It has become a tradition at Thanksgiving time of recent years for The New York Times to allow Maureen Dowd to hand her space to her brother Kevin.  The ostensible purpose of the exercise is to let the paper's way-over-to-the left readership either have an annual sense of what conservatives are thinking or to give those readers an opportunity to gag, shriek, and yell at the thoughts of conservatives (such thoughts beyond their purview, given the rather narrow field of "progressovision").

This year, due to "a heavyweight bout with COVID," Ms. Dowd's sibling Kevin was unable to keep the Thanksgiving tradition, but in a New Year's Day guest column (complete with a trigger warning), he indicates that he is now recovered, which is good news to all persons of good conscience.  Chalk it up to the Grinch in me, but Mr. Dowd does not identify the brand of COVID that settled in him, and, after vaccination, a booster shot, too, perhaps?

The former president is termed "a potential problem," in the fifth paragraph," and the tenth paragraph opens with these six words: "I hope Trump does not run."  Mr. Dowd is not here referring to the annual November running of the New York City Marathon.

Interestingly, brother Kevin threw out some raw red meat to choke the anti-Trump fanatics with the observation that some of Trump policies actually worked.  Mr. Dowd alluded to the Abraham Accords between Israel and previously hostile Arab nations, Trumpian dealings with Iran and China, "the border fence going up, low unemployment, a strong economy and best of all low energy prices and higher wages." 

Why didn't Biden just take credit for the Trump policies that were successful? Mr. Dowd asked, raising a logical point.  Brother Kevin indicates that on taking office, two weeks after "Jan. 6," Biden changed from a "moderate" into a kind of Bernie Sanders type.  Maureen's brother called the January 6 attack on the Capitol "an awful day to watch" because his father had been a Capitol Police officer "in charge of security for the United States Senate."  The father got summer jobs for his five children that included the perk of having lunch in the Capitol, sitting next to congressmen and senators, Dowd related.

But, for all his immersion in the Capitol Hill zeitgeist, Kevin Dowd seems oblivious to the basic fact of the Trump presidency: no president, not even Richard Milhous Nixon, was so hated and loathed by the noxious left as Donald J. Trump — possibly because the far left thought: "My Gawd, what if he does drain our swamp?"  Six paragraphs from column's end, Dowd writes of Biden: "The president may have mistimed his alliance with the far left."  The suggestion here is that Biden entered into a pact with the radical leftists at a time "the American people ... are sick of government programs that have hobbled our country and increased our massive debt."  This view must entertain the delusion that Biden exercises free will behind his Oval Office desk.  What if, however, Biden is not his own man, but has been held hostage to his life-long ambition of becoming president, held hostage by his quite radical handlers.

Brother Kevin's annual service as surrogate to his sister the columnist ends in a "why can't these Democrats in the House and Senate be more friendly with Republicans" flourish.  His concluding words:

Maybe if we try to find a middle ground, collegiality doesn't have to be a relic of the past.  It does not hurt to think of it as we ring in a new year.

Oh, yes it does — if one has a memory as long as mine, that dredges up the term "collegiality" from an imaginary Democrat dictionary that would have defined the term as follows: a term that, when used with reference to Republicans, is a synonym for craven behavior.