The Fortnightly Rant

Long-time readers may have noticed that at this newspaper, we tend to expect the worst.* Even so, count us among those who did not expect the President to threaten to hang Maggie Goodlander. This seems as good a time as any to raise a formal complaint: if our government is going to run as if it were a Monty Python sketch,† why is it not funnier? Sadly, current events force us to turn aside from John Cleese, Eric Idle, and the rest of that merry gang, and turn to a grimmer Englishman. If you really want to be frightened, imagine trying to navigate today’s world …

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Our newsroom, every time we publish, stands briefly poised between two fortnights, one just past, and one to come. Two weeks ago, the calendar caused that transition to occur on Halloween, the day—or night—when the mundane rubs up against the mystical. Some subtle synergy between those cycles apparently induced a state of irrational editorial exuberance. For a brief, joyous moment, certain members of the staff were convinced that the nation was about to break out of its moral, political, and economic crash dive, and begin to level off; the Republic would soon be spared, before it augers in. A real-world event sparked this extravagant hope: …

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“Where is my Roy Cohn?” bleated the President in 2018. How times have changed. Now he’s got the best Roy Cohn ever. She’s young and blonde, like a Hitchcock femme fatale, and she’s exacting ruthless retribution as his Attorney General. Still, it feels like something’s missing, though neither Trump nor Bondi seem to have noticed. She’s a General, right? So why is she out of uniform? Perhaps our disappointment stems from reading too many pulp magazines in our youth: stuff like the famous “Man’s Life,” of “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” fame, whose covers often featured lithe, long-legged dolls with whips, wearing a half-unbuttoned black Nazi …

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Well, here we are: a fortnight into freefall, and still no government in sight. In a manner of speaking, that is. Just try walking out of a bank with a bundle of somebody else’s Franklins. The truth is that—and this has always been the case—the rules are the rules, until they aren’t, and the rules apply to us all, until the time they don’t. If there’s any difference between today and a month ago, it’s this: things are more like they are now than they have ever been.* Israel suspended its genocide against Palestinians earlier this week. Not officially, of course, because according to Israel, …

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Wednesday morning, we woke up without a government. Cynics might ask, what made that any different from Tuesday? Or, from any of the many other times when our political class has shot the rest of us in our collective fiscal foot? Now, it is true that, if we define a functioning government as a body of officials who work together to carry out the will of the people, it’s been quite some time since we have had one. For the sake of argument, let’s call it fifteen years ago, when President Obama, succeeding where ten of his predecessors had failed, created a system of national …

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Thirteen days ago we actually thought that we already had the subject for our next Rant. Will we never learn? On the morning of September 6th, McDonald’s most famous customer, formerly known as The Donald, posted an AI-generated image of himself, dressed up as Lt. Col. “Bill” Kilgore, squatting most improbably for a man of his true girth. Behind him: red and yellow fire, Huey helicopters, and the skyline of Chicago. A hand-lettered legend read, “Chipocalypse Now.” The President of the United States threw in a little bonus for the literate among his followers: a text reading, “‘I love the smell of deportations in the …

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