Regardless of who wins in 2020, the mega-issue that drove the 2016 elections will grip the country more intensely than ever. From President Obama on down, the political, educational, media, and corporate establishment had long since taken for granted that placing the opinions, interests, tastes, and the rights of the rest of America on the
The Justice Department’s inspector general this month reprimanded the FBI for the manner in which it recruits and supervises its “confidential human sources.” To the layman, this seems about technicalities. In fact, it shows that one of the CIA’s deadliest dysfunctions now infects the FBI as well. This disease consists of choosing and rejecting sources
The would-be impeachers had been salivating at the prospect that John Bolton, who President Trump had fired after 17 months as his national security advisor, would lend his undoubted “conservative bona fides” to their campaign to convince Americans that Trump is bad, awful, illegitimate, dangerous, even criminal. Lately however, they have settled on doing with
Dogs biting humans being naturally unremarkable, any attempt to convince us to regard accounts of their biting as noteworthy events leads one to ask whether the person advancing that position is ignorant of nature, or is toying with us. By nature, instances of bureaucrats speaking ill of their elected superiors are equally unremarkable and lead
Americans are just beginning to realize that opposition to Donald Trump is the least explanation for what bureaucrats, corporate officials and media magnates have been doing to negate the outcome of the 2016 election. Denying that government by the people is the only legitimate form of rule, they are asserting that legitimate rule flows from
Who wags? Who gets wagged? What good are alliances? Most defenses of President Trump’s abandonment of America’s Kurdish co-belligerents to Turkey’s cruelties are insincere—for example, Trump was elected to leave the Middle East; his detractors want to stay there. No doubt some do. But the real argument is over how we leave. Nothing obliges us
Retired Admiral William McRaven devoted the bulk of a New York Times op-ed to appropriating for himself the moral and hence political authority of generations of soldiers and sailors (pointedly, especially the female ones) who have sacrificed for America, for “the good and the right.” Then he gratuitously stated—citing no specifics, as if everyone already
President Trump’s decision to allow Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, an enemy of America, slaughter northern Syria’s Kurds is as unwise as it is dishonorable. Of course, America’s interest is to leave the Middle East to its own devices. But history reminds us that exiting commitments is often more consequential than making them. When war-weary Athenians
The 2020 elections will afford us the chance to pass judgment on the immediate threat to our democracy posed by the intelligence agencies, the Democratic party, and the media in their grab for power through a bastardized impeachment process. But no such opportunity exists for us to deal with the most serious, most fundamental threat
The U.S. intelligence community’s leaders, the Democratic Party, and the media (excuse the redundancy) are trying to convince Americans that President Trump’s conversation with, and perhaps promises to, an unnamed foreign leader amounts to some sort of constitutional crisis. Never mind that the Constitution vests “the executive Power” in the “President of the United States,”
