Cockburn

President Joe Biden hit the golf course for the second time since taking office on Sunday, continuing something of an American presidential tradition. Unlike his predecessors, however, Biden appears to be a duffer. It's possible that at one point in time Biden was a decent golfer. He's been a member of Wilmington Country Club in Delaware since 2014 and reportedly had as low as a 6 handicap. That's a bit hard to believe as former president Barack Obama said he had an 'honest 13' handicap after playing 300 rounds of golf. A video of Biden on the links this past weekend further confirms that his golf game has gone the same direction as his mental acuity. The clip shows Biden well to the left of the green behind a short stone wall.

Spare a thought for the joyless malcontents over at the Intercept, a website that once proudly defended journalists and fought government interference in the everyday lives of American citizens. Now the Intercept gleefully smears reporters who have dared to cover the protests-cum-riots of the past few years. The site's senior writer Robert Mackey and video producer Travis Mannion bothered to make a 25-minute-long video scrutinizing the coverage of 'the Riot Squad', a group of young journalists and videographers who film the violent aftermath of Black Lives Matter and antifa protests — among other riots. Some of these young reporters are, gasp, conservatives. Cockburn couldn't be bothered to watch the whole mini-documentary (seriously, must everything be a video these days?

Being a somewhat old-fashioned person, Cockburn is skeptical of latter-day feminism and the utter sanctity of a woman’s right to choose. So it’s quite odd that he also feels compelled to defend progressive womanhood from Planned Parenthood, which quite unexpectedly has come out in favor of misogyny. ‘I’m the Head of Planned Parenthood. We’re Done Making Excuses for Our Founder,’ says the headline from current Planned Parenthood president Alexis McGill Johnson. The context is Planned Parenthood’s ongoing cancellation of Margaret Sanger over her support for ideas that are today unpopular, such as sterilization, eugenics, and freedom of speech.

For years, activists have demanded stricter gun control in America, on the cogent (though perhaps unconstitutional) grounds that fewer guns will save the lives of young people in American cities. Cockburn has an alternative proposal: instead of gun control, America needs celebrity control. Lacking any skin in the game and let loose on Twitter, famous people are saying extremely insane things that are going to get people killed. The chief honor this time goes to alleged ‘comedian’ Chelsea Handler, after the shooting death of Minneapolis’s Daunte Wright. Wright tragically learned the hard way that resisting arrest puts you at risk of being shot by a birdbrained police officer who confuses her taser with a pistol.

Over three-quarters of Republicans believe that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election and about a third of all Americans believe that President Biden's win was illegitimate. When tens of millions of Americans lose faith in the system, that spells serious trouble for democracy. A normal and healthy country would allow a fair and open debate about whether or not fraud occurred, and, if so, how much fraud and what evidence exists to back up these claims. Instead, Big Tech platforms have repeatedly censored any mention of voter fraud at all. Such was the case late last week when YouTube and Vimeo pulled a video interview with Trump lawyer John Eastman.

From the moment Matt Gaetz blitzed into Washington in 2016 as a 34-year-old Trump ally, it was clear that the representative from Florida liked to live dangerously. He invited Holocaust doubter and general crazy person Charles Johnson to the State of the Union. He hired canceled Trump speechwriter Darren Beattie, then, because that wasn’t risky enough, he potentially fudged House ethics rules to pay him. As a Florida state representative, Gaetz allegedly concocted a scoring system for sexual conquests in Tallahassee: lobbyists were one point, aides two, legislators three, married legislators six. (Gaetz denies any knowledge of the game.) In fall 2019, Gaetz white-knighted for Democrat Katie Hill after her bisexual menage à trois forced her out of Congress.