Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior was a radical, which is oft forgotten in all the praise we heap upon him on his birthday. The reason it gets overlooked so frequently is that we'll all hear miniature clips of King today which highlight the positive aspects of his agenda and his movement while editing out all the harder edges of what he had to say. He was non-violent, to be true, but radical does not equate to violent. Most people think of the two as interlinked, but they're not. Dr. King preached non-violent radicalism.

King called not just for racial equality, but he also called for economic equality as well. His economic ideas were somewhat to the left of Bernie Sanders, in fact. Andrew Yang likes to remind people that King was for Universal Basic Income, and he's right to do so. King called for a guaranteed job for everyone who could work, which was one portion of the Green New Deal that drew derision and scorn from its detractors.

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This week, for the third time in American history, the Senate began the impeachment trial of a sitting United States president. As Nancy Pelosi helpfully pointed out, that is forever and will never be erased. Trump still bizarrely believes that somehow this is all just going to go away, but we've crossed that Rubicon now.

The most amusing thing (of a number of amusing things about the impeachapalooza circus) is how the Republicans have made "doublethink" their mantra. With this president, it's almost necessary, we suppose, but it's still hilarious to us to now hear Senate Republicans argue until they are blue in the face why they can't possibly hear from witnesses after listening to Trump and his minions argue for months on end why they should hear from witnesses. It's also doublethink of the purest order to hear them now state that those with personal first-hand knowledge of what was done and said cannot possibly testify -- after arguing for months and months and months that "this is hearsay -- it's only second-hand!" But then that's life in the GOP under Trump, one supposes. They've now moved on to arguing that the witnesses should have testified before the House committees, which conveniently ignores how Trump barred them all from doing so and all the same Republicans backed him up. Just another fun day in Trumpland.

This doublethink continued this week, as every sitting senator (except the one who was absent due to a family medical emergency) swore a solemn oath to be an impartial juror -- an oath that several Republicans have already publicly promised to utterly disregard. Because, you know, all that business about being for law and order and all that tut-tutting over the sins of "moral relativism" is so 1990s.

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I have to begin with an apology to The Wizard Of Oz for that title. But somehow it seemed appropriate in the latest of the so-called "culture wars." Because I think most everyone is missing the point about Donald Trump's newfound focus on household appliances.

I've seen articles ridiculing Trump for talking about lightbulbs and dishwashers and toilets (and showers, but somehow they don't get the headlines as much as the other three) and heard plenty of late-night jokes from the comedians. And on one level it is admittedly not just funny but downright pathetic to hear the leader of our nation obsessing over bathroom fixtures. It's an easy punchline, especially because Trump himself has shown he just doesn't understand the basics of pretty much anything he's talking about. Flushing a toilet ten times? Opening a dishwasher while it is running? He obviously has never operated a dishwasher in his life, and it shows. To say nothing of what he's doing to his toilets, but let's ignore that one for decency's sake. So hearing him opine about the troubles of housewives and househusbands is certainly grist for the comedy mill. But all of this focus on the silliness of Trump's delivery misses the point.

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While reading everyone else's take on last night's debate, I came across an interesting idea. Actually, two of them, but they're closely related, both being suggestions for how the debate format might be changed from what we saw last night to improve it for everyone. The first suggestion was an incremental one: since there are now fewer candidates, give each of them longer answer segments -- anywhere from two to five minutes. That makes a lot of sense now that there are only six of them on stage. But the reaction that really spurred my thinking came from Larry Sabato, who wrote in Politico the following suggestion:

Now that the D.N.C. has managed to reduce the field dramatically, can we please do away with this awful format? Instead, have the candidates sit at a roundtable with a moderator whose sole job is to introduce topics and equalize time. Let the candidates take it from there.

This goes further than the other suggestion, and it also makes a lot of sense. We're down to the frontrunners (or "near-frontrunners"), so let them speak! Get rid of the formalized podium setting and have them all sit around a table with just one moderator, who would prompt discussion and occasionally keep the peace. That would indeed allow for more substantive discussion of both the issues and the candidates' differences.

This got me thinking creatively about other ways to improve the debates, and I came up with two of my own suggestions, which can either be read as tongue-in-cheek or perfectly serious, depending on whether you choose to be amused or horrified by these ideas. Ready? Here's the first one:

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To use a sports metaphor, we're right at the end of the pre-season and about to start the actual games that count. Tonight was the last presidential debate between the Democratic candidates before Iowa votes in its caucuses. From now on, in each subsequent debate, we'll know not just who is up in the public opinion polling, but who has done better at the actual polls, where voters cast their ballots for the Democratic nomination.

Tonight's debate was the smallest yet, as only the top six candidates qualified. In order of their current poll standings, we had: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Tom Steyer, and Amy Klobuchar. I was a little surprised that Steyer ranked above Klobuchar (mostly because he almost didn't qualify for tonight), but he's recently seen a surge in state-level polling due to running ads in states the other candidates have been ignoring, so I suppose that's what put him above Klobuchar.

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As you may have heard, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are now locked in a political deathmatch, trading body blows and viciously attacking each other. Except for the fact that this isn't really true, of course. But the media loves confrontation, so when there isn't much to work with, they just hype the heck out of whatever thin reeds they have available.

Excuse me for being snarky, but this sort of thing just kind of brings it out in me. I have firm beliefs about primary races in general, and my biggest disappointment (which usually comes true every four years like clockwork) is when Democrats don't attack each other strongly enough. But that needs a qualification, because mere attacks for the sake of attacking aren't what I'm talking about.

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Well we made it to the end of the week without a major new war breaking out in the Middle East. At this point, that's about as good as it gets with Donald Trump in charge.

We've said it before and we're sure we'll have to say it again before the year's out, but President Trump is the personification of what Richard Nixon used to call the "Madman Theory" of foreign policy. Back then, it was a bluff -- if Nixon acted crazy enough, then perhaps the North Vietnamese would think he was so crazy he might just drop a nuclear bomb on them. This would tend to restrain them more than if they were sure he wouldn't.

Now, however, it is no bluff. Trump actually is a madman with no idea what he's getting into at any given time, on any given subject. This obviously weighed on the minds of the Iranians, who actually chose to take a measured approach to reacting, by lobbing some missiles at a few military bases in Iraq that housed American soldiers. Rather astonishingly, nobody was hurt or killed (they were all reportedly safe in bunkers for hours before the attacks happened), and even more astonishingly, Trump refused to retaliate further. Thus both countries backed away from the brink of all-out war. In this particular instance, the Madman Theory worked.

Next time, of course, we might not be so lucky. And nobody really knows if this is the end of the Iranian response to us assassinating their top military leader -- there could be much more covert or third-party attacks to come, either on the battlefields of the Middle East or much closer to home. So while we're all breathing a rather large sigh of relief right now, there may be another shoe to drop at some point further on.

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Today, I'd like to step back from a day-to-day analysis of Donald Trump's actions in order to look at a slightly bigger picture. Because at this point, it almost seems like we should all start calling him "Precedent Trump," since he is setting so many of them for future presidents to either use or abuse at will. Republicans who now slavishly insist upon supporting anything and everything Trump does -- no matter how outrageous, no matter how disruptive -- should be warned that future presidents (Democratic ones most definitely included) may one day point to current GOP behavior while insisting that they have exactly the same rights that Trump has claimed for himself. Because this is always the ultimate test of supporting any expansion of presidential powers: would you support a president of the other party doing such a thing? Again, Republicans would do well to consider this in the Trump era, because it's my guess that some of these precedents are going to come back to bite them later on. And it'll be pretty tough for them to argue against these precedents after so wholeheartedly supporting them now.

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The next Democratic presidential debate is going to almost have to focus intensely on questions of foreign policy. No matter what anyone had planned previously, the situation almost demands it now. So far, the debates have been remarkably light on foreign policy, which has allowed almost all the candidates to utter platitudes about the type of world they'd like to see as president, without delving too far into any specifics about what they'd do as president at all (except perhaps on minor differences between the candidates' policies). This is no longer good enough, as we all wait to see what happens next with Iran.

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At the start of the Democratic presidential primary season, some pundits latched onto what they considered a fun way to label how the race was shaping up -- the "killer Bs." You had [Joe] Biden, Beto [O'Rourke], [Cory] Booker, Bernie [Sanders], [Michael] Bennet, [Steve] Bullock, and even [Pete] Buttigieg. That's a lot of Bs, to be sure (a whole hive, maybe?), and it's not even the full list. It was also (as you can tell) a fairly silly way to frame the race, but whatever. The funny thing is, with less than a month to go before the first votes are cast, we've still got a swarm of Bs. Four of the top five candidates still qualify: Biden, Bernie, Buttigieg, and newcomer [Michael] Bloomberg. The only odd woman out is Elizabeth Warren, although it wouldn't surprise me if some pundits started trying to call her "Beth," just to fit her into this strained metaphor.

Silliness aside, however, I'd like to focus today on two candidates who haven't been getting the recognition they deserve from the punditocracy. Both have shown amazing consistency in the polls, even though neither has ever been what you could accurately call a "media darling." If anything, this should show the limited influence of the pundits in the real world of the voters. While much media attention was showered on other candidates (Beto O'Rourke, Kamala Harris, etc.), this roving spotlight has never bothered to shine on either Bernie or Biden for long -- and when it does, it is usually to cast negative aspersions on their chances of winning. But none of that seems to matter all that much, at least to the voters who are paying attention.

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