SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2025
But also, what Lincoln once said: A treasured word was (almost) completely missing from this morning's Fox & Friends Weekend. That treasured word was this:
Communist Communist Communist Communist Communist Communist Communist!
In recent weeks, it happened again and again. Rachel would call Candidate Mamdani a Communist. Charlie would then go with this:
"A full-blown Communist!"
So it would go on Fox & Friends Weekend as Charlie would make the whole thing even dumber. On various Fox News Channel shows, the personalities would tell Fox viewers how many tens of millions of people had died, during the past century, under worldwide Communist rule.
Today, the friends were pushing a newer line right from the start of the program:
Yesterday's friendly session in the Oval Office was the latest masterpiece by the infallible President Trump.
During the New York City mayoral campaign, President Trump had also routinely denounced Candidate Mamdani as a Communist. But now the transformed prince of peace had showered Mamdani with praise.
(Our own reaction? Good!)
Suddenly, the magic word was missing from Fox & Friends. In this morning's first ninety minutes, it was mentioned only when Griff Jenkins brought on a guest at 6:25 a.m.:
JENKINS (11/22/25): New York Post columnist Karol Marcowicz, who fled Soviet Communism as a child, joining us now to react.
Eventually, the chyron said this as Marcowicz stated her views:
KAROL MARCOWICZ / FLED SOVIET COMMUNISM AS A CHILD
"We didn't come here to have Communism follow us," she eventually said, apparently referring to Mamdani's proposal to have free buses.
We're glad that Marcowicz and her family were able to leave the Soviet Union—and she's of course entitled to state her views. That said, we were surprised to see the "Communist" taunt disappear as three friends discussed yesterday's meeting during several chunks of the program's first ninety minutes.
Campos-Duffy seemed to have dropped her favorite word, but she continued to spill with praise for the masterful President Trump. As for Mayor-elect Mamdani, possibly not so much:
"We still don't know if he can run a lemonade stand," she said of him at one point.
That claim struck us as technically accurate. Also, if less colorfully, we ourselves don't know how the mayor-elect will end up performing in office.
Soon, though, the friends were advancing the standard bogus statistics about the way President Trump has supposedly brought inflation down during this term in office. We had to chuckle when Campos-Duffy eventually complained about the way liberals won't spend time with people who don't share their views, not even on Thanksgiving Day.
Frankly, we had to chuckle! When did these three friends ever bring a guest on their show who was going to disagree with their infallible claims? When one of the analysts asked that question, we could recall no such time!
The flooding of the zone now moves at the speed of light. Within a day, we moved from the president's furious response to a somewhat peculiar presentation by six congressional Democrats to yesterday's extremely friendly Oval Office session.
There is no way to keep up with this flow. We can say that because we've tried.
That said, also this: We don't think a modern nation can prosper under current pseudo-journalistic arrangements, in which MAGA supporters are aggressively scripted by personalities like these while our own news orgs in Blue America agree to avert their gaze.
Yesterday, we had occasion to discuss President Lincoln with a lifelong friend. We recalled Sandburg's poetical account of the president-elect's last meeting with his stepmother, Sally Bush Lincoln.
In Sandburg's account, she knew what her stepson, the president-elect, would be thinking as he was cheered in vast parades in New York City or in D.C. He'd still be thinking about the ways of life on her small farm in Coles County, Illinois, where he'd partially been raised.
That said, we also went back and reread the text shown below. Our friend was present, long ago, when we read that text for the first time, accompanied by a group of Baltimore City fifth graders on a field trip to Washington:
Lincoln's astounding second inaugural address is inscribed, opposite the text of the Gettysburg Address, on a wall inside the Lincoln Memorial. Reading this text for the first time, we instantly knew that Abraham Lincoln had plainly not been human.
This is the bulk of the text:
Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address
[...]
On the occasion corresponding to this four years ago all thoughts were anxiously directed to an impending civil war. All dreaded it, all sought to avert it. While the inaugural address was being delivered from this place, devoted altogether to saving the Union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war—seeking to dissolve the Union and divide effects by negotiation. Both parties deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let u
The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has His own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?
Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
For the full text, click here. When we first read that astonishing text, we were astounded to think that a human being had ever said any such thing in public here on this earth.
We did this too, the president said. We in the North are one of the parties "by whom the offense came."
(It's said that Lincoln added the line which starts with "It may seem strange" because he knew that many people in the victorious North wouldn't like his fuller assessment. We don't know if that's accurate.)
We did this too, that president said—and then he took things a great deal farther. In our own estimation, we Blues would do well to remember that astonishing judgment as we try to assess the devastating war of the worlds into which our two Americas, Red and Blue, have been so unhelpfully thrown, out in Coles County and everywhere else, over the past many years.
Monday: Greg Gutfeld RE President Trump, back then as compared to now. To read ahead, click here.
