Author: editor11122
Under the brutal midday sun, by a spring that had no business running in such heat, two herdsmen settled a bet the only way that mattered—with song. Damoetas and Daphnis. One with a golden chin, the other with a beard half-grown. And between them, the oldest story in the world: a monster in love with a sea-nymph, and the comedy of errors that follows. Theocritus, the grandfather of pastoral poetry, knew something we moderns keep forgetting: that the deepest human truths fit neatly into the smallest frames. A singing contest between goatherds becomes a meditation on desire, rejection, and the…
The consent decree is a weapon. Not a tool of justice, not a mechanism for reform, but a weapon wielded by the federal government against cities that refuse to bend the knee. Merrick Garland stood at the podium yesterday and uttered the fateful words. The Department of Justice will investigate the Minneapolis police for a pattern of unconstitutional policing. Unconstitutional. Racist. If such a pattern is found—and with the fixers running this game, it will be found—then the city will receive a list of recommendations. Accept them, or face an endless war of litigation. Unlimited DOJ lawyer time, billing the…
Cossack. Russia is a serious nation. We should act accordingly. Let me walk you through this carefully, because the stakes are higher than most Americans realize and the coverage has been, to put it charitably, incomplete. The 2014 revolution in Ukraine overthrew an elected president. That’s just a fact. Viktor Yanukovych was voted out by people in the streets, not by ballots. However you feel about him, however corrupt he may have been, the mechanism of his removal set patterns that are still playing out. The western half of the country, with its historical ties to populations that fought with…
The numbers are striking. Seventy-five percent of likely voters support requiring photo identification before casting a ballot. That is not a partisan outlier. That is a consensus. Eighty-nine percent of Republicans, sixty percent of Democrats, seventy-seven percent of independents. Across the political spectrum, Americans agree: showing ID to vote is common sense. Thirty-six states have enacted some form of voter ID law. They range from strict to lenient, from requiring a photo to accepting alternative documentation. But they all rest on the same principle: that verifying who is voting is a reasonable part of running an election. Then there is…
Half of Americans doubt that President Joe Biden is physically or mentally fit for the job, according to a Rasmussen Reports poll. This comes amid reports that Biden is struggling to recall the name of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, referring to him as “the guy that runs that outfit over there,” as the New York Post reported. Political commentator Dick Morris pointed to two key indicators of concern: four Senate Republicans sponsoring a bill to limit Biden’s war-making authority, and earlier, 30 Democrats writing a letter urging him to give up sole control over the nation’s nuclear codes. Morris suggested…
I spent three years as Defense and Army Attaché in the US embassy in Saudi Arabia. Then eight years heading US Defense Intelligence for the Middle East. After I left government, I went back many times on private business. I’ve been in just about every Islamic country—Algeria’s the only one I missed. And I can tell you without hesitation: Saudi Arabia stands alone. Not for good reasons. The country looks good. I’ll give them that. The infrastructure is modern, gleaming, built to impress. The medical facilities are first rate, though nearly all are run by expats because the Saudis haven’t…
The headlines wrote themselves before the meeting even happened: Xi and Putin together in Moscow, the two great autocrats embracing against the Western world. Another “no limits partnership” photo op. Another chance for the pundit class to warn about the emerging axis of authoritarianism. Then Xi opened his mouth and said something different. The Institute for the Study of War caught it. Two articles, published simultaneously on March 19, one in Chinese state media from Putin, one in Russian state media from Xi. Read them together and you see the gap. Putin’s piece was classic Russian grievance politics. The collective…
The question itself feels obscene, doesn’t it? Comparing the FBI to the Gestapo. That’s the kind of rhetorical excess that gets you dismissed as a crank, a conspiracy theorist, someone who’s watched too many movies and lost the plot. Except the men and women saying it are not cranks. They’re not conspiracy theorists. They’re FBI agents with twenty years in, counting days until they can retire, nursing a genuine, deep-seated hatred for their own director and his coterie of Deep State lackeys. When people who have spent their careers inside an institution start using that kind of language, you should…
Let me start with a confession: I’ve been around long enough to watch presidents come and go, to see the machinery of politics grind men into dust and elevate others to sainthood based on nothing more than timing and luck. I’ve seen Democrats savage Republicans and Republicans savage Democrats. I’ve seen media turn every policy disagreement into a moral crisis and every personal failing into proof of unfitness. But I have never seen anything like what Donald Trump has endured. Not even Lincoln, called a gorilla and a baboon by his own Secretary of War, faced this kind of round-the-clock,…
Anyone who embraces the stupid and absurd claim that Russia’s military intelligence outfit, the GRU, is paying the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan is either ignorant or congenitally retarded. There is no gray area here. The claim is a lie. Let me explain why this is so obvious that only people with an agenda could miss it. The Taliban do not need a financial incentive to kill American soldiers. They have been doing that willingly for twenty years. It’s their entire reason for existence. The idea that they require Russian bounties to motivate them to fight the infidel…