Opinion

I’ve often said that the best way to trigger MAGA is to use its own tactics and words against it, because it’s an incredibly effective way to showcase how bad they are at doing everything, including their internet bullying.

They don’t like to be ridiculed or told they’re racist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic, etc. They don’t want to hear any truths about Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. They use projection and immature juvenile name-calling as a replacement for discussing policy, as Trump has no policies other than enriching himself. They ignore all of Trump’s failures, bankruptcies, affairs, and multiple crimes against the United States, all in the name of “owning the Libs.”

I had a great uncle who was notorious for sleeping sitting straight up in his chair. His eyes would glaze over as family conversations swirled around him. Inevitably, his eyes would shut, and whether it was a dream or the shrill sound of his wife’s laugh, his eyes would pop open.

He was always teased about his frequent chair napping, and he always, always denied he was sleeping. “Just resting my eyes,” he would insist. Then he’d “rest his eyes” again a few moments later.

So on Tuesday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche – a misnomer if ever there was one, as the man is “acting” nothing like an actual Attorney General – admitted defeat in declaring the nearly $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” (better known by sane adults as the “slush fund”) permanently dead. Deceased. Scrapped. Gone. Sayonara.

And then, two days later, like a zombie rising from the grave, Senate Republicans refused to bury it for good.

I started in radio news as a teenage reporter at WITL-AM/FM in Lansing, Michigan, then the number one station in the capital city. I began reporting from the Capitol and City Hall, and was writing and reading the morning newscasts within a year.

The station owner was a hardcore Goldwater Republican, our news director was a liberal but Libertarian-curious Democrat, and I was a long-haired anti-war hippie member of MSU's Students for a Democratic Society.

America seems to be failing, both at home and around the world. But why?

David French published a thoughtful op-ed in Monday’s New York Times titled The Fire of Stupidity Can’t Be Contained, identifying many of the symptoms of our national decline and wondering out loud why this is happening now.

When I was growing up in the pre-cable, pre-streaming '70s and '80s, there was this thing called “appointment television.” It meant a lot of people were watching the same show at the same time, because it was only on once. If you missed it, you’d have to wait for this thing called a “rerun” in the summer, when there was almost no original programming. Instead, the three networks, which were all we had besides a local channel here and there, just recycled all of the shows from their seasons, while everyone took the summer off, as if Hollywood were a school.

“Appointment television” in my house meant watching 60 Minutes every Sunday night on CBS. My mother would order Chinese food (Jewish, New Jersey, ‘nuff said), and my father would go pick it up, returning with a giant box stuffed with all of our Americanized favorites. It was the only meal of the week eaten in front of the TV as a family. We sat on the couch and ate off of small square side tables, each of which had a border of fake jewels, one of my earliest tactile memories.

I was a news junkie long before it was cool — was it ever cool? — or even common.

Growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I was probably the only kid on my block, maybe in the entire city and state, who planted himself in front of the television every night to watch Walter Cronkite on CBS News.

Can you feel it?

There’s something weird in the air, and I think I’m perfectly justified in tossing out this piece of unfounded conjecture based on sheer gut instinct: