Eric Adams’s Turkey trot

“Brooklyn is the Istanbul of America,” now-Mayor Eric Adams told a pair of Turks on camera after they asked him for political favors in a cameo he made in a Turkish romcom. Now, in real life, Adams is accused of doing just that, following a sweeping indictment unsealed by prosecutors in Manhattan who allege that he fraudulently obtained $10 million in public campaign funds and accepted over $100,000 in bribes in order to facilitate a new Turkish consulate.

“In 2014, Eric Adams, the defendant, became Brooklyn borough president. Thereafter, for nearly a decade, Adams sought and accepted improper valuable benefits, such as luxury international travel, including from wealthy foreign businesspeople and at least one Turkish government official seeking to gain influence over him,” the fifty-seven-page indictment reads; it marks the first time a sitting mayor of New York City has been indicted.

The indictment includes multiple outright absurd allegations, including that Adams changed his iPhone password, only to claim he forgot “the password he had just set, and thus was unable to provide the FBI with a password that would unlock the phone” and that his staff asked a businessman to lie to the feds about obvious straw donations his employees made in return for him securing a city sponsorship for events.

For his part, Adams, who has called the charges “false,” has suggested that they are politically motivated, and based off of his opposition to the Biden administration’s open borders policies. They come after multiple members of his inner circle had their homes searched.

The hours leading up to and following the indictment saw a series of strange comments from Adams allies and enemies bubble up. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, herself a potential mayoral candidate down the road, called on him to resign — even before the indictments were unsealed. On the other hand, Liel Liebovitz took to the pages of Tablet magazine to argue that “Jewish New Yorkers have an obligation to stand up against a corrupt Democratic Party lawfare campaign that is targeting the mayor who stood up for us.”

What comes next is anyone’s guess. If Adams were to resign in the short term, the city’s far-left public advocate Jumaane Williams would take over. If not, next year’s election could feature a panoply of candidates, including disgraced ex-governor Andrew Cuomo — who himself is under fire for a drip-drip scandal about his personal involvement in the state’s deadly Covid-era nursing home scandal — or 2021 mayoral candidate Kathryn Garcia, whom Adams narrowly beat thanks, allegedly, to millions of dollars of straw donations from Turkey.

Watch it

You know what time it is. Donald Trump has announced his latest foray into merchandising, this week introducing his line of timepieces, Trump Watches. “The Official Trump Watch Collection is here, and these Watches are truly special — You’re going to love them,” the former president wrote on Truth Social. “Would make a great Christmas Gift. Don’t wait, they will go fast.”

The Fight Fight Fight sells for $499 in Silver Gold Tone and Red Silver Tone or $799 in Onyx Gold Tone and features Trump’s signature, while the limited edition Trump Victory Tourbillon is priced at $100,000. Worth every cent, Cockburn is certain.

Not everyone is impressed with this enterprising new Trump scheme, however. “These are the second ugliest watches in the world,” tweeted author Gary Shteyngart.

Fellow writer Joyce Carol Oates went deeper still: “what is this distinctly male predilection for amassing watches?” she wrote. “can’t be a way of seeming to control — by ‘owning’ — time; a way for well-to-do megalomaniacs to stave off quite normal fears of mortality by coming into proud possession of trinkets of ‘conspicuous consumption’ when elsewhere in the world suffering fellow humans have no watches nor even wrists to wear them on. how explain?”

So here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson…

What could be more humiliating than having the world discover your conservative pastor husband, who happens to be running for governor of North Carolina, appeared to be a prolific poster on a pornographic forum, where he posted about his sexual fantasies and fetishes, seemingly including those involving your sister? Well, how about making a campaign ad for him right after? 

Pity North Carolina second lady Yolanda Robinson, who stars in a video tweeted out by her disgraced husband Mark yesterday. “Mark has been a wonderful husband, father and grandfather,” Mrs. Robinson claims to the camera, as uplifting mellow musak plays in the background. 

Unfortunately for the Robinsons, many of the replies to the ad contain allusions to the forum posts connected to the candidate — and screenshots of the ones too blue for CNN to include in their report. Robinson denies responsibility for the posts and is threatening the outlet with legal action.

Did you know that there’s a riverside wedding venue on the Bayou?

Happiness is not a butterfly but an alligator man from the swamp. Congratulations to downtempo songstress Lana Del Rey on her nuptials to her extremely conservative-coded beau Jeremy Dufrene. The singer married Dufrene, not a Million Dollar Man, in a Thursday ceremony by the water in Des Allemandes, Louisiana, close to where he offers alligator tours of the Bayou. Lana has made references to her desire for marriage in several of her songs over the last decade, notably “Blue Banisters”:

Said he’d fix my weathervane
Give me children, take away my pain
And paint my banisters blue
My banisters blue

Cockburn extends his best wishes to the couple — and hopes Del Rey has found a long-term cure for her Summertime Sadness in deep-red America…