Your generous
donations help keep
this site running.
Visa/MC/PayPal accepted.
This really shouldn't be all that extraordinary, but sadly it is. The Department of Homeland Security just issued a warning about the possibility of right-wing violence and/or terrorism. Here are the pertinent facts:
Three momentous things happened last week which so overshadowed everything else in the political world that we're just going to ignore everything else up front, here.
First, Donald Trump slouched off to his golf resort in Florida a few hours early, for purely petty reasons -- he wanted the flight to still officially be "Air Force One" (a designation that only exists when the current president of the United States is on the plane), and he also didn't want to have to ask President Joe Biden for the routine favor of one last flight home on the big plane. So he flew while he was still president, after staging a pathetic goodbye rally at Joint Base Andrews (home base of the two planes that serve as Air Force One and Two). He forced the military into giving him one last 21-howitzer salute, and then flew south for the winter. And, hopefully, forever.
Throughout his entire presidency, Donald Trump has continued to top himself in the category of "most intense week ever." Over and over again, people thought: "Well, that's it -- he'll never sink lower than this," only to have this turn out to be mere wishful thinking, when the following week turns out to be even worse.
So why was anyone surprised when Trump rolled out his "season finale" (and "series finale," one would like to hope) of his made-for-television presidency in the first week of January? We all knew that whatever the end would look like, it would be spectacular (or, perhaps, "spectacularly bad"). And here we are.
That headline is meant to evoke an earlier phrase from American history which (even before a book and subsequent movie popularized the term) denoted one of the most existentially-dangerous times in not just our country's history, but in that of the entire world: the "thirteen days in October" of the Cuban Missile Crisis. President John F. Kennedy was informed that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear-tipped missiles a mere 80 miles from the United States, and he began a series of moves which could very well have ended up as the start of World War III. This is not an overstatement or exaggeration. If open hostilities had broken out during the height of the Cold War, it is almost certain (especially seeing what caused the crisis in the first place) that there would have been an exchange of nuclear weapons between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. For 13 days, from October 16 to 28, 1962, the world teetered on the edge of all-out nuclear war. Thankfully, sanity prevailed, and both sides agreed to face-saving measures which ended with the Soviets removing their missiles from Cuba. Kennedy gambled, he gambled big, and he won.
Younger readers may be surprised to hear it, but the Republican Party used to stand foursquare for law and order. Indeed, it was a big part of their whole political brand. Republicans used to actually sanctimoniously lecture the rest of us on the righteousness of taking personal responsibility for our actions, and how there simply had to be severe consequences for bad actions. Society absolutely depended on it, they told us.
That was then. This is now.
The sixth of January, 2021, has already gone down in American history as a day of infamy. This is, of course, the same phrase Franklin Roosevelt used to describe the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and it certainly seems appropriate right now.
Welcome back to the second part of our annual year-end awards column series! If you missed it, you can check out last week's installment too. But a warning -- for both this column and last week's -- they're long. Incredibly long. Monstrously long. It's been that kind of year, what can we say?
What a year. Seriously, that was a tough one for us all, wasn't it?
Before we begin with the awards, I would just like to thank all the people -- both online and in person -- who helped out by giving me their suggestions and nominations for all of these awards. I have tried to credit individuals where appropriate, but I probably forgot to do so here and there too, so I apologize in advance.
Once again, it's been a momentous week in American presidential history. Right as we were writing last week's column, the Supreme Court laughed President Donald Trump's last-ditch legal effort to overturn the will of the voters of multiple states right out of court. They were entirely correct in unanimously turning the case down, because it was so very laughable a concept to begin with. Texas was essentially arguing that it should be able to have a veto over any other state's election, because they didn't approve of that state's election process (in reality, what they really didn't approve of was who won those states). Coincidentally enough, they only complained about the states which, if their votes had been denied, would have handed the election to Trump -- even though several other states (including some red ones) had done exactly what Texas was complaining about in the four states they tried to sue. It was all nakedly transparent, and not based in any legal or constitutional foundation whatsoever. Which, again, is why it got unanimously laughed out of the highest court in the land.
President Donald Trump, as we all know full well by now, has truly become the thing he hates the most: a total loser.
He's lost the 2020 election so many times, it's hard to keep track of them all. First, he lost when all the votes were counted. Then he lost after he demanded they recount the votes. Then he lost when all the states certified their results. Then he lost when all the states named their electors to the Electoral College. Monday, he's going to lose the biggest one yet, as the Electoral College votes 306-232 for Joe Biden.