Opinion

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is potentially facing a campaign against Ivanka Trump in 2022 and appears to be desperately trying to appeal to the far-right supporters of President Donald Trump. In his latest move, Rubio went after National Institute of Health virologist Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Following an appearance by "State of the Union" host Jake Tapper on "CNN's "Reliable Sources" -- where he revealed that he had banned Kayleigh McEnany from his show for her shameless lying, the outgoing White House press secretary tweeted out the clip and complained it was a baseless personal attack."

She wrote, "This is a therapy session for a broken network, and

Vice President Mike Pence's 2020 was reviewed in a new video posted to Twitter by Showtime's "The Circus."

"The world stopped this October when a gigantic fly landed on Mike Pence's head and sat there for TWO F*CKING MINUTES. But that wasn't the only — or even the best — highlight of the Veep's year," the show noted on their The Recount account.

The philosopher George Santayana famously said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." One insight to draw from Santayana's oft-repeated aphorism is that the repetition of clichés is likely to have little effect, given the widespread tendency to ignore pithy advice and continue witlessly recycling, recreating and reliving history.

This article originally appeared at Salon.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky got into his own version of the holiday spirit by using wingnut media on Christmas Day to call for states to lose federal funding over public-health measures he doesn't approve of.

"You know, nobody ever intended that governors would be sort of czars or dictators in charge of the economy,'' Paul told The Epoch Times on Friday," according to nuthouse Newsmax.

Kelly Loeffler had a tumultuous first year in the Senate.

Now, the chief executive-turned-Republican lawmaker from Georgia is in the final days of a just-as-turbulent bid to keep her seat. It will culminate with a January 5 runoff election that will also determine whether her party maintains control of the upper congressional chamber.

On Saturday morning, outgoing President Donald Trump fired off a new round of conspiracy theories on Twitter attacking his own Justice Department and the Republican-controlled Supreme Court — but as of this writing, he has not put out a statement of any kind on the mysterious bombing that took place on Christmas Day in Nashville, Tennessee.

Commenters on social media noticed the disconnect — and were quick to criticize the president's priorities, noting other things he had tweeted about instead.

Americans were blasted for selfishness and whining in a new column by Rick Newman.

"Did you whine in 2020? Were masks too much for you? Did the coronavirus pandemic cause intolerable inconvenience? Congratulations, American Snowflake—you can't handle even modest adversity," Newman wrote at Yahoo! Finance.

Even people sympathetic to Donald Trump are fed up with his supporters' barbarous anti-Semitic conduct at his behest.

Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Patience Roggensack issued an extraordinary Christmas Day statement condemning threats received by colleagues who were part of a 4-3 majority rejecting the latest desperate lawsuit from Trump's Keystone Cops legal team. And Roggensack, a conservative, was one of the three justices outvoted in the case.

Last week I interviewed James Fallows, who'd spoken with many people over a period of a few months who'd been involved in or studied previous investigations of presidents, for a piece he wrote on how Joe Biden should investigate Donald Trump.

As he noted to me, "there's never been anything quite like this," even as many presidents have previously been investigated for wrong-doing. Trump is in a league of his own. And it will take a lot of work to investigate him.

You know things are bad for Donald Trump when his own online store bails on him.

If you visit www.trumpstore.com, the first images you'll find are scrolling advertisements at the top of the page for "The Holiday Gift Guide" and "The Holiday Entertaining Guide." No message of Christmas, much less the Lord. Apparently, his own commercial website has been taken captive in the War of Christmas.

'Tis the season to be folly
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la
Don(ald) we now our gay apparel,
Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la!...

It's party time in the nation's capital and the Christmas spirit reigns supreme, even if the Texas Republican Party does want to secede from the Union. I mean, who doesn't?

We're tentatively starting to emerge from the four year-long national nightmare of Donald Trump's presidency, but the reckoning of what the nation endured will take years to really understand. Trump was terrible in so many ways that it's hard to catalog them all: His sociopathic lack of regard for others. His towering narcissism. His utter ease with lying. His cruelty and sadism. The glee he took in cheating and stomping on anything good and decent. His misogyny and racism. His love of encouraging violence, only equaled by his personal cowardice.

But of all the repulsive character traits in a man so wholly lacking in any redeemable qualities, perhaps the most perplexing to his opponents was Trump's incredible stupidity. On one hand, it was maddening that a man so painfully dumb, a man who clearly could barely read — even on those rare occasions when he deigned to wear glasses — still had the low cunning necessary to take over the Republican Party and then the White House.