Opinion

With 2017 drawing to a close, let's take a moment to look back at the year in Nazis. Who would have thought that after being raised on a steady diet of Indiana Jones movies and World War II comics, a generation of disaffected young American men would succumb to the allure of Nazism and white supremacy?

Shortly after President Trump took office, House Speaker Paul Ryan could feel just how close he was to finally achieving the goal he and his party colleagues had dreamed about for decades. With Republicans in uncontested power in Washington, he tweeted, they had a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enact real comprehensive tax reform and get our economy moving.” Many Trump supporters thought reform meant relief for the “forgotten Americans” he talked about on the campaign trail. But Republicans had other plans, intending to take a wrecking ball to the system of American government that has been in place since 1933 and replace it with one based in their own ideology. If the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” becomes law, they will have succeeded.

Some Bible-believing Christians play fast and loose with their sacred text. When it suits their purposes, they treat it like the literally perfect word of God. Then, when it suits their other purposes, they conveniently ignore the parts of the Bible that are—inconvenient.

Last week Senate Republicans passed a tax bill that hands massive tax breaks to corporations and the rich at the expense of low-income and middle-class Americans. Written behind closed doors with the help of 6,000 lobbyists and rammed through before anyone could read it, the bill offers Christmas presents for special interests, like eliminating a tax that private jet owners have fought the federal government over and tax breaks hedge-fund managers living in the Virgin Islands. And it sets the stage for a sweeping attack on the New Deal and Great Society reforms of the past century that built America’s middle class.

Now that Al Franken has resigned, it is fair to note that while this was the right to thing to — and not just so Democrats could claim the moral high ground — the loss of Franken, a good and important senator, is not without cost.

Remember back when 2016 began and the world held so much promise and then a bunch of people in the Midwest got mad at Hillary Clinton because she didn't visit their state fair, eat a corn dog and admire their butter cow so they decided to toss a match in the septic tank by voting for Donald Trump to "shake things up"?

Even if we can ignore that the runner-up was a proud misogynist accused of sexually harassing at least 20 women, TIME Magazine’s 2017 “Person of the Year” has got some problems.

It isn’t easy watching the country you love fall down a black hole from which it is not likely to emerge, but that is precisely what happened this past week with the Senate passage of the so-called “tax reform” bill. Bernie Sanders spoke for many when he said it will “go down in history as one of the worst, most unfair pieces of legislation ever passed.”

President Donald Trump's speech seemed thick and slurry during his speech about Jerusalem on Wednesday, causing some to question whether his dentures were slipping.

Is it Trump’s god-complex or God’s Trump-complex?  Either way Trump and Jehovah have an awful lot in common.

Amid all the craziness surrounding Roy Moore’s race for the US Senate and the seeming willingness of Alabama’s likely voters to send a man of such dubious merit and morality to Capitol Hill (where, admittedly, the bar already is pretty damned low), I keep thinking of a line from the Randy Newman song “Rednecks.”

Delusion, and lots of it, is pretty much a prerequisite for dictators. The New Yorker's David Remnick notes that Finnish autocrat Urho Kekkonen reportedly opened his public orations with the line, “If I die…” Ugandan dictator Idi Amin decreed his official title was "His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.” Saparmurat Niyazov, the insane strongman of Turkmenistan whose prolific lunacy demanded an astonishing number of gold statues be erected in his image, once conceded “there are too many portraits, pictures and monuments [of me],” and claimed that while he did not “find any pleasure” in the ubiquity of his visage, benevolently allowed for it because “the people demand it,” as Paul Theroux noted. Ferdinand Marcos, whose 20-year rule of the Philippines was marked by terror, corruption and brutality, repeated his public lies in his private journals, which biographer William C. Rempel has written were “riddled with falsehoods and self-serving fictions” and “blatant, bald-faced, and occasionally comical” untruths. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi told journalists that there were “no demonstrations at all” even as protesters crowded the streets of Tripoli and cities around the country calling for the end of his regime. “All my people love me,” Gaddafi insisted in a 2011 interview. “They would die to protect me.”