During Donald Trump’s first four years in the White House, the stranger to Washington’s infernal ways got nothing done: That cabal of various Deep State appendages — the Democratic Party’s upper echelons, the intelligence apparatus, the Justice Department and the F.B.I., and corporate media — made sure of that. Trump seems to have thought this... Read More

Eleven days ago, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi hyped her office’s imminent release of files related to the apparently sprawling empire of vice that Jeffrey Epstein ran for many years — a scandal that has percolated at or just below public awareness for over a decade. What followed Bondi’s considerable drum roll was 200 pages... Read More

I have never been much for schadenfreude: It is always best to occupy one’s mind with worthier matters. But I cave to temptation as Volodymyr Zelensky, the puffed-up buffoon who has paraded flamboyantly across the world stage as a hero these past half-dozen years, is publicly cut to size as President Donald Trump gets on... Read More

Eight years ago, at precisely this moment in Donald’s Trump’s first term, the new president was pushing his case for a restored détente with Russia. Trump went on to summit with Vladimir Putin five times and conducted at least 16 telephone exchanges with the Russian president. This was the count by mid–2019. After that and... Read More

What hath the MAGA movement wrought? I doubt the archest of Donald Trump’s arch-enemies ever imagined that in his second term he would take things this far in the direction of dangerous or dumb or both. To be clear straightaway, Trump’s full-frontal attack on the Deep State and the liberal authoritarians who collaborated to subvert... Read More

I simply cannot figure American liberals and “progressives”—’pwogwessives,’” as the late Alexander Cockburn used to call them. They do nothing when faced with calamitous events and call it hard work. Then, when the political process (such as it is) takes a radical turn for the worse and there is serious work to do, they announce... Read More

Well, Tulsi Gabbard now says she is all for the unconstitutional law that permits the national security state to surveil Americans without obtaining legal warrants beforehand — a law Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence has previously and vigorously pledged to repeal. As President-elect Trump’s inauguration approaches and his cabinet appointments will be... Read More

It has been clear since the terror attacks in New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001 — the date I choose to mark a great turn in the global order — that America’s abdication of its postwar hegemony was to rank high among the 21st century’s defining events. The questions from that day onward... Read More

President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence (DNI) will cause shockwaves in and among the 18 fiefdoms that now comprise the U.S. intelligence community. Gabbard will be fighting an uphill battle if she tries to herd those 18 cats into a cohesive whole and restore integrity to intelligence analysis.... Read More

Uh-oh. The New York Times is picking up its familiar theme now that the Nov. 5 elections are but a few days out front: Those mal-intended foreigners are again “sowing discord and chaos in hopes of discrediting American democracy,” it reported in a piece published Tuesday. The Beelzebubs haunting this political season, when everything would... Read More

Russiagate continues to survive like a science fiction monster resilient to bullets. The latest effort at rehabilitating it is an interview by Adam Rawnsley in the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine of one Michael van Landingham, an intelligence analyst who is proud of having written the first draft of the cornerstone “analysis” of Russiagate,... Read More

A small number of very rich men are quite sure they know what is best for the future of the world and have enough wealth and influence to believe they can make it happen. They can be called oligarchs, but the term is inadequate. They are a special category, the shapers of the Global Governance... Read More