legal matter.

Five questions you won’t hear from the January 6 Committee

Imagine a BLM member's trial in which the prosecution simply played violent videos over and over, which weren't even related to the defendant in question. Sound fair? No? Well, welcome to the Third Trump Impeachment, aka the January 6 televised hearings. Having watched a lot of PBS back in the day, I kept waiting for chairman Bennie Thompson to promise a Democratic Party tote bag if I phoned in my pledge of $50 or more. That was the tone from, as they say, gavel to gavel. But there are so many important things being left out in the Dems' desire to showcase violence. Here are just five of the issues that the hearings have left unquestioned. *** Dems and groupie Liz Cheney constantly use words like coup, insurrection, incitement, sedition, and treason.

Why progressive politics is like air travel

I was recently flown cross-country on a first-class ticket by a very kind outfit. It was my first time flying up front, and I told myself to make a note of everything in case it proved to be my last. Early in the flight, I noticed that I didn’t want the plane to land. It was a curious feeling and became harder and harder to ignore as the journey progressed. To be sure, the seat was not more comfortable than my easy chair at home. The food was not as good as the food at home. And the wine was certainly nice (it comes in a glass in first class; who knew?), but it wasn’t as good as the wine at home. So why didn’t I want that plane to land?

progressives
hillary

Run again, Hillary!

Joe Biden is a wounded deer and America’s most prolific political assassin is hot on his trail. Speaking to the New York State Democratic Convention in February, Hillary Clinton, a ghoul occasionally photographed stalking the woods near Chappaqua, gave a rousing speech that had little to do with state politics. Instead, she addressed a “deeply and dangerously divided nation.” “The struggle for unity and democracy is far from over,” she told lawmakers in the country’s most corrupt state. “We need to focus on solutions that matter to voters.

Oregon’s nasty woman

Tina Kotek could be well on her way to being the thirty-ninth governor of Oregon. The Democrat, who previously served as speaker of the state’s House of Representatives, won her party’s primary this Tuesday. And with a Democratic supermajority in the legislature and a governor’s mansion that hasn’t housed a Republican since 1979, that’s likely a one-way ticket to victory in November. Kotek is, in many ways, a creature of the state Democratic establishment. Yet in Oregon — and in blue states like it — “establishment Democrat” means something very different than it once did.

A party of extremists

Yesterday, in the US Senate, Democrats let their abortion extremism hang out. No more faking it about "safe, legal, and rare": the new standard is "I mean, do you feel like it?" After the leak of Justice Alito's draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, it was inevitable that Chuck Schumer would introduce some kind of abortion legislation. Even if his bill couldn't hurdle over a filibuster, the Democrats could as least use it as a planted flag in the culture war to come. Their base has spent the last week running into traffic yodeling about right-wing fascism. And given that a majority of Americans support some kind of legal abortion, surely there was room to maneuver here. Instead, Schumer decided to tap into his party's dark id.

drunken sailors

Pennsylvania’s hipster Democrat

News stories covering the primary races for Pennsylvania's US Senate seat generally go like this: Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman is the Democratic frontrunner pulling ahead big time; now let’s talk about the tit-for-tat attack ads between Republicans Dr. Oz and Dave McCormick for twelve paragraphs. Sure, the Republican primary is developing every day, as Oz and McCormick exchange polling leads faster than Kyle Busch and Kyle Harvick. But at the end of the day (on May 17), GOP voters will have one of two, nice-looking, middle-aged, super-rich Trump wannabes representing them. What happens after the primary is where things really get interesting. Fetterman stands around six feet, eight inches tall and frowns a lot.

Madison Cawthorn is a congressional hero

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).

Democrat gets bitten by fox — and hypes the CDC

Authorities have finally done something about the aggressive, rabid critters that lurk around our nation’s capital and slink from their dens on the Hill to assault honest people for no good reason. Cockburn has encountered all sorts of such creatures on various Capitol Hill pub crawls, but the type the police just decided to address was neither a blundering elephant nor an indignant jackass. Neither was it a Blue Dog, one of those endangered porcupines that rarely appear in the Swamp, nor even a squawking chicken hawk. It was a red fox. A cute little lady fox with a majestically bushy tail, black-tipped ears and feet, white markings on her chest and muzzle, and shining black eyes. People first started posting images of the fox on Monday.

Return of the congressional earmark zombie

Much like a Hollywood movie monster franchise, earmarks are back in the federal government. Congress’s $1.5 trillion omnibus bill contains pages upon pages of so-called “member-directed spending” for hundreds of pet projects in congressional districts across the country. Senator Mike Braun put the final earmark count at $8 billion, taking up 367 pages of the 2,700-page bill that funds the government through the end of the fiscal year. Congress banned earmarks in 2011 thanks to a rather rare show of bipartisanship by House Republicans and then-President Barack Obama. Congressional bipartisanship then unanimously brought back earmarks last year.

Do House Democrats want cities to die?

The Democratic Party is out of the office. Quite literally. Nancy Pelosi, who controls administrative policy in the House, this week extended the in-office moratorium and proxy voting through the middle of May. Pelosi says she based the policy on the recommendation of the sergeant-at-arms who wrote that there is still an ongoing “public health emergency due to the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 remains in effect.” Quite the contrast to the president’s message. Pelosi's extension follows reporting from the Washington Free Beacon last week that most Democratic offices in DC remain shut, citing Covid-19 pandemic and workplace restrictions as the reason.