Four submarines mysteriously appeared off Montauk, and a driver in a 24-hour endurance race at the county airport in Westhampton Beach was stopped in his tracks by, yes, a deer collision. And that’s just 1950.

The tributes to Helen S. Rattray roll in.

Setting aside nostalgia for the days when local politics didn’t divide so starkly into blue and red camps, the fact is that single-party rule is simply a bad way to make important decisions.

If there were any doubt about how thoroughly the Trump administration has drunk from the cup of Orwellian doublethink, it has been dispelled.