First of all, a Happy Saint Patrick's Day to everyone!

Today I am running an old column again, because I have more important things to do (ahem) than write a new one. The following column was the last of the travelogue I wrote when visiting the Emerald Isle on Paddy's Day back in 2015. It's my favorite of the three, mostly because of the Led Zeppelin references.

The first two of these are worth a read, if you're interested in this sort of thing. The first column ("It's A Long, Long Way To Tipperary") details Paddy's Day in Dublin as well as some of the other more interesting things we saw (a 90-percent eclipse of the sun, Dublin mummies, a royal reburial in England, etc.). It also has a rather amusing/embarrassing photo of me (again, for those who are interested in such things) in full Paddy's Day regalia, as well as a gaffe from Joe Biden. The second of these ("Northern Ireland, Where Even The Carrots Are Orange") has a short history of the division of Ireland (and carrots) as well as a few other tourist stops. But the one below was the culmination of the trip, complete with a visit to the Bushmills distillery, which was conveniently right down the road (earlier we had visited the Jameson's distillery in Dublin, I should point out).

In any case, as I said I have some celebrating to begin, so please enjoy the following trip not only through the past but through the wild coast of Northern Ireland. And, of course..

Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig!
Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Originally published March 26, 2015

Wind-swept but safe, back on the bus, we trundled off to lunch at the Bushmills distillery. Yes, in one trip I managed to see both major Irish distilleries: Bushmills and Jameson. And I don't even drink much whiskey (except maybe a snort or two on Paddy's Day each year)! And a note to grammarians: it's only "whisky" in Scotland -- in both America and Ireland, it's "whiskey." I have no idea why, but there it is. File it under the same heading (I suppose) as why the word "Scotch" only applies to whisky and broth, and everything else is "Scottish."

But back to Ireland. Whiskey -- like parades, colors, religion, and everything else on the island (carrots included) -- is political in nature here. For instance: I've never seen Bushmills served in the Republic of Ireland. Never. And I've personally been in many a pub, throughout the years. If you order whiskey at the bar in the Republic, it had better be Jameson. I assume the same is true in Northern Ireland, for Bushmills, as well. Yes, even after a long day when you retire to the pub, politics is never all that far away from Irish life. In other words: keep in mind which side of the border you're on when you order that shot at the bar!

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In Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare gave us a brilliant construct: "Be not afraid of greatness. Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them." Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has had greatness thrust upon him, and he has more than risen to the occasion.

Today Zelenskyy addressed the United States Congress, but his real plea was to President Joe Biden. Zelenskyy urged Biden to accept the mantle of "leader of the world" -- and to use that position to achieve peace -- at the very end of his speech. Zelenskyy did so in English (unlike the rest of his speech) so his words could not be misconstrued. Ever since the invasion of his country began almost three weeks ago, Zelenskyy has shown the world what true leadership looks like. Refusing to evacuate from his capital, he has urged on his own citizens and the rest of the world to do everything possible to repeal the Russian invaders.

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I mean that headline both ways. This is indeed an article about time. And it's about time for the subject to be addressed, too. Today, in a surprise victory, Senator Marco Rubio actually passed a bill by unanimous consent in the United States Senate that would enshrine, once and for all, Daylight Saving Time (or "D.S.T.") as the year-round standard for time in all of America. No more springing forward or falling back ever again, in other words. In March of 2023, the country would spring forward one last time and then that would be the time we'd all live with forevermore, even in winter. He titled it the Sunshine Protection Act (Rubio is from Florida, after all).

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Earmarks are back! After 11 years in the political wilderness, the budgetary tactic has returned to Capitol Hill. This means that individual members of Congress were once again able to reserve chunks of money in the massive omnibus budget bill that passed last week. The practice was largely seen as completely out of control back in 2010 and became a rallying cry for the Tea Party movement and Republicans in general, which led to a complete ban on the practice in Congress. That ban has now been lifted, and this is the first budget that includes earmarks to pass in over a decade.

Is this development a good thing or a bad thing? Well, probably a little of both. The process has been reformed somewhat, but these reforms aren't all that stringent and could use some strengthening. The budget bill that just passed reportedly had over 4,000 earmarks included within it. If applied equally, this would work out to around eight earmarks per member of Congress, but that's not the way it worked out. Some Republicans refused to request earmarks, holding to their original stance that the practice was nothing short of organized corruption. And party and committee leaders got the biggest bites of the apple, it seems -- Chuck Schumer's name is attached to over 140 earmarks alone.

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Let's start with some good news this week, because we could all use some, right? Two years ago today Tom Hanks announced to the world he had contracted COVID-19, on the same day that the virus people were then largely calling "the novel coronavirus" was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization. This was when it all hit home for many -- that this could quite possibly be a very big deal indeed, even though the president of the United States was desperately trying to get the American public to believe otherwise. Salon provides a good rundown of what we all went through next:

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In politics, as in much of life, timing is key. Sometimes there are windows of opportunity that can be missed. Such seems to be the case with the so-called "People's Convoy," a group of American truckers who launched a copycat imitation of the Canadian truckers' protest, in the hopes of bringing media attention to their cause (or just themselves, perhaps). But their time -- if it ever even existed -- seems to have passed long before the big-rigs arrived near Washington D.C.

I've long been interested in the phenomenon of political protest, especially the mechanics and tactics used to gain public support and sympathy for a grand cause, no matter what issue the protest centers around. As the truckers in Canada proved, using 18-wheelers as actual protest vehicles can be a powerful display (whether popular or not). But the American imitation protest seems to be doing no more than spinning their wheels and driving in circles. Literally.

The truckers might have made a bigger impact if they had stuck to the original plan, which was to arrive in D.C. on the night of the State Of The Union speech. That would have given the television cameras something to focus on: "...outside the Capitol, however, a rather large and noisy protest was taking place." Except that that didn't happen -- and what did happen wasn't until the speech was long over anyway.

Unlike the Canadian truckers, the American protest was a rather Seinfeldian protest to begin with, since it is essentially a protest about nothing. Canadian truckers were expressing their anger at vaccine and mask mandates. The American truckers, however, faced no such mandates at all. There is no rule stating you must be vaccinated to drive a truck here, and the last statewide mask mandate just ended in Hawai'i. So what was the protest even supposed to be about?

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I must admit that while I am usually open to considering nuanced diplomatic (or military) reasons why something which seems obvious simply cannot be done, for the life of me I cannot comprehend why the MiGs Poland is offering aren't already being flown by Ukrainian pilots over the skies of Kyiv. Because in this case any diplomatic or military concerns are contradicted by what Poland and the rest of NATO are already openly doing, as well as what the United States secretary of State publicly stated last weekend.

The idea was a fairly simple one to comprehend. It isn't a small idea and it is complex, but it was still pretty easy to understand. Poland has aging MiG-29 fighter jets in its air force, leftovers from the Soviet era. Ukrainian military pilots already know how to fly them, so there would be no learning curve for them. Poland wants to donate these planes to Ukraine. To fill the void in their air fleet, Poland is asking for American-made F-16s (not new ones, they'll take older used ones, even) to replace them. Poland gets an upgrade to their air force, Ukraine gets fighter jets it desperately needs, and the U.S. and the rest of NATO shift some planes around so that the Polish forces aren't temporarily depleted in a crucially-important time and place. How the permanent replacement planes would ultimately be paid for and where they'd come from seem to be rather minor details in the grand scheme of things. After all, Ukraine needs these planes now.

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President Joe Biden announced today that he was banning Russian oil and gas from the American marketplace. This is a wildly popular position to take and is supported not only by politicians across the political spectrum but also by an overwhelming majority of the American public. We all see the horrific scenes of death and destruction caused by Vladimir Putin and the thought that we are funding that in any small way when we fill up our cars is abhorrent to many. At least, that's the case right now.

I do wonder, however, how the American public will feel about pain at the pump two or three months from now. Because while the public is easily stampeded towards a defiant political stance in dire times, modern Americans are not exactly notable for being able to sustain sacrifice over extended periods of time. Instead, we tend to like instant results, followed by the whole issue fading quickly away -- which is not always the way the world works, of course. The war in Ukraine is not likely to be wrapped up within a few weeks, to state the painfully obvious.

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With the world in a very dangerous place after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the one thing just about everyone worldwide hopes is that saner minds will prevail. There are always plenty of hotheads and madmen in the midst of a crisis, but we can all certainly hope that the cooler heads will win out in the end.

I say this to address both sides of the fight. Obviously, the entire planet hopes that saner minds within Russia will eventually prevail over Vladimir Putin's self-destructive madness. Somehow, the hope is, Putin will be stopped from his belligerence. How, exactly, is left unsaid -- since nobody really has an answer to that. Putin holds pretty much all the reins of power within Russia, and so far he has shown no signs whatsoever of flinching in any way from fully using them to achieve his goals. At the very least, the hope is that Putin won't lob a nuclear weapon into the fray -- which once would have been unthinkable, but these days there aren't a whole lot of things that truly qualify as unthinkable when it comes to Putin. As Russia intelligence expert Fiona Hill put it in a recent interview with Politico, when asked if she thought Putin really would use a nuclear weapon: "The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it. Why have it if you can't?" This is not some armchair analyst on a cable news show, this is a woman who was hired to provide such intelligence to three successive U.S. presidents. So it's hard not to take her opinion very seriously.

Hill also points out during this interview that Putin issued a veiled threat to Donald Trump when the two met, although she did express doubts that Trump even understood what Putin was alluding to (emphasis in original):

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This week, President Joe Biden gave his first State Of The Union speech to the United States Congress, to the American people, and to the rest of world. This speech had to be hastily rewritten at the last minute, obviously, due to intervening events. Russia's Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine at the end of last week, which was obviously a lot more important than any political points or laundry lists of proposed legislation. So the speech got a quick makeover.

What emerged from this process was almost certainly a lot better than the speech Biden had initially planned on giving. The first 15 minutes or so (of a speech that lasted a wee bit longer than one hour) were entirely devoted to addressing the invasion, the geopolitical situation, and what America was doing and where we stood. Now, Biden doesn't technically count as a "wartime president" during the crisis (since the U.S. is not actually at war with Russia), but it is still having a major effect on how the public sees both him and our country. Biden calling for everyone to stand united with Ukraine is an effective political stance, it cannot be denied. Even the extremists on right-wing cable channels have had to very abruptly cease their admiration for Putin and their denigration of the seriousness of what's happening in Ukraine. America is unified once again against Russian tyranny.

Which, you've got to admit, is a good way to start the biggest political speech of the year. For those old enough to remember the Cold War, it is merely a return to what you grew up with. For those young enough not to remember this, it must seem like something out of a history book has come horrifyingly alive. For all those (of any age) who may have believed major land wars were just never going to happen again, it was a jarring wakeup call.

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