Politics

The summertime auguries bode badly for former president Donald Trump, who has made a business of harmlessly splashing his feet in the Rubicon. He has reportedly made up his mind about running for president again in 2024 but won't say whether he'll cross the river yet — so you'll just have to keep giving him your money to find out. Naturally, people are growing bored and frustrated with the spectacle. QAnon supporters are probably Trump's most fervent followers, and they received his recent rally in Wellington, Ohio, with a sigh of ennui. Apart from the standard artillery blasting traitorous RINOs, Trump railed against the rising tide of crime and ridiculed 'woke' generals. But the diehards snored.

The Olympic Games in Tokyo are doomed. Before the opening ceremony, before even the torch is lit, it’s not going to be OK. The games, I’m afraid, just aren’t woke enough. Apologies to Tokyo and Japan — and #StopAsianHate and so on. But for the international left, sport no longer matters unless it can be used to win on Twitter and advance the War for Progress. Professional football can no longer be about the game. It must be a staging ground for raising awareness for racism and police brutality. Classrooms can no longer be about math and reading. They must be a nursery for implanting and implementing critical race theory. Now, the Olympics must be about anthems, swimming caps — and weed.

Donald Rumsfeld died this week — and it’s just so easy, isn’t it? It’s so convenient to dance on the grave of the man who helped bring about the disastrous Iraq war. For Rumsfeld, the old dictum, de mortuis nihil nisi bonum, seems to have been discarded almost from the start. The obituaries, mostly in left-leaning publications like the Atlantic and the Daily Beast, have been downright vicious. Rumsfeld was George W. Bush’s first defense secretary who, alongside Dick Cheney, pushed hard for deposing Saddam Hussein after 9/11. Because of this, he’s been labeled a war criminal. He’s been held responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, both in Iraq and in Afghanistan where he refused to accept a Taliban surrender.

C’mon man! That was Joe Biden’s message to the country on the Friday before his holiday weekend. Joe Biden is just a dude. He’s the dude for this time and place. He just wants to get home, crack a cold one, spend some time with his cars, his dog (RIP Champ) and his grill. Why is this so hard to understand, America? Today the last of the US forces stationed at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan were making their final departure, as the Biden administration began the handover to a fragile alliance. But who really needs to answer questions from the press on that kind of monumental foreign policy decision when there is a giant cooler of 16-cent hotdogs waiting in the yard in Delaware?

John McCain's foul-mouthed blonde scion is leaving ABC's housewife daytime program, The View. The show's token conservative firebrand, Meghan McCain, announced Thursday she would depart as a co-host at the end of the season. Cable junkies will remember McCain for her combative commentary and entertaining rows with her post-menopause colleagues. 'I'm just going to rip the bandaid off,' McCain declared. 'I am here to tell all of you, my wonderful cohorts and viewers at home: this is going to be my last season here at The View.' After four years of service, McCain revealed it was not easy to leave the show and exchanged bland girl-power pleasantries with her coworkers.

What kind of man was Donald Rumsfeld? A successful one, by almost every measure. Ivy League scholar-athlete, captain of Princeton’s football and wrestling teams. Successful candidate for office, easily reelected to Congress twice before he left to join the Richard Nixon administration. There he proved a success at navigating both the federal bureaucracy and the internal politics of the scandal-consumed administration. He survived Nixon’s resignation and soon became Gerald Ford’s chief of staff — and after that, the youngest man ever to serve as secretary of defense, taking charge of a newly-minted all-volunteer force whose morale and discipline were in shambles after Vietnam.

Joe Biden has released a new statement on gun control and it’s about as concise and coherent as you would expect. Here’s an excerpt per a White House transcript: ‘Those who say the blood of lib- — “the blood of patriots,” you know, and all the stuff about how we’re going to have to move against the government. Well, the tree of liberty is not watered with the blood of patriots. What’s happened is that there have never been — if you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.’ There’s the silver-tongued devil we all know and love.

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced to over 22 years in prison by Judge Peter Cahill on Friday for the murder of George Floyd. Prosecutors had asked the imposing punishment be closer to 30 years. State guidelines recommend a 12-and-a-half-year sentence for a first-time offender. Cahill went beyond the guidelines, citing Chauvin’s ‘abuse of a position of trust and authority and also the particular cruelty’ to Floyd. A 22-year sentence tends to be associated with more grizzly offenders. Last year, 17-year-old Jered Ohsman was sentenced as an adult by a Hennepin County District Court — the same court that sentenced Chauvin — for killing 39-year-old Steven Markey during a botched robbery.