Cockburn

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.

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.