The Fortnightly Rant

Will This Be The Week That Was?

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Interesting times. Two dozen Abrams Main Battle Tanks rolled onto the streets of the U.S. Capital on Tuesday night. Ominous as that might sound, they were presumably not carrying any live ammunition. The tanks were accompanied by about two dozen Stryker armored fighting vehicles. Combined, this badassery weighs about as much as the U.S. Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship USS Manchester. It was all hauled up from the Fort Formerly Known as Hood, down in Killeen, Texas, for a grand military parade on Saturday. The purpose of the parade is to celebrate the 250th Birthday of the U.S. Army. At least, so sayeth the Army. As …

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The Stealth Coronation of Donald J. Trump

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His detractors will tell you that our 47th president is, to select just a few aspects of his unique persona, greedy, ignorant, tasteless, foul-mouthed, incontinent, a felon, a stranger to the truth, and an enemy of the law. We will not attempt to refute any of these charges; whatever skills we may have, they do not include writing fiction. Half the country disapproves of him, according to the polls.* It’s not hard to see why. One hundred and thirty days of unrelenting chaos can get on anyone’s nerves. Yet the other half approves.† The question of why appears to be the mystery of the age. …

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Grand Theft America

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It’s a free country. If people want to believe they’ve been born again, who are we to judge? But this business of having a third of the country acting, day after day, like they were born yesterday, is really starting to take a toll. Common sense would seem to tell us that the base of support for the current regime is bound to collapse at some point. Paradoxically, the regime itself seems bent on hastening that process by showing that it’s not to be trusted. As the fortnight was getting under way, Don Junior—why does writing that name give us the feeling that we’re trapped …

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100 Down, 1,359 To Go

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The first 100 days of this thing we’re all experiencing came to an end on Tuesday. Let’s look on the bright side. At least we won’t have to go through them again. Well, so much for the good news. Unless the Giant Meteor comes along to bless us with an intervention, we have another 1,359 days of this—for the sake of propriety, let’s just call it ‘this’—to wade through. Some of our readers, battered by recent events, may not feel they’re up to grappling with what they have good reason to suspect will follow herein. For them we’ve prepared the following one-paragraph summary: Grover Norquist’s …

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The MAG-Apocalypse is Here

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It is hard to believe—but then, what isn’t these days? Just two weeks ago we were marveling in this space about petty little things like the loosey-goosey antics of our so-called national security community. Already we are nostalgic for those simpler, less stressful times. Now, the MAG-Apocalypse is here. It began on Liberation Day, April 2nd. “Liberation” may seem an odd word to use while introducing blanket restrictions on global trade, but the Vatican had dibs on “The Annunciation.” Speaking of infallibility, Wikipedia says the “announcement of the order marked the beginning of a global trade war and triggered a global stock market crash.” The …

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File Under “Can’t Make It Up”

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Quite a fortnight. Under present circumstances, we expect them all to fall somewhere between weird and bizarre on the Spectrum of Strange. Yet—again, due to conditions beyond the normal parameters of reality—nowadays, as events unfold, they don’t just exceed expectations, they nearly defy possibility. First we learned that the nation’s top national security officials didn’t just text top secret details of an attack on Yemen like a bunch of superannuated frat boys planning a kegger—we never expected any better of them—but they invited a member of the lugenpresse to follow along on a open source messaging system about as secure as the one in the …

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