Bill McMorris

Bill McMorris is a contributing writer to The Spectator World

Sunday

Bill McMorris

The legal challenge to assisted suicide

Lonnie VanHook was preparing to board the train to Oregon when his body gave out. The Navy veteran is accustomed to these sorts of betrayals. He is quadriplegic and legless to boot; a rare form of cancer is eating away at his skeletal-muscle tissues and bladder. He awoke in a facility surrounded by medical professionals wearing the plastic countenances of concern and sympathy they picked up during the med school lessons on bedside manners. During the interaction, Lonnie told them about the reason for his upcoming trip. You can picture the Oakland native rolling his eyes as he has prepared for the rebuttal. The doctors, no doubt, exchanged astonished glances. Lonnie, what were you thinking?!? You don’t need to take the train. We can do that right here!

assisted suicide

Thursday

Bill McMorris

Why Bernie Sanders has no heir

The Democratic establishment has never looked more vulnerable to progressive upheaval; Biden's supposed leadership bridge to a new generation leads nowhere. "Moderate" darling transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg has seen his slim national prospects dwindle with every near-miss in the air and toxic train derailment on the ground. Vice President Kamala Harris has been about as visible as Biden was on the 2020 campaign trail — and a geriatric Capitol Hill leadership class appears on its last legs. The scene is set for the party’s progressives to strike. And yet there is little relief in sight for the party’s left wing as its own geriatric champion rides off into the sunset.

bernie

Saturday

Bill McMorris

Why the national divorce worked: a future history

The following is an excerpt from Yale University law professor Elizabeth Friedkin’s remarks to the 2026 International Federation of United Conscious Uncoupling Professionals. When then-Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene first proposed the dissolution of the United States of America in 2023, many feared she was threatening a second Civil War, including most of us in this room. Over the past two years, however, we have witnessed a benign break-up that is now a beacon to dissatisfied land conglomerates the world over. I was skeptical when I was chosen to serve as arbitrator, but I will be the first to admit that I underestimated the shrewdness of Ms. Taylor Greene.

national divorce

Monday

Bill McMorris

Anita Dunn and Bob Bauer: meet Biden’s clean-up couple

Joe Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer once berated the commander-in-chief at his Wilmington home. Biden couldn’t get a word in edgewise without the legal giant interrupting. Aides recall the no-nonsense law professor muttering, “Not very smart, Joe,” and “I don’t know why you’d say that,” and “That’s dumb.” Bauer was playing Trump in mock debates at the time. Little did he know that he was standing in the middle of a crime scene, one he and his team of attorneys would be revisiting to quell a scandal of the president’s own making. The discovery of classified material at Biden’s various residences and offices makes for an open-and-shut case, according to former federal prosecutor Joe Moreno.

bob bauer anita dunn

Monday

Bill McMorris

The humble minivan beats holiday airline travel

Had Benjamin Franklin stuck around another two centuries, he would have added “Holidays Promise Travel Hell” headlines to his list of life’s certainties, though the Hellfire Club’s most famous member would no doubt take umbrage at the implication. The featured players in America’s security theater, as well as its taxpayer-bailed-out airlines, rival only deadbeat dads in their inability to prepare for annual celebrations. There’s a reason transportation secretary and closet-2024 presidential contender Pete Buttigieg flies private these days, even as he reassures frustrated flyers about the abundant supply of useless meal vouchers and travel credits on offer from America’s most incompetent industry.

minivan

Monday

Bill McMorris

Colony Grill’s culture remains

Nothing has done more damage to the watering hole than Bar Rescue. In each episode, the show’s protagonist swoops into some troubled landmark Toledo bar, guts its history in the name of “open concept,” installs some LED lighting to cut costs, adds some overpriced microbrew, and yells at the backwoods staff — his anger a thin disguise for his McKinsey consultant personality. As a finishing touch, he’ll add a crabcake to the menu. Rescue complete. This reverse-Road House consultant is why every bar in America looks the same: bland, bloodless, stocked with minimalist Ikea furniture, cut off from the past. Don’t let the “unique” seasonal IPA or over-sized Jenga fool you. You are staring at conformity.

colony

Sunday

Bill McMorris

The deep sleep state

America may be falling behind in manufacturing everything from household goods to textiles and semiconductors, but there is one sector of innovation where these United States will never be surpassed: defrauding the federal government. Sure, Beijing’s Machiavellian overlords may steal some missile or naval tech here or there — more often than not here and there — but they couldn’t come up with deploying fake concrete in public works projects or, say, building the Middle East’s largest women’s studies department in the name of defeating terrorism. We Americans cannot be topped in our capacity to fleece the taxpayer. I witnessed one such act on summer vacation and marveled at its creativity and simplicity.

federal

Wednesday

Bill McMorris

Andrew Yang’s doomed revolution

In 1958, the federal government surveyed the vast plains of the United States for the site that would launch the future of humanity and settled on... Greenbelt, Maryland, which had the advantage of a quick commute from the capital. On weekdays 7,000 people travel to NASA’s Goddard Space Center to work on those telescopes that go viral every few months with their high-definition photos of space. They were off for Labor Day weekend, so only a couple of hundred people were on hand to see the dawn of a political revolution.

forward

Tuesday

Bill McMorris

Closing the curtain on Norm Macdonald’s comedy

The biggest threat to the comedian of yesteryear was penury, but today even the most famous must dodge slaps, tackles and professional ruin. As a result, many have assumed a defensive posture. But on September 15, 2021, the court jesters were more defensive than ever. Norm Macdonald had perished twenty-four hours earlier, defeated by leukemia, and a chorus of his peers donned headsets to reassure the podcast world they’d “had no idea he was sick.” The one who spoke loudest was Conan O’Brien. Three months before O’Brien had wrapped his three-decade run on late night without a peep from the best guest he ever had: the man who gave us the Moth joke, “b-o-r-e-d,” Swedish-German and “that means he had sex with Madonna without a condom.

norm

Monday

Bill McMorris

The coldness of K Street

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.

k street

Thursday

Bill McMorris

The rise of the corporate abortion

More than 650,000 people have fled California since Gavin Newsom took office, many returning to the Dust Bowl homelands their forebears abandoned for the coast. The Democratic governor has called reports of an exodus “greatly exaggerated,” though inaccurate may be the better word: only 600,000 Jews fled Egypt. More than 200 companies ditched California in his first thirty months in office and, much like Newsom’s ex-wife, they’re heading for Trump country. Ever the optimist, Newsom says the solution to population depletion is to guarantee abortion up to the moment of birth. He’s even offered tax breaks to companies that relocate from pro-life states.

abortion

Wednesday

Bill McMorris

The real reason for Biden’s war on Juul

I was in a South Carolina dive bar, the type recent graduates cheekily show off to the parents who subsidized their six-figure educations. I stepped into a courtyard — for even the states tobacco built have banned indoor smoking — and was greeted by thick plumes of poisoned air. Those shades came from manicured hands holding glorified USB memory sticks, not the fingers stained yellow by 70-millimeter Marlboros. I gathered with the only people holding the latter — a bar manager and pair of fathers no doubt looking to calm the nerves after realizing this is what they took out a second mortgage to pay for.

smoking juul e-cigarettes biden

Sunday

Bill McMorris

After Biden, who?

From our UK edition

Joe Biden is telling everyone he will seek re-election in 2024 – including those who don’t want him around. After Barack Obama gave him the cold shoulder at an April White House event, sources revealed to the Hill that Biden had told his former boss he planned to go for it in 2024. You get the sense the leak did not come from Obama’s camp. 'I view myself as a bridge, not as anything else,' Biden said at a Michigan rally in March 2020. 'There’s an entire generation of leaders you saw stand behind me. They are the future of this country'. Every candidate sounds a conciliatory tone in victory, particularly when they need their former foes’ supporters, but humble words aren’t always necessary.

Monday

Bill McMorris

Of Mahler and mandates

On February 23, 1897 a slight Austrian eccentric walked into the parish church of St. Ansgar and St. Bernhard in Hamburg, affirmed his belief in the Holy Trinity, the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic church, and received the sacrament of baptism. Some months later, Gustav Mahler was named principal director of the Viennese court opera — a post that would have been denied to him had he not converted from Judaism. One hundred and twenty-five years after his baptism, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts honored Mahler by performing his Second Symphony with legendary guest conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.

Mahler

Sunday

Bill McMorris

Hunting deer in the DC suburbs

I was driving along in my 2018 Honda minivan when I received a call from a member of the National Symphony Orchestra who has been on leave since March 2020: “Just bagged a doe. If you’re up for it, I’m going to gut this thing.” I regretted taking the call through the van’s speakerphone. A text message followed; thankfully the image did not project onto the dash display. I spent the rest of the drive to school explaining to my four daughters how Daddy had to dissect Bambi for work. My father took me hunting once in high school. He shook me awake at six in the morning, loaded me into the family car, a 1998 Chevy minivan, then drove it straight into a deer. I can still picture the white-spotted fawn’s body cascading across the asphalt. “Thank God it was just a baby.

deer

Wednesday

Bill McMorris

Yard envy

It is never easy to live next door to a retired Department of Agriculture employee. Quarantine has made it intolerable. I had always reassured the missus that our yard would look just like Mr Ray’s if I too spent all day at home. Coronavirus has exposed me as a liar. For four years I enjoyed my coffee and cigarette on the porch, digesting the New York Post’s reports of the calamities that had befallen the Mets in the previous 24 hours. Without baseball I spend my mornings staring out into the yard, reckoning with the fact that I am the New York Mets of landscaping. My wife has worked from home since 2011 and must have known all along. There’s a reason her office overlooks the front yard.

garden yard

Friday

Bill McMorris

My ill-fated foray into homeschooling

I did not buy into the American Toilet Paper Hoarding Epidemic of 2020, as posterity will dub our present unfortunate episode decades hence. In an effort to help my wife avoid murder charges when the courts resume — though she could plea down to third degree manslaughter with minimal jail time — I decided to take the lead on handling the urchins’ schooling as America hunkers down. By mid-morning — around the time I heard the toddler say, ‘don’t call me a buttcheek, you dummy’ — I began weighing the odds on whether my wife had the guts to pull the trigger.Our Catholic school in Alexandria, Virginia, was one of the last to call it quits in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, a testament to our stalwart faith.

homeschooling

Thursday

Bill McMorris

My vegan hell

This article is in The Spectator’s February 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. The children are eating eggs and bacon by the time I make it downstairs. A pair of frozen hash browns sits lonely on the plate at the head of the table. They have been cooked in a separate pan, one greased in vegetable oil rather than butter. I scold myself for the bitter glare I cast upon the urchins crying ‘Good morning, Daddy!’ They cannot know that the crisp pork fat and fried eggs lie on their plates only because Daddy has agreed to go vegan for the amusement of Spectator readers. The English never seem to tire of starving the Irish. At least there are potatoes this time around. Vegans forsake leather in their belts, wool in their coats and any animal product in their mouths.

Vegan

Tuesday

Bill McMorris

Raising the smoking age to 21 is an act of cowardice

I warned every Republican about the moral hazard that Donald Trump posed to America from the moment he rode down that golden escalator. In 2008, following generations of discrimination, American voters made history by electing a cigarette smoker to the Oval Office. Why erase all that progress by replacing him with a tobacco-free teetotaler? The American people did not listen, and so, on December 20, the federal government raised the smoking age from the mindless 18 to the criminal 21.Like all great betrayals, this one was bipartisan. Every horrible cause needs its useful idiots, so Trump turned to tobacco states for political cover. Sen.

smoking

Wednesday

Bill McMorris

Transparent spirit: craft distilling has come to Washington DC big time

This article is in The Spectator’s December 2019 US edition. Subscribe here. A white cross once rested over the door of the windowless warehouse at 1135 Okie St NE in Washington, DC. Residents seeking a reprieve from the street gangs and drugs that plagued the Ivy City neighborhood would huddle on the second floor and listen to the holy men of Old Ship of Zion Baptist Mission Church preach deliverance. Deliverance came. Crime plummeted. The violence and poverty along H Street gave way to Zagat-rated restaurants, organic markets and boutique bars. The closest thing you’ll see to weapons now in Ivy City is at Kick Axe, a new watering hole offering flannel-clad Capitol Hill staffers the opportunity to have a drink and, well, throw axes at wooden boards.

distilling spirit