Nancy Mace busted by the Capitol Hill fashion police

With her vote to oust Kevin McCarthy as speaker, Nancy Mace has made herself the pariah of the House. And after donning a red, Scarlet Letter-style “A” on her chest to reflect this as she headed into House GOP meetings this week, she caught the ire of the Capitol Hill Fashion Police too.

One of her colleagues intimated the “A” must stand for “attention” — and lamented that “there wasn’t enough bling” on it and that “a light-up version would’ve been better.”

In a Congress filled with all but literal skeletons, Mace stands out for her relative youth. One staffer had no problem with her choice of outfits this week. “She’s concerned about showing off her two personalities, and I’m not just talking about two political personalities,” he told Cockburn. Another staffer told us that Mace should have instead sported a “T” for “traitor.”

“Everything about her is fake, I’m told,” the Daily Wire’s Brent Scher noted.

Monkey business

Be careful who you hire: once a disgruntled ex-staffer is off your payroll he might tell the world that your hair is fake and you kill puppies. That’s what Congressman Shri Thanedar learned this week after a flaming from his former communications director, Adam Abusalah, on Twitter/X.

Thanedar quit his membership in the controversial Democratic Socialists of America following their involvement organizing vitriolic protests against Israel.

According to Abusalah, Thanedar pushed him to send official business to his campaign list, which is illegal, “had a hard time trusting black women,” but worse of all: “his hair is fake, and he killed the monkeys and beagles.”

Abusalah is referring to Thanedar’s ridiculous hairline and to a story that’s dogged him for years ago about deadly animal testing at a Thanedar-owned lab in New Jersey. “Shri is all about himself. He’s the most ignorant, self-centered and uninformed human I’ve ever worked with.”

Weirdly enough, Thanedar isn’t known for being particularly pro-Israel. In fact, pro-Israel groups backed by AIPAC spent heavily against him just last year — but apparently ditching DSA was too much for Abusalah. It’s tough to find good help these days!

Back to school for Jamaal Bowman

Days after Representative Jamaal Bowman pulled a fire alarm in the Capitol, the New York socialist hosted a virtual school safety town hall — leaving Cockburn wondering, who was teaching who exactly?

Bowman, a former middle school principal, likely knows all about fire safety, but in the event that he doesn’t, the students on his call probably could have taught him what a fire alarm looks like. In fact, students at the school he used to run faced expulsion for pulling fire alarms under false pretenses.

Fortunately for the congressman, Republicans led by Matt Gaetz have taken all attention away from his antics as their own internal conflict threatens to inflame the House. And if Republican tensions truly boil over, Bowman now knows exactly where the fire alarm is.

There’s no word on whether the anti-Israel congressman addressed today’s international “day of jihad” brought to you by Hamas-aligned terrorists; multiple Jewish schools in and around his congressional district are on high alert.

Encounter, Extremely Online and a Spectator wedding

As temperatures drop in DC, Cockburn found as many reasons to work the party circuit and don his booze jacket to stay cozy. Last Friday, he stopped in at the launch party for Taylor Lorenz’s Extremely Online (reviewed by her former colleague David Weigel in our October edition), on the rooftop of Western Market in Foggy Bottom. The guests, among them a number of Democratic staffers and online hacks, were served a mix of Bud Light (what else), Jai Alai and White Claw, and were well protected by the event’s private security — and all the masks, naturally. Cockburn spotted: USA Today’s Francesca Chambers, NBC’s Katherine Doyle, the Atlantic’s Shadi Hamid, Ben Jacobs, NBC’s Sahil Kapur, Puck’s Tara Palmeri, the MailOnline’s Nikki Schwab, Semafor’s Weigel and Lorenz.

The next night was a small slice of Spectator World history, as Cockburn’s comrade Amber Athey became Amber Duke. She married Jonathan at St. Rita Catholic Church in Alexandria before a gorgeous reception at Fort Myer’s Patton Hall where guests were served perfectly cooked beef. In attendance: the Hill’s Emily Brooks and David Brooks, Fox News’s Jon Brown, Jordan and Will Chamberlain, Will Davis, the American Conservative’s Bradley Devlin and Mary Frances Myler, Matthew Foldi, JP Hasson, the Dallas Express’s Patrick Hauf, the Daily Caller’s Geoffrey Ingersoll, Townhall’s Kevin McMahon, The Spectator’s Teresa Mull, the Daily Signal’s Mary Margaret Olohan, Greg Price and Allie McCandless, Townhall’s Julio Rosas, Cassie Rudolph, Townhall’s Lindsay Wigo and Matt Hixon.

Cockburn maintained his blood-alcohol level at Wednesday’s twenty-fifth anniversary Encounter Books gala, from which he is ashamed to admit he is still recovering. The black-tie shindig played out at the National Building Museum and saw Encounter chief and Spectator columnist Roger Kimball play compère as Joshua Katz, formerly of Princeton, and Stanford’s Victor Davis Hanson were honored. Top-notch wine flowed through the venue as if it were the Augean stables and attendees retired to the nearby Riggs Hotel for cocktails and contemplation. Cockburn hopes to be around after another quarter-century to mark Encounter’s fiftieth — the night was a triumph.

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