It’s time to dole out our annual Golden Dukes, recognizing the biggest political disasters of the year. And what a year it has been.

We’re introducing a new feature for 2019: TPM members can vote for which of the nominees they’d like to see win.

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Satirizing president Trump isn’t easy, and it’s no secret that American comedians have struggled to do it. We have an article in Cafe today by five writers — four of whom grew up in countries that had recent brushes with authoritarianism — about what the U.S. can learn from comedy abroad. Other countries have dealt with leaders like Trump, and the circumstances that lead to his rise, before, and satirists there have had to find ways to make lemons into lemonade. This Cafe piece looks at how they did it.

Among the already surreal cast of characters unleashed on all our brains by the Ukraine scandal, there’s one particularly weird individual.

I used to meet with him in Kyiv.

A recently-released Justice Department inspector general review of the 2016 Trump-Russia probe did not convince a judge that Michael Flynn’s wild-eye allegations of prosecutorial misconduct were legitimate enough to push off his sentencing.

I flew home yesterday after a week away. The first news I saw was this stabbing attack on a Hanukah party at a Rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York. Police have arrested 37 year old Thomas Grafton, an African American man from Greenwood Lake, about twenty miles northwest of Monsey. Monsey hosts a large enclave of ultra-orthodox, or Hasidic, people — so people who are very visibly Jewish. According to this 2012 Times article, Monsey has the highest concentration of ultra-orthodox anywhere in the world outside of Brooklyn and Israel. Other than being an apparent hate crime, it’s not clear whether the attack was tied to a particular ideology, as seems to have been the case in the multiple fatality attack earlier this month in Jersey City, or a more individual hatred of Jews. But if Grafton was in Greenwood Lake and wanted to attack Jews Monsey would be the logical and closest place to go.

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While there is life there is hope. As for statistics, I will spare us any thoughts on the meaning of a Stage 4 pancreatic cancer diagnosis, which Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) announced this afternoon. For decades Lewis has been one of history’s immortals who is yet still walking among us. Elected to Congress in 1986, Lewis has now served almost 34 years as a member of the Georgia congressional delegation. But at 46, when he came to Congress, he had already accomplished enough for several lifetimes. Indeed, one could say the same by the time he turned 26.

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Notable that in the course of an otherwise valuable article the Times has promoted the Ukraine collusion conspiracy theories from discredited or false to “unfounded or overblown.”

One of the interesting side effects of a major scandal is all you learn about the details about how the government actually works, or is supposed to work. This is the case even if you’re broadly knowledgeable about the functioning of the federal bureaucracy. So for instance, one of the career officials in the pipeline for the Ukraine aide was a guy named Mark Sandy.

After the poisonous response I got to my book, Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origin of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, I vowed to stay out of discussions about Jews and Israel, but I keep breaking my resolution. Most recently it is over the coincidence of the anti-Semitic attacks in New Jersey and New York and New York Times’ columnist Bret Stephen’s column on Jews and anti-Semitism, in which he manages simultaneously to reinforce one of the historic tropes of anti-Semitism — that Jews are a superior race — and blame critics of Israel’s rightwing government for the outbreak of anti-Semitism.
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The latest news about the attack on a Rabbi’s home in Monsey, New York is that the alleged assailant, Grafton Thomas has, according to his family and lawyer, no known history of ties to hate groups and a long history of schizophrenia. If we take those claims at face value that puts the incident in a somewhat different light and suggests the possibility that the attack was the product of delusion or psychosis more than ideology or bias. But even if we assume all this, it’s probably wrong not to see the connection to the mass shooting in Jersey City early this month and the string of anti-Jewish attacks over the last week.