The Fortnightly Rant

This Is Your Government on Stupid

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Our paper goes to press this fortnight only a few hours before the U.S. House is scheduled to take a momentous vote: whether to permit the Treasury to pay such debts as the legislature has incurred already, or to refuse and plunge the world’s economy into a chaotic maelstrom. Vote “Yes” and the world goes on about its business. Vote “No” and you unleash chaos. For most people, this would seem to be a straightforward proposition and a fairly easy choice. We are dealing with Congress, though, so it’s all a little more complicated. For one thing, chaos can be quite entertaining. It is when …

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Government by ChatGOP

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Putting out a newspaper is, on the most basic, practical level, simply a matter of repeatedly doing a series of mundane chores. Rebecca West, one most respected writers of the 20th century, put it this way: “Journalism is the ability to meet the challenge of filling space.” Like some happy Sisyphus, tending to these repetitive, unending chores generally keeps us occupied, calm, and out of the gin mills. From time to time, though, we are nearly overwhelmed by the existential weight of our unique position: steering the most-senior news organization in the mightiest nation in history through a period of turbulence more extreme than any …

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Good Riddance, Tucker

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It had been so long since there had been any good news that it came as quite a shock: Fox News had fired Tucker Carlson. There is a limit to what one might reasonably expect from the firing of a single demagogue. The Former Guy was evicted from the Oval Office more than 27 months ago. Bill O’Reilly, Carlson’s own predecessor, has been gone for six years. Yet here we are, still on the brink of a dozen different catastrophes. But what the hell—it’s a start. Let us be grateful for what we’ve been given. Maybe, if we’re lucky, he’ll fade forever from public view. …

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The Dead Letter of the Law

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Three good things might be said about the fortnight which just ended: 1) It’s over; 2) We won’t have to go through it again; 3) It may help clarify the nature of the power structure in our much-vaunted, supposedly democratic republic. Two statements are sufficient to sum up how most people in this country stand in relation to our justice system: they are protected by it and unrestrained; or, they are restrained by it and unprotected. At the very apex of this justice system, doing his level best to assure that it stays the way it is—or becomes even more unjust—sits Clarence Thomas, on a …

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Doomsday Came Forty Years Ago

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A little over forty years ago—on January 18, 1983, to be exact—the U.S. of A. hit the skids. “Ridiculous,” you may say. “Nothing is that simple.” And you would be right, of course. Nothing ever is that simple. But, like Schrödinger’s famous feline—which is simultaneously dead and alive thanks to quantum mechanics—you would also be wrong. Though it is absurdly simplistic, our opening statement is also true. This vexing state of affairs is the consequence of a phenomenon we’ll call quantum politics. What is true for one person may be false to another. Facts are matters of opinion, and opinions are matters of fact. Routine, …

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Justice Deferred? Or Defunct?

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Watching Vladimir and Estragon on a nearly bare stage as they wait for Godot can, paradoxically, be a thrilling experience. Waiting for Merrick Garland to slap the cuffs on The Former Guy, on the other hand, is beginning to get tedious. Talk about pent-up demand. If Ticketmaster could sell seats to a DJT Perp Walk, its ensuing collapse would make last year’s Taylor Swift fiasco look like business as usual. And yet, we wait…and wait…. What—a seething nation might ask, boiling over in exasperation, had it not already been beaten down by a bitter succession of past disappointments—is the #@$&ing hold up? Being about as …

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