The Fortnightly Rant

President Dwight D. Eisenhower is alleged to have said, “Things are more like they are now than they ever have been.” * That was probably true then. Sadly, it seems even more so now. This could lead one to conclude that our ancestors never knew how good they had it. That’s a risky line of thought, though. Not to suggest that these things are in any way equal, but back in Ike’s day, in certain parts of the country, drinking from the wrong water fountain could get a person killed, single women could not get a credit card, and sidewalks were minefields of dog waste. …

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It has been a tough fortnight for THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE WORLD. We say this not because we have any sympathy for the former reality television “personality” who now holds the fate of 8.2 billion people in his greedy little hands. No, just as anyone else would if they were so unfortunate as to find themselves in a confined space with a heavily-armed psychopath, we’re just trying to gauge our chances of survival. Since it has long been the privilege and the duty of the editor of a publication to offer perspective, we must say we are disappointed that, after 13.8 billion years, …

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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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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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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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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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