The Fortnightly Rant

It has now been one full month since The Troika took over the U.S. government. One might argue that we’re being sloppy here, using the phrase “the government” in this way; technically, Trump and Musk, and their mascaraed sidekick Vance, only have control over the Executive Branch. Allow us to retort.* Far from representing a reliable bulwark against tyranny, the Judicial branch of our government has, for decades now, taken extraordinary measures to welcome it. First it opened the great sluicegates channeling the wealth of billionaires into a vast reservoir of political power. Then it declared that whoever is put in place by that power, …

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As expected, it took a fortnight for the general tone of the second term of the Dunning-Kruger administration to reveal itself. This is not to say there have been no surprises. Who knew Donald Trump was a Maoist? “There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent.” We certainly did not expect to hear, on National Polite Radio, such a devastatingly accurate assessment of the President’s declaration, on Tuesday, of Nakba II. “I understood this as the meeting between a convicted felon, in the White House, and an indicted war criminal, in Benjamin Netanyahu,” Yousef Munayyer told Steve Inskeep. “So the expectation was, there …

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It would have been a perfectly suitable topic for debate in collegiate political science departments: should the planet’s most powerful nation elevate a felon whose mental, moral, and psychological fitness have long been questioned into its most powerful office? This is the good old U.S.A., though. Rather than pose this blatantly silly question as a theoretical exercise, we went by a principle familiar to many men tackling an unfamiliar project, the editor himself not excluded: “Let’s do something, even if it’s wrong.” There is another way to describe what we have just done, more vulgar but succinct: FAFO, i.e., “F___ Around and Find Out.” Having …

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Thirty some-odd years ago we lamented in these pages that surveying the political landscape was like being strapped in the cheap seats, being forced to watch the glacier races. Congress conducted its business through a process known as “regular order”—committees and subcomittees held hearings, budgets were debated and passed, and so forth. A democratic president played to a broad swath of voters, largely by promoting policies associated with republicans: cracking down on crime, lightening up on regulation, balancing the budget, and making trade deals. Few were paying attention to an obscure Georgia congressman with the name of a small reptile. A certain Australian newspaper heir’s …

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We had thought we would lead off this issue with the incoming administration nearly shutting down the federal government more than a month before it even takes office. How naïve and unimaginative of us. What’s a little domestic turmoil when you’re annexing Greenland, occupying Mexico, and re-taking the Panama Canal? Even that may just be the small stuff. At this time of year when the separation of church and state is observed with a wink and a nod at best, even we are on our knees, praying that the soon-to-be inauguree was too busy on December 16th to read the Wall Street Journal column headlined, …

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