The Fortnightly Rant

What a weird time to be alive. It’s Friday, the 13th of December. Forget about how many days ’till Christmas—we’re counting down to TrumpMania 2025. Just 38 days to go under the old regime, and after that? Nobody knows, apparently anything goes. Despite our editorial policy on superstitions—i.e., just ignore them—it seems a little extra caution might be prudent. So, we’re not going to re-hash European history from ninety years ago. Neither will we try to predict what this incoming administration might get up to. Trying to make sense of a single event from this fortnight will be challenge enough. When a person is shot …

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Under the terms thrust upon us in 1789, when this newspaper was well into its thirty-third year of publication, the responsibility for keeping the federal government honest lies with a free and independent press. As the last remaining example of that species, we had best get cracking. The current state of affairs is, shall we say, somewhat less than optimal. In fact, as we scan the horizon, we are reminded of Hercules, tasked with removing thirty years of accumulated filth from the Augean stables, and given but a single day to do it. Fortunately we have fifty-two days to put the ship of state in …

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You may have to squint to see it, but there is some good news. The long, uncertain, and potentially violent struggle which we had anticipated, over who would next occupy the White House, has been abruptly cancelled. The good news pales, next to the bad. D.J. “Felonius” Trump, spared the trouble of finagling a return to the scene of the crime, will soon be ushered right back in with all of the usual pomp and ceremony. Grab your popcorn, people. Here comes “American Carnage, Part Duh.” The tagline: “Don’t bother trying to prepare. Nobody knows what’ll happen next—least of all him!” Lest we forget, let …

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It seems odd. Prior to July 21st, news organizations could not stop talking about the mental fitness and acuity of the candidates in the 2024 presidential race. Now it seems like anything goes. This is a delicate issue, so we’d like to make one thing clear: we harbor no prejudice against those who speak gibberish. Professor Irwin Corey had no more devoted fan. The line must be drawn, though, at the entrance to the Oval Office. The problem here is that if the media were to start applying the standards they once used on Joe Biden to the Republican nominee, they would immediately be buried …

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Eighteen days to go: a fortnight plus four, making this our penultimate paper before we all plunge into the unknown. This brief interval of relative calm may give us our last chance for the foreseeable future to attain anything like coherence. So let’s step back from this endless succession of crazy trees and try to perceive the forest. We’ll begin by looking at the arc of the life of the writer Kevin Phillips. In his late 20’s, Phillips devised the Southern Strategy used by Richard Nixon to win the presidency in 1968: abandon moderate Republicans in the northeast, and court racist southerners. Watergate, and what …

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When, in the course of human events, it becomes possible for voters to place in high office a convicted criminal exhibiting florid symptoms of dementia, it behooves those who labor—and occasionally frolic—under the protections of the First Amendment, to scrutinize the person who will assume the office, should the principal become so incapacitated that even CNN and the New York Times no longer ignore his gibbering incoherence. As one might expect, given the person atop the ticket, by offering up Ohio’s junior Senator, Republicans are not sending their best. Their best have already self-deported. In fact, the previous occupant of the position to which JD …

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