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America's longest war has just come home. Last week, Fox News’s All-American Christmas Tree, standing merrily outside the channel's headquarters in New York, was set on fire and destroyed. The arsonist was quickly arrested upon which he was subjected to the fearsome rigor of our justice system: released without bail as he cussed out reporters. We should pause here to note just how banal and predictable much of the late-night jesting about the blaze has been. It isn't that the likes of Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert shouldn't joke about the fire — crack all you like, and the Daily Show's "Pine Eleven" was pretty funny.

Democrats’ annus horribilis ends with a whimper 2021 is ending not with a bang but with a whimper on Capitol Hill. The summit of the two Joes, where the president had hoped he might strike a deal on his Build Back Better legislation with West Virginia senator Joe Manchin, reportedly went very badly. The chance of a multi-trillion-dollar Christmas present for Joe Biden has faded. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had tried to use the imminent expiration of the expanded child tax credit as leverage with which to force the bill’s passage by the end of the year. This was never likely to be an especially effective negotiating tactic, and sure enough, all the mood music suggests that the Democrats are a very long way from a deal.

The British High Court ruled on Friday that Julian Assange can be extradited from the UK to the US. The US thus won its appeal against a January UK court ruling that he could not be extradited due to concerns over his mental health. This latest twist in the endless Assange saga is just the culmination of the long and slow well-orchestrated campaign of character assassination that reached the lowest level imaginable with unverified rumors that Ecuadorians in their London embassy wanted to get rid of him because of his bad smell and dirty clothes.

Chris Wallace stunned the world of news media this weekend by announcing his resignation from Fox News and its staple show, Fox News Sunday. What he did next shocked some further and didn’t surprise others at all: he joined CNN+, a new streaming service coming next year from Jeff Zucker’s dramatic infotainment network. The move is hardly a bombshell given Wallace’s recent run-ins with the MAGA faithful, both on and off the network. It comes on the heels of a contentious election where Wallace lost control in the first presidential debate. Some see Wallace’s departure as an indictment of the direction in which Fox News is heading editorially.

The curious case of Mark Meadows What to make of the curious case of Mark Meadows? Donald Trump’s former chief of staff raised eyebrows — and whetted appetites — last month when he agreed to cooperate with the House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot. A week later, Meadows broke the agreement he had reached with House investigators, refused to cooperate any further and sued the committee to override a subpoena on his phone records. But Meadows seems to have cooperated for long enough to hand over nearly 10,000 pages of evidence to the committee. Some of the evidence in these pages, including messages sent to the president’s right hand man as the Capitol was under attack, was revealed yesterday ahead of a vote to hold Meadows in criminal contempt.

Some people say that the only certainties in life are death and taxes. Nonsense. There is also the certainty that in America circa 2021 anti-black racist events are hoaxes perpetrated by left-wing whites or, more often, by blacks themselves. Right now, the world is mesmerized by the case of Jussie Smollett. Until he faked the “racist” attack on himself back in 2019, no one you knew had heard of Smollett. Now he is famous, not for being an actor, but for being a race-baiting hate monger. The fake-news, enemy-of-the-people, Trump-hating media slobbered all over that story. So did the slimy Democratic politicians sup daily on fifty-seven varieties of “racism” because they think it buys votes.

Bad news for Build Back Better Most economists expected this morning’s inflation news to be bad. And it was. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, US consumer prices have soared by 6.8 percent over the past twelve months, the biggest spike since 1982. This is bad news for American households, bad news for the Biden administration and especially bad news for those Democratic lawmakers tasked with getting Build Back Better onto the books. Senate leader Chuck Schumer is, slowly but surely, ticking items off his December to do list. The National Defense Authorization Act has passed. The debt limit deadlock has been broken. But this legislative Santa and his big-spending elves have left the trickiest job 'til last.

This week, my home country of Canada implemented a slew of new travel restrictions in response to Omicron, the newest ideation of what will surely be endless Covid variants. Based on the reports, this variant is mild and nothing to panic about. But hey, why not panic, just to be safe? And by “safe,” I mean “sufficiently naive and fearful so as to ensure we continue to comply with ever-irrational regulations and restrictions, dutifully marching along dressed in useless and humiliating masks that restrict both breathing and communication, and maintaining religious devotion to vaccines that only work in that they reduce symptoms.” Some countries and states have responded to Covid humanely and rationally.

The new Omicron variant of Covid-19 is “mild” and no reason to panic, according to one of the South African doctors who discovered the new strain. Nonetheless, American politicians and public health officials are extending mask mandates, expanding vaccine mandates, and warning of the potential for another lockdown. Pfizer is taking their cues and stepping in to play hero. Despite only having a week or two of research available to them, the pharmaceutical giant insists that preliminary lab results show that three doses of their vaccine work well at neutralizing the Omicron variant. How convenient that the so-called “booster” shot Pfizer and President Joe Biden have been pushing for months is now found to be super effective against this new variant.

Cockburn has never been quite sure what to make of Republican House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Previous GOP skippers have been easy for this Washingtonian workhorse to understand: John Boehner was an old-school cigs-and-digs backroomer, who frequently used to stop by Cockburn's table at Shelly's and rant about Ted Cruz apropos of nothing. Paul Ryan was a libertarian wonk in both the best and worst senses of the term. But McCarthy? Other than accidentally blurting out the Republicans' entire anti-Hillary Benghazi strategy on a cable news bender several years back, he's never really stood out. Thankfully, though, McCarthy isn't totally devoid of Washington intrigue. Six years ago, rumors surfaced that he'd had an affair with fellow Republican rep Renee Ellmers of North Carolina.

Have vax mandates jumped the shark? Last night, the Senate dealt a major blow to Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for large employers, albeit a largely symbolic one. Fifty Republicans were joined by two Democrats, Joe Manchin and John Tester, in the vote to repeal the administration’s vaccine regulations, which have already encountered major legal problems in courts across the country. Given that the measure is not going to be picked up by the House, the Senate vote will not change the law. Not so long ago, vaccine mandates were assumed by the White House to be good policy and good politics. The fact that more and more judges agree that the administration’s regulations happen to be unconstitutional somewhat undercuts the first claim.