A dangerous world will become more disorderly and we will not have the means to straighten it out.

“The stupidest f—ing guy on the planet” is how General Tommy Franks, the head of U.S. Central Command, summed up Douglas Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy in the Pentagon from July 2001 until his resignation in August 2005. Franks was cruder than most, but Feith was under almost continuously hostile scrutiny and controversy throughout his tenure. As the third-highest ranking civilian official in Donald Rumsfeld’s wartime Pentagon, he oversaw the Defense Department’s relations with foreign governments at a time of unprecedented anti-Americanism abroad. More important, he headed both the Office of Special Plans, charged with analyzing prewar intelligence reports on the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, and, subsequently, the Pentagon groups that would eventually coalesce into the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, which oversaw much of the early rebuilding of postwar Iraq.

Of course, many other policy-makers in the Bush administration came in for their share of contumely after the lightning-fast victory of April 2003 turned into the long slog of the occupation and the rise of the Iraqi insurgency. But no one was quite so vilified as the Harvard- and Georgetown-educated Feith. He was variously charged with advocating torture, undermining the Geneva Convention, fronting for Israel’s Likud party, and sexing up the intelligence to exaggerate Saddam Hussein’s links with al Qaeda—not to mention sheer incompetence in failing to foresee the problems of the occupation.

Since 2005, journalists including Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Michael Gordon, George Packer, Thomas Ricks, Bernard Trainor, and Bob Woodward have published scathing accounts of administration policy. According to much of their common narrative, neoconservatives like Feith distorted prewar intelligence, brainwashing or tricking others into undertaking a unilateral, preemptive, and unnecessary war. They then subverted the postwar occupation by disbanding the Iraqi army, sending too few American troops, and ignoring the principled warnings of patriots like Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary Richard Armitage, Generals Eric Shinseki and Anthony Zinni, and a host of former advisers to George Bush, Sr. The result was the loss of thousands of lives and a trillion dollars in a struggle that has left us less safe and the Iraqis worse off, and whose only solution is summary withdrawal.

Agreeing with a great deal of this critique, army officers like Franks, and civilian officials such as CIA director George Tenet and Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, have claimed that others, not they, were the real culprits for the botched operations and occupation. And once again at the center of the indictments has been Feith, the bespectacled neocon who is said to have imperiously nitpicked, second-guessed, and hobbled the more experienced men of action.

_____________

In War and Decision, Feith offers a dispassionate counterresponse—the first, one can only hope, of others to follow from Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and George W. Bush. Feith is not interested in getting even, but rather in systematically exploring the accuracy of the entire pessimistic narrative that has grown up about Iraq. Although he does not question every detail, he subjects enough of the narrative to cross-examination to show that it is largely a myth. His tools are understated irony and extensive documentation—some 600 footnotes and dozens of reprinted documents. These bring forcefully to view what the Bush administration was actually thinking in the days, weeks, and months after 9/11.

As the record adduced by Feith clearly demonstrates, neither he nor Rumsfeld advocated a preemptive war for democracy. Feith was more interested in simply removing dictators like the Taliban and Saddam Hussein from power before they or their surrogates could trump the horrors of 9/11, while Rumsfeld was almost obsessive in his anxiety over mounting costs, unforeseen battlefield complications, and occupations with no predetermined end. Far from wanting an imperial American presence in Iraq, Pentagon officials wished to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis as quickly as possible—unlike their counterparts in the State Department, and unlike Paul Bremer, whose quest for the perfect constitutional government got in the way of implementing an interim governing body that would have been good enough.

Powell and Armitage—as the record also demonstrates—were neither critics nor supporters of the war, but had carefully situated themselves to be for it if it worked, and against it if it did not. Their studied triangulation meant that when things went well they were never enthusiastic advocates of the policies they were charged with overseeing, while when things turned bad they were ready to provide off-the-record quotes and background information to the growing chorus of antiwar critics.

As for the intelligence about Saddam’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, that came from the CIA, and it happened to coincide with the assessment of every pertinent foreign intelligence agency as well, including that of France. (This, quite apart from the fact that the CIA was a hotbed of political and ideological partisans with little sympathy for the Bush administration and less for its decision to go to war.) Arguments over proper troop levels were left largely to top generals. Franks adjudicated the size of the invading forces. He never requested additional troops, and summarily quit his command six weeks after the victory, just as the insurgency began.

_____________

What then were the administration’s mistakes? Feith lists several. In his view, it was wrong to make Saddam’s arsenals into the main casus belli, especially since Congress had listed several other justifications for war that could have easily been given pride of place. Although there was prewar planning aplenty, in the euphoria that followed the three-week walkover of Saddam it was either poorly implemented—too many diverse agencies—or hijacked by the State Department and the often maverick Bremer. Among particular lapses, Feith lists Bremer’s failure to turn control over to Iraqi officials early enough and waiting too long to create an Iraqi security force.

It was Defense Department personnel who, Feith writes, had been largely responsible for the inspired American efforts against the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Had they been listened to, they might have mitigated at least some of the unfolding difficulties in Iraq. Richard Meyers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was hardly the weak facilitator he was sometimes portrayed as being. Donald Rumsfeld pressed his underlings too hard, but not as hard as he worked himself. His tragedy lay not in any failure to anticipate the mess of 2004-06—in fact, he uncannily forecast almost every mishap of the “long hard slog”—but his inability to convince the President or the State Department of the mounting dangers and his crippling worry that committing more troops would stretch U.S. forces too thinly elsewhere.

_____________

There is much to be said about each of these points, and others one might name (like the debate over incorporating anti-Baathist “externals”—i.e., Iraqis who had fled Saddam’s regime—into the postwar government). Perhaps the first thing to be noted in assessing Feith’s version, however, is that even today we still do not have the final verdict on Iraq. The costly occupation/reconstruction seems one endless and bitter disappointment when set against the brilliant three-week removal of Saddam; but, on a longer-term view, if we defeat and humiliate al Qaeda in Iraq and ensure the stability of a constitutional government, even this will appear in retrospect to have been not so disastrous after all.

Similarly, it is worth bearing in mind that the choices facing Feith and others were usually of the bad-vs.-worse variety; there were no good ones. Should we cleanse the Iraqi government of Baathists who had blood on their hands, or retain valuable civil servants no matter their previous record or potential security risk? Such choices were predicated ultimately on the military situation: had we crushed the insurgency in its first few weeks, going with the worse of two bad alternatives would probably not have proved so catastrophic.

In any case, what is refreshingly and almost startlingly different about Feith’s account, in contrast to others, is that it provides a basis for disagreement. Feith does not rely on quotations from anonymous sources. Instead of the usual ploy of advancing pseudo-citations from “a senior Pentagon official” or “a high-ranking officer,” his footnotes refer to what actual people have said and have put their names to. Critics can fault his interpretation of the evidence, but at least they have a body of evidence over which to argue. In addition, Feith has provided a website (www.waranddecision.com) where readers can check his sources and ascertain for themselves the degree to which he has quoted fairly and argued honestly. All this is a huge vote in his favor.

_____________

In light of this book’s virtues, it is somewhat regrettable that Feith does not address in detail the failure of the administration to apprise the American people adequately as to the difficulty of the task ahead or to counter the often untrue but sensational accusations of critics. That multi-agency failure constantly to set the record straight did terrible damage to the once-strong public support for the war. Administration officials might have explained over and over again what exactly were our choices after 9/11, what our aims were in Iraq, how the unexpected dilemmas of this war were materially no different from those of past wars, and how, even so, our blunders in Iraq nowhere approximated the scale of earlier disasters in Korea, in World War II, in World War I, or in the Civil War.

Early on, as Feith points out, administration officials stopped emphasizing the benefits—to the Iraqis, to us, to the world—of having Saddam gone from the scene, concentrating instead on the future advantages that would accrue from Iraqi democracy. This mixed message came at precisely the moment when the insurgency was growing, and when security, not idealism, was the chief concern of the American people. The result was that our successful effort to remove a genocidal dictator in the heart of the ancient caliphate—followed by the establishment of a constitutional government where none had previously existed in the Arab world, by the routing of al Qaeda, and by the recruiting and training of thousands of Iraqi fighters, all at the cost of fewer lives than most single battles of World War II—could be written off as the worst blunder in our nation’s history.  It would be useful to have had not just Feith’s general views of this matter but an anatomy of who in the administration was responsible for the lapse and why and how it was never rectified.

I have mentioned the campaign of near-character assassination waged against Douglas Feith. The supposedly unpardonable sins of which he has been accused—they amount to his being an unapologetic policy intellectual who could be haughty to his subordinates and colleagues and obsequious to his superiors—do nothing to obscure the fact that he served his country honorably in wartime and has written a candid and invaluable account of that service.

To no avail, it would seem. Recently, Georgetown University released Feith from teaching a class at its school of foreign service. A student paper at the university ran an editorial about his impending departure: “Feith can take his salary,” it thundered, “and the further thousands he will no doubt earn from his memoir, and try to justify his failures somewhere else.”

Here, however, is the final paragraph of the appendix to War and Decision:

With appreciation of the valor and sacrifice of the men and women of the U.S. armed forces, I have donated all of my revenues from this book to a charitable foundation that will use the funds exclusively for the benefit of veterans and their families.

This, too, needs to be entered into the record, and gratefully acknowledged.

Paradise to purgatory: Gavin Newsom and California’s self-destruction

California has become a test case of the suicide of the West.

Never before has such a state, so rich in natural resources and endowed with such a bountiful human inheritance, self-destructed so rapidly.

How and why did California so utterly consume its unmatched natural and ancestral inheritance and end up as a warning to Western civilization of what might be in store for anyone who followed its nihilism?

Californians have been enduring a series of economic and social obstacles. AFP via Getty Images

The symptoms of the state’s suicide are indisputable.

Gov. Gavin Newsom enjoyed a recent $98 billion budget surplus — gifted from multibillion-dollar federal COVID-19 subsidies, the highest income and gas taxes in the nation, and among the country’s steepest sales and property taxes.

Yet in a year, he turned it into a growing $45 billion budget deficit.

At a time of an over-regulated, overtaxed and sputtering economy, Newsom spent lavishly on new entitlements, illegal immigrants and untried and inefficient green projects.

Newsom was endowed with two of the wettest years in recent California history.

Yet he and radical environmentalists squandered the water bounty — as snowmelts and runoff long designated for agricultural irrigation were drained from aqueducts and reservoirs to flow out to sea.

Newsom transferred millions of dollars designated by a voter referendum to build dams and aqueducts for water storage and instead blew up four historic dams on the Klamath River.

Critics of Gavin Newsom cite his handling of water sources in California. AP

For decades, these now-destroyed scenic lakes provided clean, green hydroelectric power, irrigation storage, flood control and recreation.

California hosts one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients.

Over a fifth of the population lives below the poverty line.

Nearly half the nation’s homeless sleep on the streets of its major cities.

California is known for its its large homeless population. David Buchan/New York Post

The state’s downtowns are dirty, dangerous and increasingly abandoned by businesses — most recently Google — that cannot rely on a defunded and shackled police.

Newsom’s California has spent billions on homeless relief and subsidizing millions of new illegal migrant arrivals across the state’s porous southern border.

The result was predictably even more homeless and more illegal immigrants, all front-loaded onto the state’s already overtaxed and broken health-care, housing and welfare entitlements.

Newsom raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 an hour.

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The result was wage inflation rippling out to all service areas, unaffordable food for the poor, and massive shut-downs and bankruptcies of fast food outlets.

Twenty-seven percent of Californians were born outside of the United States: It is a minority-majority state.

Yet California has long dropped unifying civic education, while the bankrupt state funds exploratory commissions to consider divisive racial reparations.

California’s universities are hotbeds of ethnic, religious, and racial chauvinism and infighting.

Students at UCLA have staged large-scale demonstrations to protest the Israel’s aggression towards Palestinian people – whose death toll is over 30,000. ZUMAPRESS.com

State officials, however, did little as its campuses were plagued for months by rampant and violent antisemitism.

Almost nightly, the nation watches mass smash-and-grab attacks on California retail stores.

Carjackers and thieves own the night.

They are rarely caught, even more rarely arrested — and almost never convicted.

Currently, Newsom is fighting in the courts to stop the people’s constitutional right to place on the ballot initiatives to restore penalties for violent crime and theft.

Gas prices are the highest in the continental United States, given green mandate formulas and the nation’s highest, and still rising, gasoline taxes — and are scheduled to go well over $6 a gallon.

Yet its ossified roads and highways are among the nation’s most dangerous, as vast sums of transportation funding were siphoned off to the multibillion-dollar high-speed-rail boondoggle.

The state imports almost all the costly vitals of modern life, mostly because it prohibits using California’s own vast petroleum, natural gas, timber and mineral resources.

As California implodes, its embarrassed government turns to the irrelevant, if not ludicrous.

It now outlaws natural gas stoves in new homes.

It is adding new income-based surcharges for those who dutifully pay their power bills — to help subsidize the 2.5 million Californians who simply default on their energy bills with impunity.

What happened to the once-beautiful California paradise?

California has added income-based surcharges to help underprivileged Californians keep their lights on. AFP via Getty Images

Millions of productive but frustrated, over-taxed and under-served middle-class residents have fled to low-crime, low-tax and well-served red states in disgust.

In turn, millions of illegal migrants have swarmed the state, given its sanctuary-city policies, refusal to enforce the law and generous entitlements.

Meanwhile, a tiny coastal elite, empowered by $9 trillion in Silicon Valley market capitalization, fiddled while their state burned.

Countless migrants have found themselves in California looking for work. Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

California became a medieval society of plutocratic barons, subsidized peasants and a shrinking and fleeing middle class.

It is now home to a few rich estates, subsidized apartments and unaffordable middle-class houses.

California suffers from poorly ranked public schools — but brags about its prestigious private academies.

Its highways are lethal — but it hosts the most private jets in the nation.

What do you think? Be the first to comment.

The fantasies of a protected enclave of Gavin Newsom, Nancy Pelosi and the masters of the Silicon Valley universe have become the abject nightmares of everyone else.

In sum, a privileged Bay Area elite inherited a California paradise and turned it into purgatory.

How to tell that the West’s ‘pro-Palestinian’ protesters really only care about bashing Israel

What are the mobs in Washington defiling iconic federal statues with impunity and pelting policemen really protesting?

What are the throngs in London brazenly swarming parks and rampaging in the streets really angry about?

Occupations?

They could care less that the Islamist Turkish government still stations 40,000 troops in occupied Cyprus.

No one is protesting against the Chinese takeover of a once-independent Tibet or the threatened absorption of an autonomous Taiwan.

Refugees?

None of these mobs are agitating on behalf of the nearly one million Jews ethnically cleansed since 1947 from the major capitals of the Middle East.

Some 200,000 Cypriots displaced by Turks earn not a murmur, nor does the ethnic cleansing of 99% of Nagorno-Karabakh’s ancient Armenian population just last year.

Civilian casualties?

The global protesters are not furious over the one million Uighurs brutalized by the communist Chinese government.

Neither are they concerned about the Turkish government’s indiscriminate war against the Kurds or its serial threats to attack Armenians and Greeks.

The new woke jihadist movement is instead focused only on Israel and “Palestine.”

It is oblivious to the modern gruesome Muslim-on-Muslim exterminations of Bashar al-Assad and Saddam Hussein, the Black September massacres of Palestinians by Jordanian forces and the 1982 erasure of thousands in Hama, Syria.

So woke jihadism is not an ecumenical concern for the oppressed, the occupied, the collateral damage of war or the fate of refugees.

Instead, it is a romanticized and repackaged anti-Western, anti-Israel and antisemitic jihadism that supports the murder of civilians, mass rape, torture and hostage-taking.

But what makes it now so insidious is its new tripartite constituency.

First, the old romantic pro-Palestine cause was rebooted in the West by millions of Arab and Muslim immigrants who have flocked to Europe and the US in the last half-century.

Billions of dollars in oil sheikdom “grant” monies swarmed Western universities to found “Middle Eastern Studies” departments.

These are not so much centers for historical or linguistic scholarship as political megaphones focused on “Zionism” and “the Jews.”

Moreover, there may be well over a half-million affluent Middle Eastern students in Western universities.

Given that they pay full tuition, imbibe ideology from endowed Middle Eastern studies faculty and are growing in number, they logically feel that they can do anything with impunity on Western streets and campuses.

Second, the DEI movement empowers the new woke jihadis.

Claiming to be non-white victims of white Jewish colonialism, they pose as natural kindred victims to Blacks, Latinos and any Westerner now claiming oppressed status.

Black radicalism, from Al Sharpton to Louis Farrakhan to Black Lives Matter, has had a long, documented history of antisemitism.

It is no wonder that its elite eagerly embraced the anti-Israel Palestine movement as fellow travelers.

The third leg of woke jihadism is mostly affluent white leftist students at Western universities.

Sensing that their faculties are anti-Israel, their administrations are anti-Israel (although more covertly) and the most politically active among the student body are anti-Israel, European and American students find authenticity in virtue-signaling their solidarity with Hamas, Hezbollah and radical Islamists in general.

Given the recent abandonment of standardized tests for admission to universities, the watering-down of curricula and rampant grade inflation, thousands of students at elite campuses feel that they have successfully redefined their universities to suit their own politics, constituencies and demographics.

Insecure about their preparation for college and mostly ignorant of the politics of the Middle East, usefully idiotic students find resonance by screaming antisemitic chants and wearing keffiyehs.

Nurtured in grade school on the Marxist binary of bad, oppressive whites versus good, oppressed nonwhites, they can cheaply shed their boutique guilt by joining the mobs.

The result is a bizarre new antisemitism and overt support for the gruesome terrorists of Hamas by those who usually preach to the middle class about their own exalted morality.

Still, woke jihadism would never have found resonance had Western leaders — vote-conscious heads of state, timid university presidents and radicalized big-city mayors and police chiefs — not ignored blatant violations of laws against illegal immigration, vandalism, assault, illegal occupation and rioting.

Finally, woke jihadism is fueling a radical Western turn to the right, partly due to open borders and the huge influx into the West from non-Western illiberal regimes.

Partly the reaction is due to the ingratitude shown their hosts by indulged Middle Eastern guest students and green-card holders.

Partly, the public is sick of the sense of entitlement shown by pampered, sanctimonious protesters.

And partly the revulsion arises against left-wing governments and universities that will not enforce basic criminal and immigration statutes in fear of offending this strange new blend of wokism and jihadism.

Yet the more violent campuses and streets become, the more clueless the mobs seem about the cascading public antipathy to what they do and what they represent.

Our revolutionary times

Events like the destruction of the southern border over the last three years, the Oct. 7 massacre and ensuing Gaza war, the campus protests, the COVID-19 epidemic and lockdown, and the systematic efforts to weaponize our bureaucracies and courts have all led to radical reappraisals of American culture and civilization.

Since the 1960s, universities have always been hotbeds of left-wing protests, sometimes violently so.

But the post-Oct. 7 campus eruptions marked a watershed difference.

Masked left-wing protesters were unashamedly and virulently antisemitic. Students on elite campuses especially showed contempt for both middle-class police officers tasked with preventing their violence and vandalism as well as the maintenance workers who had to clean up their garbage.

Mobs took over buildings, assaulted Jewish students, called for the destruction of Israel, and defaced American monuments and commentaries.

When pressed by journalists to explain their protests, most students knew nothing of the politics or geography of Palestine, for which they were protesting.

The public concluded that the more elite the campus, the more ignorant, arrogant, and hateful the students seemed.

The Biden administration destroyed the southern border. Ten million illegal aliens swarmed into the U.S. without audit. Almost daily, news accounts detail violent acts committed by illegal aliens or their surreal demands for more free lodging and support.

Simultaneously, thousands of Middle Eastern students, invited by universities on student visas, block traffic, occupy bridges, disrupt graduations, and generally show contempt for the laws of their American hosts.icle continues below.

The net result is that Americans are reappraising their entire attitude toward immigration. Expect the border to be closed soon and immigration to become mostly meritocratic, smaller, and legal, with zero tolerance for immigrants and resident visitors who break the laws of their hosts.

Americans are also reappraising their attitudes toward time-honoured bureaucracies, the courts, and government agencies.

The public still cannot digest the truth that the once respected FBI partnered with social media to suppress news stories, to surveil parents at school board meetings, and to conduct performance art swat raids on the homes of supposed political opponents.

After the attempts of the Department of Justice to go easy on the miscreant Hunter Biden but to hound ex-president Donald Trump for supposedly removing files illegally in the same fashion as current President Joe Biden, the public lost confidence not just in Attorney General Merrick Garland but in American jur

The shenanigans of prosecutors like Fani Willis, Letitia James, and Alvin Bragg, along with overtly biased judges like Juan Merchant and Arthur Engoron, only reinforced the reality that the American legal system has descended into third-world-like tit-for-tat vendettas.

The same politicization has nearly discredited the Pentagon. Its investigations of “white” rage and white supremacy found no such organized cabals in the ranks. But these unicorn hunts likely helped cause a 45,000-recruitment shortfall among precisely the demographic that died at twice their numbers in the general population in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Add in the humiliating flight from Kabul, the abandonment of $50 billion in weapons to the Taliban terrorists, the recent embarrassment of the failed Gaza pier, and the litany of political invective from retired generals and admirals. The result is that the armed forces have an enormous task to restore public faith.

They will have to return to meritocracy and emphasize battle efficacy, enforce the uniform code of military justice, and start either winning wars or avoiding those that cannot be won.

Finally, we are witnessing a radical inversion in our two political parties. The old populist Democratic Party that championed lunch-bucket workers has turned into a shrill union of the very rich and subsidized poor. Its support of open borders, illegal immigration, the war on fossil fuels, transgenderism, critical legal and race theories, and the woke agenda are causing the party to lose support.

The Republican Party is likewise rebranding itself from a once-stereotyped brand of aristocratic and corporate grandees to one anchored in the middle class.

Even more radically, the new populist Republicans are beginning to appeal to voters on shared class and cultural concerns rather than on racial and tribal interests.

The results of all these revolutions will shake up the U.S. for decades to come.

Soon we may see a Georgia Tech or Purdue degree as far better proof of an educated and civic-minded citizen than a Harvard or Stanford brand.

We will likely jettison the failed salad bowl approach to immigration and return to the melting pot as immigration becomes exclusively legal, meritocratic, and manageable.

To avoid further loss of public confidence, institutions like the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the DOJ will have to re-earn rather than just assume the public’s confidence.

And we may soon accept the reality that Democrats reflect the values of Silicon Valley plutocrats, university presidents, and blue-city mayors, while Republicans become the home of an ecumenical black, Hispanic, Asian, and white middle

Dems, media fool no one: White House is knee-deep in Trump prosecutions

The five criminal and civil prosecutions of former President Donald Trump all prompt heated denials from Democrats that President Joe Biden and Democrat operatives had a role in any of them.

But Biden has long let it be known that he was frustrated with his own Justice Department’s federal prosecutors for their tardiness in indicting Trump.

Biden was upset because any delay might mean that his rival Trump would not be in federal court during the 2024 election cycle.

And that would mean he could not be tagged as a “convicted felon” by the November election while being kept off the campaign trail.

Politico has long prided itself on its supposed insider knowledge of the workings of the Biden administration: Note that it reported this February that a frustrated Joe Biden “has grumbled to aides and advisers that had [Attorney General Merrick] Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former President Donald Trump’s election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded.”

If there was any doubt about the Biden administration’s effort to force Trump into court before November, Politico further dispelled it — even as it blamed Trump for Biden’s anger at Garland: “That trial still could take place before the election and much of the delay is owed not to Garland but to deliberate resistance put up by the former president and his team.”

Note in passing how a presidential candidate’s legal right to oppose a politicized indictment months before an election by his opponent’s federal attorneys is smeared by Politico as “deliberate resistance.”

Given Politico was publicly reporting six months ago about Biden’s anger at the pace of his DOJ’s prosecution of Trump, does anyone believe his special counsel, Jack Smith, was not aware of such presidential displeasure and pressure?

Note Smith had petitioned and was denied an unusual request to the court to speed up the course of his Trump indictment.

And why would Biden’s own attorney general, Garland, select such an obvious partisan as Smith?

Remember, in his last tenure as special counsel, Smith had gone after popular Republican and conservative Virginia Gov. Bob MacDonald.

Yet Smith’s politicized persecution of the innocent McDonnell was reversed by a unanimous verdict of the US Supreme Court.

That rare court unanimity normally should have raised a red flag to the Biden DOJ about both Smith’s partiality and his incompetence.

But then again, Smith’s wife had donated to the 2020 Biden campaign fund.

And she was previously known for producing a hagiographic 2020 documentary (“Becoming”) about Michelle Obama.

Selecting a special counsel with a successful record of prior nonpartisan convictions was clearly not why the DOJ appointed Smith.

The White House’s involvement is not limited to the Smith federal indictments.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ paramour and erstwhile lead prosecutor in her indictment of Trump, Nathan Wade, met twice with the White House counsel’s office.

On one occasion, Wade met inside the Biden White House.

Subpoenaed records reveal that the brazen Wade actually billed the federal government for his time spent with the White House counsel’s staff — although so far no one has disclosed under oath the nature of such meetings.

Of the tens of thousands of local prosecutions each year, in how many instances does a county prosecutor consult with the White House counsel’s office — and then bill it for his knowledge?

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s just-completed felony convictions of Trump were spearheaded by former prominent federal prosecutor Matthew Colangelo.

He is not just a well-known Democratic partisan who served as a political consultant to the Democratic National Committee: Colangelo had also just left his position in the Biden Justice Department — reputedly as Garland’s third-ranking prosecutor — to join the local Bragg team.

Again, among all the multitudes of annual municipal indictments nationwide, how many local prosecutors manage to enlist one of the nation’s three top federal attorneys to head their case?

So, apparently, it was not enough for the shameless Bragg to campaign flagrantly on promises to go after Trump.

In addition, Bragg brashly drafted a top Democratic operative and political appointee from inside Joe Biden’s DOJ to head his prosecution.

Not surprisingly, it took only a few hours after the Colangelo-Bragg conviction of Trump for Biden on spec to start blasting his rival as a “convicted felon.”

Biden is delighted that his own former prosecutor, a left-wing judge and a Manhattan jury may well keep Trump off the campaign trail.

So, it is past time for the media and Democrats to drop this ridiculous ruse of Biden’s White House “neutrality.”

Instead, they should admit that they are terrified of the will of the people in November and so are conniving to silence them.

When killers like Putin and Xi hint at nuclear annihilation, take heed

After a recent summit between new partners China and Russia, General Secretary Xi Jinping and Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin issued an odd one-sentence communique: “There can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be fought.”

No one would disagree, even though several officials of both hypocritical governments have previously threatened their neighbors with nuclear attacks.

But still, why did the two feel the need to issue such a terse statement — and why now?

General Secretary Xi Jinping and Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin issued an odd one-sentence communique: “There can be no winners in a nuclear war and it should never be fought.” via REUTERS

Rarely has the global rhetoric of mass annihilation reached such a crescendo as the present, as existential wars rage in Ukraine and Gaza.

In particular, Putin at least believes that he is finally winning the Ukraine conflict. Xi seems to assume that conventional ascendant Chinese military power in the South China Sea has finally made the absorption of Taiwan practicable.

They both believe that the only impediment to their victories would be an intervention from the US and the NATO alliance, a conflict that could descend into mutual threats to resort to nuclear weapons.

Thus the recent warnings of Xi and Putin.

Almost monthly, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un continues his weary threats to use his nuclear arsenal to destroy South Korea or Japan.

Kim Jong Un has repeatedly threatened South Korea with attacks AP

A similarly monotonous pro-Hamas Turkish President Recep Erdogan regularly threatens Armenians with crazy talk of repeating the “mission of our grandfathers.” And he occasionally warns Israelis and Greeks that they may one day wake up to Turkish missiles raining down upon their cities.

More concretely, for the first time in history, Iran attacked the homeland of Israel. It launched the largest wartime array of cruise missiles, ballistic missiles and drones in modern history — over 320 projectiles.

Iran’s theocrats simultaneously claim they are about ready to produce nuclear weapons. And, of course, since 1979, Iran has periodically promised to wipe Israel off the map and half the world’s Jews with it.

Most ignore these crazy threats and write them off as the braggadocio of dictators. But as we saw on Oct. 7, the barbarity of human nature has not changed much from the pre-modern world, whether defined by savage beheading, mutilations, murdering, mass rape, torture and hostage taking of Israeli elderly, women and children.

But what has radically transformed are the delivery systems of mass death — nuclear weapons, chemical gasses, biological agents and artificial-intelligence-driven delivery systems.

Oddly, the global reaction to the promise of Armageddon remains one of nonchalance. Most feel that such strongmen rant wildly but would never unleash weapons of civilizational destruction.

Consider that there are as many autocratic nuclear nations (e.g., Russia, China, Pakistan, North Korea and perhaps Iran) as democratic ones (US, Britain, France, Israel and India). Only Israel has an effective anti-ballistic missile dome. And the more the conventional power of the West declines, the more in extremis it will have to rely on a nuclear deterrent — at a time when it has no effective missile defense of its homelands

In a just-released book, “The End of Everything,” I wrote about four examples of annihilation — the classical city-state of Thebes, ancient Carthage, Byzantine Constantinople and Aztec Tenochtitlan — in which the unimaginable became all too real.

In all these erasures, the targeted, naive states believed that their illustrious pasts, rather than a realistic appraisal of their present inadequate defenses, would ensure their survival.

All hoped that their allies — the Spartans, the anti-Roman Macedonians, the Christian nations of Western Europe and the subject cities of the Aztecs — would appear at the eleventh hour to stave off their defeat.

Additionally, these targeted states had little understanding of the agendas and capabilities of the brilliantly methodic killers outside their walls — the ruthless wannabe philosopher Alexander the Great, the literary patron Scipio Aemilianus, the self-described intellectual Mehmet II and the widely read Hernan Cortes — who all sought to destroy utterly rather than merely defeat their enemies.

These doomed cities and nations were reduced to rubble or absorbed by the conquerors. Their populations were wiped out or enslaved, and their once-hallowed cultures, customs and traditions lost to history. The last words of the conquered were usually variations of, “It can’t happen here.”

If the past is any guide to the present, we should take heed that what almost never happens in war can certainly still occur.

When killers issue wild, even lunatic, threats, we should nonetheless take them seriously.

We should not count on friends or neutrals to save our civilization. Instead, Americans should build defense systems over the skies of our homeland, secure our borders, ensure our military operates on meritocracy, cease wild deficit spending and borrowing and rebuild both our conventional and nuclear forces.

Otherwise, we will naively — and fatally — believe that we are magically exempt when the inconceivable becomes all too real.

Why mankind’s greatest threat is mankind

Recently, some Russian political leaders and generals, an occasional Chinese Communist Party insider, Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, unhinged North Korean Kim Jong-un and, of course, the Iranian theocracy, have threatened to annihilate their enemies.

Sometimes the saber-rattlers boast of using nuclear weapons, surprise invasions, or rocket barrages, such as we saw against Israel last month. 

Or as Erdoğan recently warned Greece of Turkey’s new missile arsenal, “We can come down suddenly one night when the time comes.”

Taiwan is told it will be absorbed.

North Korea warned recently it would “annihilate” South Korea. 

When we dismiss these lunatic threats, are we really assured they’re truly crazy?

Ballistic missiles such as these being tested in North Korea last month have the power to annihilate humankind despite our supposed progress and intelligence. KCNA VIA KNS/AFP via Getty Images

The aim of wars, of course, is to defeat the enemy.

But usually in history the victors do not annihilate the losers — wiping out their people, civilization, language and physical space. 

Even the devastated powers of World War II, Germany, Japan and Italy, survived and rebooted their nations into responsible democracies.

Modern democratic Israel is a testament to the courage and resilience of the postwar Jewish people. 

Yet occasionally in the past war became existential and final, erasing permanently the defeated civilization, and under a variety of gruesome circumstances that offer important warnings today.

Alexander the Great in 335 B.C. besieged and wiped out the 1,000-year-old iconic city of Thebes.

He slaughtered the adult males, enslaved the women and children and razed the fabled Greek city-state to the ground. 

In just one day, Alexander finished off the mythical home of Cadmus, Oedipus and Antigone, and the great democratic liberator Epameinondas. 

A drawing of Alexander the Great (l) and his great teacher Aristotle. The legendary Greek leader was vastly educated and knowledgeable, but still embraced warfare. Getty Images

The empire of the North African city of Carthage once was larger than Rome.

But after defeats in two Punic Wars, Carthage over a century was reduced to a coastal corridor in modern-day Tunisia.

Yet by 149 B.C., the city was again thriving.

It wished peace with Rome — at least until a huge Roman fleet unexpectedly arrived on African shores determined to obliterate their once powerful rival. 

Cato the Elder, the aged archenemy of Carthage, finished each of his Roman senate harangues with “Carthago delenda est: Carthage must be destroyed!” 

That proved not just rhetoric.

6 “The End of Everything” is written by Victor D. Hanson.

Without cause, Rome prompted the Third Punic War (149-6 B.C.), more a siege than a real war.

The Romans finally annihilated the city of 500,000, killed all but an enslaved 50,000, and left the majestic metropolis a junk heap.

In 1453, the Ottomans finally overran the 1,100 year-old city of Constantinople, the hub of Hellenism, Christianity and the Byzantine Empire for over a millennium.

They killed, enslaved, or relegated to inferior status the entire population, and turned the majestic Hagia Sophia cathedral into the mosque that it remains today.

The conquerors appropriated the shell of the once greatest city in Christendom as their new capital of an Islamic Ottoman Empire. 

So ended the ancient Christian Hellenic civilization of Asia.

6 Nuclear weapons remains a particularly potent tool of human destruction decades after their use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. AFP/Getty Images

In 1520, Hernán Cortés led a tiny army of about 1,500 conquistadors to attack the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán.

In less than two years, the Spanish destroyed the four-million-person Aztec empire with the help of indigenous allies who hated the mass sacrifices of the Aztecs.

What do these examples of annihilation have in common?

The doomed are never really aware of the fate that awaits them. 

Often their glorious past deludes them into assuming that their once formidable defenses — the seven gates of Thebes, the massive fortifications of Carthage, the 35-foot-high Theodosian walls of Constantinopl, and the vast lake surrounding Tenochtitlán — would ensure their safety. 

False hopes always arose that help was on the way. Surely allies — like the Athenians — will save Thebes.

Or the enemies of Rome would rescue Carthage in its eleventh-hour. 

6 Although the world has yet to see a major incident of cyber-warfare, all of the elements are in place for such a conflict to break out. Artem – stock.adobe.com

Would not the Western Europeans sail up the Dardanelles in time to break the Ottoman siege of Constantinople? 

Would not the subjects of the Aztec Empire finally turn on the Spaniards?

As for the destroyers of entire civilizations, they prove not always just the stereotypical mass murderers of history like Attila the Hun, Tamerlane or Genghis Khan.

Often the annihilators were the well-educated, such as Alexander the Great, student of Aristotle, and companion of philosophers. 

The annihilator of Carthage, Scipio Aemilianus, was an intellectual who befriended the brilliant historian Polybius and was a patron of literature.

Mehmet II, who wiped away Christian Constantinople, was proud of his enormous library. 

6 Bio-warfare is also a real threat today, as evidenced by the fall-out from the recent Covid-19 pandemic. CNS/AFP via Getty Images

And the more such conquerors feigned no intention of erasing their enemies, the more they methodically did so — and in the aftermath shed crocodile tears over the extinction.

We live today with far easier tools of civilizational destruction nuclear, bioweaponry, cyberwar and perhaps soon artificial intelligence.

And from Israel to Greece to Taiwan, there are plenty of vulnerable peoples and nations threatened by their historically hostile neighbors.

These Three Ideas Will Win 2024

That makes this week’s debate more meaningful than others in the cycle’s past.

This week’s debate reveals—in many ways—the blueprint for the election of 2024. Every candidate for federal office will be viewed as an extension of the Presidential nominee representing them this week.

The major reason this is the case is because both men have had the reigns of government, both have a record in office, and the people will choose on those records.

From a purely policy perspective that indicates the most lopsided loss in history should be expected for the incumbent. But with the malcontent in office, his corrupt influence with the media, and whatever gamesmanship they may have planned for shenanigans the Trump team has zero room to relax or take a breath.

By extension, it also means that the rest of the ticket must play it equally tough. It is not time for the U.S. Senate candidate for a state or a House candidate for a district to wander off message. Incumbent Democrats are chained to Biden’s failures and his attack on Americans

Yesterday in the Bronx at a rally for electeds Jamal Bowman and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, in a borough where Trump just weeks ago drew twelve times the turnout (on a weeknight,) the pair from “The Squad” went profane, angry and unhinged.

They did so because that’s all the top of their ticket has left them with.

Did I also mention that a poll this week has New York State within 1% between Trump vs Biden?

Speaking of deep blue strongholds President Trump held a rally in deeply blue Philadelphia, largely attended by Hispanics and African Americans, and not only packed out the Temple University venue, but like the Bronx rally even more people lined up outside and around the block.

The reason he is getting this seismic response may twist the brains of Jake Tapper and Rachel Maddow but it shouldn’t surprise just about anyone and everyone else. He’s talking about three things that every voter cares about.

Trump promises to protect the American people from the wanton dangers of crime and to keep them safe. Biden’s plan of flooding our nation with illegal aliens and the Democratic push to defund police have put every American in jeopardy. Trump’s message: close the border, deport the criminals, and back the blue. Simple. It resonates with Obama’s largest fundraiser from 2008, who announced she’s now Team Trump, and it will work for Senate and House nominees. It will work, that is if you make it your core policy point on the trail. If one gets distracted by other frivolous or even just less important talking points—then it takes the voter’s eye off the biggest  issue on the radar.

Trump is promising to protect the American people’s hard-earned money. It’s not the government’s money, it’s the people’s money. Through deregulation, you unleash the economy again. Through the extension of the Trump tax cuts before they expire—including the child tax credit—you create financial improvement for every poor and middle-class family and child in America. And by reversing Biden’s war on energy and letting Americans domestic energy flow we will reverse the regressive tax of 20% increase of costs on goods that Biden has gleefully overseen. Side benefit: Getting American energy-producing again also bankrupts Russia and Iran which will curtail their ability to make war. If Russia is poor they can’t invade their neighbors. If Iran is poor they can’t pay proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthies.

Lastly, Trump is promising to protect American children. Parents have a right to know what their schools are teaching. They have a right to determine the curriculum. They have the right to believe that boys and girls will be respected for their distinction. And they have the right to expect their girls will be kept safe by not having to allow men into their locker rooms, showers, and fields of play. Biden believes America’s children belong to the state. Americans believe they belong to their parents. This isn’t controversial. So say it over and over: “We are fighting to protect your children!”

If Republicans down the ticket want to win—parrot what Trump is promising. Protect Americans’ safety, money, and children.

Every American cares deeply—in their heart of hearts—about these three things. Biden has attacked them on all three fronts. And a united Republican ticket championing these simple three ideas will landslide the competition.

Now get to it!

Trump Has Picked His VP

Former President Donald Trump has picked his 2024 running mate. 

On Saturday, Trump announced that he has decided who will be his vice president, but hasn’t told anyone who he or she might be yet. 

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“In my mind, yeah,” Trump told reporters at a Philadelphia rally when asked if he’s decided on his trusty sidekick. 

“No, nobody knows,” the former president said when asked if anyone knew. However, Trump confirmed they will be at the first 2024 televised debate between him and President Joe Biden. 

Last month, I reported that Trump’s VP shortlist had been narrowed down to just a handful of potential choices including  Gov. Doug Burgum (R-ND), Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH), Sen.Tim Scott (R-SC), Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), and Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.). 

Potential choices received vetting materials from the Trump campaign in recent weeks as he prepares to make a final decision. 

NEW: Trump tells me and @DashaBurns just now:
– He’s picked his VP
– He hasn’t told them yet
– They’ll be at the debate pic.twitter.com/xL3qV98PFL— Jake Traylor (@jake__traylor) June 22, 2024

A source close to the 2024 hopeful told the New York Post that Trump is looking for three things in regards to a running mate. 

“He’s looking for who can raise money, he’s looking for who is an effective surrogate on TV with adversarial media, and he’s looking at who will do the best job debating Kamala Harris,” the source said. 

As the country has anticipated the announcement of Trump’s VP pick for some time, the former president has downplayed the impact of a running mate on how the election will turn out. 

“It’s never really had that much of an effect on an election,” Trump said. 

Trump’s senior adviser Brian Hughes said the former president’s top concern when choosing a VP “is a strong leader who will make a great President for eight years after his next four-year term concludes.”

Gaza War Ignites a Civil War Within the LGBT Community

Pride month is almost over, but it seemed like barely anything happened. There were parades, but it wasn’t as ‘in your face’ as in other years. Maybe it’s because different things are going on, maybe it’s because it’s an election year, or perhaps it’s because the war in Gaza has fractured the LGBT community in ways that are baffling.

I will never step in to stop liberals from cannibalizing each other, and this is no exception. It’s a bit entertaining: some are openly pro-Hamas, while others rightfully point out how nonsensical that position is in this situation. The New York Times wrote about this civil war within the gay community and how it’s set Fire Island ablaze (via NYT): 

The dispute on Fire Island, just off Long Island, was just one expression of the tensions over the Gaza war that have wracked American public life. But within New York’s L.G.B.T.Q. community, whose members hail from every ethnic and social background and tend to be highly attuned to issues of social justice, the war has touched off some especially raw conflicts. 

[…] 

The fight over how the community should respond to the war in Gaza has played out in fiery online comments and false accusations of pro-Hamas activity. On Fire Island, the flag conflict has pitted Mr. Torres and local homeowners, including Mr. Lucas, against the very activists honored at the park. Elsewhere in New York, similar, if lower profile, disputes have shaken gay bars, L.G.B.T.Q. fund-raising dinners and Pride festivities. 

“I think queer people are mostly on one side of the debate,” said Afeef Nessouli, a journalist and activist who has been highlighting the stories of L.G.B.T.Q. people in Gaza on his popular social media channels since the war began. “It feels like queer people are coming out for Palestine in a really large way.” 

Indeed, members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community overwhelmingly self-identify as politically liberal or moderate, according to polls. A majority of Democrats have disapproved of Israel’s actions since at least last November, one month after the war began, according to Gallup surveys. 

[…]

…supporters of Israel, including some vocal L.G.B.T.Q. people, often argue that the community should support the country because, while it lags behind Western countries on some gay rights issues, it is more tolerant than other places in the Middle East. 

In Gaza, like in many places in the Arab world, homosexuality remains taboo and gay life happens largely behind closed doors. Government persecution is not uncommon, and in one high-profile case Hamas killed a prominent commander after accusing him of embezzlement and homosexuality. 

Rec“Taboo” and “largely being closed doors” are descriptors that are awfully anti-progressive with this lot. Also, it’s not true: we know what radical Islamists do to gays when found. It’s death. ISIS hurled these people off rooftops. The Times doesn’t want to highlight the silliness here, which is that some in the LGBT community are siding with people who would kill them if they had the chance. Say what you want, but, in general, siding with a group of people who want you dead seems illogical. 

Yet, this is where intersectionality and other left-wing inanity reign. We saw the vestiges of this when a lesbian was booted from Chicago’s ‘Dyke March’ in 2017; she had a rainbow Star of David flag. Also, have liberal Americans forgotten when a local council in Michigan became all-Muslim, they banned Pride flags? 

Let them eat their own. I’ll be watching game seven of the Stanley Cup Final.