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Welcome back to the ongoing saga of "The Arsonist Fireman." In this week's episode, our protagonist lights a fire which could burn down the entire Western world -- starting with its military alliance -- before grabbing a fire extinguisher and singlehandedly snuffing it out. As usual, he then wonders why everyone doesn't congratulate him on having bravely averted such a disaster.
Today marks the end of the first year of Donald Trump's second term in office. One down, three to go.
Looking back, the most notable thing about Trump's first year back was how he has thrown himself fully into the Silicon Valley maxim to "move fast and break things." Trump has indeed moved fast, and he has indeed broken many things -- some of which will take a very long time to put back together and some of which may just stay broken forever.
In another four days, we will have survived the first full year of Donald Trump's second term in office. That's right -- one down, only three more to go!
(Sigh.)
The defining feature of this past year has been -- just like it was in his first term -- the continuing cycle of being so aghast at Trump's planet-sized ego, flailing insecurities, and toddler-grade tantrums and thinking to oneself: "Well, it surely can't get any worse than this!" -- only to wake up the next morning, read the headlines, and find out that yep, it sure can get worse, in ways you would never have imagined in a million years, pre-Trump.
Donald Trump is approaching his own Rubicon, it seems. The phrase "crossing the Rubicon" is a metaphor for crossing a line that, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed. "Burning your bridges" is a slightly-different metaphor with a similar meaning. For Trump, the Rubicon he is contemplating crossing is invoking the Insurrection Act to send in U.S. armed forces to an American city.
The Democratic Party -- and liberalism in general -- needs to take a stand. So far, they have mostly been reactive, fighting back against Donald Trump and his administration. Trump will do something outrageous, and Democrats then react to it. But there's no cohesive plan to any of it -- nothing that ties it all together into an actual political agenda. So it would behoove them to steal a page (actually a whole lot of pages) from the Republicans, and come up with a "Project 2029" document that lays out what their vision of the federal government would be, if they win the White House and Congress.
A U.S. military website showing Santa Claus delivering his presents while guarded by warplanes has some children's advocates worried.
In a twist to its tradition of tracking an animated version of Santa Claus' sleigh and reindeer as he flies around the globe on December 24, the military is adding the animated fighter plane escort to give a realistic feel to the popular feature, said a spokesman for the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
Welcome back to the second of our year-end awards columns! And if you missed it last Friday, go check out [Part 1] as well.
This article is mind-bendingly long enough, so we're not going to bother with any other introductory words at all. Instead, let's just get right to the awards, shall we?
Welcome to our annual year-end awards! As always, we honor the memory of The McLaughlin show with our categories, and we want to thank the readers who responded to our calls for nominees for them all.
Also as always, it is long. Really, really, insanely long. You have been warned!
And also as always, we'll be back again next Friday for [Part 2].
Donald Trump's "Day One" in office is now less than two weeks away. He promised American voters a lot of action on his first day, but in the past few weeks he seems inordinately focused on some rather odd (one might say: "downright bizarre") goals. He has become a big fan of expanding America in what can only be called imperialistic fashion -- adding Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal to the American map. Today he floated a new idea, this one not a land-grab but instead of a sort of water-grab: he wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America," for no particular reason (other than to annoy Mexico, one assumes).
So the longest federal government shutdown in American history ended last weekend, not with a bang but a whimper. Seven Democrat senators and one Independent voted with the Republicans to reopen the government without securing the goal that Democrats had been fighting for. This has outraged many other Democrats, since it was seen as "pulling defeat out of the jaws of victory," once again.