Cockburn

Cockburn can’t help but tune into the late-night shows. On Wednesday night, he was spoiled rotten: President Joe Biden showed up on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, kicking off a West Coast tour to revive his declining popularity. While the audience applause lasted more than a minute upon his arrival, Cockburn wasn't quite impressed with the interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEtPV-qvLe8&ab_channel=JimmyKimmelLive From the start, it was clear Kimmel would carry the show like a pack mule, clarifying Biden’s points and continually asking questions that led the president towards easy answers, along with the occasional jab at Trump and Fox News. Kimmel kicked off proceedings by asking: “Do you mind if I ask you some serious questions?

Matthew McConaughey came to Cockburn’s hometown of Washington, DC on Tuesday. It was not to say hi, of course, but to advocate for “commonsense gun control” at the White House. McConaughey is a Uvalde native and wanted to speak about the victims, as well as how the government might better regulate firearms. McConaughey spoke about going back to Uvalde and talking to the families of the victims. He said, “We need background checks, we need to raise the minimum age to purchase an AR-15 rifle to 21, we need a waiting period for those rifles, we need red flag laws and consequences for those who abuse them.” He went on Bret Baier’s Fox News show that night to continue opining.

While Cockburn was flipping through the channels last night, he came across Tucker Carlson, whom the media decries as a racist, interviewing Kyle Rittenhouse, whom the media decries as a murderer. Rittenhouse’s lawyer had accompanied him to this interview, and the pair announced that they planned to pull a Sandmann. That is, they want to sue the mainstream media over its smearing of Rittenhouse and the suppression of the facts that would have clarified the circumstances surrounding his shooting of three men in downtown Kenosha during a riot. Other claims have floated that Rittenhouse was a racist. Joe Biden even posted a video implying that Rittenhouse was either a white supremacist or part of a militia group.

Elon Musk recently posted a meme about Jeffrey Epstein and the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Twitter, the brand he's soon (maybe?) hoping to buy. The meme says, “Only thing more remarkable than DOJ not leaking the list is that no one in the media cares. Doesn’t that seem odd?” While Cockburn has nothing but reverence for his governmental overlords, Musk's reference to the Jeffery Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell client list does stand out as a particularly juicy piece of news. The mainstream media has avoided the list like the Spanish Flu. Doesn’t the average person deserve to know which of their esteemed leaders has taken a trip to the infamous Little Saint James Island?

While Cockburn is loath to be anywhere that does not serve brandy, he made an exception for the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard verdict, which was handed down in Fairfax, Virginia, on Wednesday. On a sunny, hot, sweltering afternoon, Cockburn took a bus from his hometown of Washington, DC. Cue the driver furiously shaking him awake and kicking him to the curb, right in front of the courthouse. Since it was only 1 p.m., there was little to see aside from the various news crews circling the entrance like vultures. As much as Cockburn was hoping for something out of a Hunter S. Thompson article, what he got was more like a city council meeting. At around 1:30, news broke that a verdict had been reached, and that it would be announced at 3. At that point, the crowd began growing.

Normally Cockburn regards himself as well above the mere paparazzi — or at least too dissolute to properly operate a camera. But he happily made an exception on Wednesday to catch the verdict in the Johnny Depp/Amber Heard trial, held at the Fairfax County Courthouse just outside his native Washington, DC. It was the region's most captivating trial of an unstable blonde since the Clinton impeachment. And sure enough, the jury found that Heard had defamed Depp, and that Depp had defamed Heard. Yet while Depp was awarded $15 million, Heard was only awarded $2 million, all of it in compensatory as opposed to punitive damages. It's a win for Depp, and Cockburn will have much more to come from the courthouse.

While nursing a cold pint, Cockburn felt glad for the first time in his life to catch a game of basketball. More specifically, he felt glad to hear commentator Charles Barkley say, “You know the bad thing about all this rain? It’s not raining in San Francisco to clean off those dirty ass streets... y’all gotta clean that off the streets… San Francisco needs a good washing.” Being quite the worldly man himself, Cockburn has heard the phrase “as California goes, so goes the nation” before. However, since San Francisco is the only place to have a fecal matter map, this brought with it a subtle worry that only more alcohol could assuage. However, Barkley may be right. San Francisco is certainly in need of a good washing. Rampant homelessness, crime, and drugs flood the streets.

President Biden is meeting with the K-Pop band BTS on Tuesday, ostensibly to discuss anti-Asian hate crimes. To Cockburn, who tends to be a bit cynical, it looks more like part of a government trend to appeal to Generation Z in the most blatant way imaginable.  While there is nothing inherently wrong with bringing in celebrities to talk about serious issues (which both Obama and Trump did while in office), it seems suspiciously as if the Biden administration only invites the most popular stars in order to serve its own agenda. Normally presidential puppets would come in the form of fellow politicians, but when dealing with mass-market public figures like TikTokkers or other internet celebrities, the move comes off as shallow and deceitful.