Cockburn

Vice President Kamala Harris might not be the Queen of the White House, but she's still demanding some R-E-S-P-E-C-T à la the Queen of Soul. Harris — who is often affectionately referred to as "President" and "First Lady" by the actual president, Joe Biden — is the subject of another news story detailing the exhausting way she treats staff. According to a forthcoming book by New York Times correspondents Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, Harris felt slighted by White House aides not standing up when she entered a room like they did for Biden.

Take Cockburn's hand and let him whisk you back to the halcyon days of fall 2020. The presidential campaign was in full swing and the New York Post had just gotten its hands on a scoop: Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, had left his laptop at a repair shop in Delaware. On its hard drive was a treasure trove of damning emails and pictures, including one that appeared to show Hunter passed out in bed with a crack pipe in his mouth. The Post published its story, the Biden campaign yelped, and the establishment duly lost its mind. The Post's Twitter account was suspended. And perhaps most damningly, fifty-one intelligence "experts" signed a letter warning that the laptop story could be Russian disinformation.

Last night, as is his custom, Cockburn was ingesting his daily dose of news in the most palatable way possible — by washing it down with a stiff drink. The television behind the bar was tuned to Fox News, and Cockburn was happy to cease sipping for a moment as the attractive visage of Florida representative Maria Salazar appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight. The respite was short-lived, as the interview dragged on for a full eighteen minutes, and when Tucker derailed the debate toward the end of the segment with an outlandish analogy, Cockburn nearly spat out his gimlet. (Remembering his manners and the ever-inflating cost of Beefeater these days, he restrained himself.

Don’t call it a comeback! Rumors emanating from Dante’s seventh circle of political hell suggest that disgraced New York governor Andrew Cuomo could return to this mortal plane to challenge his replacement Kathy Hochul in a Democratic primary. Unnamed sources, who Cockburn is sure definitely aren’t former Cuomo employees and diehard loyalists such as Rich Azzopardi or Melissa DeRosa, told CNBC that the Luv Guv “has been fielding calls from supporters about a possible run against his former lieutenant governor” and that “his aides have been conducting their own internal voter polling on a potential matchup.

Cockburn has never been much of a hawk, unless you count his begrudging deficit hawkery over the massive tab he ran up at his local bar. But many elected Republicans are very hawkish on foreign policy, supporting "peace through strength," as Ronald Reagan put it, as well as occasionally war through strength. So how are the GOP's highest-flying hawks handling Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Cockburn was surprised to find them divided. Nearly every Republican lawmaker (and Democrat for that matter) agrees that we need to throttle Russia with economic sanctions. It's on the question of whether the United States should implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine that the cracks begin to show.

The “Tinder Swindler” has some competition in the “romantic entanglement gone wrong” department this week. Congressman Van Taylor, Republican from Texas, has just announced he’s ending his re-election campaign, which the Texas Tribune reports he had in the bag with 49 percent of the primary vote. The reason? According to Breitbart, Taylor had an affair with Tania Joya, a so-called “ISIS bride.” Cockburn notes that the details are sordid. Joya had been married to the late John Georgelas, an American who had converted to Islam, embraced jihad, joined ISIS and was reported to have been killed in Syria in 2017. Joya says Taylor paid her $5,000 to keep the affair quiet and provided Breitbart with bank records that appear to prove that Taylor did, indeed, make such a deposit.

“My way, or the highway,” was, at one time in the not-so-distant past, quite a popular phrase to associate with American dads. Cockburn recalls his fellow classmates invoking the maxim as evidence to their fathers’ strictness. “My dad is tough, man, he always says ‘it’s my way or the highway.’” On the contrary, Cockburn would respond, that statement shows your father to be quite reasonable, pusillanimous even: “Ahh, you’ve got it easy, then; your dad gives you a choice. Mine doesn’t allow the highway option.” Having a choice is what differentiates a command from a recommendation. Not terribly complicated — yet this simple fact apparently evades a great many in our media class.

Conservatives in the DMV have been very loud in their opposition to mask and vaccine mandates — but how many are practicing what they preach? Truckers in Canada are risking their livelihoods to protest vaccine mandates, the US military is discharging service members who refuse to get the shot, and families have been thrown out of restaurants by police because their young children wouldn't wear masks. Meanwhile, many Republican politicians and conservative organizations seem to be sacrificing very little in the name of ending Covid restrictions.

The nation’s capital is finally dropping its vaccine and mask mandates…mostly. DC mayor Muriel Bowser reluctantly followed the science and ended the vaccine requirement for the district’s businesses effective Tuesday — rendering the city’s “get the vax to see the acts” campaign null and void. The decision to require proof of vaccination now falls to individual businesses in the city — a civil rights victory, surely, given that just under a quarter of DC’s black residents remain unvaccinated. Bowser’s move comes after a lengthy battle with venues such as The Big Board on H Street, which had its license suspended by the ABC Board earlier this month for refusing to enforce the mandate.

What is the future for American conservatism? That was the question posed at a Manhattan Institute event on Thursday night, which Cockburn sauntered down to after hearing there would be an open bar. The evening's discussion was centered on "millennials, Gen Z, and the future of American conservatism" and unfolded in an upstairs area of Mission Navy Yard, a bar that more commonly plays host to blitzed Hill intern makeout sessions. What a stroke of good fortune that three of the young journalists tasked with charting the path forward for American conservatism were recent products of National Review's internship and fellowship schemes. The panel was chaired by Teddy Kupfer, now of City Journal, and featured NR's Alexandra DeSanctis and the Wall Street Journal's Elliot Kaufman.

Clubhouse may be dead, but Cockburn hears from his niece that Twitter Spaces is the hot news tool for social media seppuku. According to murmurings on Twitter, congressional candidate George Santos may be its latest victim. Santos, a Republican, is running to represent New York's 3rd congressional district. He previously lost in 2020 to Democrat Tom Suozzi, who earned 55.9 percent of the vote to Santos's 43.5 percent. Santos describes himself as "America First" and has received the endorsement of New York congresswoman and House Republican Conference chair Elise Stefanik. However, earlier this week, he drew the ire of right-wing Twitter for suggesting that he could see himself supporting reparations for American descendants of slaves.