Matt Purple

Over the weekend, the two-hundred-and-forty-second woman to accuse Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment came forward. That number is no less true for being inaccurate. It seems you can’t open a newspaper these days without reading about some horrible Cuomo come-on at an Albany Christmas party or a Manhattan cocktail hour. How’s it going for Democrats seeking a left-wing foil to Donald Trump? They seem to have gotten all of the vices with none of the humor. Of course, Cuomo deserves his due process like everyone else. But the accusations do seem credible and certainly fit with his hard-charging bull-in-a-bodega persona. There’s also the matter of the governor’s other scandal, which has been swept under the rug despite it involving the mass death of old people.

One of my favorite photos of all time comes from a 2012 March Madness basketball game that then-president Barack Obama attended with then-British prime minister David Cameron. The picture captures the two men perfectly. It shows Obama sitting courtside with a hot dog in his hand pointing and lecturing in that quintessential Obama way, while Cameron glowers and appears to contemplate all the places he’d rather be — getting an endoscopy, bombing Libya, anywhere else on the planet, really. The question inherent in that photo isn’t why Obama appeared to be hectoring a European ally: Obama would have hectored the Dalai Lama if given the chance. The question is: what was the most powerful leader on earth doing at a Mississippi Valley State basketball game in the first place?

I’m not in the habit of feeling sorry for Joe Biden, but for a few minutes last week, it was difficult not to. Biden was asked during a CNN town hall about — what else? — Donald Trump. His response sounded exasperated: ‘For four years all that has been in the news is Trump,’ he said. ‘The next four years I want to make sure that all the news is about the American people. I’m tired of talking about Trump.’ How galling it must be.

I played my share of video games when I was a kid and there was nothing quite like getting to the last level. You’d fought your way through various sewers and hideouts, past a series of increasingly bullet-resistant guards, encountering a couple cheesy plot twists along the way. But for the last level, you had some idea what was coming. It had been alluded to in the game story, previewed in the instruction manual. And so you felt a rush of awe as you wandered around, having finally made it to the end, even as you hunted for that body armor you desperately needed. That was how many of the dipshits who stormed the Capitol in Washington DC on Wednesday seemed to behave.

One of my favorite quotes about America — mainly because it annoys so many people — comes from the historian Robert Wiebe. In his book Self-Rule, he writes: ‘Telling Americans to improve democracy by sinking comfortably into community, by losing themselves in a collective life, is calling into the wind. There has never been an American democracy without its powerful strand of individualism, and nothing suggests there will ever be.’ Cue the yelping from nationalists, socialists, Burkeans, take your pick. Yet Wiebe was less making a political argument than he was observing what was right in front of his nose.

How in the world did Chris Matthews get himself fired? To be sure, the man did stick his foot in his mouth so often that the word ‘Keds’ is probably embossed on the inside of his cheek. But hadn’t the good people at MSNBC heard? Brand Matthews is hot right now! ’Tis the season for motor-mouthed men who begin sentences with ‘Now this isn’t something you should say around your mother but…’2020 is shaping up to be the Year of the Drunken Uncle. And according to my astrological observations of the planet Jupiter as well as a star that just moved and might actually be a plane, that augurs great nuttiness ahead.

This article is in The Spectator’s March 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. What would a Michael Bloomberg foreign policy look like? A total smoking ban across the Middle East seems imminent, even if it does risk spawning a new generation of pro-hookah jihadists. Fresh sanctions would likely be imposed on enemies of the West, including Iran and salt. Air superiority would be prioritized, especially as it pertains to illegally landing one’s personal helicopter in midtown Manhattan. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. Bloomberg has spent most of his career codifying class snobbery through petty regulations, and, while that’s a potent recipe for being annoying at home, it doesn’t really lend itself to a coherent agenda abroad.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. If we can’t be governed, we may as well be entertained. That’s become the ethos behind the Donald Trump presidency. The national debt might continue to bulge, our military might remain pointlessly overextended, our healthcare system might stay ablaze, but at least politics has become funny in a nothing-matters, Rick and Morty kind of way. Americans upvoted a man who’d spent hours on the Howard Stern show boasting about his sexual prowess, and we expect to be amused, dammit. So why has the news lately been so dreadfully boring? The fault certainly doesn’t lie with Trump.

John Bolton has left the White House and those of us who desire some modicum of peace in this world can breathe a sigh of relief. Bolton was appointed to serve as Donald Trump’s third national security adviser barely a year and a half ago, succeeding H.R. McMaster. It was always a strange choice: Trump’s foreign policy is premised largely on hard-nosed (and often hard-of-luck) deal brokering, while Bolton’s preferred method is to bomb other countries. This is the man who has no regrets about the calamitous occupation of Iraq, who wanted to assassinate Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who seemed to advocate for the use of nuclear weapons against Iran, and who lamented that we didn’t destroy the Syrian regime all the way back in 2003.

Eric Swalwell, we hardly knew ye. And we might add that what we did know did not leave us pining for more. Swalwell, a fourth-term congressman from California, became the first candidate to drop out of the Democratic primary last month, citing his poll numbers, which were hovering around zero percent. He’ll be remembered mostly for the armory of rakes that he upended into his own face, from his Twitter push poll on banning ‘assault weapons’ that’s still recording a sizable pro-gun majority to the awkward silence that greeted his ‘I’ll be bold without the bull!’ campaign motto to his informing CNN that they might have to leave Georgia over the state’s new abortion law.

Three years ago at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) just outside Washington, I convened in a large room with a small group of mostly British expatriates to watch Nigel Farage rail against the European Union. That was then; this is now, and today Farage is one of the event’s most iconic superstars. His speeches have been upgraded to the main ballroom where he’s received adoringly (the woman sitting next to me last year cheered louder for him than she did for Trump). Afterwards throngs corner him in hallways brimming with grins and hoisting cell phones high. Yes, welcome to CPAC, the volatile, star-studded Lollapalooza of American conservatism, held annually and somewhat ironically at the Gaylord Convention Center in Maryland.