Charles Hurt

Rarely in modern politics have the battle lines been so clearly marked between two political camps.

Well, this is awkward.

Call it, as President Trump does, a “wall.” Lately, he’s been saying, “steel slats.”

The towering arrogance on display last week from the global interventionists in both parties in Washington over President Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. troops from the Syrian civil war was enough to choke a full-sized draft mule.

Back during the formation of the European Union in the 1990s, there was a joke going around among those who prefer to remember history — mainly hoping to avoid repeating it. The last time folks worked this hard to unify Europe, the joke went, things didn’t turn out so well.

It has been nothing short of miraculous in this new season of Advent to hear all the Hosannas and applause for our recently departed former President George H.W. Bush.

Political cartoonists from Virginia to California gorged themselves last week on caricatures of President Trump as a fat, orange-haired gobbler in need himself of a pardon. But the truth is the only turkey in Washington these days is Chuck Schumer, still the lowly Senate minority leader after the much-ballyhooed Great Blue Wave of 2018.

These people are looking for Nero. Just so long as he keeps playing the fiddle so nicely.

Blue wave? These damned meteorologists keep getting it wrong. Well, at least it is safe to come back out on the beach again.

Because President Trump is an Alt-Right, White-Supremacist, Nationalist Racist who wants to bring black slavery back in America, he dispatched a tweet proudly declaring record support among black voters.

In this shameful season of partisan lies, it is nearly impossible to run down every deceit before it lands on the lips of some lusty mob, where it becomes a rallying cry to chase decency, dissent and free speech from the public square.

These are lonely times. The whole world, it seems, is talking past each other, not listening. Whatever vestiges of civility were left after the 2016 election has vanished.

President Trump, it has been reported in all seriousness, is a hateful, racist conspiracy theorist hellbent on ridiculing the deaths of some 3,000 Puerto Ricans reportedly killed by the double hurricanes that blasted the island territory last year.

Just in time to remind America why voters elected Donald Trump president two years ago, ex-President Barack Obama emerged from political exile last week.

It sure was nice to turn on the “Sunday shows” and finally get away from all the politics of this weekend’s funerals.

She is an informed, law-abiding citizen, deemed honest and trustworthy by adversaries in court. She carries out her civic duties with devotion and integrity. She is worthy of self-governance.

Given the Democratic Party’s jubilant enthusiasm for abortion, widespread abhorrence of law enforcement officers, and general hatred of all human freedom, voters could be forgiven these days for thinking that maybe Democrats just don’t really like human beings all that much.

Since nobody else takes The Washington Post seriously anymore, the newspaper of record for The Swamp has had to pick up the slack and take itself even more seriously.

Let the pogrom begin!

You would think, at some point, these people would eventually get tired.

Well, that certainly was not The Art of the Deal. And that was not the tough guy from Queens we so enthusiastically elected.

In this era of mob rule, a fellow like Rep. Steve Cohen might want to keep a sharp eye out for crowds of people with buckets of tar and garbage bags full of white feathers. Back home in Tennessee, he might also want to keep an eye out for any crowds carrying a rail. As in “the thing on which they might run him out of town.”

Of course the whole point of replacing retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy is overturning Roe v. Wade. That and a thousand other egregious overreaches by the panel of unelected, robed autocrats.

“Beware the coming civil war!” Coming? Oh, it’s already upon us. And it has been raging for some time now.

Thousands of poor, innocent children streaming illegally across the border!

However bad you thought it was, it really is so much worse.

Call it “Sitting Bull in a china shop.”

No president from either party over the past three decades has earned the inheritance of Ronald Reagan on the world stage quite like President Trump has.

At the end of all the scandal and drama, all of the breathlessly reported lies and false accusations, at the end of all the money wasted on some zany kabuki swamp dance choreographed to the thrumming of giant bullfrogs and yipping of excited coyotes — at the end of all of this — it comes down to precisely what we said it was a year and a half ago.

RICHMOND — The last time Sen. John McCain lay dying, he was in a North Vietnamese prison cell having been brutally tortured.