Hillary Clinton, drama queen

Cockburn was surprised to find out that Madame Secretary has found a new line of work — Broadway producer. Hillary Clinton, along with fellow Broadway mogul Lin-Manuel Miranda, hosted a fundraiser for President Biden on Wednesday night at a presentation of Suffs, a musical about the women’s suffrage movement and the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. The show apparently first opened in 2022 where it received middling reviews and had a short run. The New York Times review called it “all work and mostly no play.” 

So Cockburn finds himself wondering — who asked for this? 

A scan of the social media marketing reveals a rather desperate and sad attempt to ride the Hamilton wave, with a hefty dose of #girlboss language and cringe piece-to-camera pleas from Clinton herself. Cockburn is no Broadway expert (though he has a number of sordid unproduced plays in his study), but if the producer begging for an audience that early in the game, Suffs may cause theatergoers some real suffering.

Kamala’s airball

March Madness offers a great chance for the nation’s politicians to attempt to seem relatable, picking their local teams to win it all, even when doing so defies logic. Vice President Kamala Harris has had a fairly decent run of it so far, earning major kudos for picking Oakland to upset Kentucky early on in the men’s tournament (even though the school is in the politically useful Michigan as opposed to her native Bay Area). But her wildly inaccurate remarks about women’s college basketball are blowing up just as the tournaments come to a close. 

Iowa’s Caitlin Clark is the animus behind women’s college basketball taking the nation by storm this year — but according to our vice president, in a Thursday interview with New York local news, “women’s teams were not allowed to have brackets until 2022.” 

That would be a damning indictment of sexism in college athletics — to say nothing of the recent uptick in male athletes switching teams to dominate women in sports à la Lia Thomas. There’s only one problem: Kamala is glaringly wrong. 

In the “history lesson” she offered, she botched the key claim: “We love March Madness and even just now allowing the women to have brackets and what that does to encourage people to talk about the women’s teams, to watch them.” 

The irony deepens when you note that Harris’s husband, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff, boasted about his Women’s NCAA March Madness bracket in 2021 — a full year before his wife posits they were “allowed.” And Harris responded to his post at the time — did she forget? Or perhaps the staffer who sent it has since been catapulted through the notorious Kamala revolving door…

Courier service

Cockburn has been enthused to see recent coverage in right-wing media of Democratic political operative Tara McGowan and her “Courier Newsroom.” A March 25 piece in NOTUS (no idea) clutches pearls as McGowan is “testing the limits of what a newsroom can be,” raising concerns about “undisclosed funders and glowing coverage of Democratic candidates.” That article was hastily rewritten and amplified by the Daily Caller on the same day. A Fox News follow-up this week gasped as it recounted how McGowan had visited the Biden White House almost twenty times.

These reports are doubtless concerning — but all Cockburn can say is, “what took you so long?” Clearly they all missed the thoroughly reported feature from Mediaite editor-in-chief Aidan McLaughlin — no partisan hack, he — in the February 2024 edition of The Spectator World. His sources described “a badly mismanaged company that does in fact operate more like a Democratic propaganda outfit than a real news endeavor.”

“It’s great to see reporters digging into Courier Newsroom, which for too long has managed to milk millions from Democratic megadonors to run what is basically a propaganda outfit disguised as a network of local news sites,” McLaughlin told Cockburn this morning. How charitable of him to share the fruits of his labor…

Freudian nightmare of the week

If Sigmund Freud and Oedipus walked into a writers’ room, they might end up producing something like Strictly Confidential, a thriller film that debuts today in a limited release.

Under normal circumstances, the movie would be notable for its director and writer, Damian Hurley, only being twenty-one. But these are not normal times: he cast his mother, actress and Nineties sex symbol Elizabeth Hurley, in the film — and oversaw her lesbian love scene with co-star Pear Chiravara.

Fifty-eight year old Liz has been praised as “the hottest woman on the planet.” Her role in the film is fulfilling a promise she made to a then-eight-year-old Hurley that she’d be in his first movie — although it seems unlikely that he envisioned her being in a sex scene back when he was in elementary school, at least Cockburn hopes. Then again, he was raised in Hollywood…

And yet, a promise is a promise for Hurley mère. “Mama dropped everything and raced out to the beautiful Caribbean to help,” her nepo baby beamed. Siggie would be so proud!