Last week was one suggesting America might just take up smoking.

First there was the media furor over the handling of the wave of immigrants crossing the border into the United States sans written permission or legal authority (they’re not undocumented- they didn’t leave their travel Visa in their other coat back in San Salvador) and the crude makeshift shelters thrown up to contain them, and the inevitable separation of children from the adults who claimed them (in some cases their parents, others attached by convenience).

As in almost all instances of melodramatic leftist outrage, these conditions existed for years predating the Trump Administration yet somehow only now did the situation become heart-wrenching for them.

And then there was the almost hilarious attempt at a football spike by a popular periodical of leftist narrative when TIME magazine exploited the image of a crying adolescent border crosser to make her the mascot for children ruthlessly torn away from the embrace of their mother – except she wasn’t, and nothing TIME put on its now-infamous cover was true.

Of course the folks at TIME tried to circularly defend the “deeper meaning” of their false photoshop smear, with nobody buying their line…and perhaps not as many buying their magazine in the future.  The publication obsessed with running unflattering cartoonish imagery of the president on their once coveted cover has devolved into becoming MSBNC: The Magazine, and while millennials still watch television, they don’t so much flip their paper rags anymore.

TIME’s blunder of an overreach was a reinforcement of the Trump narrative that the established media is rigged against them and they cannot be trusted.  The president has deep-carved the hashtag FAKENEWS on to TIME’s reputation.

Seeking to avenge the plight of illegal immigrants and perhaps settle a score over the Supreme Court Christian baker decision, the Lexington, Virginia restaurant Red Hen booted out White House spox Sarah Huckabee Sanders along with her dining party in the midst of a cheese appetizer after the restaurant’s waitron “party cell” voted to, as they put it in service industry parlance, 86 the group.

Sanders joins other White House officials who have also been harassed inside restaurants by “patriotic” leftists.

Congressional Voice of Unreason Maxine Waters seized on the shabby treatment of the presidential staff and declared the initiation of a kind of Cultural Revolution, by which Democrats are to harass Republicans of profile in restaurants, their homes, and even gas stations.  But don’t just do so individually but do so in groups, or in the more common vernacular, mobs.

Surely this wont lead to anything bad like, shootings, physical beatdowns, and other less than ideal outcomes in the presence of flammables and automobiles. Right?

You have to question both Waters’ brain and heart to be egging on the impressionable into doing something both reckless and dangerous to both the harassers and the targets of harassment.  And pending on the district attorney of the locale where these “struggle sessions” occur, a potential arrest and conviction.

Hopefully enterprising Republican consultants will run Waters’ tirade on loop during the midterms as further exposing her party for what it really is:  a portable group of professional protestors and rioters with ballot access.

The week also saw a number of unfavorable rulings to the Left by the US Supreme Court regarding redistricting (it’s not an outrage when gerrymandering benefits the Democrats) and compelling public sector employees to pay union dues even if they choose not to affiliate with a union.

California’s comptroller has already announced that forced contributions will not longer be deducted from pay checks of stare workers who are not full union members.  Tens of thousands of workers in California alone will benefit from this windfall courtesy of the Supreme Court.  Conversely, the ruling will cost Big Labor millions of dollars that help fund political activities that benefit the Democratic Party.

But the cherry on top from the US Supreme Court wasn’t a case decision but a personal one: the announcement that Justice Anthony Kennedy will be stepping down.

The Reagan-appointee who ruled like Gerry Ford was sort of a weather vane justice, being the deciding vote on a number of “third rail” issues, from abortion (he was with the majority that upheld Roe v. Wade) to the 2000 presidential election Florida recounts that went into extra-innings.

Conservatives see an opportunity to build a solid 5-4 strict constructionist court majority; leftists see the sky falling and are once again polishing the ole slogan “most important election of your lifetime”.

President Donald Trump can reshape the Supreme Court like no other president since Franklin Roosevelt with his appointee and do so before the mid-terms.

In fact Democrats are insisting that he hold off until after, not because they have illusions of taking the senate (they are defending much more turf than the GOP) but to not expose their wobbly caucuses members from Trump states who won on media-exacerbated fluke contests.

If you thought last week marked unprecedented ugliness in American politics just wait for the confirmation circus.

And I am being charitable to call it even that.

The gauntlet of character assassination that a Republican high court-appointee must endure is not so much a hearing but a soul-shredding experience more closely resembling as a Soviet-era show trial.

It is truly an affront to decency and civil government.

May God strengthen the heart and steel the spine of whoever gets tapped by the Oval Office and America should get ready for “The Big Ugly”.