Cockburn

Being something of a barfly, Cockburn is used to overhearing tall tales, braggadocious orations, and outlandish accusations, also known as “fightin’ words.” So imagine his astonishment in learning that what he heard over his breakfast stout this afternoon was not the consequence of some riled-up Hill staffer who’d had a few too many, but was really and truly uttered by the (presumably sober) president of the United States. “This MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that's existed in American history,” President Biden said. “Recent history,” he clarified. “Recent” is a relative term. Perhaps the explosive hate crimes of the Ku Klux Klan that reached their height in the 1920s are not “recent” enough for Biden.

Cockburn has the good fortune to be invited to all the right places. And one of the rightest of places on Palm Beach Island is the home of Beth Ailes, widow of the man that was the “I” in the masterclass book of persuasion, You Are the Message. On occasion, an invitation to a good liberal party comes Cockburn’s way. But they are getting few and further apart. He'll be going to the Coachella of mainstream moralism, the White House Correspondents' Dinner this weekend. (A subject for another missive). But for now let’s get back to Palm Beach, Florida, where the girls are pretty and the streets not gritty. The occasion for the party was Andrew Giuliani — son of America’s Mayor, Rudy — who was in town doing the political rounds.

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).

Cockburn has long regarded the Easter bunny as the least convincing of all the holiday-themed characters. Give him jelly beans, malt eggs, even a couple verses from “All Creatures of Our God and King” — but leave the giant rabbits out of it, says he. That’s why he was so alarmed by video that emerged from the president’s annual Easter egg roll on Monday. The footage shows Biden chatting with a reporter who asks him a question about Afghanistan. He’s just beginning to answer when suddenly the White House’s resident Easter bunny lunges between him and the press. The creature turns to Biden and waves, while the leader of the free world turns obediently and walks away. Far be it from Cockburn to deny that the rotund rabbit had a point.

Cockburn knows we've all been there before. You're off on an innocent slosh through the Rio Grande River on the US-Mexican border when suddenly a posse of yodeling Border Patrol agents on horseback gallops up and starts attacking you with bullwhips. Such was the outrage of the day 24,000 outrages ago when images appeared to show mounted government agents riding after Haitian immigrants illegally trying to enter the country. The agents were holding their reins, which the left promptly portrayed as whips, all but accusing the men of being Indiana Jones wannabes. The episode was blamed on racism, xenophobia, Donald Trump, who was no longer president. Joe Biden said the agents "will pay." Kamala Harris invoked scenes of slaves being flogged.

Who is the most intriguing political artist of the Biden era? Cockburn is happy to welcome a new contender to the fray: Thomas Richard Glazewski of Manor Township, Pennsylvania. Glazewski is part of a daring street collective who have been posting stickers of Joe Biden on gas pumps. They show the president pointing with the caption “I did that!” and are placed next to the price of gasoline — which has risen significantly in the past year or so. The vinyl stickers — available on Amazon — are manufactured in China. Just like the Biden presidency, right? But Glazewski took his piece to a whole new level: risking his freedom last month, he turned his sticker protest into performance art by getting himself arrested. A viral video shows the artist’s arrest.

Five Guys has always been Cockburn’s first choice for a greasy cheeseburger — breakfast of champions, says he — but Good Stuff Eatery, a Capitol Hill joint, is a solid second. So it is that Cockburn finds himself with a new respect for Congressman Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, who was recently interviewed by Politico while eating at Good Stuff. Yet for sheer artery-clogging goodness, you can’t beat the story Khanna told about President Joe Biden. Per Politico, Khanna said he was once chatting with the president about the difficulties facing the Democratic senatorial caucus (as one does). “Mr. President,” he said, “why don’t you just get Bernie Sanders and Joe Manchin in the room and hammer this out?

Cockburn has accidentally left his laptop at plenty of bars in his day. Yet if you were to open it up and search it — as a PI hired by one of his loopy exes once did — you would not find extensive evidence of drug use or information potentially compromising to national security. Not so in the case of Hunter Biden. Even the New York Times admitted last month that his now-notorious laptop is real and under investigation by federal prosecutors. When the New York Post broke that story back in October 2020, the mainstream media took a pass and Twitter even suspended the Post’s account. Now that the crooked computer has been verified, those same alleged journalists are rushing to play CYA.

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.

Madison Cawthorn is paying the price for trying to seem cool on a podcast. The North Carolina congressman carried himself with the air of a high school kid with a “girlfriend” who “goes to a different school” as he spilled the beans on how similar Capitol Hill was to the depiction in House of Cards. Cawthorn described being invited to orgies by older members of Congress and seeing politicos taking cocaine. “I look at all these people, a lot of whom I’ve you know looked up to through my life… then all of a sudden you get invited to- ‘well hey we’re gonna have a sexual get-together at one of our homes, you should come!’… and you’re like ‘w-what did you just ask me to come to?

This is a public service announcement from Cockburn: the mask mandates have got to go — for everyone’s health. Even America’s most progressive cities have lifted their face mask restrictions after the cresting of the first Omicron wave — but some of their denizens are hooked on the taste of government boot, and are going mad at the prospect of being weaned off it. Cockburn was sent a video by his nephew earlier this week showcasing this phenomenon: a masked Washington local cussing out unmasked teens at a DC Metro station. Masks are, for some unscientific reason, still required on public transport in the nation’s capital — despite not being needed in schools, gyms, stores, bars, restaurants…you get the picture.

Small literary and political journals are having a moment. The latest to enter the fray, Compact, aspires to be a sort of post-liberal melding of big-government conservatism with left-wing economics. An invite for the launch party arrived via email last week and, as you know, Cockburn tries to never miss a party, especially in our shattered post-Covid social milieu. Getting out of his Uber, your correspondent was reminded of the new world we live in, as his Ukrainian driver asked why he was being dropped off at a place called KGB Bar. Cockburn mumbled some answer that made no sense about socialists in New York finding it clever and sheepishly slunk out of the car. The selection of KGB Bar certainly wasn't a mistake.

Cockburn has never thought much of Senator Cory Booker. At a time when Republicans are forever being accused of demagoguery and playing to the cheap seats, Booker does the same thing, only from the other side and with a smile firmly in place. That practiced enthusiasm was on full display Wednesday when Booker "questioned" Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. And by "questioned," Cockburn means "tossed flower petals on the ground before her while weeping uncontrollably." This clip, in which Booker praises Jackson's record and lauds her for being the first black woman nominee to the Supreme Court, went viral: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk-0eryw1u0 Certainly Cockburn can understand why Jackson's nomination struck a personal chord with Booker.

The Dr. Oz team has gone where — Cockburn sincerely hopes — no other campaign has ventured before (or will again): on the attack against “bros.” Former hedge fund CEO David McCormick is challenging Oz for Pennsylvania’s US Senate seat, and Oz’s latest attack ad (they’ve been airing more relentlessly than MyPillow commercials in Pennsylvania) is particularly off-putting. It doesn’t so much deride McCormick himself as it does a whole class of people. A fairly inoffensive one, at that. https://twitter.com/DrOz/status/1506694900087197696?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw The ad begins with two thirty-something guys (“Chad” and “Tad”) identifying themselves as “finance bros.