Donald Trump ping-ponged his way from being TelePrompTer Trump to being The Real Unfiltered Trump (and then back again) this week. It started off with a rather amazing flip-flop, as Trump essentially admitted that everything he's ever said or thought about Afghanistan was wrong. Not unlike Arthur Fonzarelli, Trump's mouth couldn't actually form the words "I was wrong," but the admission was still there for all to see.

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Maybe we all just misheard him. Maybe it was his outer-borough accent. Maybe what candidate Donald Trump really said was:

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There's a reason why Afghanistan is known as the "graveyard of empires." Ask the Soviets... or Alexander the Great, for that matter. The United States of America's war in Afghanistan has gone on far longer than any other conflict we've ever fought in, and there has been no real end in sight for a long time now.

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Within days, the Iraqi city of Mosul will be declared completely liberated from the Islamic State. Within weeks (a few months, at most), the battle for Raqqa in Syria will also be over, driving the Islamic State from their biggest strongholds within their self-proclaimed caliphate. Much will be made of these two victories on American television, no doubt. Both victories were long-planned and hard-fought, so the celebrations will indeed be well-earned. Today it was reported that the celebrations in Mosul have already begun. But the fall of Mosul and Raqqa mean that the fight against the Islamic State will have truly entered its end stage, in both Iraq and Syria. What Americans should be asking during this period is what are we going to do after the Islamic State becomes truly stateless? A military and diplomatic strategy needs to be in place when this happens, and so far few in Washington seem to want to address it.

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That's a doozy of a subheading, but we felt it was completely appropriate this week. It is a direct quote, from conservative (and "Never Trump") commentator Ana Navarro. During an interview with Wolf Blitzer, Navarro responded to Trump's recent tweetstorm attacking Mika Brzezinski by calling on Republicans to say to Trump (either on television or personally) the following: "Listen, you crazy, lunatic, 70-year-old man-baby, stop it. You are now the president of United States, the commander-in-chief and you need to stop acting like a mean girl because we just won't take it." We've saved her entire rant for the talking points, because it is indeed worth reading in full; but because it was the most forceful pushback on Trump we heard all week, we thought it deserved headline status. Tell us what you really think, Ana!

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President Donald J. Trump turned 71 years old this week. He held a party and invited all his cabinet members, who were all allowed to sing his praises in a manner one reporter summed up as: "honestly this is like a scene from the Third World." The internet, of course, had a field day afterwards. But it's pretty easy to understand why Trump felt the need to hold a public ass-kissing event to celebrate. After all, pretty much all of his other birthday presents were stinkers.

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Being in the midst of history sometimes mean events are not seen in the "big picture" view that historians often later take, when looking back at the period. Case in point: what will America's ongoing war eventually be known as? To date, we've been at war since October 2001, or a mind-boggling period of 15 years. This war was initially called "The Global War On Terror" by the Bush administration, which lumped in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq with all the skirmishes in various other North African and Middle East countries. The Obama administration has dropped the term, but they've never really replaced it with anything else. But what I wonder this Memorial Day is what it will be called in the future. Right now, it'd be the "Fifteen Years' War" -- but few expect all conflicts will end by the time the next president is sworn in, so eventually that number will likely be higher.

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Tomorrow, in case you hadn't heard, will be Donald Trump's 100th day as president. Grading his performance has been a weeklong event in the media. Rather than our normal Friday format, what follows is our honest evaluation of Trump's first 100 days, which might be summed up as: "Coulda been better, coulda been a lot worse."

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There seems to be a higher-than-usual amount of attention on grading President Donald Trump's first 100 days in office. We're still more than a week away from the milestone, yet both the media and the White House already seem to be at fever pitch over how history will see Trump's first 100 days. Maybe it's just my own perception, but I don't seem to remember quite this level of intensity for the past few presidents, or at least not this early on the calendar.

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Today is when America celebrates Dr. Martin Luther King Junior's birthday, so I thought it would be an appropriate day to discuss a cultural change in America over the polite terminology used to identify what might be called characteristics of (take your pick) race, ethnicity, or cultural identity. I'll warn you from the start, however, that this is not the usual discussion most people would associate with today's holiday, but rather something which has left me scratching my head trying to figure out the reasoning behind. I will begin with one of the usual discussions people have today, and then branch off from there, in an attempt to relate it all in a loose fashion to Dr. King's holiday.

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