Opinion

We now live in a country where the Republican Party has fully given itself over to authoritarianism with the razor-thin confirmation of Todd “Trumpsimp” Blanche as Attorney General.

You can tell they’re all super proud of their vote, because they held it in the wee hours of Saturday morning. None of them were coerced in any way into voting, obvs, especially not “Dr.” Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who sounded completely defeated and not at all terrified during his performative announcement from the Senate floor.

When President Donald Trump expressed serious interest in obtaining Greenland, it wasn't actually the craziest idea he's come up with. Many U.S. presidents, some of them fairly good ones, have bandied about the same thought for the same reasons: strategic defense and mineral availability.

Importantly, no other president proposed simply taking it, as Trump essentially did — a pattern of behavior that goes well beyond Greenland, but we digress. He's back at it, in Greenland again, only this time things are set to get even more heated. Heated enough to be less funny, more scary.

The Third Way has functionally declared its intention to purge the Democratic Party of progressives. They will not, in my opinion, get us the things progressives are working for and most Americans and the large majority of Democrats want:

— A national healthcare program that covers everybody
— Free or affordable college
— A clean environment and relief from climate wilding
— Reasonable taxation for billionaires and corporations
— Affordable housing and groceries
— Widespread unionization and an increased minimum wage
— An end to the brutality of ICE and the frantic construction of concentration camps.

The United States Department of Defense, an institution that once defined global stability, is an absolute mess of epic proportions. And you can blame 49 GOP senators for this abomination.

The man in charge, Pete Hegseth, has absolutely no business holding the job. And none of this would have likely happened if not for those 49 senators, who were aided in the crime by an equally incapable vice president, whose tie-breaking vote gave Hegseth a title he did not earn.

The Republican Party as we’ve known it officially died this week as Acting Attorney General Todd “Trumpsimp” Blanche’s nomination essentially became inevitable. The personal lawyer of a convicted felon adjudicated rapist Epstein Bestie will almost certainly be the Attorney General of the United States of America.

Blanche will be remembered as the biggest traitor of them all, selling his spine to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin for a currently unknown reason. It’s clear all of the Republicans have a price, or else we’d either be enjoying President Joe Biden’s second term or President Kamala Harris’s first.

Of the innumerable Trump scandals in this or his previous administration, the mishandling or non-handling of the Epstein investigation manages to stand out which, given the scandal-a-day pace, all but puts higher functions into a comprehensive coma.

It would be fun to ask why the administration has gone to such great lengths to hide the matter and shown so little enthusiasm in prosecuting the co-conspirators were it not for Occam standing right there, aghast, shaving away: "Take a wild guess."

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. blocked me on Twitter this week. And I’m not sorry.

Supernatural is widely regarded as the longest-running horror show in television history, with 327 episodes over 15 seasons.

The entire Trump presidency, from his first term through now, has been a horror show, blowing past 327 episodes in his first year back in office. Each episode seemingly has its own iteration; however, the plots sometimes repeat themselves.

Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan, declared Thursday morning, seems to have broken the brains of Republicans and the chattering class.

Donald Trump’s pathetic bleats notwithstanding, people voting for progressive Democrats and “democratic socialists” aren’t voting for communism or even socialism; they’re trying to get America to the same sort of economy and form of government that works for everybody — a system somewhat like the one a majority of us had before Reaganism, and that most other developed countries enjoy right now. That includes:

Obviously, this is not our first warning; indeed, Donald Trump's response to the Michigan Democratic primary fits a pattern that goes back years and will certainly progress through the general election this Fall. But hearing him rail away in theory doesn't shake the spine like seeing it in practice. And for real, it appears as though Trump is putting in serious practice time in Michigan and elsewhere, ready for gameday this fall.

As has been noted here for months, voters are furious over the state of the nation, and that goes for both Left and Right, though most on the Right can't bring themselves to lay their anger at the feet of the man almost solely responsible for the inflation, wars, and healthcare cuts fertilizing that anger. The Reds are most certainly willing to oust incumbents, witness Cornyn, Massie, among others.

As a veteran, I will go to my grave believing that covering each other's six doesn't end at the grave.

I learned the military mantra, meaning to “protect each other from danger coming from behind,” when I enlisted in the Vietnam War as an armorer after two of my childhood friends were killed in action.

It seems like only yesterday that Pam Bondi was confirmed as Attorney General and every political type in Washington assured us she was qualified because, after all, she'd once held the job in Florida.

I’m cynical in the most extreme way when it comes to anything involving the Trump administration, so I had zero faith that Bondi would be a guardrail. Instead, she was a drop-off, teetering on the ledge alongside Donald Trump throughout her tenure before eventually being pushed off.