It is impossible to get all the 2018 memories into one article, even this double-sized (literally) long one, so this 2018 retrospective limits to one paragraph per topic and amplifies not in the text but by embedding hyperlinks to some forty or so of my TAS readers’ favorite articles from the past year and a half — not to mention the past year’s most viral favorite: Everyone’s Smart Except Trump. Feel free to read in bits, a ’graph here and a ’graph there, over the extended New Year’s Weekend — or read more if, like me, you now boycott the NFL completely so have more time. And now on to memory lane:

Hillary Still Coping in Alternate Reality

Hillary (D-NY)… and suddenly that name will never be the same again. Answering Chris Wallace in a 2016 Presidential debate, Hillary (D-NY) excoriated Donald Trump when he left open whether he would accept uncritically the results of the Presidential election if he were to lose. Yet, after the election, Hillary challenged the vote counts, denounced the electoral college, mocked the stupidity of White women for letting their husbands tell them how to vote, endlessly blamed her loss on Russian collusion and election influencing, and she blamed James Comey for reopening the investigation into her 33,000 yoga and wedding-dress emails after the FBI learned that Hillary aide Huma Abedin had emailed secure and confidential materials to a home computer used simultaneously by her lecherous then-and-now-former husband Anthony Weiner (D-NY). Having only barely not lost in 2008 to Obama, and again having not lost to Trump, she has supporters urging her to try a third time in 2020 not to lose the Presidency again. Many of those urging her to run are loyal readers of these columns. None believe that her 33,000 deleted emails concerned yoga. Reality check: Hillary never attained the lotus position, and Hillary never attained the POTUS position.

Manafort and Ostriches

Paul Manafort bought an ostrich jacket for $15,000, and it does not even look much different from a Kmart sweater. This helps better understand why ostriches hide their heads. The President pardoned two turkeys before Thanksgiving, and he may be expected to pardon both an ostrich and Manafort but not Michael “Cash Cab” Cohen in the next year or two.

Omarosa

Someone named Omarosa ended up with a job as “Apprentice” in the White House. She hung around and did whatever she did, sort of like Seinfeld’s Cosmo Kramer working daily at a job where he never was hired. When they caught up with her, she proceeded secretly to tape-record the White House Chief of Staff, Gen. John Kelly, during a polite confidential termination meeting. To prove that she did not deserve to be fired and that she is a consummate professional, she then went on television and shared secret tapes for those who would listen to them. The predictable book followed.

Comey Leaks/Strzok-Page Sneaks/McCabe Creaks

Because he was found to be a low life, Andrew McCabe got fired summarily from the FBI just before his pension kicked in. Peter Strzok and Lisa Page are gone, too. (This is the only article published anywhere in Year 2018 America that will not gratuitously call them “lovers.”) James Comey, their peerless leader, leaked secret confidential FBI documents to the New York Times. CNN and the Left media spent the year attacking police and supporting “Black Lives Matter Except in Chicago and Baltimore,” and calling for the end of ICE and border enforcement. But the anti-law-enforcement, anti-military Left became pro-FBI and established a new religion built around Gen. James Mattis as Savior and Bernie Sanders (D-VT), Joe Biden (D-RI), and Beto O’Rourke (D-TX) as the Three Wise Men. It was questioned throughout 2018 how the FBI could have developed a culture of deceit among so many of its top brass when it was under the steady hand of Director Comey. At public appearances hawking his book, Comey leaked the answer.

Perjury Blasey Ford

#MeToo’s founders included cowards who knew what Harvey Weinstein had done to others, but they nevertheless remained silent for years and instead called him “god” while cheering for Roman Polanski, a child rapist. Ultimately, they found a remarkably wealthy perjurer to serve as their vocal fry. Christine Blasey Ford turned out to be a multi-millionaire, sharing with her husband several properties with a combined fair market value exceeding five million dollars. No small fry she. Plus another million in GoFundMe cash. When the Fords converted one of their properties for rental, they skirted zoning rules by adding an extra front door for entrance and exit. She perjured herself by testifying under oath that she had added the door to help her cope with claustrophobia. (Medical science treats claustrophobia by prescribing breaking walls to install more front doors. That also is why doctors urge kleptomaniacs to hold up banks.) Meanwhile, Justice Kavanaugh now has a lifetime bench seat, will age there like a fine wine, and will order beer when attending baseball games with friends. Because he likes beer.

A Very Serious New Scourge: Implanted False Memory

With Blasey Ford’s compelling false testimony at the Kavanaugh hearings reciting imaginary “repressed” memories, we now are on the cusp of a new scourge that will pock the next American decade if we do not find a cure, possibly by haling viciously manipulative psychotherapists to court on advanced tort theories. When people go to the rapists, they arrive in various states. It would seem that only a minority truly are severely afflicted, while many simply seek guidance, self-understanding, marriage insights, and coping mechanisms for work or family life. However, those sorely afflicted are susceptible to severe psychological manipulation. In some outlier situations, predatory therapists take advantage of their deeply vulnerable patients by engaging them sexually: the therapist divides the word and becomes the rapist. From the implications of the Kavanaugh hearings, it now is clear that, in cases where a therapist has his or her own agenda — for example, where an extreme feminist psychologist mistrusts all or many men, or the wealthy or established or successful, and has an intersectionalist or other agenda — such a psychologist has the power, akin to hypnosis, to implant into a sincere but deeply troubled and vulnerable patient false “memories” and to convince the person manipulatively that these implanted notions are “repressed” from decades earlier. Clearly, everything from the Cosby case to matters that have unfolded in the Catholic and other religious communities have revealed that repressed memories of abuse indeed can be horrifyingly real. However, the Kavanaugh hearings demonstrated likewise that they can be devastatingly fabricated, too, and the impact of such false accusations derived from implanted false memories can be life-ruining and character-assassinating to the morally best of people, primarily cynically targeted men, who do not deserve that and perhaps never will be able to erase the asterisk from their biographies.

Cheap Penny-Pinching Euro Prigs

Trump went to Europe and nicely told NATO leaders to their faces that they are the cheapest penny-pinching blood-suckers he ever met, and that it is time for them to pay lots more towards their own defense and security, even as they have imposed the most unfair trade restrictions and tariffs against America for 75 years since we saved their keisters in World War II. As a result, reflecting that they do not like him as much as Obama, they did not give him a Nobel Prize for brushing his teeth daily, washing his hands, and drinking his milk. Instead, they sat quietly, hands clasped, faces staring down at their desks, deprived of day’s recess, facing after-class detention, realizing that after falsely stereotyping Jews for a thousand years, it is the West Europeans who are the actual Shylocks and Fagins, cheap and stingy, financially dishonest as the day is long, constantly chiseling and dickering and failing to honor their promises to pay, sucking blood and treasure out of the America that sacrificed the blood of its boys for them in the past century’s two World Wars after they proved unwilling to prepare for their own defenses from enemy attack, hailing “peace in their time” with Hitler as they sold out the Czechs, and incapable of warding off enemy attack without our help.

Pocahontas: I’m an Indian, Too

In a seminole moment in the year’s politics, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) set out to prove definitively that she was worthy of being denominated as the Harvard faculty’s first woman of color. Her DNA blood tests came back, and it emerged that she has about as much Native American blood as Andrew Jackson and George Armstrong Custer. For a while, President Trump fretted that he no longer could call her “Pocahontas” because she was so Indian-free. No word yet on whether she will sioux the DNA analysts, but she came under a furious Cherokee attack. Sen. Speaking Bull may be waiting for 2020 for her last stand.

Blaming the Russians for Supposedly Doing to America Exactly What Obama and Kerry Actually Did to Israel

Obama (D-IL) and Kerry (D-MA) used United States taxpayers’ money to engage in secret spending and collusion with Leftist groups in Israel to try throwing the 2015 Israeli national elections towards a coalition of Leftist political parties to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu won resoundingly anyway. The very next year, Obama knowingly did not endeavor to stop Russian interference in the American elections until Donald Trump unexpectedly beat Hillary. No one ever has met or identified a single person who can or will say that his or her 2016 vote was based on something the Russians posted somewhere. Meanwhile, Democrats manipulated predatory “vote harvesting” to steal seven or more House seats in California, and they indeed engaged in fake news and Facebook manipulation to steal the Republican Senate seat in Alabama that awaits Jeff Sessions’s return in 2020 as he completes rectifying his error in having stumbled temporarily into the Peter Principle from which he now has recused himself.

Kamala

Kamala Harris (D-CA) outshone her senior partner, Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), this year of California Fires in Paradise and Senators from Purgatory. As Kamala gets even better known, the public will start learning more about how she rose to the top from the bottom. Kamala Harris slept her way into prominence by being the public escort and consort of a guy named Willie Brown, who was California Democrat Boss in his day. During the incredibly public affair, everyone knew of it and also knew that Brown still was very married. In the poetically immortal words of Blanche Brown, the ostensibly feckless wife: “Listen, she may have him at the moment, but come inauguration day and he’s up there on the platform being sworn in, I’ll be the b***h holding the Bible.” (Well, maybe Blanche had some feck.) Today Kamala Harris preaches morality. In California politics, when someone says “Kamala is lying,” the response is not: “About what?” Rather the response is: “With whom?” Kamala is fortunate that an undergraduate at Barnard already seems to have cornered the nickname “The Mattress Girl.”

Kamala! Kamala!

I know it sounds a bit bizarre

But in Kamala, Kamala

That’s how conditions are.

If they make her rise into a musical, at least one of the songs should be to the melody of mypillow.com.

Trump Recognizes Jerusalem Insteadipus Rex

President Trump recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Policy experts Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis predicted that this would isolate America from her allies, launch a major international conflagration, and that the whole Arab world would declare jihad against America and Israel. Then Trump next moved the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The same experts predicted that, well, now the international jihad really will start. Meanwhile, a year later, no jihad. No international nothing. Israel and Sunni Arab countries have grown as close as those fraught relationships can allow Wahhabi Islam to go. Instead, the biggest Saudi Arabia problem of 2018 is what happened to Khashoggi and whether that answer can lead the FBI finally to find Jimmy Hoffa. Along the way, Jewish leftists continued ignoring rabid anti-Semitism on the Left while tagging the most pro-Israel President in American history as an “anti-Semite” despite the President now enjoying 91% favorability polling numbers among Orthodox Jews.

Avenatti

We met Avenatti, the creepy porn lawyer. He sued Trump for defaming his client, a pole dancer whose reputation borders on the Cerasani standard of being “defamation proof.” How does one defame a pole dancer — by calling her “bi-polar”? By proving that she never even visited the North Pole or the South Pole? So he sued Trump for defamation, and the judge not only threw out the complaint but also ordered the pole dancer to pay Trump’s lawyers almost $300,000. Meanwhile, Avenatti uncovered some kook who claimed that, when she was in college, she regularly attended teenagers’ parties where male high schoolers stood on a rape line — a “rape train” — and she just kept going back to more of those parties. Not long after, Avenatti got busted by L.A. police for allegedly busting a woman’s face. He denied the charges, invoking his inner Kavanaugh, asking only that he not be pre-judged based on uncorroborated allegations. With that, to the dismay of these columns, he ended his eagerly anticipated 2020 candidacy for the Presidency of the United States. Putin will have to rewrite the Facebook posts.

Spartacus

Cory Booker (D-NJ) compared himself to Spartacus. The two differ only in how they respectively spent their days of young manhood. The fictional Spartacus devoted those years to fighting the Roman empire in a desperate life-or-death struggle to end slavery. The cost: he was crucified. The fictitious Cory Booker spent those same years trying to get his hands inside women’s undergarments. For his efforts, he ended up on the Senate Judiciary Committee, preaching morality to Brett M. Kavanaugh, a moral pillar whose main infraction apparently is that he likes beer and once was a teenage boy. During the Blasey Ford questioning, Booker was seated beyond arm’s length from the witness.

The Ninth and the Ode to Oy!

President Trump enacted an entry ban on immigrants from certain countries disposed to exporting terror, and the Left ran to the Ninth Circuit and got them to enjoin the law. Trump banned sanctuary cities, and the Left ran to the Ninth Circuit and got them to enjoin the law. Trump approved the Keystone XL pipeline, and the Left ran to the Ninth Circuit and got a district judge to enjoin the law. Trump ruled that immigrants seeking asylum need to apply at proper ports of entry, and the Left ran to the Ninth Circuit and got them to enjoin the law. Then John Roberts declared that there are “no Obama judges.” It is not known whether this declaration ruined the holidays for a seven-year-old girl who was following the trek of an Obama Judge on NORAD, hoping for a nationwide injunction for Christmas.

Gillibrand Backstabs the Clintons, Then Links With the Jew-Haters

Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) spent her entire political gestation period supping at the feet of the Clintons. They helped her raise money, get name recognition, and enter the public arena. After Hillary was beaten by Trump and no longer constituted a force in the party, and with Donna Brazile and the rest of the Democrat Party blaming Hillary for losing the White House, the ascendant Gillibrand unceremoniously dumped the Clintons, said that Bill should have resigned from the Presidency because of all his #MeToo (Paula Jones) and #SheToo (Juanita Broaddrick) and #SheThree (Kathleen Willey) and #SheFour (Lewinsky) moments. Then Gillibrand set her sights on the 2020 Democrat nomination for the Presidency, joining up with two rabid Jew-haters, Linda Sarsour and Tamika Mallory, and throwing her lot in with the anti-Semites. Gillibrand also fit in with her new intersectionalist friends by opposing legislation that would punish anti-Semitic corporate boycotts of Israel.

Tariffs

Trump imposed steel and aluminum tariffs to save the American steel and aluminum industries. In the event of an urgent need to turn a peace economy into a war economy as the Western world faced in the 1930s, it is less desirable to be defenseless and sliced like butter (as the morally decadent and lazy French experienced at Hitler’s hands) or to be bombed every night for a year or two (as happened to a defiant but unprepared England) than to be situated to defend with a flourishing steel-and-aluminum home-grown industrial base. (Would you rather be attacking the enemy with a stealth bomber or a Peugeot?) Paul Ryan led the charge against Trump, explaining that tariffs never work. Soon, neither will Ryan, while the American steel and aluminum industries have experienced a revival.

CNN’s Racism Impugning Blacks As Too Stupid to Read

Don Lemon laughed uncontrollably when one of his guests stated that Kanye West’s political views derived from Mr. West’s apparent inability to read. We know it is forbidden to use the “N- word” (although Robert De Niro has established that it is permitted to use the “F- word”). But Lemon and CNN legitimized racism through the back door by establishing that it is reasonable to say that some African Americans, even multi-millionaire business geniuses and music legends within their chosen genres, are inherently so stupid that they simply do not know how to read. CNN does not allow this viciously racist and despicable canard to be said about political opponents of any other demographic group besides African Americans.

Après Trump, Le Macron

Donald Trump took America out of the cockamamie Paris Climate Accord that basically allowed all Third World polluters — especially China and India — to continue choking the earth’s atmosphere with soot, carbon, and garbage while Obama and Kerry had America uniquely committing to reduce our economic activity and debilitate our industry. In response, a year after the pull-out, Emmanuel Macron lectured Trump publicly in Europe, virtue-signaling, and declaring that Macron is too excellent ever to call himself a “nationalist” because he understands his global responsibilities. A few weeks later, the streets of France went on fire — a national French roast — as Macron’s less-globalist French constituency revolted, reducing him to a french-fry. Macron had to go on national French TV to beg his people to forgive him and not guillotine his wife or him amid the French dressing down. Towards that end, he promised everyone lots more tax-free money that effectively would let them eat all the cake they like.

Kamala and Mazie Join the Klan in Trashing Catholics

American voters would not allow a Catholic to become President until 1960, when John F. Kennedy (D-MA) defeated Richard Nixon (possibly honestly, possibly by ballot cheating in Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago and in Landslide Lyndon’s Texas). The expressed concern about Catholics until then, besides the underlying bigotry, is that Catholics cannot be trusted to uphold the laws of America because bigots suspected that Catholics answer dutifully to alien authorities like the Pope and Knights of Columbus. Since 1960, Catholics have been an integral part of America’s national political landscape. Now suddenly, half a century after the religion test for Catholics seemed to have ended, Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) have joined the Ku Klux Klan — America’s definitive anti-Catholic society, where deceased Sen. Robert Carlyle Byrd (D-WV), born Cornelius Calvin Sale, Jr., once was Exalted Cyclops — in challenging the Constitutional loyalties of Presidential nominees who happen to be Catholic. Kalifornia’s Konspicuous Kamala possibly is the first Black person to revive KKK philosophy on the mainland, and her sister in religious bigotry, Hirono, seems the first Asian American to revive Klan philosophy in the Pacific.

Trump, Santa, and Mueller

President Trump came under blistering attack for asking a seven-year-old girl whether she still believes in Santa Claus and saying that such belief, by age seven, becomes “marginal.” He did this while he and his wife gave up their private time on Christmas Eve so that they could talk to American children who were calling NORAD to monitor Santa’s location. Instead of personally celebrating at Mar-a-Lago, the Trumps opted to remain in the White House and thrill children with a once-in-a-lifetime chance to speak directly to the President of the United States. His critics, meantime, were at home or at parties, getting themselves drunk on eggnog and desperately standing under mistletoes with no luck. Even the horrors of World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War regularly would see a one-day Christmas truce, but contemporary Trump haters will not accord the President even that. They also blistered him for not visiting troops during Christmastime. His critics apparently did not realize that the President cannot tell a child that there really is a Santa Claus because otherwise Mueller will indict him for perjury in the White House, and the Washington Post will give him four Pinocchios. Meanwhile, the next day President Trump and the First Lady were in Iraq visiting the troops, thereafter visiting even more troops in Germany, while Jim Acosta reportedly was in his 48th consecutive hour, standing under a mistletoe, yelling: “Hey, everyone, I’m Jim Acosta! I’m Jim! The guy with the iron-fisted mike grip.”

Women’s March Gets “Woke” and Goes Judenrein Just Like the Nazis

A tough year for women as Megyn Keller (or was it Kelly — y’know, the one who used to be famous) finally disappeared behind her last culturally appropriated Halloween mask. The Women’s March began with hyper-sexagenarian Madonna boasting on the day the Trump Presidency began that, like so many others who hate Obama, she often previously had considered blowing up the White House. Soon, the outlier member of the Judd Family who briefly had escaped from the butterfly nets, was reciting a poem written for her by a teenager who had experienced a bad episode. From that auspicious beginning, the Women’s March spent its next eighteen months converting into a Jew-hating infrastructure, made Judenrein at the top in a manner reminiscent of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, and headed by the country’s most vile all-around bigot, Linda Sarsour, and by her scrofulous soul sister, Tamika Mallory, the latter a Jew-hater who publicly idolizes both her mentors, Al Sharpton and Louis Farrakhan. By year’s end, major celebrities were pulling out of Women’s March, state chapters were quitting, and the founder of Women’s March was bemoaning how the movement had been taken over by apostles of Farrakhan.

Caravan

DACA? What DACA? A Caravan-sans-camels came to the American southern border from Guatemala and the Honduras after overrunning the vaunted and much-undervalued Mexican army. After the MS-13 animals, rapists, opioid peddlers, and a supporting cast of some women and children surged past the hapless Mexican troopers who pathetically asked for credentials, it became clear that they really do need stinkin’ badges. And we need a big beautiful Wall, no matter who pays for it.

Trump Tax Cuts

While CNN and the Left media pushed the trope that the President has dementia, Trump pushed for massive tax cuts. Every last Senate Democrat voted against, including Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND), and Joe Donnelly (D-IN). (Bye, pals.) Immediately after the tax cuts were passed, major corporate employers started distributing $1,000 and $2,000 pay bonuses, and the economy began booming. In time, unemployment hit all-time record lows in the African-American and Latino communities, forty-year lows among women, and kept sinking even lower. Food stamp and welfare recipients started dropping off the public till and instead started paying into the system with income taxes. As Pelosi mocked the initial bonuses as “crumbs,” salaries themselves started rising after the Obama Lost Decade. Whereas Obama had invoked his inner Jimmy Carter to assert that stagnant economies and muddled two percent growth were the “new normal,” Trump boldly predicted growth exceeding three percent. Obama mockingly asked whether the foolhardy Trump was going to achieve that impossible target with a magic wand. Trump was proven right. It was the one triumphant policy moment in Trump’s first two years in which even RINOs could bask, as the Senate needed only a simple majority to pass the tax cuts under “budget reconciliation.” That enactment demonstrated, however so briefly, what the Republicans might have accomplished these past two years had they not been hamstrung by the Senate’s archaic bastardization of the filibuster rule that sees virtually every legislative initiative needing sixty votes rather than the simple majority envisioned by the Constitution’s framers.

It was quite a year. Have a wonderful 2019. Next year — the pardons… and the Wall.