Roseanne show is canceled.

ABC has taken Roseanne off the air. Read why here.

Neil Gorsuch

In an article at New York Magazine entitled "Little Scalia," Simon van Zuylen-Wood takes a long look at Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Trump threw a pebble at a global glass house. Cracked glass shatters easily.

At National Review, Victor Davis Hanson asserts that the Post-War Order is Over.

The 75-year-old post-war order crafted by the United States after World War II is falling apart. Almost every major foreign-policy initiative of the last 16 years seems to have gone haywire.

Donald Trump’s presidency was a reflection, not a catalyst, of the demise of the foreign-policy status quo. Much of the world now already operates on premises that have little to do with official post-war institutions, customs, and traditions, which, however once successful, belong now to a bygone age.

...For over a decade Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan has insidiously destroyed Turkey’s once pro-Western and largely secular traditions; he could not have done so without at least majority popular support....By any standard of behavior — Ankara just withdrew its ambassador from the U.S. — Turkey is a de facto enemy of the United States. It supports radical Islamic movements, is increasingly hostile to U.S. allies such as Greece, the Kurds, and Israel, and opposes almost every foreign-policy initiative that Washington has adopted over the last decade.

Instead, Turkey is analogous to Pakistan, a country whose occasional usefulness to the U.S. does not suggest that it is either an ally or even usually friendly.

...China is by design a chronic international trade cheater. Trade violations have been its road to affluence. And it seeks to use its cash as leverage to re-create something like the old imperial Japanese Greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere. U.S. trade appeasement of Beijing over the last decades no more brought stability to Asia than did nodding to Tokyo in the 1930s.

There is also nothing sacred about the European Union. ...The often-crude imposition of a democratic socialism, pacifism, and multiculturalism, under the auspices of anti-democratic elites, from the Atlantic to the Russian border, is spreading, not curbing, chaos. The EU utopian mindset has altered European demography, immigration policy, energy production, and defense. The result is that there are already four sorts of antithetical EUs: a renegade and departing United Kingdom, an estranged Eastern European bloc worried over open borders, an insolvent South bitter over front-line illegal immigration and fiscal austerity, and the old core of Western Europe (a euphemism now for German hegemony).

...About the only metaphor that works is that But that is not a morality tale about the power of pebbles, but rather about the easy shattering of cracked glass.

Read more here.

Comey, Clapper, Brennan, and Spygate

At The American Spectator, George Neumayr writes about the "Three Stooges of Spygate." On James Clapper:

...his I-know-nothing routine didn’t stop him from serving as an authority on the knowledge levels of others: “No one in the White House knew. Certainly the president didn’t know.” But amidst all this defensiveness, Clapper worked up a sweat defending the spying as a “good thing,” which raises the obvious question: If it was all so normal and praiseworthy, why not tell Obama?

...Just as Clapper’s denial of FISA warrants on the Trump campaign disintegrated, so too will that one. Sooner or later it will come out that Obama knew damn well that the Trump campaign was under surveillance and signed off on it. How could he not have? After all, we’ve been told repeatedly that spying on the Trump campaign was a national security matter of unspeakable gravity. How could such a matter be withheld from the person most responsible for national security?

So what did Obama know and when did he know it? Brennan could give the precise date; he was personally briefing Obama on “Russian interference,” Brennan’s euphemism for his paranoid hunch that Putin’s agents had recruited Trump campaign officials. All the hush-hush dynamics around Brennan’s “taskforce” make no sense if he and White House officials were just sitting around discussing Facebook ads. No, what made it an “exceptionally, exceptionally sensitive issue,” in Brennan’s words, was that they were spying on an opposing party’s presidential campaign.

The doublespeak around this spying has been comically pitiful. We’re told by the three stooges and their media propagandists that Halper — who tried to get a position in the campaign, spent over a year shadowing Carter Page, and tried to entrap George Papadopoulos — “wasn’t spying.” Halper was just “observing,” “assisting an FBI investigation” (as the Washington Post desperately put it), or, in the words of John Brennan, seeking “insight.”

George Orwell would have laughed at that one. “Political language,” Orwell said, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” In this case, it is an all-hands-on-deck propaganda effort to make spying on political opponents respectable — a ruination of reputations, careers, and bank accounts of Trump campaign officials undertaken “for their own good,” we’re told. Liberalism claims a monopoly on everything, particularly language, and liberals will let us know when we can and can’t use “spying” to describe obtaining information secretly.

Once a story starts cutting against the Democrats, reporters drop it. But if that becomes impossible, as in the case of Spygate, the next best thing they figure is to saturate the airwaves with semantic quibbles and hope the public abandons the story out of sheer confusion. And if that doesn’t work, if the unwashed want to keep watching the game, they just steadily move the goal posts back — they say Trump hasn’t “proven” the undesirable story or they give one of his tweets a literalist tsk-tsking, as if the seriousness of the story hangs exclusively on the precision of his tweets. It is hilarious to watch the “clarifications” of CNN, which always amount to distinctions without a difference, presented in the most ludicrously solemn tones by the likes of Jim Sciutto, who apparently went to anchorman school after his stint as an Obama political appointee. Halper, he intones gravely, was not a spy but a “confidential human source.”

If you are one of the three stooges, you preface such denials of reality with a ponderous platitude, such as “facts matter.” That was Comey’s tack in a tweet, before launching into one of his rank-pulling, jargony descriptions of FBI investigations, which was aimed at concealing the facts. The flimflammery of it all was reminiscent of Comey sending his aides out to deny Trump’s tweets about intercepted communications at Trump Tower while FISA warrants that allowed the FBI to reach into Trump Tower sat on Comey’s desk.

“As best as I can tell,” Comey said to Conan O’Brien in reference to Halper, “it is made up. I don’t know where [Trump] is getting that from.” He was getting it from Comey’s old subordinates, who had no choice but to confirm the infiltration attempt, albeit on their own self-serving terms, before Nunes uncovered it.

Read more here.

On the receiving end of "diversity"

Mark Steyn writes,

...in almost the entirety of the western world, whenever anyone draws attention to some of the more problematic aspects of Islam, the state cracks down not on the problematic aspects, but on the guy who draws attention thereto. In Britain and Europe, we are an incident or two away from literally "shooting the messenger".

Britain has banned reporting on the arrest and, within hours, imprisonment of Tommy Robinson after Tommy was live streaming a rape trial in which the alleged rapists were Muslims. Mark was on an Australian broadcast and his interviewers were adhering to the ban! Mark continues,

On Friday, Robinson was livestreaming (from his telephone) outside Leeds Crown Court where last week's Grooming Gang of the Week were on trial for "grooming" - the useless euphemism for industrial-scale child gang rape and sex slavery by large numbers of Muslim men with the active connivance (as I pointed out to the Sky guys) of every organ of the state: social workers, police, politicians. Oh, and also the media.

...You can say a lot of things about Tommy Robinson, but he's one of the embarrassingly small number of Britons who recognizes the horror inflicted on those young and vulnerable girls on the receiving end of "diversity" and seeks to do something about it.

...So on Friday he was outside the Crown Court in Leeds. He was not demonstrating, or accosting or chanting, or even speaking. He was just pointing his mobile phone upon the scene from a distance. Within minutes, seven coppers showed up in whatever they use instead of a Black Maria these days, tossed him inside it and drove off. In other words, these were not "investigating officers" called to the scene: They showed up with the intent to take him away. Within hours, he was tried, convicted and gaoled - at HM Prison Hull, a Category B chokey, or one level below maximum security. The judge in the case, one Geoffrey Marson, spent all of four minutes on trying, convicting and sentencing Robinson. It is not clear whether that leisurely tribunal included his order expressly forbidding "any report on these proceedings" (the case is Regina vs Yaxley-Lennon because that's Robinson's real name).

Which is why, all the way over in Sydney, Messrs Dean and Cameron were being so vague and cautious. In Britain itself, early online reports at The Mirror, the Scottish Daily Record, The Birmingham Mail and elsewhere vanished instantly, and silence has been maintained, especially on radio and TV, ever since.

The justification for this is Robinson's previous conviction in a previous Grooming Gang of the Week case at Canterbury Crown Court. On that occasion, the judge sentenced him to three months' imprisonment suspended for eighteen months. That was almost exactly a year ago - so, suspension-wise, he came up six months short when the plods collared him on Friday. That doesn't explain why Judge Marson in Leeds added an additional ten months (ie, he quadrupled his sentence) and disregarded a point that Judge Norton last year took into account - that the British state insists on banging up Robinson in gaols full of Muslim blokes who violently assault him.

Supposedly Judge Marson ordered a media blackout because news reports would "prejudice" the trial of the groomers. Surely the opposite is true - that widespread reporting of the arrest of Robinson would lead to fewer citizens attempting to "prejudice" the trials of groomers. At the very least, when a man loses his liberty and is gaoled immediately without due process on an instantly quadrupled sentence, it would be nice to think that a free press would be free enough to mull the pros and cons of such an action. But Geoffrey Marson seems to have been minded to teach a more basic lesson - that in England, as in Argentina under the junta, you can be disappeared by the state, and it won't even make the papers.

And the lesson is not lost on those few who question the cozy bipartisan multiculti consensus: Best to fall into line - or at least pipe down.

...it is a fact that in 21st-century England - in Yorkshire, in Shropshire, in Lancashire, in Oxfordshire, in the Home Counties - child-rape gangs are Muslim. It is a phenomenon, one that has never existed previously in the British Isles and one which will continue and metastasize until there is honest debate about it.

And, while Judge Norton is evidently outraged by Tommy Robinson's ill manners in referring to Muslims who rape children as "Muslim child rapists", one notices that neither she nor anybody else display any such outrage about the ruined lives of thousands of victims of men who get away with their evil for years ...because officialdom has chosen to prioritize "Islamophobia" over real crimes.

One more thought from my trip to Rotherham:

The cops drove away. It must have been an abiding image for Jessica, for Katie, for Bannaras Hussain's twelve-year-old, for the girl who would later testify that all three brothers pissed on her like 'a pack of animals', for a thousand and more 'Paki-shaggers' and 'white slags' all over Rotherham, year in year out, for decades: The police driving away ...and leaving them.

...and heading off to arrest one man with a cellphone, over and over and over.

Read more here.

Economic consequences looming for China

Here is more from Sundance on China, Trump, and the dancing Korean brothers!

It’s a smart strategy for Team USA to engage with Team Rocketman while a Chinese trade visit from U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross looms on the Beijing calendar, June 2nd. Given the tenuously adversarial position Chairman Xi has boxed himself into, the dragon would be unwise to stir the pot until after Secretary Ross delivers his trade terms.

Chairman Xi has only one way out of the current box. However, if Xi were to move Kim into an aggressive proxy position too soon, like now, Secretary Ross would likely unload on the economic consequences come June 2nd. Rut roh,… dragon thrashing amid panda box.

China has recently violated the terms of the August 2017 U.N. economic sanctions against North Korea. Economic Panda is naked to his enemies. The consequences outlined and enhanced by the U.S. in support of those U.N. sanctions was a threat to cut off any violating country from the U.S. banking system and economic engagement therein.

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, Commerce Secretary Ross and POTUS Trump didn’t respond to the recent China/DPRK violations because Rocketman was moving in the right direction. However, the economic consequences now loom like a sword of Damocles if Chairman Xi attempts to move Kim Jong-un again.

In the big picture we can see how President Trump has moved Xi away from having influence. Against this strategic success, with Chairman Xi sidelined, President Trump is now in position to be more assertive in his presentations toward a Korean peace process.

Moon Jae-in and Kim Jong-un can play happy sandwich makers and without knowing it they are quietly protected by the strategy President Trump has constructed.

If Xi attempts to break up the happily dancing Korea brothers, President Trump tells Secretary Ross to cut the horsehair and the sword of Damocles falls on the Chinese economy.

Brilliantly played.

Read more here.

Trump's strategy for dealing with North Korea

At The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance digs up this excerpt from one of the Republican primary debates with a focus on what to do about North Korea. Trump's answer? China is in total control of North Korea. China is who we need to persuade to take action! Just as he is now doing!

Fascinating interview regarding Electro Magnetic Pulse threats

This is the second one of these Mark Levine interview shows I have watched, and both have been very informative. Today's guest is Peter Pry, an expert in Electro Magnetic Pulse and Director of our national EMP Task Force. He has written a book entitled "Blackout Wars."

Did Obama give any attention to the possibility of a nuclear explosion in our atmosphere that would result in 90% of us dying? No! Why? It did not fit into their narrative (Iran nuclear deal). Mr. Pry said he and other experts believe Iran already has the bomb and has had it for some years! Obama didn't want it known and didn't want to talk about!

North Korea has two satellites flying over America several times a day at an altitude above our nuclear defense capabilities! They could make an EMP field and detonate a satellite that could already be nuclear armed! The EMP Commission has recommended that these satellites be shot down!

We have no prevention capability south of America because we assumed any attack would come from Russia or China!

Russia, Iran, North Korea and Iran have all been poking around to test our capabilities.

Mr. Pry tells of two cyber attacks that have been undertaken against our military, one by China and one by Russia. Another interfered with White House communications for about a week! We have not taken precautions to protect ourselves! We have known how to protect our entire national grid against a nuclear attack for fifty years, but the $2-3 billion dollars required has not been approved (until Trump stopped it, we gave away $2 billion dollars every year to Pakistan!)

Why hasn't this been done? The electric power industry doesn't want to do anything to prevent EMP. They have very deep pockets and own half of K Street. They are the last critical infrastructure that regulates itself!

Pry gives President Trump an A+. Obama never let the Commission meet with anyone in his administration!

Rampant child abuse—ignored and abetted by the police and social workers

At Forbes, Roger Scruton tries to help us understand the Rotherham, England situation in which 1,400 British children were abused by Pakistani gangs. It is a must read here.

I like this photo

A social justice warrior took this photo of shoppers ignoring the NRA protestors at a Publix store in Florida.

No National Anthem? We'll see about that!

Joel Pollak reports at Breitbart,

A crowd attending the Central Section Division I softball championship in Fresno on Friday evening burst into The Star-Spangled Banner after being told by the announcer that there would be no national anthem before the game.
The Fresno Bee reported:

Before Clovis High played Buchanan Friday night for the Central Section softball championship, the announcer representing the section stated there wouldn’t be a national anthem prior to the game.

Those in attendance at Fresno State’s Margie Wright Diamond weren’t having any of that.

Following a loud chorus of boos, the patriotic crowd stood up and began singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” a cappella.

Many removed their hats and placed their hands over their hearts. Others simply stood tall with pride.

Players stopped their pregame warmups to turn around and face the American flag that waved beyond the center-field wall.

When the song was over, the crowd burst into a round of applause.

According to the Bee, the game’s organizers acknowledged that they had made a mistake.

A fan posted a video of the crowd singing the national anthem here.

A school-shooting video game!

At The Daily Wire, Ryan Saavedra reports,

A popular online video game platform is set to release an extremely controversial video game on June 6 called "Active Shooter," which gives users the opportunity to be a mass shooter and go on shooting sprees inside schools.

The BBC reports:

According to its listing on the Steam video game store, the software lets players "slaughter as many civilians as possible" in a school environment...

...The school-shooting game is described as "realistic" and "impressive". And the developer has suggested it will include 3D models of children to shoot at.

Users are given on-screen stats informing them of how many civilians and law enforcement officials they have killed during their shooting spree.

Charity Infer Trust called on Valve, the company behind Steam, to remove the game before it goes on sale in a couple of weeks.

Read more here.

Exposing corruption

At Fox News, Newt Gingrich tries to wrap his head around the scandals in Washington.

The current Robert Mueller-Justice Department-Russia mess is almost impossible to understand because it is made up of five parallel scandals.

For months, as I wrote my new book, “Trump’s America,” I tried to better understand news as it emerged from the Justice Department – and I still am trying. There are so many moving parts, personalities and dates that it is difficult to track. However, as a trained historian, I began creating an orderly outline for people, dates and events.

I realized that the scandal is so big, so complex, and involves so many people with power that codifying it really required me to draw from my experience writing novels. There are so many egos and there is so much manipulative behavior, dishonesty (and dishonesty about the dishonesty) that it is very difficult to explain it as a straightforward history. It could be more easily explained as a narrative of ambition, illegality and criminal plotting.

Finally, it hit me that the real problem is that there are five parallel and often interlocked scandals going on in concert:

1. The Clintons have been breaking the law and getting away with it at least since Hillary Clinton made nearly $100,000 from a $1,000 investment in cattle futures in 1978-1979. For 40 years the Clintons have acted as though there were no laws that applied to them. They have surrounded themselves with lawyers and simply muscled their way through every scandal. The scale of Clinton illegal activity is so large and so widespread that no one has been able to fully describe it – although Peter Schweizer made a pretty good start with his book “Clinton Cash.”

2. The extraordinary deep state defense of Hillary Clinton, combined with the systematic avoidance of exposing and dealing with her illegal behaviors while protecting her staff members when they support and participate in her illegality, is beyond anything we have seen in American history.
The reason for this deep state resistance is simple. Transparency is going to get a lot of people in trouble – and it goes to the very top.

3. The calculated effort to undermine and discredit then-candidate and now-President Donald Trump is actually a continuation of a deep anti-Republican bias in the Justice Department. This Justice Department tradition is well catalogued in Sidney Powell’s stunning book, “Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice.”

If you have any illusions about the Justice Department’s objectivity, keep in mind that employees of this department gave 97 percent of their 2016 campaign donations to Hillary Clinton – while the department was supposedly investigating her for illegally using a private email server to send and receive classified information as secretary of state. With each passing week, we are learning more about the extraordinary abuses of power designed to undermine President Trump and punish his supporters (a direct contrast to the treatment of Clinton and her staff). The aggressive abuse of power has led both Alan Dershowitz and former Clinton adviser Mark Penn to warn that limitless police power is a danger to all of us.

4. The scandal of the deep state resistance to accountability and transparency has also been astounding. As a career deep state member, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has consistently resisted inquiries by Congress. Documents requested by the Senate Judiciary Committee were heavily redacted for supposed national security reasons – which turned out to have nothing to do with national security (including the fact that the FBI had spent $70,000 on a conference table).

Meanwhile, more than 1 million documents were withheld from the House Judiciary Committee for so long that the committee had to issue a subpoena. The reason for this deep state resistance is simple. Transparency is going to get a lot of people in trouble – and it goes to the very top. When Lisa Page wrote Peter Strzok in September 2016, “POTUS wants to know everything,” there is a good reason to believe President Obama was the one she was referring to as POTUS. If President Obama wanted to know everything, given the way his White House worked, it is very likely his senior adviser Valerie Jarrett knew everything. The more we learn, the bigger the scandal web gets.

5. Panic is breaking out among senior people who engaged in illegal activities because they thought President Hillary Clinton would protect them. Suddenly, they find themselves in danger of criminal charges. That is why people like former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan grow increasingly hysterical in their TV appearances.

I did my best to succinctly capture this moment in American history in “Trump’s America,” but each one of these five scandals is worthy of its own detailed book. Taken together, they are a mound of illegalities, abuses, dishonesty, and manipulation – on a scale that has never before occurred in America.

I suspect when all these scandals are unraveled, a political and cultural reckoning in Washington will follow.

From a closet in Manhattan to a mansion in Memphis

At The Daily Mail, Valerie Bauman takes the time to compare the buying power of $200,000 in various cities across America.

Read more here.

Britain's gag order helps spread the story of Tommy Robinson's arrest and immediate imprisonment

At the Powerline blog Scott Johnson reprints an article by Bruce Bawer from Gatestone Institute about the arrest and immediate imprisonment of Tommy Robinson in the UK.

The upside — and the irony — of this case is that the gag order, while silencing the British news media, has caused people around the world to take notice. To be sure, a quick tour of major mainstream newspaper websites in Western Europe, North America and around the Anglosphere turned up nothing. But on alternative news sites around Europe, the story was front and center. The Fox News website reported on Robinson’s arrest — but even Fox, frustratingly, insisted on calling him a “right-wing activist.”

Judi McLeod, editor of the Canada Free Press, began her article:

“Where is Tommy Robinson? A question whose answer should be demanded rather than merely asked…. Modern day Merry England has become far more nightmare than fairytale, as it steadily works its way toward ugly police state status.”

McLeod also challenged Fox’s label for Robinson: “‘Right wing activist’? How about civil rights activist or humanitarian activist?”

Read more here.

Do we really need children?

At American Thinker, Tom Trinko reports,

To maintain a stable population the fertility rate, the number of children an average woman has, needs to be about 2.1. In 1960 the American fertility rate was about 3.6 and in 2015 it was about 1.8.

This is a big deal; a similar problem is what is driving the Islamification of Europe. Contrary to some conservatives, Frau Merkel didn’t invite millions of poorly educated sharia law-loving Muslims into Germany just because she likes Islam. She did so because you can’t sustain a welfare state when your population is shrinking. The fertility rate in Germany has always been lower than the U.S., about 1.5 in 2015, so Germany is facing a serious problem due to a lack of Germans.

Read more here.

Overhearing Kerry's secret partner

At The Daily Caller, Peter Hasson reports,

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, a key architect of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, was caught on camera chanting “Death to America,” “Death to Britain” and “Death to Israel,” Israeli outlet Ynetnews reported on Saturday.

Zarif participated in the violent chants on Thursday after Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered a speech in Tehran, according to Ynetnews.

Zarif’s call for the destruction of America came less than two months after he secretly met with former Secretary of State John Kerry in mid-April to try and save the Iran nuclear deal.

Kerry’s “unusual shadow diplomacy” was ultimately unsuccessful, as President Donald Trump announced on May 8 the U.S. would be withdrawing from the deal. Iranian lawmakers responded that same day by setting an American flag on fire on the floor of parliament and chanting, “Death to America!”

Read more here.

Enjoy the warm weather!

Gregory Wrightstone writes at Lifezette,

...The blessed rise of temperature that we are experiencing is lifting us out of the death-dealing cold of the horrific Little Ice Age, when half the population of Iceland perished. The beginning of this warming started in the late 1600s, long before man could have had any effect on temperature.

In fact, the rate of warming over the first 40 years of the trend, extending into the early 1700s, was several times the rate of the 20th-century warming and was 100 percent naturally driven.

At least the first 150 years of our current warming trend were also entirely naturally driven — and contributed about the same amount of warming as the past 150 or so years, during which we have been adding CO2 to the atmosphere.

The question is not whether the planet is warming. It is, and demonstrably so. We know this from both direct measurement and thousands of historical records.

Related: Closed Enviro Minds Lead Massachusetts to Buy Russian Gas

The real question is, did the natural forces that were driving the temperature increase in the 17th century or, for that matter, over the past hundreds of millions of years, suddenly stop for some reason in the 20th century? Of course not, but that is what the ayatollahs of alarmism want you to believe.

So why the media firestorm and portrayal of the latest data as dangerous? H. L. Mencken warned us of imaginary “hobgoblins of alarm” that governments needed to create to frighten the population into accepting onerous regulations such as the Paris climate accord. Climate change today is one of those hobgoblins of alarm used to convince people that our current warming is “unusual and unprecedented” when it is neither.

Six hundred million months of below-average temperature, or 400 months of above-average temperature? Both are true, depending on which metric you choose to use, but the media are publicizing what is designed to best promote the political agenda of catastrophic climate alarm.

Read more here.

Can we be trusted?

FH Buckley writes at The American Spectator,

Put yourself in Kim’s shoes. He doesn’t need the nukes to protect himself against his own people. If he has a problem with someone he’ll rip them apart with a machine gun. He did that to a Defense Chief who fell asleep during one of his speeches.

And he’s not about to initiate a nuclear war with the United States. He’d be signing his death warrant, and he knows that.

So why does he need the nukes? Why, to protect himself from America idealism. His nukes are defensive. What he’s telling us is that he’ll attack us if we try to depose him.

As we did in Libya. It’s all about Libya. It’s always been about Libya.

Remember how the Obama administration greeted the “Arab Spring”? It brought down some American friends such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, as well some deranged miscreants such as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. It replaced them in Egypt with the Moslem Brotherhood and in Libya with the people who killed Ambassador Chris Stevens.

Ah, Libya. It was supposed to give us a democratic Arab nation, one as firmly committed to human rights as any San Francisco Democrat. The then-Secretary of State was so gung-ho for it that the Washington Post called it “Hillary’s War.”

What it got us instead was blackest chaos. The death of our ambassador and the death of Gaddafi.

Which is what’s going on in Rocket Man’s mind. He doesn’t need nukes to defend himself against his own people. He needs nukes to defend himself against the way in which American foreign policy idealism threatens him.

That’s why Trump has gone out of his way to signal a return to realism in foreign policy. We’re no longer in the business of regime-change, of nation-building, he’s announced. That was George W. Bush. That was Hillary. It’s not us.

If that promise were credible, Kim wouldn’t need his nukes. He only needs them against a Hillary Clinton.

So the question for Kim is, do I trust the United States?

Well, ask yourself. Would you trust us? Have we shown ourselves so consistent in our foreign policy, so credible, that we’ve earned the right to be trusted?

We didn’t make ourselves more credible by appointing John Bolton as National Security Advisor. I know, Bolton tells us he no longer believes in nation-building. But he carries a lot of baggage from the failed George W. Bush administration. With that kind of a history, he should be going out of his way to signal a return to realism, but old habits die hard with someone so imperious, so cocksure, so war-loving as Bolton.

Kim fears Bolton. He’s right to do so. What a spanner Bolton threw into the works when he mentioned Libya last week. Trump’s goal is to ensure that we’re not threatened by North Korea’s nukes. Kim’s goal is to ensure that he’s not threatened by the United States. To get there, we need to take the example of Libya off the table. By raising the issue Bolton reminded us of twenty years of American foreign policy failures and of how we can’t be trusted.

Which is why, in Trump’s shoes, I’d think of firing Bolton. Or at least of signaling to Kim that Bolton doesn’t speak for us. Trump needs to remind everyone of how he promised realism in our foreign policy.

Some liberals have expressed surprise that we aren’t seeking regime change in North Korea. That’s because they’re idiots. Realism, and the abandonment of foreign policy idealism is precisely what Trump has promised for the last two years.

Some conservatives have defended Bolton as the administration’s “bad cop.” We don’t need a bad cop, however. What is needed instead is realism, cynicism, and a recognition that both we and the Norks have a credibility problem. Bolton doesn’t help. He’s not dumb and he’s not especially sharp. He’s just a ventor cloaca.

Read more here.

Who is better than Branco?