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Welcome back once again to our year-end "McLaughlin Awards," named for the awards categories we lifted from the McLaughlin Report years ago. We've added a category here and there over time, but it's still the same basic list.
I'm veering away from the impeachment hearings today to write up my reactions to last night's fifth Democratic presidential debate. This morning's testimony was pretty powerful, and Adam Schiff's closing statement was one for the history books, but it'll all have to wait until tomorrow.
The Democratic field now has 18 people in it, as Wayne Messam formally dropped out but Michael Bloomberg formally took his place. Other than Bloomberg, the candidates who are still running but who didn't appear last night are: Deval Patrick, Michael Bennet, Steve Bullock, Julián Castro, John Delaney, Joe Sestak, and Marianne Williamson. The ones who did appear on last night's debate stage: Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Tulsi Gabbard, Andrew Yang, and Tom Steyer. Hopefully, by the next debate, that entire list will have shrunk a bit more, but these days you never know -- maybe it'll even get bigger!
We've reached the stage where Donald Trump and his henchmen are no longer even pretending to care about their lawlessness -- they're just doing it right out in the open for everyone to see, daring their fellow travellers in the Republican Senate to care. Right after Trump's White House chief of staff admitted that there was indeed a quid pro quo in Trump's call to the Ukraine, the White House announced that the upcoming G-7 summit would take place at Trump's own Florida resort. Both are, quite obviously, impeachable offenses. Right out there in the open, for all to see.
As I read the breaking news that Turkey has now agreed to a five-day ceasefire of its invasion into Syria, I couldn't help but think that this is yet another example of what might be called the Trump Doctrine. Unlike other presidential doctrines, however, this one works just as easily on domestic affairs as it does on foreign affairs. It's really nothing short of Trump's modus operandi, writ large.
The amusing thing about a circus clown car is, of course, that just when you think that itty-bitty car couldn't possibly vomit forth any more clowns... a few more climb out. That's what this week's news of the arrest of two "clients" of Rudy Giuliani (Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman) as they were attempting to flee the country certainly felt like.
We're in the midst of a brand-new breaking scandal -- one that's so new it hasn't even been assigned a "-gate" label yet. Ukraine-gate? Kiev-gate? MassiveTrumpCollusion-gate? As was entirely appropriate, Hillary Clinton had the pithiest tweet of the week: "The president asked a foreign power to help him win an election. Again."
This week, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Donald Trump, for some strange reason, now wants to try to buy Greenland again. The Washington Post later followed up on the story:
After all the hype, things weren't nearly as bad as they could have been in Washington D.C. for the nation's birthday. Donald Trump gave a speech in front of some stationary tanks, but he (mostly) rigorously kept to the script which had been written for him to parrot. Perhaps someone had explained that if he went off script and turned the event into a campaign rally, then his campaign would have had to foot the bill. The size of that bill is still a secret, although the National Park Service admitted it had used over $2 million for it that should have gone to regular park maintenance.
Along with millions of other Americans, I watched the first round of the first Democratic 2020 presidential debates last night. Although there were a few standout moments, the general impression I was left with was that any one of the people on that stage would do a much better job leading the country than the current occupant of the Oval Office. Of course, I could probably say the same thing about any random 10 people stopped on the street -- or even Michael Moore's ficus plant candidate -- so that's not really saying a whole lot. But it was indeed, as one late-night host pointed out later in the evening, sincerely refreshing to hear adults discuss the issues of the day in complete sentences, full paragraphs, and intelligent language without once resorting to playground bullying or other nasty taunts. In other words, it felt like a return to normalcy just to see them all up there.
Joe Biden drew a huge target on himself this week, with his comments on getting along with stone-cold racists in the United States Senate. Conservative commenter Ana Navarro perhaps best summed up Biden's error, criticizing him for "dragging up these dead racists instead of talking about the live racists."