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Already we’ve had two nights below zero and winter has not yet arrived. The shudder at what that portends, which I no doubt share with a lot of New York homeowners, is less about the temperature than that little monthly slip of paper that says I owe another $700 for a few weeks of heating oil.

Yet affordability, says the huckster who claims to be our president, is a hoax. A scam perpetrated by Democrats. Civil words do not come to mind.

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What is becoming increasingly clear to more and more Americans, and about time, is who the ultimate con artist is in this country. Donald Trump is fond of looking backwards for the model to remake the America he would prefer, to the age of despots and robber barons. So we should be looking for the appropriate sendoff into obscurity, which I believe is coming none too soon. Hot tar and feathering comes to mind.

Now, maybe not the full monty such as Mark Twain describes in “Huckleberry Finn” — even Twain thought that a bit much — but instead the Scrooge McDuck version with warm syrup instead. It’s the humiliation that matters most, not the pain inflicted, which is far more generous than we can say about what he has done to........

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