The policies of defeated one-term presidents are not as easily reversed as their victorious successors, suffused with campaign rhetoric, sometimes suppose they will be. Even when, as now, the winning party has majorities in both houses of Congress.
President Donald Trump, it turns out, was being quite literal when he told us Jan. 6 would be "wild."
Islamic terror has been trending down for five years.
We are now almost one year from the dark days when the coronavirus first hit these shores. Why are the politicians' making the same policy mistakes today that they made nine months ago? The 300,000+ deaths are an act of nature, but the virus's death and despair have been compounded by acts of man -- i.e., foolish politicians.
A week from today, Joe Biden will still be on his inexorable course to become the 46th president of the United States.
Did America go crazy in 2020? I suspect observers years hence will think so because of the responses, of both elite officials and ordinary Americans, to the COVID-19 pandemic starting last February and to the shocking video from Minneapolis police officers released over Memorial Day weekend.
In its most recent exercise of liberal democracy, the state senate of Massachusetts voted 32-8 to override Gov. Charlie Baker's veto of what is called the Roe Act.
One day earlier, Monday, the state house had voted to override.
If there were ever a time to "question authority," as the old counterculture slogan of the 1960s urged, the authoritarian age of COVID-19 is that time. 2020 will go down in American history as the year that public health "experts" got everything wrong.
Was 2020 the worst year ever? The media keep saying that.
We did have the pandemic, a bitter election, unemployment, riots and a soaring national debt.
Nearly everyone has seen the classic movie "The Shawshank Redemption." Well, it turns out there is a real life "Red" Redding, the character played by Morgan Freeman. He is in prison in Alabama. He has been there for nearly 40 years. He was guilty of his crime: a murder he committed as a teenager in a drug operation. But so many people who have interacted with Rutledge in prison see the similarities in character with Red.
Who could have predicted how dreadful a year 2020 would be.
The raging argument on the left between progressives who argue for radical change and centrists who advocate for incrementalism is hardly new. Nearly a century ago, progressive titan and Wisconsin Gov. Robert La Follette and then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt were often at loggerheads over the same question.
Like Sherlock Holmes' dog that didn't bark in the night, so goes in politics: Uncharacteristic behavior can turn out to be crucially significant -- uncharacteristic behavior in politics being defined as one demographic group unexpectedly trending one way when most of the electorate trends the other.
Denouncing the $900 billion COVID-19 relief bill as a parsimonious "disgrace" and hinting at an Alamo-style finish on Jan. 6, when Congress votes to declare Joe Biden the next president, Donald Trump is not going to go quietly.
This country is not governed by a "Republican Party" and a "Democratic Party." It is governed by an establishment "uniparty" that betrays our citizens at every turn. Exhibit A: The joint annual ritual of fiscal vulgarity known as the omnibus spending bill.
Who should be on Santa's naughty and nice lists this Christmas?
*Naughty:
I'd give lumps of coal to:
Democrats and their liberal economic advisers obsess about income inequality. Will someone please tell them that no act in modern times has widened the gap between the rich and the poor more than the lockdowns going on right now?
If America were a company and not a country, we would have long ago dissolved the corporation, split the blanket, and gone our separate ways.
"In his first rally since losing the election last month, President Trump continued to spout conspiracy theories about voter fraud, falsely claiming that he had defeated President-elect Joe Biden." That was the lede of a news story in the Dec. 5 Washington Post.
Identity politics seems to be sticking around. Important election results seemed to refute the notion that Americans vote for their ethnic or racial identity. Hispanic voters trended significantly toward the supposedly anti-Hispanic Donald Trump, and Californians, while voting 63% for Joe Biden, rejected racial quotas and preferences in a referendum by an even larger margin than in the 1990s.
