We’re not even to February, but it already seems like 2020 has had more than its fair share of devastating news.
Most recently, of course, was last weekend’s helicopter crash that claimed the lives of NBA legend Kobe Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others, including two girls just starting their lives.
But even before that, the first month of 2020 was fraught with rough news, including the World War III worries stemming from President Donald Trump’s killing of Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani and its aftermath, which included an Iranian attack on a United States airbase in western Iraq that has, so far, left 50 U.S. service members with traumatic brain injuries, and also resulted in the shooting down of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, which killed 176 passengers and crew members.
To find out weeks later — from a Daily Beast report — that our president may have given guests at his Florida resort “advance knowledge” of the drone strike on Soleimani, resulting in what some senators have called possible money-making trades of defense industry stocks and commodities, would be a devastating and shocking revelation for any other president but was just another “huh, yeah, that sounds really, really bad” piece of news coming out of an administration that uses gaslighting, chaos and distraction as its main forms of communication.
To help counteract the daily bad news of this new year, we’ve decided to go heavy on the “Cheers” in this first “Cheers & Jeers” column of 2020.