MONDAY: The New York Times doesn't report it again!

MONDAY, JANUARY 12, 2026

The insult that hasn't quite barked: This morning, starting at 6:17, Joe and Mika reported the classic insulting remark.

It was the last comment recorded on the 47-second videotape recorded by Jonathan Ross. As we noted in Saturday's report, the 47-second videotape went public last Friday. Last Wednesday morning, someone present at the scene had made the remark a second or two after Renee Good was fatally shot.

Good's car was still rolling down the street when the comment was recorded. This morning, featuring one or two misstatements by Joe, here's what the Morning Joe co-hosts reported about the remark:

BRZEZINSKI (1/12/26): Then [Good] was called an "F-ing B" after he [Ross] shot her.

SCARBOROUGH: After he killed her, after he killed her, he’s [sic] then calling her a fucking bitch.

BRZEZINSKI: OK, Joe! Wow.

SCARBOROUGH: That’s what he said!

BRZEZINSKI: I know.

SCARBOROUGH: After he murdered—after he—

 I take that back—after he "killed" her. After he killed her, that’s what he called her.

BRZEZINSKI: That’s true.

So said Joe and Mika. You can see the videotape as part of this report by Mediaite.

Two quick corrections / clarifications:

We'd score Joe's initial use of the term "murdered" as a possible deliberate mistake. He knows that "murdered" is a legal term. No one has been charged with murder at this point, let alone convicted.

By standard journalistic norms, he should have said "killed" and left it at that. Presumably, that's why he took his original comment back.

Also this:

As far as we know, no one has established that it was actually Ross who uttered the classic two-pronged insult. It could have been Ross, of course. Or it could have been one of the other ICE officers who had been gathered around Good's car.

That said, the classic insult was quickly delivered, a second or two after Good was fatally shot. Unless you read the New York Times, in which case you've apparently never seen the classic insult reported.

The background goes like this:

At 3:36 this morning, the Times published this updated version of a detailed report:

What We Know About the Fatal ICE Shooting in Minneapolis

The updated report includes an account of the comments which can be heard on the 47-second videotape.  But once again, for whatever reason, the Times fails to mention the "fucking bitch" comment in this updated report. 

Using the Times search engine earlier today, we were able to find no sign that the Times has ever reported the existence of that classic soul-draining remark.

As we noted in Saturday's report, the Washington Post did report the comment in question as part of a detailed report. This morning, Joe and Mika also reported the remark, with two possible journalistic errors sprinkled in.

We brunched with a lifelong friend on Sunday morning. Like many D.C.-area denizens, he and his wife cancelled their subscription to the Washington Post during one of the Jeff Bezos brouhahas.

His main subscription now is the Times. On Sunday morning, two days after the 47-second tape was released, he was still unaware of the "fucking bitch" remark.

There may be a defendable reason for what the Times has chosen to do. Also, there may not be! All in all, we're frequently puzzled by the "sanitizing" behavior the New York Times seems to perform in matters of this type.

(In its news reporting, we'd say that the Post tends to be much tougher. As we noted on Saturday, the Post gave major prominence the 47-second tape all day Saturday. As of 7 o'clock that morning, the Times seemed to have virtually disappeared the 47-second videotape—seemed to have removed its initial report on the tape from view on its major websites.

Was the ugly two-pronged insult ever delivered that day at all? 

Times subscribers will say (and will think) one thing. Post subscribers, and Morning Joe viewers, are likely to think something different.

Some orgs have reported the comment. Other orgs have not. What's the reason for this divergence?

We don't have the slightest idea—and by prevailing rules of the game, no one will ever ask!

NOW TOO MUCH FOR US: We Americans, badly in need of a guide!

MONDAY, JANUARY 12, 2026

A road back out of all this: "Back out of all this now too much for us?"

We've cited the line several times before. It's the opening line of a puzzling poem by Robert Frost—a poem which starts like this:

Directive

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town...

Say what? Already, the poem may seem to be a bit hard—and, as the poem continues, its difficulty seems to grow:

(continuing directly from above)
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered....

In that passage, the poem cites "the road there"—some road which would lead you back to "a time made simple by loss of detail."  That road is a road you might find, and even proceed along, "if you'll let a guide direct you who only has at heart your getting lost."

At this point, matters get worse:

That road—this route of escape—"may seem as if it should have been a quarry!" Meanwhile, go ahead and try to decipher the reference those great monolithic knees!

Critics and scholars seem to agree—this is a difficult poem. We've cited it because of the contemporary relevance of that opening line—of that instant reference to "a time now too much for us." 

We Americans, Red and Blue alike, currently seem to be caught in such a time. We're caught in a time—in a cultural situation—which plainly seems to be "now too much for us."

Actually, to our eye and to our ear, it's substantially worse than that. To our eye and to our ear, the current situation seems to be vastly too much for us. 

Beyond that, the situation seems to be sliding downhill in rapid fashion—as, for example, with the fatal shooting of Renee Good last week, or as can be seen in these recent headlines from Mediaite:

Trump Bizarrely Posts That He’s the ‘Acting President of Venezuela’
For full report, click here

Trump Promises to ‘Do Something on Greenland’: ‘Whether They Like It Or Not’
For full report, click here

Trump Tells NY Times the Only Limit On His Power is His ‘Own Morality’
For full report, click here

Maggie Haberman Offers Grim Warning About Trump: ‘He Is Emboldened in a Way I Don’t Think We’ve Ever Seen Before’
For full report, click here

There's much, much more where those items came from. As a further marker of the times, we include this relatively innocuous report from the New York Times:

The Next Phase of Trump’s Renovations: A New ‘Upper West Wing’

It turns out there was another reason President Trump was memorably “taking a little walk” along the White House roof in August: “I was looking at doing office space.”

After tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build a lavish new ballroom, Mr. Trump is turning his sights to a more famous section of the White House. He wants to build a second level on top of the colonnade that connects the West Wing to the White House residence.

In an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday evening, Mr. Trump said that he was calling the project the “Upper West Wing.” He said that it was currently under design and that if he liked what he saw, he would move forward. He said that West Wing aides could have additional office space there, or that it could be “first ladies’ offices for future first ladies.”

Later, during a tour of the White House residence, he said he planned to tear up the brick walkways in Lafayette Park and replace them with granite.

[...]

During a nearly two-hour interview, Mr. Trump described not only his plans for a large ballroom that has more than doubled in size since it was first proposed, but also his ideas for more building projects. Those include the renovations of the West Wing and Lafayette Park, as well as Washington Dulles International Airport, and the construction of a triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery and a national garden of American heroes on the Potomac River.

Beyond this, he's placing his name in various entities, including the Kennedy Center. With respect to his plans for Greenland, this is the headline which appeared in the Times:

Trump Threatens to Take Greenland ‘the Hard Way’
For full report, click here

There's much, much more where those items came from! We see a dangerous pattern in this. That said, many, many people—many millions of people—disagree with that assessment.

"Back out of all this now too much for us?" In our view, we Americans are now caught in a time—in a cultural situation—which exceeds "our poor power to add," though not so much to detract. We've divided into rival tribes, neither of which seems to be pointing the way out of the current chaos.

We stress this significant point:

In our view, it isn't just Red America—the Red America of Trump and Vance and Noem oh my—who are way in over their heads, and way out over their skis, in the current situation. In our view, that's also true of our own Blue America—and we're willing to say that even after watching the jaw-dropping agitprop of Fox & Friends Weekend and The Big Weekend Show over the past two days.

At this site, we regard Red America as being almost completely lost at this point in time. (Many millions of people disagree with that assessment.)

We regard Red America as being almost completely lost—but our own Blue America is struggling rather badly too. We see no sign that our own Blue America, as currently constituted, is likely to serve as a guide to a road "back out of all this [mess]."

In the aftermath of Renee Good's death, we're recommending Frost's puzzling imagery for a reason we've tried to explain before. In our view, those of us in Blue America badly need to take a step outside the hourly turmoil of the time.

We need to take a major step back! We need to seek a better way to understand this time—and to understand our own Blue America's role in the endless turmoil.

Hoping to serve as a bit of a guide, we'll be trying to take a step back all this week. At this site, we think we Americans, such as we are, are currently living in a very dangerous time:

Friend, do you think, as we do, that the madness is all around us—and that this is a time of great danger? If so, how might we, as Blue Americans, help find a way back out of this mess?

Tomorrow: As heard on Fox & Friends Weekend

SATURDAY: Concerning a very bad Week That Was!

SATURDAY, JANUARY 10, 2026

Instructive new videotape: A deeply instructive "Week That Was" started on Wednesday morning.

Check that! So far, it's only been an instructive half week that was. It started with a fatal shooting, and then, as surely as night follows day, we were instantly saddled with this:

Truth Details

Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump

I have just viewed the clip of the event which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a horrible thing to watch. The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense...

PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP

We're sorry, Virginia, but no. In reality, that ICE officer—Jonathan Ross—did not get "run over" in the course of this incident. Whatever else may have happened that day, no one was viciously run over.

As an obvious matter of fact, no one got "run over" that day at all. Whatever different people might think about the various events of that morning, we can surely all agree on that! 

Or can we all agree on that? Has the power of Storyline become so great that we the people can't all agree, not even on that basic fact?

Storyline is a powerful god. Also, the current sitting president seems to be badly disordered. At this site, we're inclined to assume that he's (significantly) "mentally ill" (to use an outmoded term).

That would be our assumption. But as part of the culture in which we all live, the academics and journalists of Blue America have agreed that that obvious possibility must never be discussed by competent medical specialists. That's part of the culture we've chosen.

At any rate, the aftermath of the fatal shooting began with that instant misstatement. From that point on, it has largely been Storyline all the way down as this event is discussed. 

More specifically, we refer to the works of Tribal Storyline, the ubiquitous deity who currently serves as our greatest, most powerful god.

Yesterday, the latest video of this fatal shooting emerged—and it has turned out to be the most instructive such video yet. Headline included, the New York Times report about this new videotape starts exactly like this:

New Cellphone Video Shows ICE Agent’s Perspective Before Minneapolis Shooting

A cellphone video made public on Friday appears to show the moments leading up to the fatal shooting of a woman in Minneapolis from the perspective of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who killed her.

The footage, published by Alpha News, a conservative news outlet, appears to come from a cellphone held by the agent who fatally shot Renee Nicole Good on a snowy residential street on Wednesday morning. The Department of Homeland Security confirmed that the video was taken by the agent and posted the clip from Alpha News on X.

The 47-second video shows the agent getting out of a vehicle and approaching the S.U.V. that Ms. Good is driving, which is partly blocking the street. A black dog sits in the rear seat of Ms. Good’s Honda, its head sticking out of the window.

The agent walks around the hood of Ms. Good’s vehicle, and the car begins to move slowly in reverse. Ms. Good, wearing a knit cap and a plaid jacket over a sweatshirt, is heard saying, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad,” though it is not clear from the footage whom she is addressing or to what she might be responding. She continues talking, but her words become less clear as the agent moves toward the vehicle’s rear.

That's how the Times report starts. A bit mater, as it continues, it describes some conduct which strikes us as profoundly unfortunate:

A person standing near the car, believed to be Becca Good, Renee Good’s wife, begins talking when the agent reaches the rear of the vehicle and films the license plate. “That’s OK, we don’t change our plates every morning, just so you know,” that woman says. “It’ll be the same plate when you come talk to us later.”

That woman, wearing sunglasses and an orange whistle around her neck, is then shown on camera holding up a phone, apparently filming the agent.

“That’s fine,” the woman adds. “U.S. citizen. Former fucking veteran.”

The agent then walks toward the front of the vehicle, as the woman stands between him and Renee Good’s S.U.V.

“You want to come at us?” she asks. “I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy. Go ahead.”

To our eye and to our ear, Becca Good almost seems to be "taunting" the agent at that point. Seconds after that somewhat combative exchange, Renee Good has been fatally shot.

We regard that tape as highly instructive—as a painful marker of the shape our failing nation is in. We'll also now mention this:

For reasons which go unexplained, the final statement heard on that tape goes unmentioned by the Times. In the corresponding report by the Washington Post, that instructive final statement does get reported.

Headline included, that news report by the Washington Post starts and ends like this:

The ICE agent’s cellphone video: Five key moments

Cellphone video recorded by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent as he fatally shot a woman in Minneapolis surfaced online Friday, revealing new details about the hotly disputed incident from a perspective rarely seen.

The 47-second recording, published by the Minnesota website Alpha News, shows for the first time that Renee Nicole Good spoke to the ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, before he shot her. It reveals that, a split second before the gunfire, Good’s wife urged her to drive away from the scene.

[...]

5. An insult after the shooting

As the vehicle moves forward, Ross is standing near the front driver’s side corner of the vehicle. Someone yells, “Whoa.”

Ross’s camera pans skyward but does not fall to the ground.

One shot can be heard, then two more can be heard in rapid succession. Ross appears to refocus his camera on the SUV almost immediately, before it crashes nearby.

A male voice—it is not clear whose—can be heard uttering two expletives: “Fucking bitch.”

The full video, uninterrupted, can be seen here:

The Post reports what the Times omits. Even as the stricken Good's car rolls down the street, a male voice—possibly the voice of Ross, possibly not—utters those words:

"Fucking bitch."

We're inclined to regard those words as instructive. We don't know why the New York Times didn't report that statement.

Summation:

We know of no good reason why Renee Good should have been shot. That said:

In our view, the conduct of the Goods is instructive. So is the conduct of agent Ross. So is that final comment, which the New York Times chose to omit.

Let's say it again. We know of no good reason why Renee Good should have been shot. That said, we find that 47 seconds of videotape deeply instructive.

In our view, the great god Tribe is now in the saddle and is driving our "nation" down. The president made his required misstatement. Generally speaking, the great god known as Storyline has taken over from there.

For the record, no one got "run over" that day. Someone was fatally shot.

FRIDAY: Was Renee Good monitoring ICE that day?

FRIDAY, JANUARY 9, 2026

Did the New York Post get it right? What was actually happening in Minneapolis when Renee Good was shot and killed? More specifically, is it possible that Good was monitoring ICE activities in some way when the fatal shooting occurred?

Last evening on Anderson Cooper 360, law enforcement analyst John Miller suggested that the answer was yes, then rearranged one part of the timeline which those of us in Blue America had been receiving through our major news outlets.

According to Miller, CNN had learned that Good had dropped her child off at school at roughly 8 a.m. that morning. The shooting had occurred at 10:37—two and a half hours later.

Miller's report contradicted the earlier suggestion that Good had just finished dropping her child off when she stumbled upon the situation involving ICE. Through a series of slippery reports and claims, that impression had been widely circulated.

Was Good monitoring ICE? There's no reason why she shouldn't have been! That said, Blue orgs produced a lot of slippery content in the past few days—fuzzy content which suggested that Good had come upon the ICE activity in a terrible bit of bad luck.

We Blues were being fed those suggestions. At the same time, denizens of Red America were being exposed to reporting like this from the New York Post:

Renee Nicole Good was Minneapolis ‘ICE Watch’ ‘warrior’ who trained to resist feds before shooting

Renee Nicole Good, the mom who was killed by a federal agent after veering her car toward him, was an anti-ICE “warrior” and was part of a group of activists who worked to “document and resist” the federal immigration crackdown in Minnesota, The Post can reveal.

Good, who moved to the city last year, linked up with the anti-ICE activists through her 6-year-old son’s woke charter school, which boasts that it puts “social justice first” and prioritizes “involving kids in political and social activism,” multiple local sources said.

“She was a warrior. She died doing what was right,” a mother named Leesa, whose child attends the same school, told The Post at a growing vigil where Good was killed Wednesday.

“I know she was doing the right thing. I watched the video plenty of times but I also know in my heart the woman she was, she was doing everything right.”

Good and her wife, Rebecca, 40, were raising the boy together in the mostly working-class, activist-heavy neighborhood of south Minneapolis, which features tree-lined streets and a large number of homes with windows decked out in LGBTQ+ flags or signs depicting George Floyd.

And so on, at length, from there. As it continues, the report describes the progressive values of the charter school Good's child attends, including the opposition of the school community to current ICE activities.

The report was published on Thursday afternoon. How accurate is the report?

We'll guess the report was basically accurate, but we can't say with certainty. Our possible point might be this:

As we noted this morning, we saw three major figures on CNN and MS NOW last night saying or assuming that Good had been involved in some form of anti-ICE activism on the day she was fatally shot.

At this site, we'd been wondering about that possibility ever since we became aware of this fatal shooting on Wednesday afternoon. That said, we were struck by the way major cable players in Blue America were ignoring this possibility through the bulk of Wednesday and Thursday.

On Thursday morning, Morning Joe devoted its first 24 minutes to a discussion of this fatal shooting. Everyone completely avoided two fairly obvious question:

How did Good happen to be at that particular location? Also, why was her car parked in such an unusual way, seeming perhaps to block traffic?

In our view, those of us in Blue America need to stop playing these games. We played these "see nothing but blue sky" games all through Campaign 2024, and our insistence on playing such games helped send President Trump back to the White House.

There was absolutely no reason why Good shouldn't have been monitoring ICE, if that's what she was doing. If she was intentionally blocking traffic, that could be a different story, at least in terms of the law.

We don't know if the Post report was accurate, (We'll guess that it probably was.) The moral of the story may be this:

Sometimes, Red Americans receive more accurate reporting than we Blue Americans do! 

We Blues! We disappeared an array of significant topics all through the last presidential campaign.

We helped put Trump in the White House that way. History teaches that this sort of self-delusion can be a very hard habit to break.

Final point:

It's perfectly legal to monitor ICE! On a simple legal basis, obstruction of ICE activities might be something else.

(Warning! Your tribal brain will insist that you find something wrong with this content! It happens on the Fox News Channel all day and all night. We Blues are susceptible too.)

UNDISGUISED: Truly, an American Babel!

FRIDAY, JANUARY 9, 2026

The president's excuse: Truly, we're all living is a wholly undisguised Babel. Let's recall the basics of the ancient, instructive tale:

Tower of Babel

The Tower of Babel is an origin myth and parable in the Book of Genesis (chapter 11) meant to explain the existence of different languages and cultures.

According to the story, a united human race speaking a single language migrates to Shinar (Lower Mesopotamia), where they agree to build a great city with a tower that would reach the sky. Yahweh, observing these efforts and remarking on humanity's power in unity, confounds their speech so that they can no longer understand each other and scatters them around the world, leaving the city unfinished.

And so on from there. At any rate, we Americans are now living in a modern Babel, with competing storylines taking the place of the original profusion of tongues.

One set of those storylines originates with President Trump. As we will recall below, he at least has an excuse for the bewildering stories and the ludicrous claims on which he crazily insists.

The rest of us may not be so lucky—and that even includes us Blues! Let's run through a few basic parts of the Babel we Americans have chosen.

Footprints in the snow:

Yesterday afternoon, Director Noem was in New York City, where she held a press conference. As you can see by playing this short video clip, she was still stuck in the snow as he tried to describe Wednesday's fatal shooting.

("What happened is, our officers were out trying to get a car stuck out of the snow when they were surrounded and assaulted and blocked in by protestors...")

That's what the secretary inexplicably said yesterday in New York. Please don't make us transcribe the full exchange, but that's what the secretary inexplicably said yesterday in New York. Her capsule account of Wednesday's fatal shooting still involved a set of events which had no apparent connection to anything visible on videotape.

More than a full day later, the director was still describing the fatal shooting in a way which was hard to explain. That said, Secretary Noem has long been an active part of our current Babel.

Fuller disclosure! In this lengthy report from The Independent, a local resident named Caitlin Callenson is quoted making reference to some ICE officers trying to “zoom their car out of the snowbank," apparently at some location near the fatal shooting. That said, the account is still as clear as mud, and Callenson is quoted saying that the "ICE vehicle stuck in snow had been freed" by the time Good arrived on the scene.

(That report is sourced to this report from Minnesota Public Radio.)

More than a full day later, Noem was still stuck in the snow. That said, confusion and incoherence typify the discourse found within our modern Babel.

President Trump has an excuse. What explains the blanket of fog with which Noem is still obscuring Wednesday's key events?

Why was Renee Good present?

For the first time, we've started to see Blue American sources saying that Renee Good was, in fact, at the scene of the fatal shooting as an anti-ICE activist.

For the record, there's no reason why Good shouldn't have been functioning as an ant-ICE activist, if that's actually why she was present that day. But Blue American outlets were avoiding questions about her presence at the scene from mid-day Wednesday right through Thursday's Morning Joe and on into mid-day. 

Other outlets, The Independent included, were presenting factually misleading accounts which suggested that Good had only stumbled upon the scene of the fatal shooting in some sort of coincidence. This slippery avoidance was general over Blue America as yesterday wound on.

Again, there's nothing wrong with being an anti-ICE activist, if that's what Good actually was. That said, Blue orgs kept trying to disappear that possibility. As of last night and this morning, MS NOW seems to be letting people say that she was present on the scene as part of an anti-ICE activity. 

(We refer to Professor Tribe on last evening's The Last Word, and to Jeh Johnson on today's Morning Joe.)

Lessons possibly lost:

Was Renee Good an anti-ICE activist? There's no reason why she shouldn't have been! That said, we'll suggest that some basic lessons have possibly been lost within our own (self-impressed) Blue America, where—if you let us Blues tell the story—"all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the [adults] are all above average."

(That's drawn from Garrison Keillor's satirical portrait of Lake Wobegon, a fictional Minnesota hamlet.)

Question! Even among people as brilliant as we Blues are known to be, have some lessons been lost? We'll offer two possibilities:

Nonviolent resistance / civil disobedience:

As far as we know, it's perfectly legal to monitor, record and report the activities of ICE agents. ICE personnel don't like such activities, but as far as we know, such conduct is perfectly legal.

Other conduct isn't legal—for example, blocking roads with your vehicle to obstruct operations by ICE. Was Good involved in some such conduct during events on Wednesday morning? We don't yet know, but if she was, civil disobedience during the civil rights era involved a willingness to accept arrest for deliberate illegal conduct.

Elections have consequences:

As everyone knows and everyone says, it's also true that "elections have consequences." 

For better or worse, ICE is currently involved in operations which are perfectly legal, at least in their broader outline. We Blues don't approve of those operations, but when we managed to lose the last election, we managed to get a man elected who had openly campaigned on the goal of MASS DEPORTATION.

We Blues don't favor MASS DEPORTATION, and there's no reason why we have to. But as we stumbled and bumbled all during the Biden years—as we stumbled and bumbled in many ways in the years and decades before that—we managed to help create a world in which President Trump's priorities now define the federal landscape.

Like most tribal groups, we Blues tend to have a very hard time seeing the various ways in which our lack of perfect brilliance helped return President Trum to the White House. Our tribe is still locked in deep denial about the bungles of our past. We Blues will continue to stumble and fail until we create deeper insight.

President Trump is the most important architect of our modern American Babel. Kristi Noem id a key player too, as is the endlessly astonishing JD Vance.

That said, President Trump has an excuse for his endless astonishing conduct. We've cited that excuse many times. It looks exactly like this:

MARY L. TRUMP (pages 12-13): I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label only gets us so far.

[...]

A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe forms is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others...

The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.

Elsewhere, she calls them psychopathologies. It seems likely to us that President Trump is significantly "mentally ill," to use a (somewhat) outmoded term.

That would be his excuse for his astonishing behavior. Fellow citizens of Blue America, what the [frump] is ours?

President Trump nay be medically afflicted. He's the most significant part of our deeply destructive Babel.

That said, we Blues have been part of the madness too. Our bungles have been undisguised. They're invisible only to us!

That madness has been growing like Topsy this week. Noem and Vance and Miller oh my, but through our own relentless flawed judgment, we Blues have been part of this deeply dangerous societal meltdown too.

(Every empire falls apert. "The center cannot hold!")