The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, it was obvious, wanted to be as far away from this stinker as he could get. He didn’t, it seemed, want to be soiled with whatever the Secretary of Defense (“secretary of war” in his own delusions of grandeur) had been rolling in.
It’s doubly tragic that just days before Easter there’s need to address the appalling fact that more and more countries in the world, and a dozen states, now have laws that allow the killing of their citizens and residents.
If you’ve been conscious at all the last 10 years or so, it’s been pretty tough in American politics. Outright assassinations, attempted assassinations, and the type of conflict that could turn violent at any time. Many people think they cannot have a conversation across the political aisle, so to speak, without harming or ending friendships, and even family relationships. We’ve all experienced the tension here; no one we know has been free of its effects.
So far, 2026 brings to mind Dorothy Parker’s legendary sigh, “What fresh hell is this?” It’s said to have been uttered when her doorbell rang, but it has other uses. Applied to our current year it makes Parker seem a prophet (though her politics and choices of friends tended to be terrible).
The political forces tell us we must choose. Either the “ICEstapo” executed a heroic nurse this weekend as a precursor of the new holocaust or ICE is the most elite law enforcement agency ever assembled and anyone who dies had it coming. Mercifully, more of us are refusing these absurdities, but there aren’t yet enough of us.
Alas, it has begun anew. It will get worse and there’s reason to believe that this time it will be more irritating than ever before.
Are you happy with 2026, now that the first month is almost half over? Me neither.
The last week has been like one of those bizarre times in which you notice that nothing makes any sense, so you must be having a dream. With that realization, you awaken.
I’ll get right to the point: Charlie Kirk was not a white supremacist. I will leave you to believe that he deserves to be called a colorful name for a donkey. I leave you free to believe he was a good man, who ultimately died for his Christian faith.
The NFL’s decision to make a “gender non-conforming” star who doesn’t sing in English the halftime performer is not important to world events. But it is a symptom of a big problem in how we deal with our big problems.