Welcome! This is an unapologetic, agenda-free zone. Just commentaries on current events that’ll move you to think, laugh, rage, and even cry.
As President Trump boasted of his administration’s accomplishments at a campaign rally Monday in Johnson City, Tenn., he also touted something he hasn’t done: replace Andrew Jackson’s portrait on the $20 bill with a likeness of [Harriet]Tubman, the African-American icon who ran the Underground Railroad that helped Southern slaves escape to freedom in the North.… Read more.
Meghan McCain’s eulogy of her father evoked the kind of approving gasps not heard since the Earl of Spencer eulogized his sister, Princess Diana. She delivered a sustained assault on the petty politics of division and derision, which Senator McCain detested to his core but President Trump practices more and more. And she delivered it… Read more.
History is littered with public figures who betrayed the public trust. But no betrayal has been more shocking and disillusioning than Aung San Suu Kyi’s complicity in genocide against the Rohingya. I have vented my own shock and disillusionment in such commentaries as “Aung San Suu Kyi Becoming Democratic Mascot of Myanmar’s Military Dictatorship,” March… Read more.
Washington is abuzz this morning with speculation about Trump pardoning Cohen and Manafort. He has the absolute power to do so, of course. And he willfully laid the predicate for pardoning undeserving criminals like these when he pardoned defiantly racist Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona. Except that, far from protecting Trump from impeachment, doing so… Read more.
Michael Cohen, President Trump’s hapless lawyer and fixer, pleaded guilty this afternoon to eight criminal charges. Significantly, while allocuting to his crimes under oath, Cohen implicated Trump, sealing this president’s fate as an unindicted co-conspirator. Cohen … pleaded guilty on Tuesday to campaign finance and other charges. He made the extraordinary admission that he paid… Read more.
The few A-list advisers Trump appointed to his cabinet represented the one redeeming feature of his presidency at the outset. The prevailing wisdom was that the triumvirate of James Mattis at Defense, Rex Tillerson at State, and H.R. McMaster at National Security would provide the kind of steadiness for Trump’s White House that training wheels… Read more.
At a joint press conference today, President Trump doubled down on his belief in President Putin’s denial that Russia launched cyberattacks on the 2016 US presidential election. This, despite his own intelligence agencies, which includes the CIA, FBI, and NSA, saying Russia did, and the Mueller investigation indicting 12 Russian agents for orchestrating those cyberattacks.… Read more.
Alas, England, this is no breach. For the embarrassing truth is that this narcissistic Neanderthal thinks everything, including royal protocol, is all about him. Related commentaries: mooning NATO… Read more.
Iran called for calm on Sunday after protests in a southern city over water shortages turned violent overnight with reports of police shooting at demonstrators who attacked banks and public buildings. … A number of protests have broken out in Iran since the beginning of the year over water, a growing political concern due to… Read more.
If Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were alive today, he would be the first to bemoan that America remains so far from the Promised Land that inspired his famous dream. It speaks volumes in this respect that President-elect Trump began observations of this holiday last year with a racist rant on Twitter against MLK protégé John… Read more.
