"The Iran war must end with a decisive victory. And that victory can only be achieved in one of two ways..."

"Either Iran capitulates or the U.S. launches a final flurry of military strikes. Trump has given the regime every opportunity to sue for peace, and it has rejected his overtures. It is admirable that Trump is taking his time. He understands that what he is doing is important and cannot be rushed. But it is also true that he cannot declare victory until either Iran cries uncle — or he finishes the job."

Writes Marc A. Thiessen in "Trump is 14 days from decisive victory in Iran/The regime won’t deal and the blockade alone won't break it. Only military action will" (WaPo).

ADDED: Elsewhere in WaPo, there's "What will happen when the clock strikes 60 days on Trump’s war/Clinton's precedent will allow Trump to keep fighting Iran without congressional approval."

"The 20 best things Trump did in 2025/The accomplishments of a stunning year can’t be captured in just 10 items."

Marc A. Thiessen itemizes the good, over at The Washington Post. That's a gift link, so you can see if you agree with the ranking and with the characterization of these things as good. You might want to read some of the comments, which can't believe what an awful idiot Thiessen is. 

"The scandal here is not Trump’s willingness to accept the gift of a plane, but Boeing’s utter failure to deliver the planes it promised Trump in his first term."

Writes Marc A. Thiessen, in "Yes, Trump can accept an airplane from Qatar. Here’s why he shouldn’t. Just because Donald Trump can take Qatar’s largesse doesn’t mean he should. Qatar is a nasty regime" (WaPo).

Legally, the U.S. government is in the clear to accept the donation of an aircraft from a foreign government. The precedent was set by Congress in the 1990s, when it authorized the president to accept from any person, foreign government or international organization financial and in-kind contributions related to operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm. The United States took in more than $50 billion from Germany, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and other countries. Current law authorizes the defense secretary to “accept from any person, foreign government, or international organization any contribution of money or real or personal property… for use by the Department of Defense.”....

"These men are all caught with their pants down, and Theissen marvels at how well-endowed they are."

That's the top-rated comment at Marc Thiessen's Washington Post column "The Signal chat’s big takeaway? Trump has built an effective team. Americans got a fly-on-the-wall view of a group working together to execute the president’s policy."

"Designer Behind President Zelensky’s White House Outfit Defends the Choice."

A headline at Women's Wear Daily.

Who knew Zelensky had a designer?

I ran across that article looking for confirmation of something I happened to see — here — in The Washington Post: "Even after Zelensky refused a White House request to wear a suit, Trump praised his outfit, saying, 'I think he’s dressed beautifully.'"

Zelensky was asked — in advance?! — to wear a suit?! This is the first I'm seeing that.

From Women's Wear Daily: "Zelensky turned up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue wearing a three-button knitted long-sleeve polo shirt from [Elvira] Gasanova’s menswear label Damirli, as well as pants from the collection. She had made a special version for Zelensky with the emblem of a tryzub, a shield with a trident that is the coat of arms that Ukraine adopted in February 1991."

The above-linked WaPo column is "Zelensky must mend the breach with Trump — or resign/Zelensky's stubbornness has badly hurt Ukraine" by Marc A. Thiessen. Excerpt:

"Harris’s closing argument is dishonest, desperate and hypocritical/Trump isn’t a fascist, and he didn’t say he would use the military against his political opponents."

Writes Marc A. Thiessen, in The Washington Post. That's a gift link, so you can read the whole thing. Excerpt:

In their miasma of outrage, Democrats seem to have forgotten that they have been demonizing Republicans as “enemies” for years. During his noxious 2022 speech in Atlanta, President Joe Biden accused Republicans who opposed his proposed federal takeover of our elections of standing with traitors such as Confederate president Jefferson Davis and explicitly called them “enemies” of America, thundering: “I will defend the right to vote, our democracy against all enemies — foreign and, yes, domestic.” Barack Obama famously declared “We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us” (He later conceded that he should have used the word “opponents” instead.)

"So, Harris is trying something no sitting vice president has ever attempted: running as an insurgent and treating Donald Trump as the incumbent."

"In her telling, she is the fresh new face on the political scene, while Trump is the one running for reelection. She is asking voters to forget that she co-presided over an unprecedented panoply of disasters over the last four years and is now campaigning on a message of denying Trump another term. This is absurd. Democrats have been in power for the past 3 1/2 years and have held the White House for 12 of the past 16 years. But, so far, that strategy is working.... Trump needs to make clear that Harris not only helped craft those Biden catastrophes, but also she plans to double down on the administration’s failures — and that a Harris presidency would be a second Biden term."

Writes Marc A. Thiessen, in "A sitting VP has won once in 188 years. Harris won’t likely be next. Only one sitting vice president has been elected to the top office in the last 188 years" (WaPo).

"You might think journalists would want to get to the bottom of how they were duped so that they could repair the reputational damage to themselves and their industry. Apparently not."

Writes Marc A. Thiessen in "The Durham report is a damning indictment of the FBI — and the media" (WaPo).

It was the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee that funded the Steele dossier, which relied on a Russian with suspected ties to Russian intelligence. The FBI then included the dossier as part of the materials it used to investigate Trump, paralyzing our country, undermining a newly elected president for two years while costing tens of millions of dollars — all over what ended up being a conspiracy theory.

ADDED: Let me carp about copy editing. This sentence — which I put in the post headline — is miswritten: "You might think journalists would want to get to the bottom of how they were duped so that they could repair the reputational damage to themselves and their industry." The phrase "they were duped so that they could repair" needs rewriting, because journalists were not duped so they could repair their reputation. They should "want to... repair the reputational damage." You might think columnists would want to see these double meanings and eliminate them. Apparently not.

My spellcheck is questioning the word "reputational." It is a real word, but it's an ugly and unnecessary word. Why write "reputational damage" when you could write "damaged reputation"? "Damaged reputation" looks more natural, and it's more accurate, because the thing to be repaired is the reputation, not the damage. You could leave out "damage[d]" altogether. It's redundant. You can't repair what's not damaged.

"The difference between is that Carter was a bumbling fool. Biden is destroying this country on purpose."

That's the most-responded-to comment at a WaPo column by Marc A. Thiessen called "It’s the 1970s all over again, and Joe Biden is the new Jimmy Carter." 

That commenter says: "The headline for this piece is all wrong. Biden is nothing like Carter. He is much much worse. He is trying to make this country into a socialist communist place." 

From the column: 

"President Biden promised to usher in a golden age of bipartisan cooperation, but instead he is showing a reverse Midas touch..."

"... taking issues that once united Republicans and Democrats and making them partisan and divisive," writes Marc A. Thiessen (at WaPo).

Until Biden came along, every single covid-19 relief bill was approved with overwhelming bipartisan support in both houses.... For Biden, who promised to put his “whole soul” into uniting Republicans and Democrats, passing a bipartisan covid bill should have been a layup. I mean, Trump did it five times. But instead, the president has turned unity into division by using covid relief as a pretext to pass all sorts of liberal spending projects that have nothing to do with the pandemic....

There has long been strong support among Republican leaders for an infrastructure package of as much as $1 trillion. But instead of uniting Republicans and Democrats around a bipartisan deal, Biden is using infrastructure as a pretext to spend more tax dollars on things that have nothing to do with infrastructure. A Politico analysis of his $2.25 trillion proposal found that only $821 billion, or 37 percent, is focused on traditional infrastructure items such as transportation, electricity and Internet....

How does Biden justify the hyperpartisan start to his presidency? Just as Democrats redefined “infrastructure,” the president is now trying to redefine “bipartisanship.” Biden recently declared, “I would like . . . elected Republican support, but what I know I have now is that I have electoral support from Republican voters.”

FROM THE EMAIL: Iain writes:

The President has spent his entire career as a windsock, showing us all the direction of the prevailing winds that would keep Joe Biden in public office and in the public eye. He's always been a partisan hack, but with his own electoral interests front and center. That he is now touting division as unity and partisanship as bipartisan is a sign of either his cognitive decline and weakened independence or of his reading that this is the way the wind is blowing. Or both. Wind direction, or the perception of it, can differ if there is an obstacle between you and the wind, or something that alters the wind in a small area to appear directionally different from the actual prevailing winds. Time will tell, I suppose, which way the winds are actually blowing.

And Bob Boyd writes:

"Biden...promised to put his 'whole soul' into uniting Republicans and Democrats"

That's like promising to put a mouse turd into a double batch of oatmeal cookies.

Does Joe Biden ever take questions?

I wondered... and did this Google search:



I was amused — in a dark, scary way — by the first headline that came up — "Trump needs to stop making fun of Joe Biden’s mental lapses" in The Washington Post. I want Joe Biden's brain tested by questioning him in front of us, the people, so we can judge for ourselves. But the WaPo piece — a column by Marc A. Thiessen — looks like another example of what, for me, is making much of the news unfit for human consumption. Whatever happens is turned into a way to say Trump is bad.

Thiessen's argument is twofold: 1. Trump is hurting his own cause by lowering expectations for Biden (because now Biden can be perceived as doing well if he does nothing more than "string together a few coherent sentences"), and 2. It's "offensive to seniors." Thiessen advises Trump to shut up about the problem and just "let Biden continue to show" his deficiencies. Well, that would be better, but the press is protecting Biden! They're not putting him to the test.

The other link I clicked on from my search was: "Chris Wallace on Trump interview: He took all the questions, Biden hasn't faced the same scrutiny" (Fox News):

“The fact is, the president is out there. He's out there in this broiling heat with me for an hour, he took all the questions. You can like his answers or dislike them but he had answers and Joe Biden hasn’t faced that kind of scrutiny, hasn’t faced that kind of exposure,” Wallace told Fox News’ Bret Baier on Monday.

“You’ve got to feel at some point he’s going to come out from the basement ... he’s gonna have to be more exposed and take questions just as tough as the ones I asked this president,” Wallace said. “He’s gonna have to do it with a bunch of people and, of course, he’s going to have those three debates with the president and you know that the president can handle himself in these debates... I think there is an open question there, can Joe Biden do the same?”

Then Baier asked a question that tracks what Thiessen said in his column:

“Just from a political analysis standpoint, is there a danger here, going down this road?" Baier asked. “In other words, all Biden has to do is show up and the bar is very low for him to have a success.”

Wallace reveals this is the conventional opinion among Republicans:

Wallace responded, “That’s what a lot of Republican strategists are worrying about. If you set that bar, and the expectation so low for Biden... three presidential debates, if he shows up and doesn’t drool his supporters can say, ‘Well he had a good debate.’”

I'm suspicious of this line of reasoning, because Trump shutting up on this topic — his opponent's mental weakness — is also consistent with the massive collusion to protect Joe Biden. If Trump doesn't keep this subject going, it might allow the people to become complacent about the topic. Oh, Joe Biden, he's just, you know, the thing, you know the thing, the guy, the guy, you know, the guy that's not... you know... not Trump!

"And, most important, Pelosi and Schumer failed to use the one word that millions of Americans were longing to hear — compromise."

"But Trump did. That is why the president won the night. Schumer and Pelosi appealed to their base, while Trump made an effective appeal to persuadable Americans."

Writes Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post.

Here's the text of Trump's speech, if you want to look for where Trump used the word "compromise." He uses it twice, but both times it's about not compromising. First, there's a criticism of those who oppose the wall and won't compromise:

How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job? To those who refuse to compromise in the name of border security, I would ask: Imagine if it was your child, your husband, or your wife whose life was so cruelly shattered and totally broken?

Second, there's a refusal to compromise "safety and security":

My fellow Americans, there is no challenge so great that our nation cannot rise to meet it. We can re-open the government and continue to work through disagreements about policy. We can secure our border without an expensive, ineffective wall. And we can welcome legal immigrants and refugees without compromising safety and security.

But perhaps he does, overall, sound conciliatory.

I watched the speech in real time last night, and it was much more moderate than I expected (because I was expecting him to announce that he was going to use "emergency powers" to build the wall). I haven't watched the Pelosi/Schumer response. But I will.

ADDED: I've now watched the Pelosi/Schumer response. I observed my emotional reaction, and I can tell you for sure that the line that reached me was "The fact is: the women and children at the border are not a security threat, they are a humanitarian challenge – a challenge that President Trump's own cruel and counterproductive policies have only deepened" (spoken by Pelosi).

The word with emotional resonance for me was "humanitarian." So I went back to the text of Trump's speech, and I see that he used the word in his first sentence:

My fellow Americans: Tonight, I am speaking to you because there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border.

And, to skip ahead to the 6th paragraph:

This is a humanitarian crisis — a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.... 

"In the wake of Donald Trump’s abortion gaffes, it should finally be clear that Trump is not a real conservative..."

"... he is the liberal caricature of a conservative."

Since Trump does not actually understand what pro-life conservatives truly believe, he mindlessly echoes the liberal caricature of pro-life conservatives. He mistakenly thinks this is what these conservatives want to hear. They don’t. This is, however, what liberals want to hear. They want a Republican candidate who feeds their false “war on women” narrative. They want to run against the caricature of the pro-life position, because the caricature is ugly. And Trump is giving them precisely what they want....

"Who wants to be Obama’s judicial kamikaze pilot?"

Nice column title — for Marc A. Thiessen in The Washington Post. Of course, it assumes Obama's nominee will not make it, and I'm not convinced of that. Nevertheless, it's a risk to be the person who gets thrown out there to the beasts in the political arena. But you may get through it, and if you do, you're there for life, just like Clarence Thomas, who survived a more vicious thrashing than anything that could plausibly happen to this new character. 

The reason I think the nominee might make it is that Donald Trump is the likely GOP candidate for President, and he can't be trusted to nominate a truly conservative person. Efforts at getting a reliably conservative Justice often fail anyway, and I don't expect Trump even to want a hard-core Thomas/Scalia-type conservative. Trump isn't opposed to abortion rights and gay rights and the rest of the things that torment social conservatives. That's my reading. I could be wrong. But my point is: The Senators, thinking about how they want to play out their roles in the Theater of Confirmation, should be able to predict — if and when Trump becomes the Republican nominee — that the next President isn't going to give them an old-time conservative. It doesn't matter who wins the election — Hillary or Trump — there's no one to hold out for.

The GOP Senators should be looking at: 1. The political benefit to be squeezed out of the drama of wielding the confirmation power, and 2. Who Obama actually nominates. Obama may pick someone moderate, because he predicts the GOP Senators will figure out that it's in their interest to take that person and to look good exercising their role in a dignified, elevated fashion. But Obama might predict that behavior and go for someone liberal enough to trigger a bad-looking response from the GOP Senators. What does Obama want more — another person of his choosing on the Court or to muck up the GOP in the fall elections?

That's how I'm thinking. Thiessan, by contrast, thinks that anyone who accepts the nomination is committing career suicide by serving as "Obama’s pawn in an unwinnable fight." Thiessan is obviously in the game himself. I think I'm looking at the chessboard from a more distanced position and seeing quite a few moves and many different outcomes — including the one where a failed nominee gains stature and goes on to write and comment on the legal/political scene in a vigorous, rewarding post-nomination career.

"They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none."

Said Donald Trump at the last debate.  Marc A. Thiessen, at WaPo, says:

This is uninformed left-wing claptrap. Trump’s allegation was definitively refuted by the bipartisan WMD commission led by former senator Chuck Robb (D-Va.) and Judge Laurence Silberman. Silberman has called Trump’s allegation that Bush lied “dangerous,” writing “it is one thing to assert . . . that the Iraq war was ill-advised. It is quite another to make the horrendous charge that President Bush lied to or deceived the American people about the threat from Saddam.”...

Thiessen goes on to reveal his hopes that Trump's "rantings should backfire" and hurt him in South Carolina, where George W. Bush is, we're told, popular, and he's been suddenly released to pump up his as-yet-unpopular brother. Trump also put some blame on GWB for 9/11:

The World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign, remember that. That’s not keeping us safe. . . . And George Bush — by the way, George Bush had the chance, also, and he didn’t listen to the advice of his CIA.

That's not "truther" territory, though Thiessen dishonestly calls it such: "It turns out the front-runner for the GOP nomination is a 9/11 'truther'...." A truther believes or explores the belief there was a conspiracy behind 9/11 that included GWB. Trump is obviously only adverting to the warning that Osama bin Laden was determined somehow, somewhere to strike in the U.S.

This is the realm of conspiracy theory. In Republican circles, it is heresy. And in normal times, it would be disqualifying for a candidate seeking the GOP presidential nomination.

Thiessen is plainly overdoing it, making accusations that it takes 3 seconds of clear thought to reject. Ironically, he's the one ranting. Trump's statements are strong and surprising, but they're not wild swinging. These aren't stray thoughts that popped out of his head, but carefully framed statements. Trump comes across as spontaneous, but he is prepared. The statements are simple, but these are thought-out punches, not ravings. Thiessen and others would like us to think of these statements as ravings, as if Trump is deranged. A better question is: Why is Trump taking this track?

Rush Limbaugh got into that zone of inquiry yesterday:

And the things that Trump said and did Saturday night came out of nowhere.  They didn't make any sense.  Here we are in a Republican primary, and Donald Trump, out of the blue, starts blaming the Bush family for 9/11, for knowing that the intelligence was made up, that there never were any weapons of mass destruction, and they knew it, Trump said. Michael Moore doesn't even say that.  The World Trade Center came down when George W. Bush was president so don't anybody tell me, Trump said, he kept us safe.  He jumped all over the Bush family and the Iraq war...

And, "Donald Trump defended Planned Parenthood. Not the abortion stuff, he said, but the fact that they do great things for women's health." So, Rush asks, "What's going on?... Donald Trump sounded like the Daily Kos blog... like the Democrat Underground... like any average host on MSNBC... he went to liberal Democratville." Rush doesn't go to the stupid/crazy/dangerous explanation. He says: "Trump strategically was making a move on independents and Democrats in South Carolina since it's [an] open [primary]." And he's not just trying to win the South Carolina primary. Rush theorizes that Trump is looking ahead to the electoral college and trying to get the polling to show that he could beat the Democrat in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and even New York. That is, before the nomination is sewn up, we could be seeing a potential to win (in November) states that the other GOP candidates might write off from day one.

Rush talks about the anger we're seeing in both parties' races and how the anger roiling up needs somewhere to go:

Why is Trump saying these things about Iraq and 9/11? (Multiple answers ok.)

He's got an overemotional and disordered mind.

He's an entertainer. It's for the fun and the thrills.

He's throwing things out there to see what works, a trial and error method.

He's saying what he really believes.

He's expressing thoughts he at least somewhat believes and thinks might work.

He's got a brilliant plan and we never see the whole plan at once.

He's already repositioning for the general election and wants Democrats.

He wants to be the go-to guy for all the angry people.

 

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"Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, a potential contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination..."

".... is collaborating on a book with Marc Thiessen, a former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush."