Cockburn

In his victory speech on Saturday night, Joe Biden quoted the 1970s Roman Catholic hymn, ‘On Eagle’s Wings’. The President-elect said that its message helped him cope with his various personal tragedies, which are undoubtedly very real and sad. Still, Cockburn wonders whether Biden is correct in his assessment that this particular hymn ‘captures the faith that sustains’ America. If Biden is right about that, then Cockburn wonders whether the ‘battle for the soul’ of the nation was even worth having.Of course, Cockburn doesn’t pretend to be a Catholic, let alone a good one, but having borrowed a friend’s Bible, he suspects that the hymn in question — a bastardization of Psalm 91 — rather misses the point.

It's been a bad couple of years for Jeffreys... Veteran New Yorker reporter Jeffrey Toobin has been suspended from the magazine after he 'exposed himself during a Zoom call last week', according to VICE. Toobin, who also serves as a CNN legal analyst, must have been reaching for the tissues as he described the incident as an 'embarrassingly stupid mistake' and offered an apology to his 'wife, family, friends and co-workers' in a statement. Cockburn is perhaps most surprised that Toobin is the first significant figure to be caught out during a video-conference, seven months into the COVID pandemic. What took us? Naturally, Twitter users have been having a field day with the story: https://twitter.com/rysimmons/status/1318266346610765829 https://twitter.

The lockdown is dead...long live the lockdown?In an interview last Thursday on Spectator TV, WHO special envoy David Nabarro warned seven months too late that the ubiquitous global response to the coronavirus pandemic might be a bit of an oopsie-daisy: https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1314573157827858434 ‘We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus,' Nabarro said. ‘Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer... It seems that we may well have a doubling of world poverty by next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition.’Now, there was nothing astonishing about Dr Nabarro’s claims.

Remember the Ukraine impeachment drama? No? Cockburn can hardly blame you. But believe it or not, less than nine months ago, the Ukraine ‘scandal’ was supposed to be the greatest in American history. Donald Trump was impeached. Mitt Romney gave some embarrassing speech.Not even a year later, it’s the story never happened. Neither impeachment nor Ukraine were mentioned a single time at the Democratic convention. The party isn’t just tired with the story. They seem earnest about keeping it dead.But now, thanks to the US Senate, they’ll need an assist from the press.A newly released report by the Senate Intelligence Committee resurrects the Ukraine story by reviving focus on Joe Biden’s ne’er-do-well son Hunter Biden.

This week, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg dropped what could be his biggest piece since he won a major award for drawing bogus links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. The piece claims that during a 2018 visit to France President Trump canceled a visit to an American war cemetery, dismissing the dead who lie there as 'suckers' and 'losers' unworthy of passing beneath his presidential shadow. Outsiders have expressed skepticism of the story for many reasons. For starters, in Goldberg’s account, Trump also questioned America’s pointless and enormously costly involvement in World War One. If Trump really said that, it would be an unprecedented display of historical knowledge and insight on the President’s part.

Cockburn dislikes the latent misogyny behind the rise of this term ‘Karen’, which is used to describe any white woman who is caught being aggressive on social media. Then again, Karens don’t have to be female; plenty of men fit the term perfectly. One of them is the President of France.Yes, Emmanuel Macron lost his rag again on Wednesday, this time berating a French journalist who dared to try to cover the President’s complicated maneuvers in Lebanon.

President Trump spoke mildly in defense of Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse on Tuesday, saying that the 17-year-old seemed to be defending himself when he shot three people, killing two of them. NPR, fresh off of interviewing In Defense of Looting author Vicky Osterweil, had something stern to say about that, tweeting 'President Trump declined to condemn the actions of the suspected 17-year-old shooter of three protesters against police brutality in Kenosha — claiming, without evidence, that it appeared the gunman was acting in self-defense.’ https://twitter.com/NPR/status/1300614359236964358 Without evidence!

Let nobody say the outgoing president of Liberty University is not an intellectual.Cockburn will not belabor you with the full tragedy of Jerry Falwell Jr. Who is he kidding, you already have read (though not seen, mercifully) all the details.Falwell’s rapid downfall is a testament to the dangers of hubris. At the tender age of 44, Falwell was handed the presidency of a university his father had already built. He was paid roughly $1 million a year for this privilege. To keep the job indefinitely, Falwell didn’t need to do much. Even taking photos of himself half-undressed with a woman half his age at a yacht party, and entering into a ménage à trois with a pool boy, would have been completely fine.

On Thursday afternoon, prior to the final night of the Democratic convention, four New York Times opinion columnists gathered to discuss the political landscape. Of course, millions of people do that every single day. The special conceit of the Times opinion staff is that it believes its discussions are worth broadcasting to the world. The special curse for the rest of us is that many find them worth listening to. The theme of Thursday’s discussion was the awful, terrifying, unspeakable, unthinkable idea that a major presidential candidate might delegitimize an election outcome.