Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac On March 31 the first round of Ukraine’s presidential election was held. In line with all polls, the top spot (with about 30 percent of the vote) was taken by Volodymyr Zelensky, a comic actor who played President of Ukraine in a popular TV series, making him the leading candidate for the...
One can almost hear an audible sigh of relief from the rogues’ gallery of criminal conspirators behind the phony Russiagate collusion story cooked up in the bowels of the US-UK Deep State with the aim of overturning the 2016 election. Now, after two years of the GOP’s dithering in the area of investigations and hearings...
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac It’s just incredible what a hullabaloo can erupt from the garbled account of just one spoken word. All week long the national media and political class have been in a tizzy over what Donald Trump was reported to have said in a closed-door White House meeting with Senators over DACA and immigration...
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac The campaign against memorials to long-dead Confederates seems to have taken a bit of a sabbatical. Perhaps the media have only paused the hype in favor the celebrity groping mania, or maybe pulling down or defacing outdoor art is not a cold-weather activity. In any case, the relative calm was a blessing...
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac One of President Donald Trump’s first actions after taking office was his Executive Order of January 25, 2017, instructing the Departments of Justice (DOJ) and Homeland Security (DHS) to deny federal grant money for local law enforcement activities to cities and counties refusing to cooperate with the federal government in dealing with...
Every living nation needs symbols. They tell us who we are as one people, in what we believe, and on what basis we organize our common life. This fact seems to be very clear to the current leadership in Russia, particularly to President Vladimir Putin, in restoring and reunifying a country rent by three generations...
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac The Trump presidency eerily inhabits two diametrically opposed realities. On the one hand, we have the Beltway Reality. This is a world where Donald Trump is friendless and on the ropes, the Kevin McCallister of American politics. His legislative agenda, starting with repeal of Obamacare, is stalled if not moribund at the...
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac Just imagine if a deranged Tea Party activist known to rant on social media against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had gunned down a bunch of Democrats. Would Republican officials get away with saccharine expressions of “this is an attack on all of us,” “we stand united,” and similar vacuities? Hardly. They’d...
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac On the heels of Donald Trump’s Oval Office visit with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other American and Russian officials, it finally seemed the fledgling US administration was turning the corner and making progress toward cooperation with Moscow against radical Islamic terrorism, particularly in Syria. Then the fake news came flying...
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac Here’s an interesting hypothetical. Suppose the Trump Administration’s game of chicken with Pyongyang goes wrong. Suppose it results in the vaporization of a goodly portion of Seoul’s 10 million-plus population, not to mention almost all of the 28 thousand or so American troops in South Korea. It’s not an unrealistic scenario. Sure,...
Letter from Pergamum-on-the-Potomac As the Stupid Party licks its wounds after the not-too-surprising disintegration of its bid to repeal and replace Obamacare, talk is again turning to abolishing the Senate filibuster with a “nuclear options” that would allow legislation to clear the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body (WGDB) with a simple majority of 51 votes (or...
As he completes his third week in office Donald Trump has already stunned the world with his “shock and awe” campaign to keep promises made when he was a candidate. The mere fact of a politician doing what he said he would do seems to have unsettled the nerves of his opponents. What is called...
By Edward Lozansky and Jim Jatras Departing presidents tend to fade from public consciousness surprisingly quickly once they leave office. Most at least have the good grace to assume a low profile on their way out to give their successors room to launch. Not Barack Obama though. The closing weeks of his tenure have seen...
During the presidential campaign Donald Trump horrified the bipartisan foreign policy mandarinate by suggesting that NATO was “obsolete” and useless against the only real threat faced by Europe: the massive influx of violent Muslims applauded by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the “EuSSR” bureaucracy in Brussels, and the Obama Administration. Trump also indicated that America’s treaty...
by Edward Lozansky and Jim Jatras With the defeat of Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump, we may never know how close America and all mankind came to nuclear war. Driven by the globalist agenda of the “indispensable” neoconservatives and liberal-interventionists calling the shots in a Clinton administration, it would have been only a matter of...
Every election cycle, we are told that “this” might be the most important ballot we ever cast. What if this time it turns out to be true? Maybe this election isn’t like the Super Bowl or the World Series, where fans of the defeated team can console themselves with “Wait ‘til next year!” What if...
by Edward Lozansky and Jim Jatras Perhaps one of the most used and abused political expressions in recent years has been that of “American exceptionalism.” Politicians and commentators routinely invoke it as high principle and accuse their opponents of insufficient devotion to it, or contrariwise blame it for all the ills of the world. For...
You’d think that after three and a half decades’ working in Pergamum-on-the-Potomac, not to mention over 17 years’ service with the U.S. Senate, one’s capacity to be scandalized would have been exhausted. But even this jaded observer can’t help being a bit shocked by the sheer sleaziness of the Obama Administration, Congressional leaders of both...
In view of the ongoing partisan MSM feeding frenzy over Donald Trump’s hot microphone comments about women, the question is raised over what constitutes impermissibly lewd thoughts, words, and actions. The following is a helpful guide: 1. LEWD. This means the way virtually all men sometimes think about women, with varying degrees of frequency; the...
“How American Media Serves as a Transmission Belt for Wars of Choice” Several weeks ago the mainstream media (MSM) gave saturation coverage to a picture of a little boy pulled from the rubble of Aleppo after his home and family were crushed in what was dubiously reported as a Russian airstrike. Promptly dubbed “Aleppo Boy,”...
Donald Trump caught a lot of people off guard with his proposal, spearheaded by daughter Ivanka, on child-care benefits. This is not familiar Republican territory. Of course, Hillary Clinton’s plan is more “generous,” promising 12 weeks of paid leave to Trump’s six. But there’s one, big fat difference that has been underreported: Hillary’s plan only...
No one paying attention with even one eye and half an ear can be ignorant of the fact that when it comes to this year’s election the MSM are lying shills for Hillary. But now it seems they’re all suffering from amnesia too. The latest “OMG, Trump said that!” moment is The Donald’s claim that...
If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, Scoundrel Time to the nth degree was on full display in Philadelphia last week. The closing days of the Democratic Convention featured an orgy of frenzied flag-waving (never mind the minimal presence of Old Glory at the opening) and orchestrated chants of “USA! USA! USA!” (doing double...
Donald Trump has made it clear from the beginning that he’s in it to win it. He has said that if he ends up losing the presidential race it will all have been for nothing: “If I don’t go all the way, and if I don’t win, I will consider it to be a total...
We’ve watched this movie before. We will soon watch it again. In mere minutes following the latest jihad attack in Nice—assuming another hasn’t occurred before this appears in print—the script had already written itself. Shockingly, it seems the perpetrator is—again!—a Muslim. What are the odds? Evidently, a Tunisian who moved to Nice is a “Frenchman.”...
by Edward Lozansky and Jim Jatras Since the end of the Cold War, American foreign policy could almost have been designed to undermine our national interests. Whether under Republican George W. Bush or Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, we have seen “regime changes” and “color revolutions,” facilitation of global jihadism while claiming to combat...
With his resounding victory in Indiana, the forces denoted by the Twitter hashtag #NeverTrump should fold up shop and accept the inevitable. Some of them will. Senator Ted Cruz had the sense to realize that his play to deny Donald J. Trump a first-ballot victory in Cleveland would find even less favorable ground in New...
This week Donald Trump ignited another furor, this time for asking the simple question of whether America’s commitment to NATO is worth it. The following day, Brussels was hit by jihad terror attacks. Johnny on the spot, Senator Ted Cruz accused Trump of surrendering to ISIS and to Putin in the face of the...
Tuning in last night, one could be forgiven for thinking the United States (or at least Miami) was no longer functionally an English-speaking land. Taking place under a backdrop proclaiming El Debate Demócrata, the exchange pretty much dispelled any lingering doubt that the Democrats are in any sense a party serving the interests of a...
President Obama’s final State of the Union address was long on themes and short on specifics. It clearly was an attempt to secure a legacy of accomplishment. That attempt is at best questionable. It is important to divide Obama’s record between what he failed to do and what he has succeeded in doing—most of it bad. Either...
The Iowa caucuses are under a month away, and the GOP Establishment is in white-knuckle panic that Donald Trump’s candidacy has not imploded. His rather moderate proposal for a temporary time-out on Muslims’ entry into the U.S. has gone the way of its predecessors in actually boosting his numbers. Allegations of sexist misuse of a Yiddish expression have fallen...