No House Republican has actually gone on record saying he or she voted against the impeachment of the president because of fear for themselves or their family, but that is indeed what is being reported by other House members they've shared such fears with. If true, this is a stunning indictment of their own moral failing. Because it means that the terrorists have successfully extorted votes in Congress with the threat of personal violence or death. Think about that concept for just one moment, because it is stunning. By refusing to vote a certain way out of fear, the terrorists have won. No, they didn't win the larger vote, but if even one vote switched out because of such rank intimidation, then something is very wrong indeed.

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That headline is meant to evoke an earlier phrase from American history which (even before a book and subsequent movie popularized the term) denoted one of the most existentially-dangerous times in not just our country's history, but in that of the entire world: the "thirteen days in October" of the Cuban Missile Crisis. President John F. Kennedy was informed that the Soviet Union had installed nuclear-tipped missiles a mere 80 miles from the United States, and he began a series of moves which could very well have ended up as the start of World War III. This is not an overstatement or exaggeration. If open hostilities had broken out during the height of the Cold War, it is almost certain (especially seeing what caused the crisis in the first place) that there would have been an exchange of nuclear weapons between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. For 13 days, from October 16 to 28, 1962, the world teetered on the edge of all-out nuclear war. Thankfully, sanity prevailed, and both sides agreed to face-saving measures which ended with the Soviets removing their missiles from Cuba. Kennedy gambled, he gambled big, and he won.

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Younger readers may be surprised to hear it, but the Republican Party used to stand foursquare for law and order. Indeed, it was a big part of their whole political brand. Republicans used to actually sanctimoniously lecture the rest of us on the righteousness of taking personal responsibility for our actions, and how there simply had to be severe consequences for bad actions. Society absolutely depended on it, they told us.

That was then. This is now.

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Republicans have always been much better at the spin game than Democrats. That's a generally-accepted fact. Which is why it is so important right now for everyone to reject, repudiate, and heap withering scorn upon the latest GOP talking point about last Wednesday's seditious insurrection at the United States Capitol, which tried to forcibly overthrow the will of the people as expressed in a presidential election.

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The sixth of January, 2021, has already gone down in American history as a day of infamy. This is, of course, the same phrase Franklin Roosevelt used to describe the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and it certainly seems appropriate right now.

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Our title today is (of course) the core belief of Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The entire book hinges on this concept, in fact. The end of the book comes after the totalitarian, personality-cult government reprograms Smith into not just repeating as the party line but actually believing that two plus two really equals five, not four. His belief in this falsehood is total at the end -- the party tells him it must be so, and so he believes it to be true.

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First of all, I hope everyone had a happy new year. In the political world, the new year isn't really going to start for another 16 days, of course.

President Donald Trump is, in a word, delusional. He keeps proving it, over and over again, beyond any shadow of a doubt. In the past, some have wondered whether Trump really believes some of the wilder things he says, or whether he's just a consummate showman, giving his intended audience exactly what they want (kind of like a right-wing radio personality who knows full well how much he's exaggerating and bloviating, but not caring because it brings in the ratings and the money). But the phone call just released of Trump begging and threatening Georgia's secretary of state should end such hair-splitting, because (if you either read the full transcript or listen to the whole call) it is patently obvious that this is no schtick for Trump -- it's truly what he believes. He has apparently surrounded himself with people even more fervent than he in their belief in all the falsehoods, and he has banished most of those around him who still have even a tenuous connection to

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Welcome back to the second part of our annual year-end awards column series! If you missed it, you can check out last week's installment too. But a warning -- for both this column and last week's -- they're long. Incredibly long. Monstrously long. It's been that kind of year, what can we say?

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What a year. Seriously, that was a tough one for us all, wasn't it?

Before we begin with the awards, I would just like to thank all the people -- both online and in person -- who helped out by giving me their suggestions and nominations for all of these awards. I have tried to credit individuals where appropriate, but I probably forgot to do so here and there too, so I apologize in advance.

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Once again, it's been a momentous week in American presidential history. Right as we were writing last week's column, the Supreme Court laughed President Donald Trump's last-ditch legal effort to overturn the will of the voters of multiple states right out of court. They were entirely correct in unanimously turning the case down, because it was so very laughable a concept to begin with. Texas was essentially arguing that it should be able to have a veto over any other state's election, because they didn't approve of that state's election process (in reality, what they really didn't approve of was who won those states). Coincidentally enough, they only complained about the states which, if their votes had been denied, would have handed the election to Trump -- even though several other states (including some red ones) had done exactly what Texas was complaining about in the four states they tried to sue. It was all nakedly transparent, and not based in any legal or constitutional foundation whatsoever. Which, again, is why it got unanimously laughed out of the highest court in the land.

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