While I realize a momentous event happened in Washington today, I am choosing to let President Trump's announcement he's withdrawing the United States from the Paris climate agreement sink in for a bit before commenting upon it. Instead, I'd like to offer up a personal farewell to Scott Pelley, since it was announced this week that CBS is demoting him from the anchor chair of their evening news broadcast. I, for one, will miss Pelley.

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So, comedienne Kathy Griffin's head appears to be on the chopping block. That's a metaphor, of course, and as of now it is even inaccurate, since CNN has already parted ways with Griffin (she co-hosted their New Year's Eve show with Anderson Cooper, one of the most bizarre television matchups since Al Franken and Arianna Huffington appeared "in bed" together, doing their version of election coverage in 1996). Since CNN's announcement, the proper metaphor becomes: "Kathy Griffin axed by CNN." Or, perhaps: "her head has already rolled." These aren't really political metaphors, they're instead business-related. Speaking of getting "axed" rather than getting fired is merely poetic hyperbole, and who among us hasn't ever used the "heads are going to roll" or "on the chopping block" line ourselves? Does this kind of conflation cross a moral or ethical line? Or is it merely what used to be called "gallows humor" -- attempting to make light of the worst of situations?

Having said all of that, I am not going to defend Griffin today. This is not really a column about free speech or artistic license. It could have been, but I prefer to leave commentary on artists and comedians to those who know what they're talking about. While an occasional consumer of both art and comedy, I am certainly no expert and thus don't have anything interesting to add to the conversation of comedic propriety surrounding Griffin's shocking photo with the (fake) bloody, severed head of Donald Trump. But I did want to begin with a reminder that while most of us have never posed for such a photo, the decapitation concept isn't completely out of bounds in polite society, otherwise you wouldn't even recognize what a metaphor such as "heads are going to roll" even means.

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These days, Congress rarely does much of anything without a deadline staring them in the face. The only substantive piece of legislation Congress has so far put on President Trump's desk (four months into his term) has been a continuing resolution to fund the government through the end of the fiscal year. Not exactly a spectacular record of achievement for the GOP to be proud of, but then that's pretty much par for the course for the Republican Congress these days. What will quite likely be the second major piece of legislation that gets passed, at this rate, will be raising the debt ceiling.

Of course, it wasn't supposed to be this way. In Paul Ryan's dream scenario, Republicans were supposed to line up several items on their wish list, crank them out, and put them on Trump's desk to sign. So far, that hasn't happened. The health care bill limped out of the House, but nothing else has yet been achieved. Even their revised schedule now looks rather dubious, as Senate action on health care and a grand overhaul of the tax code keep getting pushed further and further back. None of this Republican agenda really has a built-in deadline, however, so things can be endlessly punted with no real consequence (other than political fallout).

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Below is the Memorial Day column I wrote last year. Sadly, it doesn't need much updating. Change it to "Sixteen Years' War" and most of the rest is still just as valid today.

The only section (and the only bright spot) is the paragraphs on Iraq. One year later, the battle to liberate Mosul from the Islamic State is almost over, and the Iraqi forces (with American air support and other help) have retaken almost their entire country back from the Islamic State. All that remains is one stretch of highway heading to the Syrian border, the towns (and surrounding areas) of Tal Afar and Hawija, and a few desert towns south of Sinjar. That's a lot of progress, and the end is now in sight. That's something to be thankful for, at least.

In any case, here's hoping you and yours have a wonderful Memorial Day!

Originally published May 30, 2016

Being in the midst of history sometimes mean events are not seen in the "big picture" view that historians often later take, when looking back at the period. Case in point: what will America's ongoing war eventually be known as? To date, we've been at war since October 2001, or a mind-boggling period of 15 years. This war was initially called "The Global War On Terror" by the Bush administration, which lumped in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq with all the skirmishes in various other North African and Middle East countries. The Obama administration has dropped the term, but they've never really replaced it with anything else. But what I wonder this Memorial Day is what it will be called in the future. Right now, it'd be the "Fifteen Years' War" -- but few expect all conflicts will end by the time the next president is sworn in, so eventually that number will likely be higher.

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President Donald Trump went on a tour of foreign countries this week, and World War III did not erupt. So things could have been worse.

Trump bumbled his way across the Middle East and Europe, providing the media with plenty of amusing stories to write. Much of this centered on physicality, for unknown reasons. Consider some of the Trump news over the course of the week:

Trump bowed to Saudi king after criticizing Barack Obama for doing the same thing. His wife and daughter bared their heads in Saudi Arabia after Trump criticized Michelle Obama for doing the same thing. Trump awkwardly participated in a sword dance. Melania Trump not only refused to hold her husband's hand, she actually swatted it away when it was offered -- on more than one occasion. Trump shoved his way to the front of a photo-op in Europe. And someone finally defeated the "Trumpshake" -- the propensity Trump has to try to yank the arm off whomever he's shaking hands with. The new French president was warned in advance about this, and beat Trump at his own frat-boy game, though. By the end of the handshake, Trump was desperately trying to free his own hand. Turnabout is fair play, n'est-ce pas?

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As I write this, today's Montana special House election results have not started coming in yet. Which means some of what I have to say is may be outdated by the time you read it. Such are the risks of this sort of timing. But I did want to point it out up front, just in case anything I write causes belly laughs later on. Consider yourselves duly warned.

Today is the second of four special elections for the House of Representatives caused by Donald Trump naming House members to administration positions. The first was in Kansas, where the Democrat lost (but by a much closer margin than anyone expected). We've been through the first round of voting in another of these special elections, down in Georgia. More on that in a moment. The final race is in South Carolina, and is considered the longest longshot of the bunch for Democrats to pick up (all four of these were Republican-held seats). Today, Montanans go to the polls to elect their one at-large House member.

Before yesterday, the race was seen as close, but leaning Republican. Two rather colorful characters were in the running, Republican Greg Gianforte and Democrat Rob Quist. Gianforte had previously run (and lost) a governor's race, but both men are outsiders to the political world, having never held public office.

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The new Congressional Budget Office numbers are in for the House healthcare bill, and they're almost as breathtakingly bad as the first version's score. Instead of 24 million Americans losing health insurance in the next ten years, now "only" 23 million will lose health insurance. The number of people who will lose health insurance next year alone stayed the same, at 14 million. Medicaid funding will be cut by $834 billion, instead of $880 billion. This would save a paltry $12 billion a year, instead of the $15 billion a year the original bill would have saved. That's a lot of pain for not very much money saved. Which Democrats are going to be pointing out soon, in midterm ads.

This legislation had two major goals. The first was to provide a whopping tax cut for wealthy people. The second was for Republicans to be able to claim "we repealed Obamacare." Measured on those metrics, the bill is a success. Measured by any other metric, it is a complete disaster.

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To really be true to today's subject, I should have come up with a headline more along the lines of: "Donald Trump Takes America Back To 1890s!" That's a tad sensationalistic, but we do seem to be right in the middle of a good old-fashioned newspaper war. In the past month alone, I have lost count of the times that major scoops about the extent of the Trump administration's misdeeds have appeared in both the New York Times and the Washington Post. Even without counting them, the score seems pretty close to tied, although the Post may have a slight edge at the current moment.

I cannot say with any accuracy how many of the bombshell leaks the Post and the Times have offered up in the past few weeks are the result of dogged professional journalistic efforts, or just of reporters doing no more than sitting around waiting for the phone to ring, as yet another White House staffer voluntarily dials in to dish the dirt. All presidents strive to stop such leaks (see: Richard Nixon, "The Plumbers," for just one historic example), but Trump seems even more obsessed than most -- so far, with little to show for it. The trickle of leaks has become a raging flooded river, and to date not a single leaker has been caught by Trump. Nobody's been fired because they leaked, and the leaks just keep right on happening, at what seems to be an ever-increasing pace.

The Trump White House has now reached the point where we need a new superlative simile to describe it. After all, there are plenty of ways to finish "crazy as a..." or "drunk as a...", but I know of few metaphorical comparisons which adequately describe the concept of "leakiest." Leaky as a busted sieve? Leaky as an old garden hose? Leaky as your husband's plumbing repair? I did find one Rudyard Kipling citation -- "leaky as a lobster pot" -- but this may not be immediately understood beyond the shores of Maine. At this point in the Trump administration, though, we all seem to be in need of such a superlative "leakiest" simile.

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President Donald Trump has only just begun his first road trip outside the United States, and he's already "exhausted," according to one of his own advisors. This may or may not be true, since anything either Trump or any of his spokespeople say at this point has to be taken with a grain of salt -- especially considering the "exhausted" comment was given as an excuse for a Trump gaffe (more on that in a bit). But this week's calendar for Trump seems to have been constructed on the theme of: "Any Trump campaign promises left unbroken? Well, let's see how many we can break in a single week!"

Let's begin with Trump's reported exhaustion. Trump apparently tried to cut the length of his first trip in half, because nine days on the road was just too much to ask. On Day Two of his trip, he's already got an advisor explaining a gaffe away because of exhaustion. That doesn't exactly bode well for the rest of the trip, does it? Especially since he made so much political hay on the campaign trail over the issue of how manly he was -- as compared to "low energy" Jeb Bush and "no stamina" Hillary Clinton. This is all pretty amusing in hindsight, after Trump's Day Two exhaustion.

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We'd like to begin today by apologizing for not including whatever scandal broke while we were writing this column. It takes us hours to write these, and while we're typing we're not reading news headlines. So this weekly wrapup will doubtlessly not mention whatever scandal broke in the past few hours, and for this we apologize. We would direct you to the final talking point today to cover this lapse (from which we also borrowed our subtitle today, because Daniel Drezner's article is such a hilarious piece of satire).

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