Falls Church and Northern Virginia's Premier Weekly Newspaper
Friday, June 24, 2022
A few days ago The New York Times published a report on the drying up of the Great Salt Lake, a story I’m ashamed to admit had flown under my personal radar. We’re not talking about a hypothetical event in the distant future: The lake has already lost two-thirds of its surface area, and ecological disasters — salinity rising to the point where wildlife dies off, occasional poisonous dust storms sweeping through a metropolitan area of 2.5 million people — seem imminent.
Following the fourth action-and truth-packed House January 6 Committee hearing Tuesday, as the depraved perfidy and moral toilet of former President Trump has now come out so plainly and systematically for all to see, the wisest summary insight about it all to date (No. 5 is today) has come from veteran journalist and MSNBC contributor Mike Barnicle. On two points.
WASHINGTON — Monsters are not what they used to be. I’m reading “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley for school, and the monster is magnificent.
Back in 1973, too few of us fully appreciated the momentous times we were living in, how massive the Watergate scandal was and the magnitude of its consequences. The idea of a U.S. president having to resign was simply unheard of, and even I, being more than your average U.S. history buff, was, relatively speaking, incapable of fully grasping the scale of the whole thing.
Here’s a surprising fact: At a time when Americans can’t agree on virtually anything, there’s been a consistent majority in favor of giving generous economic and military aid to Ukraine in its fight against Vladimir Putin’s effort to wipe it off the map. It’s doubly surprising when you consider that most Americans couldn’t find Ukraine on a map just a few months ago, as it’s a country with which we’ve never had a special relationship.
Starting with prime time tonight (Thursday, June 9), the nation will become informed of a monstrous and widespread conspiracy orchestrated out of the highest office in the land to subvert democracy in the U.S. and impose an unlawful government over the people of the U.S. and by extrapolation over the world. The criminal sedition directed by then President Trump to overturn the lawful election that defeated him in November 2020 resulted in the violent sacking of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, the date designated by the U.S. Constitution for the lawful transfer of power of one U.S. presidential administration to its successor.
It’s hard to say which of the Republican responses to the latest mass shooting was most reprehensible.
The reliably awful Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas attracted considerable attention by insisting that the answer is to put armed guards in schools, never mind that Uvalde’s school system has its own police force and officers seem to have been on the scene soon after the shooter arrived.
President Joe Biden invited me for lunch at the White House last Monday. But it was all off the record — so I can’t tell you anything he said.
As dark as things appear to be right now in terms of a whole array of situations on this tiny orb, it is vital to affirm the reality that humanity remains in its best situation ever to fix things. As an amazing species, we nonetheless come with no shortage of failures, of cruelties, of miscalculations.
At the core of the frenzied interest in Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is an intuition that I think is right: The major social media platforms are, in some hard-to-define way, essential to modern life.
