Matthew Chapman writes about the weird right wing obsession with Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and how their attempts to discredit her (such as posting a fake photo supposedly of her in a bathtub) are really pathetic and backfiring badly, as she knows how to respond aggressively and they are only serving to increase her profile, way beyond that of any new member of Congress. I think they are so used to Democrats trying to defend and explain themselves from attacks that they are not used to some who responds by gleefully mocking them.
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Nancy Pelosi has written to Donald Trump saying that it would be best to postpone his State of the Union address to the joint session of Congress, scheduled for January 29, until after the government shutdown ends or that he could give it in writing as presidents once used to do. She is effectively withdrawing the invitation for him to speak and since the Speaker is the one who controls the event, she has the right to do so. Trump is realizing that no longer having his obedient puppy Paul Ryan as Speaker has real consequences.
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It is hard to gauge where public sentiment lies on social issues. But one indicator is the commercials that big companies put out. These companies are seeking to maximize their customer base and so anything they do has to have taken into consideration its impact in terms of sales. When they take a stance on hot-button issues, they have likely calculated that the people who will respond favorably to it will be greater than the people who are offended. That Nike’s ad featuring Colin Kaeprnick ended up boosting sales for its product showed that they gauged the zeitgeist correctly even though Donald Trump had been whipping up anti-kneeling sentiment among his base.
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That Theresa May’s deal with the EU was likely to be rejected by parliament today was widely expected. What was perhaps a surprise was the scale of the defeat 432-202. Only 196 of her own Conservative party voted for it, joined by the three Labour MPs and three independents. 118 members of her own party rejected it.
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After the recent death of their flagship magazine The Weekly Standard, the neoconservatives have come out with a new magazine called The Bulwark. Matt Taibbi reminds us of the history of the neoconservatives, opportunists all, who align themselves with any party that they think will best satisfy their bloodthirsty warmongering needs and have decided that Democrats currently fit that bill.

Neocons began as liberal intellectuals. The likes of Bill Kristol’s father, Irving (who famously said a neoconservative was a liberal who’d been “mugged by reality”), drifted from the Democratic Party in the Seventies because it had become insufficiently hawkish after the Vietnam debacle.

They abhorred realpolitik and “containment,” hated Richard Nixon for going to China and preferred using force to spread American values, even if it meant removing an existing government. Reagan’s “evil empire” gibberish and semi-legal muscle-flexing in places like Nicaragua made neocons tingly and finalized their defection to the red party.
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The neocon-Republican marriage wasn’t exactly smooth. After all, it required sanctimonious, left-leaning intellectuals to get into political bed with the Jerry Falwells of the world and embrace all sorts of positions they plainly felt were absurd. But they believed pretending to support religiosity or other popular passions was fine for ruling elites. This was supposedly a version of Plato’s “noble lie” concept, as Irving Kristol wrote in Commentary half a century ago:

“If religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without…let men believe in the lies of religion… and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves,” Kristol wrote, adding: “Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men.”

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Not only is there no end to the government shutdown in the US, there does not seem to be even any action at all on this front. But there is plenty of high drama in the UK where things are rapidly coming to a head over Brexit. Tomorrow there is a big vote in the British parliament on the deal that Theresa May negotiated with the EU. She is widely expected to lose that vote, and if so is then required to come up with a new plan that will be voted on next Monday. Note that there is a deadline of March 29 for any deal with the EU to be approved. If it does not happen by then, the UK would be faced with a ‘no deal Brexit’ (see below) unless the deadline is extended by both sides which seems likely to happen since few like the idea of a disorderly breakup.
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Iowa’s congressperson Steve King is not the stupidest person in the US Congress. That honor belongs to Texas congressperson Louis Gohmert. But King has been saying the most obnoxious things, especially when it comes to race. That King is a stone-cold racist has been well-known for a long time.
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People newly elected to the House of Representatives are usually considered political nonentities. Nobody outside their districts pays any attention to them, they get put on minor committees that deal with issues on the fringes, and have to slowly work their way up the seniority ranks before they are taken seriously. So the prominence of the new batch of Democratic congresspersons, especially the women, is something different. And of these, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the standout.
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