Matt Purple

You actually can spell ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organization’ without ‘America’, as it turns out. You can also, however, spell ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organization’ without, say, ‘European Union commissioner Ursula von der Leyen’. And right now, that seems like the more pressing of these two anagrammatical bombshells. Both the United States and Europe have spent the last week reprising what by now ought to be played-to-death roles. America made another clumsy move in the Middle East without cluing in our Nato allies, and the Europeans complain about it into the roar of a C-130 engine.

I remember well the day this all began. The rain was slanting through the gray air and drops were plinking against my office window. I was sitting at my computer, checking my email, when I noticed I had a new message. I opened it and saw that it had been typed in sporadic red and blue fonts, like someone had clipped each letter out of a magazine. ‘Don't let President Trump think he's lost your support,’ it read. ‘He has EXTENDED your PERSONAL 500%-MATCH DEADLINE FOR 1 MORE HOUR… This is your last chance.’ I sat back in my chair and exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke. I had been receiving Donald Trump’s fundraising emails for years and certainly the language had always been insistent. But this was a new level of aggression altogether. My last chance, I thought.

Washington DC — I’ll try not to overstate things here — does not have a stellar reputation. Most Americans regard it as corrupt, alien, taking in an exorbitant amount of their taxpayer money and blowing it on stupid wars and bureaucratic boondoggles. DC is the Swamp, a fetid hothouse of buzzing lobbyists and special interests. It’s the Deep State, where well-oiled gears interlock and turn towards ever more self-enrichment and self-preservation. The reality has always been a bit sadder. Washington is more pseudo-expertise than evil genius, more $3 Coors until closing than three-martini lunch.

Marjorie Taylor Greene held a press conference late last week. It took place inside, meaning the Jews with the space laser must have been at red alert once again. The raison d’être for Greene’s shindig was to announce that she’d been banned from Twitter. Which raises the question: what do I have to do to get arrested in this town? I recently reactivated my own Twitter account after a blessed hiatus and I would give anything to be banished from that cesspool. How do you get hoosegowed? Apparently all you have to do is what everyone else on Twitter is doing: Greene was banned for spreading ‘COVID misinformation’.

Donald Trump has issued another statement after being criticized by his former staffers in recent days. Here’s an excerpt: ‘Every day the increasing weight of years admonishes me more and more, that the shade of retirement is as necessary to me as it will be welcome.’ Sorry, that was George Washington. I must have mixed up my notes. Here’s Trump: ‘Many say I am the greatest star-maker of all time. But some of the stars I produced are actually made of garbage.’ There’s the elder statesman we all know and love! That may be the closest thing to an admission of error I’ve yet seen from our 45th president. And certainly Trump is correct in even the most literal sense.

Donald Rumsfeld died this week — and it’s just so easy, isn’t it? It’s so convenient to dance on the grave of the man who helped bring about the disastrous Iraq war. For Rumsfeld, the old dictum, de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, seems to have been discarded almost from the start. The obituaries, mostly in left-leaning publications like the Atlantic and the Daily Beast, have been downright vicious. Rumsfeld was George W. Bush’s first defense secretary who, alongside Dick Cheney, pushed hard for deposing Saddam Hussein after 9/11. Because of this, he’s been labeled a war criminal. He’s been held responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan where he refused to accept a Taliban surrender.

Joe Biden has released a new statement on gun control and it’s about as concise and coherent as you would expect. Here’s an excerpt per a White House transcript: ‘Those who say the blood of lib- — “the blood of patriots,” you know, and all the stuff about how we’re going to have to move against the government. Well, the tree of liberty is not watered with the blood of patriots. What’s happened is that there have never been — if you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.’ There’s the silver-tongued devil we all know and love.

The vice presidency, as even the most remedial student of American politics will tell you, is not the most exciting gig in the world. Our first veep, John Adams, famously hated it so much that he called it ‘the most insignificant Office that ever the Invention of Man contrived’. It’s a sleepy position, one that doesn’t typically involve, say, surviving a mob that believes you’re conspiring to steal the election away from your own ticket. Yet this is the fate that’s befallen Michael Richard Pence. Prior to January 6, Pence had been wraithlike even by vice-presidential standards, overshadowed by one of the most inescapable presidents in American history. The attack on the Capitol fixed the attention of the world upon him. Would he carry out his constitutional duties?

It began last month when the Wall Street Journal reported that three researchers from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology had come down sick in November 2019. According to an intelligence report obtained by the Journal, the scientists had exhibited symptoms ‘consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illness’. This was further evidence in favor of the lab leak theory, the idea that the coronavirus had originated inside a Chinese lab. It continued last week with the release of a trove of Dr Anthony Fauci’s emails, which revealed that Fauci had been warned by a California virologist last January that the coronavirus appeared ‘engineered’.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2021 World edition. Click here to subscribe. Somewhere along the way, Jon Stewart discovered he could make stupid people laugh by smirking at Fox News clips — and the world has never been the same since. Stewart, who anchored The Daily Show until 2015, is often remembered as the progenitor of a long line of left-wing topical comedians, from Stephen Colbert to John Oliver to Samantha Bee. Yet before that he was something else: the most gloriously subversive personality on television. The Daily Show’s heyday came at the turn of the century, just after Stewart had taken it over from Craig Kilborn.

Several weeks back, I went for a run in the Del Ray neighborhood of Alexandria in Northern Virginia. It’s the sort of place where ‘Black Lives Matter’ signs cry out of security-alarmed windows and the dollar-to-fried-pickle exchange rate is instantly available upon request. I was hoofing it along when suddenly a guy leaned out of nowhere and shouted, ‘Why don’t you wear a mask if you’re going to jog on the sidewalk?!’ I told him to screw off and ran on, but my first reaction was one of pity. In Northern Virginia, the danger of getting mown down by a waif on a Lime scooter is real and ever-present; maybe he was just on edge. It was only later that I realized he may as well have just wished me dead — people have asphyxiated from wearing masks while exercising.

Gird your loins and grab your betting guides: there is to be a California recall election! Angry Golden Staters have gathered enough signatures to trigger a recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was last spotted managing California’s pandemic response from table 14 at the French Laundry, which incidentally would like another recommendation from the sommelier whenever she gets the chance. Among those who have entered the race to replace him is Caitlyn Jenner. The trans woman and former reality TV star is also a libertarian Republican who for a time even had nice things to say about Donald Trump. Now she wants to be the next governor of California. And right on, I say.

Some hot water this week for Rep. Matt Gaetz. The Sunshine State Republican and adroit controversialist stands accused of everything from having sex with a 17-year-old girl to throwing orgies with underage prostitutes to showing his fellow lawmakers pictures of nude women on the House floor. He has yet to be caught chucking an alligator into a drive-thru window or attacking a Disney princess with a flamethrower, but even by Florida Man standards these are serious charges. The Justice Department has opened an investigation, while Gaetz himself has denied everything, claiming he’s being extorted. And certainly he deserves due process and the benefit of the doubt. Yet the allegations against him raise a thorny question: where do Republicans draw the line on sexual misconduct?