Washington Post

Cockburn’s monocle popped out of his head and plopped into his oatmeal yesterday morning as he perused the Washington Post. “A Bottomless Pinocchio for Biden — and other recent gaffes,” read the headline. Surely “gaffe” has come to mean “lovable quirk” when applied to Democrats? And “Pinocchio” must refer somehow to the way in which Italian puppets are marginalized? But no — the Post straight-up published “a roundup of some of the president’s recent errors of fact” and reiterated, a day before the midterm elections mind you, the “gaffe machine” nickname Joe Biden gave himself. First on the Post’s fact-check list is Biden’s repeated claim that he “spent a lot of time — more time with Xi Jinping than any other head of state.

You couldn’t miss him as you strolled down K Street. He wore a fedora and boxy suits, was not afraid to imbibe as he worked, and paced the capital’s most infamous stretch chain-smoking cigarettes. He arrived in Washington in the Nineties as a traveling salesman and would have kept right on traveling were it not for that checkout girl. For three decades, he put the road behind him and went to work erasing any trace of the street from the brogues, Oxfords and, in the final decade of his life, the slip-on monks and bit loafers ubiquitous among the graceless lobbyists of the twenty-first century. K Street may have become too busy to tie shoelaces, but its denizens were never too busy for a happy-hour stop with the self-proclaimed “Godfather of Shine.

I regret to inform you that America’s decrepit media commentators are once again attempting to play a game of rope-a-dope with Republican voters. This time around, their choice is Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, who has experienced increased media attention of late as a potentially less divisive alternative for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, compared to the supposedly more controversial potential of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty writes: There are plenty of Democrats who believe the man who campaigned as a sunny suburban dad in a zippered vest is really a Trump in fleece clothing. But Virginia — which was trending blue until his victory — is clearly warming up to Youngkin.

In the final year of Donald Trump’s presidency, I went to an event at the AFI Silver Theater and Cultural Center in Washington’s Maryland suburbs. The occasion wasn’t a film but an evening with Bob Woodward. He talked about the lessons of Watergate and what it was like to chase down all, or at least most, of the president’s men. He was, however, pretty coy when it came to talking about the big reveals he would make in an upcoming book about the Trump presidency. “Follow the money,” he winked. He intimated that there would be big revelations about Trump and Russia. What they might be he never said. The reverential crowd of several hundred Washingtonians was ready to burn incense at his feet. But the oracle simply refused to deliver.

It seems to be harder to donate money to the Canadian truckers protesting their country's vaccine mandate than it is to keep Hunter Biden out of a strip club. After GoFundMe seized millions of dollars raised on its platform for the Freedom Convoy, Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo stepped in and enabled donors to give nearly $10 million. GiveSendGo was promptly hacked and the personal information of 93,000 donors to the Freedom Convoy released to the public. The media — who largely resisted touching the Hunter Biden laptop story because it allegedly contained "hacked" information — jumped on the opportunity to shame and harass private citizens for donating to causes of which they don't approve.

The die against conservatives opposed to the Iraq war was cast by David Frum in a now-infamous essay for National Review back in 2003. Not only were the right's antiwar sorts unpatriotic, Frum charged, they were defeatist and conspiratorialist appeasers. “They have made common cause with the left-wing and Islamist antiwar movements in this country and in Europe,” he wrote. As one can imagine, this made it quite difficult for this small but active faction of the conservative movement (which included the American Conservative magazine and libertarians like Texas Congressman Ron Paul) to penetrate the mainstream, or build trust with their compatriots across the aisle.

A Washington Post opinion writer believes that President Biden is receiving worse treatment from the media than Trump did. It is a laughable theory, so naturally the media loves it. Dana Milbank’s piece is headlined, “The media treats Biden as badly as — or worse than — Trump. Here’s proof.” Using a data analytics unit, called forge.ai, the writer claims he was able to confirm his sneaking suspicion: journalists are being meaner to the “empathizer-in-chief”, as the Hill once dubbed Biden, than they are to “The Monster Who Feeds on Fear”, as the New York Times once dubbed Trump.