Spooks sometimes like to make up their own rules. They're often up against a ruthless enemy of the nation, and it's tempting to think anything goes. It's becoming clear now that certain officers within the U.S. intelligence community took considerable liberties with the tools of their trade to watch certain civilians inside the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.
Japan emerged from World War II as a crushed survivor of its own ambition and cruelty, despised by the Asia it described as a "partner" in the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Asia was a very junior "partner" indeed.
Diplomat-speak is not President Trump's greatest talent, but recognizing threats to U.S. national security is, and the civilized world can be grateful.
President Trump's State of the Union speech was perhaps the best speech of his presidency and one of the best State of the Union speeches of any president of the modern era.
The growth of the Chinese economy has slowed to the lowest in three decades, suggesting peril to world security by the second-largest economy and principal trader. When China spits, as the proverb goes, Asia swims. The rest of the world gets wet feet, too.
The Constitution requires that the president "shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient." For Donald Trump, that "time to time" will fall Tuesday evening.
Troubled times are closing in on "the lucky country." Australia hasn't had a recession in almost 30 years, which is one good reason to call it lucky.
It used to be, when you lose an election, you had a trio of options: You could slink off into obscurity. Nothing wrong with that. Many honorable losers leave town with a discreet slink. You could run for a lesser office. Or, you can try again for the office you were booted from. (Richard Nixon, the patron saint of losers, did a version of all three.) There's a fourth option, too, but it's usually regarded as the fate worse than death. You could go home and get a job.
The Democrats have tried to sell the notion that there's no such thing as voter fraud in America — that it's only an urban legend that thousands of people who have no business in a polling place have cast illicit ballots and altered outcomes of elections.
The status quo on the Korean peninsula, which had been frozen in place for decades — binding northeast Asia, including Japan and China, in an icy embrace — has begun to show signs of cracking.
It's not true that the government shutdown, concluded over the weekend after 35 days of shutdown, accomplished "nothing." President Trump did not score a policy victory on the issue that led to the shutdown. The continuing resolution that is to run for three weeks, as signed by the president, does not include a dime of funding for a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border. The Mexican standoff over the Mexican border wall did, however, accomplish something important. It revealed just how radical the Democrats have become on the issue of immigration. In the run-up to the 2020 election elections, they have been smoked out. That's not nothing.
Once upon a time and not so long ago Venezuela was the most prosperous nation in South America. When the late Hugo Chavez took over as maximum leader, he put it on the road to socialist hell. Under his successor, Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela got there.
Justine Sacco was a public relations executive about to embark on a trip to South Africa back in the day of 2013. Before boarding her plane, Miss Sacco put up a lame joke to her 170 Twitter followers: "Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!" The joke was a clumsy attempt to lampoon the racial inequities of post-apartheid South Africa. She apparently confused AIDS, which has afflicted millions of whites, with Ebola epidemics, which have afflicted mostly blacks Africans.
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