'Tis the season

It was 10 days before Christmas and all through the house, some grownups were thinking about becoming a souse. The children were all crying in bed, visions of 37 pencils stuck in their head.

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Reading the news this morning makes it hard to feel gay and bright, especially since you would not be wrong to think the Trump regime considered banning some classic Christmas songs for being “woke.”

Let’s look at what has happened in just the last few days:

• Yet another school shooting in the United States, an event so common it amounted to dejå vu for two surviving Brown University students;

• An antisemitic massacre in Australia;

• The murder of liberal Hollywood director Rob Reiner and his wife Michelle Singer Reiner — by their son;

• A near-miss midair accident between a commercial jet liner and a military tanker that failed to turn on its transponder, part of an escalating push toward war with Venezuela; and

• The ongoing effort to distract from the mayhem and shift the spotlight away from Donald Trump on the Epstein files by targeting Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Obviously not all of the items are created equal with the umpteenth school shooting and the undeclared war on Venezuela topping Trump’s naughty list.

There have been 392 mass shootings in the United States in the 349 days (so far) of 2025. The Brown University incident isn’t even the most recent.

But it is apparently the most recent case of FBI Director Kash Patel, um, jumping the gun, and claiming authorities had a person of interest who turned out not to be the suspect.

The sad litany of gun-related violence rarely even cracks national newscast rundowns any more.

The slow but steady march to topple Venezuelan dictator Nicolås Maduro has received more attention, even though the massive buildup of military forces in the Caribbean has taken second fiddle to the Secretary of “War” Pete Hegseth’s illegal attacks on alleged narco-terrorists.

The JetBlue flight that avoided the tanker was departing from Curaçao, located about 40 miles off the Venezuelan coast. The island most assuredly was not part of the “no-fly zone” Trump declared over the mainland, a claim of dubious legal authority to begin with.

The civilian pilot who avoided catastrophe, summed it up nicely:

“They don’t have their transponder turned on, it’s outrageous,” the JetBlue pilot told an air traffic controller, after identifying the type of plane he had encountered. “We almost had a midair collision up here.”

We can only hope the apparent casual disregard for commercial air traffic will be as important an issue for Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as encouraging passengers to dress up before they fly.

All of this is taking place as the Leader of the Free World seems to be sinking deeper into a mental decline. He continues to claim — and then temporarily back off — that affordability is a “hoax.”

Just like the Epstein files “hoax”which includes just-released pictures of him surrounded by young women. No wonder he is trying to drag Hillary Clinton into his counter offensive.

Bad enough, but Trump used a speech designed to show he did understand the unhappiness over prices to launch into a nonsensical tirade about steel, pencils, dolls and Christmas:

And with our historic tariffs, steel production is roaring back. We’re building steel mills all over the country, and U.S. Steel is coming back at a level never thought possible before.

And I was up. And I was up here and with the workers and with Selena. Do you know Selena? Does everybody know? And with some other people.

We were up with some great people, and we spent the whole day, and they were determining whether or not they want to make which one of the deals. I went to the workers, I said, which one do you like? We picked the right one.

I as I said before, billions, billions of dollars they’re spending. And the steel workers are doing phenomenally better.

I think you’re gonna do better than you’ve ever done before. You were losing all of your steel. If we didn’t have tariffs, you would have no steel–. We wouldn’t have one steel mill anywhere in the United States.

And that would be really bad for, Scott, national security. We need the one thing you need, you need steel.

You know, you can give up certain products. You can give up pencils. That’s under the China policy. You know, every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two, you know. They don’t need that many.

But you always need, you always need steel.

You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice, but you don’t need 37 dolls.

So we’re doing things right, we’re running this country, right.

There appears to be some slow fraying around the edges of the MAGA true believers who hang on to every word of the Felon-in-Chief as gospel. Especially among those who voted for him on the basis of his promise to put America First.

But a potentially greater threat to their continued faith is the behavior of the billionaire class to whom Trump pays total loyalty:

“… [B]illionaires are still flooding politics with their money and still reaping the benefits, but they won’t stop yapping about it.

All the distractions, real and manufactured, are only slowing the inevitable.

Can’t wait for his Christmas message. Wanna bet it’s short on tidings of comfort and joy.