VIDEO – FIRST HAND ACCOUNT –
Feb. 19, 2022 – As I write this in my marble notebook, I am a stereotype, drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, dry just a few days. It’s a chilly morning for Southern California. I put the Beatles on. My 11-year-old recently discovered them. In his greenest youth he thinks Paul, not George, is the best of them. It’s wonderful to see your kid’s taste grow. This is my second stint at Miramar, the treatment facility. Eight months ago I first stepped through these doors. The impetus, well the immediate impetus anyway, was my merrymaking at the February 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando.
I won’t bore you with all the details, but it ended with me in a parking lot of a hotel party, on my phone, doing a live appearance on Newsmax, drunk as Falstaff, and refusing to put out my cigarette. The next day I found out some of the Newsmax guys thought it was a hoot. My bosses at the Federalist, where I was the New York correspondent, well, less so.
About a week later I was summoned to Washington, D.C., by my friend and then boss Ben Domenech. Ben and I took a long walk through the cozy red bricks and historical monuments of Alexandria, Virginia.
