When similes attack

If only the Kenyan usurper hadn't grabbed all that surplus military hardware away from local police departments, someone might have wondered:

The sky was clear but the storm kept coming, a relentless downpour of scarlet and gray that ran, got up, ran, got up, and ran some more. The Ohio State rushing attack was a tank, collecting first downs like mud in its tires and rolling over every possession, plowing through third downs, only stopping when it hit the end zone wall. Six touchdowns? Three hundred and sixty-nine yards rushing? Against a Michigan defense that was ranked fourth in the nation against the run? 

Pronouns: George F. Will are not amused

The pronouns are back, and George F. Will's got 'em! But first, of course, the obligatory sideswipe at the Kenyan usurper:

Trump, who uses the first-person singular pronoun even more than the previous world-record holder (Obama), promises that constitutional arrangements need be no impediment to the leader’s savvy, “management” brilliance and iron will.

In case you've been holed up in the survival bunker hoping the freeze-dried food lasts until January 2017: No. Obama doesn't even crack the presidential Top 10 in first-person-singular use, and if he did, the derpmongers who've been most assiduous in spreading that particular fable -- mostly Will and Charles Krauthammer -- would be no closer to proving him the narcissistic, arrogant fraud of their nightmares, because that's not even enough of a correlation to be a bogus correlation. But this column is about a different candidate from a different party, so let's have a quick look at Trump's presidential announcement, as reported by the New York Daily News.

There are always going to be challenges in getting an exact ratio of FPS pronouns to words. When the same paragraph (or the transcriber's best guess at it) contains "the $5 billion website" and "a $5 billion dollar website," how many words were spoken each time? (And, if don't set your watch by AP style, what happens if we make it "Web site," two words, as God ordained?) But letting MS Word do the overall word-counting, and tallying "I," "me," "my," etc. by hand, Trump comes in around 4.4%, which -- going by the MSNBC chart reproduced at Language Log* -- puts him about even with Ike and Bush Sr. but behind the notoriously uppity taciturn Harry Truman.
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Actually, no

The world ... in crisis! But first, this:

It is incumbent on me as a columnist to do one of those year-end things — the 10 best of this, the 10 worst of that or, as you will see, who had the worst year in politics.

Columnists of the world, you have nothing to lose but the chains of the annual Top 10 list. No, you don't have to come up with the year's best or worst. You don't have to write a Things I'm Thankful For at Thanksgiving. You don't even have to provide a list of Banned Words every year. (I still fail to see the point in banning new words when so many familiar ones -- "police are investigating," for example -- are still waiting for a space on the unheated cattle train to Siberia.) Your obligation as a columnist is to be interesting. OK, "true" and "nonstupid," which are stumbling blocks for many columnists, are highly recommended too, but they often go along with interesting.

All that considered, when someone actually writes a year-end summary called "The World in Crisis," it's incumbent on you to draw a more different S and read along in your best voice:

We close 2013 in a world that seems to be swiftly tilting toward ever-larger crises of government legitimacy, oncoming clashes of foreign powers, and an abiding sense of concern on the part of the American people that the economic realities of long-term unemployment, wage stagnation, and the working class squeeze of higher prices for health care, higher education, and basic goods and services are not a brief trend, but enduring problems for which Washington has no solutions.

Or you could just get a few sheets of paper and start diagramming.

You'll be missing a lot if you just skip to the end, but -- no, not really.

... Of course, there is still hope. The nation has survived incredible crises before, on the global scale and within our society. The path toward liberty is still a viable one. And perhaps we will find that even when things break down, when government fails and grand strategies fade, the American people can count on each other more than they thought. These are strange times for the country and the world. But we may find that, even as institutions fail us, the American people exceed expectations. They have done it so many times before. In the coming year, they will be called on to do so again.