In the opening days of Iraq War 2.0, a wiser but not yet-General David Petraeus famously asked “Tell me how this ends.” Petraeus understood how wars end is more important than why they started or how they were carried out. So how does the current war in Ukraine end? Petraeus, for his part, said with […]

The whole idea of boycotting Russian vodka reminds too much of “freedom fries” from Gulf War II. It seems stupid and silly until you realize we are stupid and silly and this is how we are led to war. The tsunami of pro-Ukrainian propaganda is only matched by its transparency. The Ghost of Kiev was […]

I hate going back, again, to Orwell, but since the world is intent on using his epic novel 1984 as an instructional guide, I have no choice. So proles, take note: this week’s Two Minutes of Hate will be split among Tucker Carlson, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. They may in fact be the same […]

1) Special Counsel John Durham dropped a new filing in his Russiagate investigation. Fox says it means one thing, and CNN says something almost the opposite… The whole filing is only 13 pages; the juicy stuff about “spying” is only a few paragraphs. Just read it. 2) I’m kinda busy, so could you just give […]

I have a medal for winning the Cold War. It was issuable to any member of the military, or civilian employee of the federal government, who served during the Cold War. That included me, at the tail end, with the State Department. Ironically my so-called Cold War service was on Taiwan. I probably should return […]

Let’s connect the dots among Durham, Russiagate, the FBI, and Clinton. They show the Clinton campaign ran a sophisticated, multi-prong coordinated intelligence operation against Trump with either the active or tacit support of the FBI. In the case of prong one, the dossier, the Clinton campaign hired MI6 intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The hiring was […]

Fairfax County, Virginia is ground zero for wokeness. It is 65 percent white and votes solidly Democratic. The median income is over $124k. I used to live there; it was common to hear white people brag about having black friends (but at work you know, not the kind that come over to the house) and […]

There is a word for secretly collecting information about enemies or competitors to use against them. According to the latest court filing by Special Counsel John Durham, the Hillary Clinton campaign surreptitiously and likely illegally reached into protected White House and Trump communications data to try and show some link between Trump and Russia. The […]

What is Sarah Palin up to suing the New York Times for libel? Is she really trying to change the First Amendment and does she know what she is doing? Palin v. The New York Times Company is now before a district court in New York, and no matter the verdict is also certainly headed […]

  No book should be banned. But it is important to point out the predominant reason classic books are now banned in U.S. schools is progressive angst over “racism/N-word” so all those in heat over Maus should check their hate and hypocrisy. By now the world and beyond has heard that McMinn County, Tennessee voted […]

  The Democrats’ newest champion (Michael Avenatti did not return calls) Rep. Liz Cheney just about said the quiet part out loud: her January 6 Committee has the singular goal of pre-defeating Trump ahead of any voting in 2024. As it becomes clearer the Committee is failing in its propaganda campaign to get Republican Party […]

How can we end Covid the public policy disaster? Because Covid the public health disaster is mostly already over and we’re still dying out here. It is now the third winter of writing about Covid. Topics come and go in journalism; I wrote what I am sure will be my last story about the Afghan […]

  Important questions about what happened on January 6 are left unanswered if they would disturb the Democratic narrative. These potential game-changers are ignored for the most part, or wish-washed away by claiming they are “conspiracy theories” somehow not worth looking into. This is quite funny, given that the Democrat flailing is built entirely around […]

I hate these people. I hate them for who they are and for what they are doing and most of all I hate them for the larger thing they are a part of. The people I hate call themselves sedition hunters. They give themselves war names glorified by a liberal press, names like Deep State […]

On this day, what would Dr. King think about critical race theory? As an educated man, he might recognize it has little intellectual underpinning. You just have to believe. Questioning is haram. He would likely disagree the force of jihad is necessary to end the white reign, or that non-believers are racial infidels, or that […]

  One truth is the 2020 campaign never really ended. On paper Joe Biden became president and Donald Trump became a real estate developer again, but in reality Biden is simply a placeholder and Trump an active candidate for the presidency in 2024. A second truth is in the law, unlike in propaganda and journalism […]

“Well before diversity in merchandising was a thing, my mother, like many black parents in the 1980s and 1990s, always MacGyvered peach-skinned Christmas figurines into mirror images of our own family. Mom carefully colored in the faces of elves on ornaments, angel tree toppers, carolers on Christmas cards, and, most importantly, all iterations of Santa […]

  In early December Hillary Clinton appeared on the Today show to read aloud her never-used victory speech from 2016. The scene was bizarre, Clinton tearing up as she read in first-person, present tense about becoming the first woman president, something which in real life did not happen. She then layered on another alternate reality, […]

  I don’t know the right answer on abortion. I do know based on the oral arguments recently heard by the Supreme Court regarding Mississippi’s abortion law that our country has problems that cut deeper into our national fabric than the specifics of any abortion law. The out-of-the-box role the Founders had in mind for […]

  YouTube sent me down a spiral rewatching Glee clips. I am not a Glee fan per se, but it was one of a handful of shows I watched when my kids were in Peak Mode, old enough to be interesting as people but not old enough to realize I was not interesting. My kids […]

One of the great things about not being obsessed with racism is not having to go through the mental twisty turns required to see racism in everything. Of course not being obsessed with racism still allows me to understand that racism has played a sordid role in our country’s history. I can understand anger and […]

  I punched Elon Musk in the nose. I figured, why not, he’s a jerk. Little did I know my punch would dislodge a chunk of artisanal tofu he was in the process of choking on and save his life. To say thanks, he offered to pay for a private Spice Girls reunion (minus Posh) […]

  The Democrats only possible path forward is to ensure Trump does not run in 2024. They want to lock him in jail. With only three years left to go, the 2024 race is narrowing quickly to Trump versus Some Democrat. By election day President Biden will be a vaguely sentient 82, VP Harris likely […]

When will our intellectual life return to normal, the place Socrates, et al, once left it, where facts come together into conclusions? Today in service to ideologies like CRT a conclusion is established and facts are manipulated or just ignored to support it. You can’t argue intellectually against something so profoundly unintellectual but you can […]

It’s bad enough when someone actually thinks reposting a “I Stand With…” meme is an act of woke resistance. But when the problem is enlarged to societal-scale, it hurts us all. Nothing actually broken actually gets fixed, and a deep sense of cynicism is injected into the souls of once-believers when they realize they’ve been […]

It was Hillary all along. The indictment by Special Counsel John Durham of Igor Danchenko for lying to the FBI demonstrates conclusively the Steele dossier was wholly untrue. Clinton paid for the dossier to be created and Clinton people supplied the fodder. Steele, working with journalists, pushed the dossier into the hands of the FBI […]

Sometimes a thing can be two things at once, one good and one bad. That requires a choice. In a free society that choice is usually best made by the individual affected. If not, then by an open, democratic process. That is not what’s happening with the vax mandate and why the cure may be […]

The worst bout of food poisoning I ever had took days to run through me. Every orifice worked day and night to rid my body of whatever evil I had ingested and even when it was all gone it took more time for things to reset themselves. It was as awful as it was necessary […]

I’m holding an old Polaroid, taken at a Halloween party at one of my early State Department assignments in the 1980s. One of my diplomatic colleagues is in blackface, done up to look like the minstrel player who was on the “Darkie” toothpaste boxes then for sale in every drugstore in Asia. You can see […]

Pre-Covid I walked into a café in Florence and said “Expresso, please.” The waitress replied “No, here we say buongiorno first, we smile, then we order. Try it, it is nice.” That is a civil place. America has become an uncivil place. Almost all of us are convinced this is a broken place; the problem […]