The Fortnightly Rant

Jack Gets His Day in Kangaroo Court

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This has been, we regret to report, the most maddening decade in American history. Trust us, we have seen it all. Typically our hard times have given us something: independence, the end of chattel slavery, an improved standard of living, and so forth. All we have gotten over the past ten years, though, has been the constant degradation of… just about everything. The only exceptions seem to have been the laws of physics, but you can bet your bippy that otherwise unemployable asshats at some lavishly-funded think tank are conjuring up a scheme for doubling the speed of light and cutting gravity in half. This …

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What Have We Learned?

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Exactly one week ago the big media outfits went through the mandatory ritual of marking the 25th anniversary of… That Day. Being what they are, they could hardly have done otherwise. Their marching orders were to be solemn and respectful, to note how many people died in less than two hours—enough to constitute a modest New Hampshire town—and remember all the people who loved them, and whose lives have been forever changed. Not to have done any and all of this would have been unthinkable. The more daring of the news franchises, having temporarily appeased their audience’s apparently insatiable appetite for ritualized catharsis, may have …

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Ruining America as a Business

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Interesting: on Tuesday, “The Grey Lady” caught up with us. Ever since we snuck into Lord Kenneth of Fleet’s stable of newspapers and rode away on The Nation’s Oldest Newspaper,™ we’ve been sounding the same barbaric yawp. Our more recently established colleagues went on reporting as if governance was proceeding more or less along the lines laid out centuries earlier on parchment. In contrast, our assumption, from the start of our stewardship, has been that journalism, as it was being practiced, mostly served a prop to hold up the façade of a Potemkin reality. The opinion section of The New York Times for September 1st …

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Time to Jump-Start Congress

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Another fortnight has come and gone—and not just any fortnight. Continuing a trend that began in 2015—and mirroring, in the political realm, the ratcheting up of global temperatures and resultant climatic catastrophes—this has been the 290th consecutive fortnight to have been worse than the one before. Appropriately, this one kicked off under cover of darkness. In the early morning hours of Saturday, August 8th, the full Senate voted, in effect, to combine the offices of Attorney General of the United States of America with that of Mr. Fixit of the Trump Organization. So, your mother was right: nothing good happens after midnight. Nine years earlier, …

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Our Criminal Justice Department

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Tuesday, Stewart Rhodes and his Oath Keepers—who millions of Americans saw with their own eyes, on live television, attacking the U.S. Congress on January 6, 2021 intending to prevent the orderly transition of executive power—were handed a “Get Out of Jail Free” card by the Justice Department, currently being run by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Through sheer force of character, we presume, Judge Mehta declined to mention Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener in his opinion. Nevertheless, he made it clear that he would have preferred not to issue it. “Before turning to the government’s proffered justifications for dismissal, it is important to note the reasons …

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Time and Tide Wait for No Man

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Nine hundred years ago, Henry of Huntingdon wrote of King Canute, a Dane who had ruled England about a century before. Canute, in Henry’s telling, had his throne carried down to the seashore, where he then commanded the incoming tide to stop advancing before it reached him. Spoiler alert: the tide did not stop. Tides come and go, but that story has remained. So it goes with many stories that are open to interpretation. A fool might think that the story shows King Canute to be a wet-footed fool. That ancient monarch knew, though, where his powers ended. He was just trying to drive some …

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