Cockburn

Christmas may not come from a store, but Cockburn's poor heart still shrunk three sizes after he saw First Lady Jill Biden's attempt at Christmas decorations on Monday. The good doctor unveiled her first annual White House holiday décor with the theme "Gifts from the Heart", an ode to "small acts of kindness" that was rather small-minded indeed. Cockburn's distaste for Dr. Jill's decorations is only partially motivated by the fact that he was not invited to the press preview as in past years; he is sure that after four years of First Lady Melania Trump's ethereal and Vogue-esque displays, independent observers will agree that the new administration didn't live up to the hype.

Much of Tucker Carlson’s exclusive interview with Kyle Rittenhouse, the teenager found not guilty in a high-profile homicide trial last week, went as Cockburn expected. Tucker largely let Rittenhouse tell his side of the story, running through the events of the bloody night last summer when Rittenhouse shot and killed two men and wounded a third. Tucker’s questions on the political dimensions of the case, something about which Rittenhouse has said very little until now, prompted the most interesting responses. “This case has nothing to do with race, it never had anything to do with race,” said Rittenhouse. “It had to do with the right to self-defense.” Rittenhouse also said: “I support the BLM movement. I support peacefully demonstrating.

Are you a sexist and a racist? For her supporters, that’s the only possible explanation for why Vice President Kamala Harris is so unpopular. A pair of dovetailing pieces this weekend in Politico and CNN extensively document how hard done by the Veep feels by the Biden administration. CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere and Jasmine Wright write that Harris allies “fume that she's not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined” and that Harris herself “has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she's able to do politically.” Politico says that Harris’s “allies outside of the administration have argued she’s been set up for failure by the portfolio she’s been handed.

Welcome to the grubby world of politics, Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin. A breathless report on the Democrat blog Blue Virginia on Friday claimed to have uncovered yet another racism scandal involving a Virginia politician, asserting that the new Republican governor hadn’t been “vetted.” But just how damning is what’s been unearthed? “A recently-obtained copy of Glenn Youngkin’s prep school yearbook (Norfolk Academy, 1985) shows that his senior prom, entitled ‘An Oriental Occasion,’ featured white students offensively dressed in ‘rice hats,’ sandals and geisha robes serving their tuxedoed, all-white peers. Youngkin is pictured right next to these racist stereotypes.

Cockburn has always been suspicious of politicians who don't drink. The track record there isn't very good: Hitler, Biden, Trump, Che Guevara, the grand old Duke of York Prince Andrew. Contrast that to history's legions of statesmanlike squifflers, from Winston Churchill to George Washington to Vaclav Havel. Hence why Cockburn is struggling to understand why Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel is under fire for getting a bit tibbly. Nessel, a Democrat, apologized on her Facebook page Wednesday for having had too much to drink at a tailgate party before a college football game. She admitted that she'd been imbibing on an empty stomach, and said she'd later felt sick and had to leave the stadium so as to, as she put it, "prevent me from vomiting on any of my constituents.

“Every man has two countries — his own and France.” A variation of this line, frequently misattributed to Thomas Jefferson, came to Cockburn as he saw the latest footage from Kamala Harris’s trip to Paris. Everyone, he realized, has two accents — his own and French. And so it is with Momala. On a Tuesday tour of the Pasteur Institute, the vice president opted for a very Fraaanch pronunciation in her conversation with zee scientistes. See for yourself: https://twitter.com/AmericaRising/status/1458489403513491460 Now, Cockburn readily admits that Harris’s Franglais (or should that be Framerican?) is a little more subtle than his own garbled intonation when asking for directions on the Riviera.

Orlando, Florida   Cockburn just got back from the second annual National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida. The ballroom of the Orlando Hilton can hold more than a thousand people. A little snowbird tells Cockburn that Yoram Hazony, the event's organizer, was in panic mode in the days before the summit. Not enough people had paid for the $315 ticket or $2,500 VIP pass. It seems even DC politicos had better things to do on Halloween than listen to Josh Hawley scream about porn. Cockburn hears that every right-wing organization in attendance received emails from Hazony begging them to help ship out more people. In the end, the official turnout was 700 attendees — though a hundred of them were the ladies and gentlemen of the press, and most of them were on a freebie.

Cockburn had thought he'd seen it all. But now he learns that DC has reached a new low in the annals of Swamp incompetence. Democratic staffers in Representative Ayanna Pressley's office can't figure out how to turn their phones back on after setting them to go straight to voicemail for over a year and a half. Every Capitol Hill rat would agree that the worse job in a congressional office is answering the phones. From dusk to dawn, deranged boomers light them up, demanding Representative Joe Blow do something about their loud neighbors, or fix their TV, or help them pay their rent. Many of these callers don't even live in the lawmaker's district or state. It's an exhausting task usually reserved for the lowest of the low — interns.

Cockburn’s rug-cutting days are behind him. An unfortunate misunderstanding with the wife of an Ecuadorian chargé d’affairs during a Georgetown salsa class means he now steers well clear of the dancefloor. But he learned enough in his time to know that Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for Virginia governor, has a strong claim to the title of worst boogier inside the Beltway. The Macker’s moves gained fresh attention when the former governor, floundering in his bid for another stint in his old job, started shaking his hips alongside Joe Biden at a rally in Arlington this week. Everyone else on the stage seems to know what to do: stand, smile and wave. Pretend we’re not bombing in the polls, pat each other on the back, hold our hands in the air.

Cockburn lost a game of darts with Amber Athey at the weekend, so he got the distinct pleasure of trekking over to the Virginia Highlands Park in Arlington on Tuesday, to watch a cavalcade of Virginia Democrats — and President Joe Biden — stump for Terry McAuliffe, one week ahead of Election Day. (Amber, meanwhile, was indoors at a Loudoun County school board meeting, which you can read about here.) He joined a single-file line of Democrats at just after 5 p.m. that stretched the full width of the park. At its head, a group of Youngkin supporters were gathered on a verge, wielding signs that read “LET’S GO BRANDON,” “Virginia runs on Youngkin” and “More like Terry McAwful.

October is upon us, which means it’s horror movie season. And a new release promises ‘a dark dystopian story’ that depicts ‘terrifyingly evil’ behavior. But Cockburn raised an eyebrow at the trailer for Florever Purge, which contains very little to fear and a lot to love. Among the supposedly blood-curdling lines uttered by the movie’s main villain: ‘We trust people to make their own decisions’ and ‘We’re not going to be bludgeoning people with restrictions, mandates, lockdowns or any of that stuff.’ Cockburn is no horror connoisseur, but ‘I’m going to leave you alone’ doesn’t give him goosebumps. For most of the trailer, Cockburn found himself not hiding behind his sofa, but nodding his head in agreement.

Cockburn was intrigued to learn that OkCupid, the dating app service, now offers a ‘pro-choice’ badge for its users’ profiles. The feature was introduced in response to Texas Senate Bill 8, a law that could potentially limit abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected at around six weeks.  While dating apps are not Cockburn’s preferred method of wooing the ladies (mystery is everything), he wonders whether this corporate vice-signaling is catching on. In addition to abortion enthusiasm, OkCupid also promotes itself as a platform for the sexually adventurous. On its website, colorful gender-bending models simulate various sex positions and one apparent orgy.

Oh, those Hunter Biden emails? At least some of them are real, according to a new book. Politico staffers casually smuggled a ‘revelation’ from their colleague Ben Schreckinger’s The Bidens: Inside the First Family’s Fifty Years of Tragedy into Tuesday’s edition of the Playbook AM email. By sheer coincidence, Schreckinger’s book was also released on Tuesday. Schreckinger independently verified both the ’10 held by H for the big guy?’ email and a 2015 email ‘from a Ukrainian businessman thanking him for the chance to meet Joe Biden’. Politico further confirms that ‘emails released by a Swedish government agency also match emails in the leaked cache, and two people who corresponded with Hunter Biden confirmed emails from the cache were genuine’.