If this is how 2016 is starting out, it looks like we are all in for a very long year.
We start with the latest Trump lie.
According to "the Donald," the terrorist group Isis "was a creation of Barak Obama and Hilary Clinton."
As anyone who has even a half a brain knows, it was, in fact, the unnecessary War of Choice that the Bush Administration waged against Saddam Hussein and Iraq which eventually led to the creation of ISIS.
And no amount of historical rewriting by Trump and his political flunkies can change the fact that the Iraq war was the wholly- owned brain child not of Obama and Clinton, but neo-con Republicans Dick Cheney/Don Rumsfeld/ and Paul Wolfowitz, and was sold to America (and the world) based on the duel lies that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and that the US had found a direct terrorist link between and amongst Saddam Hussein/Al Qaeda/Abu Masab al-Zarqawi/ and Osama Bin Laden.
Both of those earlier lies were later definitively debunked, and in time, so will the latest whopper from Trump.
Moving on, the President finally decides to take tiny baby steps to close the gross loophole in the law which allows gun show vendors to sell a gun to anyone with $20 bucks in their pocket, and the Republican halleluiah chorus of presidential wannabe's wails that he's going to take guns away from law abiding Americans.
The question the public should be asking is how these fraudulent Cassandra's sleep at night.
Morphing back to Trump, when he says in his new abominable commercial that "he's going to build a wall, and Mexico will pay for it," exactly how is he going to force an independent nation to do so?
Hmmmm.
Speaking of "paying for it," how do we get the loon in Oregon who has illegally taken over a building you and I own as American citizens, to return the $530,000 Small Business Loan our government (i.e., you and I) gave him?
Talk about ungrateful.
File under: when will we ever learn.
After an extensive independent review of our "advanced interrogation techniques" (i.e. torture) proved to have been an unmitigated disaster at eliciting any useful information regarding the War on Terror, Senator Marco Rubio boldly joined Carli Fiorina in promising to reinstitute the failed practice, and at the horrific Gitmo Prison, of all places.
The political name for this brazen political pandering is called trying to "out tough" Trump.
Talking about tough and Trump, Jeb Bush started the race being outed by Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe as a former prep school bully.
Wonder how his former prep school victims feel seeing him being verbally tossed around from pillar to post by an even bigger bully.
The Lord, it seems, does indeed sometimes work in strange ways.
And speaking of bully's, North Korea is closer than ever to getting the bomb, and China can be none too happy with this development.
How's you like to be a fly on the wall in Beijing this week.
Most depressing holiday read this year: Killing a King, the story of how right wing religious fanatics carried out the assassination of the late great Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, putting in motion the ultimate election of their chosen candidate, the current Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu.
Reminds one of the game American historians try to play when they fanaticize what might have been if Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy or Bobby Kennedy had survived their assassins.
Finally, the great 1950's and 1960's satirist Tom Leher wrote a song he called, National Brotherhood Week, and the lyrics included the following:
Oh the Protestants hate the Catholics
And the Catholics hate the Protestants
And the Hindus hate the Moslems
And EVERYBODY hates the Jews.
As 2016 rolls out, if Leher wrote the same song today, the lyrics might be:
Oh the Sunnis hate the Shiites
And the Shiites hate the Sunnis
And Christians hate the Arabs
And EVERYBODY hates the Jews.
I mean, what a mess.
Like I wrote before, if this is how 2016 is starting out, it looks like we are all in for a very long year.