Roger Kimball

Hysteria, thy name is Biden. Or maybe it’s Walensky, named for Dr Rochelle Walensky, aspiring soap opera star and newly appointed director of the Centers for Disease Cons. Maybe that’s not quite right, but I am sure the acronym is CDC and I am just as sure that the politicized directive pouring out of its offices count as some sort of hoax or con game. Did you catch her performance the other day? It was extraordinary. There she was, fighting back tears, telling her captive audience that she was 'scared’, warning of 'impending doom’, a 'fourth wave’ if the entire populace of the United States did not grab their masks to cower under their socially-distanced beds until further notice. It’s amazing how surreal reality TV can be.

Just a sec. Let me check my notes. Ah, right. Hurgh. 'My message to the American people is: help is here. Hope is on the way.' 'Can I go home now?' he asked with his eyes. Joe Biden looked like he wanted to call an end to his first presidential press conference before he even got started. But he soldiered on. Having prepared for a few weeks to talk to — what, seven? Eight? — carefully selected members of the press, he was not about to give up on this chance to bask in some adulation. And boy was the adulation ever on offer. 'Was it because you were such a a nice man that you had more success than the awful Voldemort who proceeded you?' oozed one female correspondent. No that’s not a direct quote. The original was more embarrassing.

Thoughtful observers of life often comment on the richness of the English language, its huge polyglot vocabulary, its precision, it sinewy expressiveness. It is doubtless politically incorrect to say so, but English has also shown itself to be a conspicuous ally of political liberty. I have commented on this in the past, noting that 'there seems to be some deep connection between the English language and that most uncommon virtue, common sense'. Speakers of English can be plenty extravagant, it may go without saying, but there is something about English — exactly why, I do not know — that acts to tether thought to the empirical world.

As I write, jury selection for the murder trial of Derek Chauvin is about to begin in Minneapolis. You remember Derek Chauvin, right? He is the (former) policeman charged with the murder of St George Floyd, race martyr (also drug addict, woman abuser, and career criminal). Chauvin and his three colleagues disgusted civilized opinion last spring when a bystander’s video clip of Officer Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck was released. Nine minutes. Chauvin kept Floyd pinned to the ground for some nine minutes. ‘I can’t breathe,’ Floyd can be heard crying. An ambulance eventually came to whisk Floyd off to hospital. Too late. Floyd died, murdered by the brutish policeman who cruelly, gratuitously, asphyxiated him by kneeling on his neck, cutting off his air supply.

It’s hard to keep them all straight, but among the many diktats emitted by the Biden administration during its first days in office, one deserves special commendation for its brazen mendacity. I mean the ‘Executive Order On Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government’. The key word, as we’ve heard over and over again these last few weeks, is ‘equity’. The diktat (a more accurate term for what is happening than ‘Executive Order’) promises ‘a comprehensive approach to advancing equity for all’ by ‘affirmatively advancing,’ well, ‘equity’. If you think you discern a little whiff of tautology, you’re right. You are also right if, on second sniff, you catch the acrid scent of contradiction.

I support Nancy Pelosi’s call for a '9/11-style inquiry' into the mêlée at the Capitol on January 6. I do so not because I think there is any valid analogy between the terrorist attack on the United States by Muslim fanatics on September 11, 2001 and the low-level riot at the Capitol. There isn’t. On 9/11 some 3,000 innocent people were murdered, billions of dollars of property was obliterated and important symbols of American economic and military might were attacked, utterly destroyed in the case of the World Trade Towers, seriously damaged in the case of the Pentagon. On January 6, a pro-Trump rally got out of hand despite the president’s instructions to proceed to the Capitol 'peacefully and patriotically’.

Do you suppose that Kamala Harris is a student of Jane Austen? The contingency, as Jeeves was wont to observe, is remote. Yet there is at least one passage from Pride and Prejudice that I’d wager Harris would appreciate. Towards the end of the novel, after she has accepted Mr Darcy’s proposal of marriage, Elizabeth confides the news to her sister Jane. Knowing how cordially Elizabeth had disliked Mr Darcy in days past, Jane is appalled. ‘Oh, Lizzy! it cannot be. I know how much you dislike him.’ ‘You know nothing of the matter. That is all to be forgot. Perhaps I did not always love him so well as I do now. But in such cases as these, a good memory is unpardonable. This is the last time I shall ever remember it myself.

Rand Paul just made the most bracing speech of his career. It was about the absurdity of the new effort to convene a Senate trial to impeach Donald Trump. I’ll come back to Sen. Paul’s speech in a moment. First, let’s take a moment to talk about the man everyone is talking about today. I mean the former president of the Untied States, Donald J. Trump. Addiction can be a terrible curse. It can make people do all manner of irrational things. Consider the Democrats and their addiction to Donald Trump. Has any junkie been more abject in trying to score his fix? Like many addicts, the Dems hate the thing to which they are addicted. Yet they are ineluctably drawn to it. The Democrats and their media enablers have spent the last four years railing against Donald Trump.

It is a truism that while it takes much time and patience to build up a civilization, those achievements can all be undone in a moment. The administration of Joe Biden seems bent on testing that proposition. On his first day in office, 'C’mon Man’ Biden issued a spate of executive orders — 17 in all, if you are counting — aimed at undoing the legacy of President Trump.  It was all 'hello Paris Climate Accords, goodbye policing the borders.’ Two executive orders in particular caught my attention, one shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline, the other shutting down the 1776 Commission and removing its report, issued just two days before America’s first armed-camp inauguration, from the White House website.

Like most Greek stories, the tale of Pandora’s box is fraught with ambiguity. Most of us, when we first encounter the story, learn that it is a fable about the dangers of curiosity, not unlike the story ‘of man’s first disobedience, and the Fruit/ of that Forbidden Tree’. As Eve sneaked the apple, so Pandora took the lid off a box that she was forbidden to peek inside. Bang! Death, illness, famine and all the other miseries of the world escaped to blight man’s life, leaving behind only hope as a sort of consolation prize. But is hope a consolation? Or is it a subtler, more insinuating evil?

‘Disappointed but not surprised.’ I suppose that describes my initial feeling about the summary dismissal by the Supreme Court last night of the ‘audacious’ (the New York Times) lawsuit brought by the state of Texas against Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia and Michigan on December 8. In essence, Texas argued that those four states had trespassed on the civil rights of citizens by favoring some voters over others in violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The amusing and perspicacious commentator known as Ace of Spades added a bit of hot sauce in his response to the news of the Court’s ruling. ‘The ultimate Friday Night News Dump,’ he wrote.

Are the chickens coming home for Hunter Biden? It certainly seems so, though experts differ on the critical question of whether they are coming home to roost or roast. Wednesday’s news, splashed via an official communiqué from his father’s transition operation, that Hunter is being investigated by the US Attorney’s Office for possible tax fraud makes me want to bet for ‘roast’ not ‘roost’. Here’s Hunter’s statement from Wednesday, in full: ‘I learned yesterday for the first time that the US Attorney’s Office in Delaware advised my legal counsel, also yesterday, that they are investigating my tax affairs.

Although the electors for the presidential election of 2020 do not cast their votes until December 14, and their votes are not certified — and hence the election is not officially ratified — until December 23, it is eminently possible that by the time you read this the world will know whether the election was won by Donald Trump or Joe Biden. That is emphatically not the case now, in mid-November. The media narrative would have you believe otherwise. According to the received script, Biden won on November 3, or at least in the wee hours of November 4, when mail-in ballots, tens of thousands of them, began appearing like manna from heaven.

Once again, President Trump has done the right thing. This afternoon, he announced that earlier today he had pardoned Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, the man who was framed by the corrupt administration of Barack Obama and mercilessly hounded for four years by a rogue FBI and out-of-control deep state apparat. The case was so embarrassing that the Department of Justice eventually intervened and dropped the prosecution. That did nothing to quell the fury of the vindictive Judge Emmet Sullivan, who decided to soldier on as both prosecutor and judge in his effort to nail Gen. Flynn. All that comes to an end today. 'It is my Great Honor,' the Twitterer-in-Chief wrote this afternoon, 'to announce that General Michael T. Flynn has been granted a Full Pardon.