If Donald Trump has the kryptonite powers of Superman that both his friends and enemies think he has (and who are we to say he doesn’t?), kryptonite power #1 is his ability to absorb limitless drama and energy from an attack and send it back at his attacker in bursts of invective from both mouth and thumbs.
Summer isn’t what it used to be. Almost nothing is. But with the dying of the happiest season we return refreshed to the demands of job, family and community. Labor Day has come and gone and Americans are stepping back into the harness of duty. The advent of autumn kicks off the midterm election season, and with that comes forecasts, if not actual answers to how the national mood will determine success for Republican and Democrat.
Clever marketing is as important to selling a political candidate as selling a laxative or a Lexus. Bill Clinton and the Democrats insisted a generation ago they wanted abortion to be "legal, safe and rare?"
Donald Trump has held any number of positions on just about everything — abortion, single-payer health care, even illegal immigration. Now governing as a rock-ribbed conservative, Mr. Trump took a circuitous path to his current ideological home.
No one asks to be born. Yet the dawning of self-realization brings the inescapable challenge to make the best of life. Many "kill it," figuratively speaking, surmounting the hurdles and making their time on earth a blessing to themselves and to their fellow men (and women, too, if it's really necessary to say it). Most people manage to live graciously and seal their achievements to the gratitude of family and friends.
Playing God, even online, is not as easy as it looks. Facebook, Twitter and the other technology firms in control of the social-media universe are learning that with nearly limitless power comes the responsibility to administer it fairly. So far social media has failed. Bias, mostly but not all left-leaning, has obstructed the free flow of dialogue. Unless the tech giants figure out how to remedy their tendency to mediate political discourse by leaning left, the bloom will fade from the unmatched flower of human connectivity, and bad things will follow.
Heroism on the battlefield is the ultimate tribute man can pay to those whom he loves, and above all to his country. But such heroism is not limited to the actual fields where sword flashes against sword.
Washington is a one-horse town, and that horse, a swayback nag, is politics. Politics is a year-round business and with the congressional midterms less than 2-1/2 months away it's high season for pundits.
Mollie Tibbetts, 20, a psychology student at the University of Iowa, went for a jog on July 18 and was never seen alive again. She was once a cross-country runner, a good athlete, and hope was fading but still alive when the first month passed and she was still missing. Then her body was recovered on Aug. 21, a life snuffed out before the life could begin in earnest. Miss Tibbetts' dreams of life and love vanished with her.
The wheels of justice known for grinding slowly and exceedingly fine, are grinding molasses and marshmallows. Paul Manafort's trial is in the books, moving from the front page to the truss ads. To be sure, the conviction of Donald Trump's one-time campaign manager was more than a nothing-burger. He faces the rest of his life in a striped suit. But neither was it "the trial of a century." In short order, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen skipped the courtroom drama and copped a plea. He's a clotheshorse with expensive tastes and he might look good in stripes, and not even have to pay for them. Robert Mueller, who was expected to tame tigers and lions, has only put the cat out again. Democratic media predictions notwithstanding, the sun came up again this morning and Donald Trump is still president, and Hillary Clinton is still in the kitchen, baking cookies and trying to get the wifely hang of preserving the summer's string beans, squash and peaches.
Nothing could so expose the mainstream media as an industry built on bashing Donald Trump like the rise of the star of Omarosa. She was born for trash media, particularly trash television. No one fuels a first-stage rocket like Donald Trump. To the fury of the media, no one can make a star shine brighter than the Donald, and every trashy scandal makes him stronger.
President Trump deserves considerable credit for putting the opioid addiction crisis on the front pages where it attracts needed public attention. Opioids, or heroin-based painkillers, are a devastating blight on millions of Americans, producing a sense of hopelessness and sapping the energy and industriousness of the nation just as we're on the wave of a major economic recovery.
Socialism, of all discarded economic systems, is sending shock waves across the political landscape in dark tones as Democratic candidates in the midterm congressional elections pitch their proposals for improving the nation's economy, which is already looking pretty good. Economics, the dismal science, seldom excites the pulse but everyone has an interest in what's in his wallet. More than banners and promises from "progressives" will be required to persuade voters that harsh government beats free enterprise.
The illegal immigrants, by whatever name or label they're called, keep on coming. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York scoffed that "America was never all that great." He took it back only after he was inundated by several days of outrage and by the thousands who arrive every day having argued with him with their sore feet.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was once chairman of the committee and might be again if the Republicans blow the midterms. Her driver would have been, not a fly on the wall, but a fly on the steering wheel.
