The thing you must understand about the modern Democratic party— in particular its impatient, intolerant progressive wing— is that the game is up without control of the Supreme Court.

To paraphrase Robert Duvall (Col. Kilgore) in Apocalypse Now, “I love the smell of whining in the morning. It smells like… government funding”.

Back in the day, the simple word debt could make someone a pariah. It could strip him or her of their self respect. Debt could leave you dependent on charity soup kitchens and consignment shops. I can remember my parents, children of the Depression, grow dark and silent when they learned one of my uncles was being buried by debt.

Unless you’ve been out of the universe since Y2K you’ve no doubt heard that a plague is sweeping the nation. Bullying has become a dread curse for the progressive left. There are online campaigns, in-school codes of conduct and television commercials decrying this bane on society. 

The moment was pure Justin Trudeau. Virtuous. Blithe. Impulsive. And more than a little messianic. 

Ah, the Oscars. Tinseltown never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Lost in Beatty’s Bungle-Rama (live TV!) was a more telling misstep. Host Jimmy Kimmel orchestrated a stunt where a bus-full of tourists was ushered into the auditorium to gawk at the perfect people. 

The poor old Swedes. There they were, minding their own progressive business. Then Donald Trump caught them in his cross-hairs, and the Tre Kronor reacted something like this (https://goo.gl/WqSCag)

They discovered what America discovered last year when Trump had the temerity to break the gentleman’s agreement to not talk about immigration. While average Americans were very concerned about the issues of illegal immigrants, the political class was bent on not listening to them about the issue. 

Here’s a satire Alec Baldwin won’t be doing this Saturday night on SNL. Keith “Overheated” Olbermann (https://goo.gl/3d2YVp) contends that the duly elected U.S. president, Donald Trump, is an autocrat and a tyrant of the stripe of Hitler who wants to accumulate absolute power over Americans. He’s demanding the gibbet for Trump over consorting with there godless ex-Commies in Russia. 

Consider the George W. Bush paradox. According to the attack strategy employed by Michael Moore and his resisting pals, POTUS 43 was either capable of the most intricate conspiracies the world has ever known or he was a blithering idiot. How could Bush be both evil genius and town fool? Depending on the day, marshmallow Marxists could cleverly employ one of the Bush piñatas to explain why they were losing the Congress, state legislatures and, finally, the presidency. 

Donald Trump must have some karma saved from another life. Alternatively, he has sold his soul to the man at the crossroads. In his run to the White House he was repeatedly rescued by deus ex machina. Engaged in a costly alley fight of his own making on immigration, the new president was handed a reprieve for his beleaguered executive-order rollout. 

There’s a liberal truism that goes, people can believe anything they want— so long as it’s the same thing. As the Women’s March On Washington amply demonstrated, the left’s free market in ideas and opinions is honored more in the breach than in the observance. 

As 2016 draws its final breaths, a few more notable celebrities did the same. In the past week it was Carrie Fisher (60) and George Michael (53) who joined the eternal choir that had earlier seen Leonard Cohen, David Bowie, Prince, Glenn Frey and Alan Ryckman, among others, shuffle off their mortal coil.

It’s good to have hope for the holidays. What’s harder to define is what is meant by hope. There is the theological hope in the trinity of faith, hope and charity— associated with salvation resulting from the Christian grace of God. There is the very human hope of “Hope I get a puppy for Christmas.” Then there’s the more ambiguous hope employed by soon-to-be-former First Lady Michelle Obama when she shoots the breeze with Oprah Winfrey.

God bless Joy Behar. If it weren’t for the febrile panelist on The View, one might think we’d made significant strides in the treatment of clinical paranoia. Guess not. Trump “needs to resign” before inauguration day, she fumed on Monday’s show. “Do we have to wait until the hammer and sickle is on the American flag before we stand up to this guy?” (It’s escaped Joy that the Russian flag has had no hammer and sickle since 1991.)

These are heady days for the pushback in Western society. Brexit slammed the window on the fingers of the tenured globalists trying to cede British sovereignty to the technocrats in Brussels. Italian voters followed suit with their rejection of their current leadership under Matteo Renzi. The reactionaries’ grand slam, however, was the election of Donald Trump. 

The most telling indictment of the death of Fidel Castro this past week came not from a network TV savant but from an anonymous partier in Miami’s Little Havana. Asked how Castro’s brutal regime should be portrayed by the media, he said, “You didn’t see anyone trying to launch a Toyota Prius flotilla to go from here to Havana, did you?”

As you might expect from an industry that whiffed on Donald Trump, the media is burying the lede on prime minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to fade out coal from energy production by the year 2030. And it’s not coal.

Remember what this is really about: In an ideal scenario, assuming that the western democracies hitch themselves to the climate change plough, we’re promised maybe one degree of temperature relief… by the end of the century. Let me repeat that: one degree. Probably less, very unlikely more. In 85 years.