The Fortnightly Rant

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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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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In compliance with a bold and decisive order from Donald J. Trump, the 45th and 47th President of the United States of America, on Tuesday the National Archives made the greatest-ever release of formerly-classified documents regarding the horrible, really bad murder of one of his many, many less-great predecessors, specifically, John F. Kennedy. Obviously, like so many bold moves from this unprecedented President, this truly terrific release had an immediate, and really, really strong impact—as one might expect from a Chief Executive who single-handedly forged a whole New Frontier in declassification, despite constant opposition by a bunch of rotten, corrupt, biased bureaucrats and so-called judges. …

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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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