I positively loathe those dreadful end-of-the-year reviews now upon us; still, I didn't want this year to pass without acknowledging just how spectacularly wrong I was about the president's 2015.
Obama should have been the lamest of ducks for the past 12 months, yet …
… he restored diplomatic relations with Cuba; he reached a nuclear agreement with the otherwise incorrigible Iranian government; he is well on his way to securing the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade accord (hardly the working-class disaster deemed by some); he successfully defended the Affordable Care Act before a dubious Supreme Court; he has contained ISIS, notwithstanding Republican hysterics that we are doomed to slave under Sharia smuggled into the republic by a Muslim-loving, America-hating chief executive; and he passed a budget — one not particularly to my liking, but passing any budget through this unspeakably torpid Congress is nothing short of epic.
Best of all, President Obama has given congressional Republicans a nasty case of the political shingles. Try as they might to triumph, they keep losing to a lame duck. There's an operatic beauty to it — the amplified pseudoconservative frenzy, that is — that just gets better and better.
Here's to an even more splendid 2016.
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Please tweet this to @Reince. I did. Help make his day year.