What the hell happened in politics this week? Esquire's legendary blogger Charlie P. Pierce has answers |
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Tell the truth. When was the last time you thought seriously about the United Nations and this country's place in that body? I think the last time I thought seriously about the UN was when the late Colin Powell was there making his thoroughly mendacious case for invading Iraq. (Remember? Those mountains of bioweapons, those lagoons of poison, those huge billows of deadly gas, all those aluminum tubes! What a crock of beans that was.) On Monday, however, we got a sad reminder that the U.N. is still there and that the United States has decided to formalize what we've all known since 2015 or longer. |
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It looks like the Commonwealth (God save it!) in general, and Boston in particular, is about to get all up in the grill of Homeland Security bag of hot air Tom Homan. The city has declared quite clearly that it is not going to allow one of Homan's beloved ICE dragnets to run amok in the streets of Boston. |
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On Monday, when the United States lined up with, among others, Russia, Israel, Equatorial Guinea, and Burkina Faso in selling out Ukraine at the United Nations, you may have wondered why Elise Stefanik, whom El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago has nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to the UN, was AWOL and therefore not available to collect the 30 pieces of silver. The answer, of course, is that the Republican Party, root and branch, is run by bungling stumblebums. |
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The president decapitated the Joint Chiefs, firing chairman General C.Q. Brown Jr. and replacing him with retired Air Force lieutenant general Dan "Razin" Caine, probably because the president has a childish sweet tooth for people who flatter him and have really cool nicknames. Given the fact that Brown is Black, and also given that Trump has clear-cut nearly all the women in positions of high military command, much of the commentary on the firings has centered on making it part of the administration's racist and sexist fanaticism regarding DEI programs. Which admittedly makes a lot of sense, since Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth already has tagged Brown with being a DEI hire. |
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Right now, separation of powers is in an appalling place. The executive is run by a dotty old autocrat who is populating his administration with slavish devotees, a madman begetting more madmen, as Starbuck cries into the storm battering the Pequod. The legislature has rubber-stamped dreadful Cabinet employees. And the Supreme Court has abandoned its own precedents hand over fist. I have lived through the imperial presidency days, but this is something worse. Both the Congress and the court have lost the stomach to fight for their own constitutional prerogatives. |
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