Watching Democrats sweep election night was a little like sitting in the stands and watching the cursed Red Sox get to first base in a World Series game. You don’t want to get too excited, but it makes the warm beer a bit more tolerable.

No time to dwell on it, though. We’ve got a war to win.

I am speaking, of course, of our pending conquest of Nigeria.


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Pat Beall is an editorial writer and columnist for the Sun Sentinel, focusing mainly on Palm Beach County issues.

Perhaps you had confused it with Kim Kardashian’s war on IQ? It wasn’t the first volley, but her assertion that Americans had not landed on the moon because 1) the astronaut had not gone flying off the moon’s surface and 2) the flag was wavy, marked a major escalation in hostilities to math, the law of gravity and 15-second Google searches. NASA offered to moon ‘splain, but Kardashian and her social media troopers had already moved on.

Over at Mar-a-Lago, a young woman seemed to be losing her war with a giant rotating martini glass perched outside the president’s not-90,000-square-foot ballroom. With SNAP food aid for 42 million Americans hours from expiring, Trump was inside at a Roaring ’20s party waging his own war on hunger.

Meanwhile, Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. waved a white flag in the war on Tylenol. We don’t know for sure that Tylenol causes autism, he said, as opposed to the RFK Jr. who a month ago said that HHS knew for sure that Tylenol causes autism. “Fight like hell not to take it,” said Dr. President at the joint press conference, proving yet another causal link between Trump and unrelenting headaches. Instead, investors fought like hell to dump the stock of Tylenol’s maker. Texas is suing it, possibly based on RFK Jr.’s previously announced non-science. And the manufacturer has surrendered to a takeover. Chaos all around.

Mission accomplished.

And this, friends, is why I cannot stay focused on our war with Nigeria. Just as soon as one faux-fact battle settles into a brain fold, another comes along to push it out. Like this one: Trump apparently cannot distinguish between testing a rocket and testing bombs on the front of a rocket. Putin did the first. Trump saw the second.

Everyone is testing their nuclear bombs! Trump said. We must test! To, you know, see if they still work. Predictably, Putin has followed suit.

The good news for Trump is that only one has to work.

The bad news for the rest of us is that only one has to work.

This doesn’t mean Nigeria has fallen off General President’s priority list. Might have to go in “guns-a-blazing,” to save persecuted Christians, he posted.

Declaring near-war would be a full day’s work for most of us, but our indefatigable leader soldiered on, tirelessly posting photo after photo of the revamped gold and marble Lincoln bathroom, where the toilet is in front of a full-length window.

Back in Nigeria, an adviser to that country’s president downplayed the Trumpian threat, suggesting that perhaps waving fistfuls of tanks is just this particular president’s way of asking, “Can we talk?”

Putin can. Putin will, and soon. The last remaining nuclear arms treaty with Russia expires in February. He’ll likely have a lot to say, quite possibly with fingers crossed behind his back.

That gives the rest of us plenty of time to dig up a fallout shelter, stock up on rice and beans, practice our 1950s-era “duck and cover” fireball protection drills and also fret, a lot, about what the president’s recent MRI showed, and if what it showed has declared war on his brain.

Pat Beall is a Sun Sentinel columnist and editorial writer.