Just before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 passed last week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told us what she thought of the bill in the proverbial "no uncertain terms" –

“In this holy time, the moral obscenity and unrepentant greed of the GOP tax scam stands out even more clearly...  This GOP tax scam is simply theft, monumental, brazen theft from the American middle class and from every person who aspires to reach it. The GOP tax scam is not a vote for an investment in growth or jobs. It is a vote to install a permanent plutocracy in our nation.”

Well, the latter is almost always reliable – for when it comes to "permanent plutocracy in our nation" few should know more about that than Nancy.  According to the Center for Responsive Politics, she has a net worth of $196 million.

Truth is, it’s the Democrats who are now the Party of the Rich – Silicon Valley, Hollywood, media, much of Wall Street – and they are going to pay for it Big Time in 2018.

The original Civil War was fought by farmhands and factory workers, freed slaves and young boys turned soldiers; the new Civil War is being fought by lawyers in blue or gray suits not with bullets, but with bullet points.

From the Mueller investigation to Federal judges declaring that President Trump doesn’t have the right to control immigration policy or command the military, the cold civil war set off by the Left’s rejection of the 2016 election results has been a paper war largely waged by lawyers.

The left’s legal civil war appears to reject the authority of the Federal government. Yet despite the posturing, blue staters aren’t serious about seceding. Nor have they become newfound converts to the rights of states to go their own way when they disagree with DC.

New York and California’s #resistance apparatchiks aren’t rejecting the authority of Federal judges. They’re turning to them and relying on them. Instead they’re rejecting the authority of elected Federal officials. Their secession isn’t from the Federal government, it’s from democracy. They want a strong central government. They just aren’t willing to allow the American people to decide who gets to run it.

That’s what the Paper Civil War is about.

The members of Barack Obama’s administration in exile have become conspicuously noisy of late—even more so than usual.

Former CIA Director John Brennan accused Donald Trump and his administration of engaging in “outrageous,” “narcissistic” behavior typical of “vengeful autocrats” by threatening proportionate retaliation against countries that voted to condemn the United States in the United Nations, as though that were unprecedented.  It is not.

James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, all but alleged that the president is a Russian “asset.”  He isn’t.

Perhaps the most acerbic and incendiary series of accusations from the former Democrat president’s foreign-policy professionals were placed in the New York Times by Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice. In her estimation, America has abdicated its role as a “force for good.”

It’s no coincidence that these overheated condemnations accompany abundant evidence that the Trump administration is finding its legs. As the last administration’s undeserved reputation as sober-minded foreign policy rationalists is dismantled one retrospective report at a time, its jilted members are lashing out.

Iran’s geopolitical ascent is the most significant and dangerous development in the Middle East this century.

But while the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy properly identifies Iran as among the important challenges to U.S. security interests, it doesn’t offer a concrete strategy on how to counter Iran’s growing regional power.

President Trump should follow the example of President Reagan, who pursued an offensive strategy to undermine the Soviet Union that included supporting indigenous anti-communist insurgents around the globe: the Reagan Doctrine.

Today, America should support indigenous forces that oppose – and seek independence from – Iranian domination: a Trump-Reagan Doctrine.

The Democracy Dies in Darkness Café is located conveniently near the Capitol, the Hill and the FBI headquarters. It’s open all night and I stopped in for a late-night coffee with my friend, a fiction novelist who was depressed.

“I spent a year writing about a coup attempt against an outsider who by strategic brilliance defeated the handpicked candidate of a cabal of establishment powerhouses” he explained. “It involved the highest officials of the FBI and Department of Justice. They manipulated a FISA Court into letting them electronically surveil the candidate and all who worked with him, unmasked their names, leaked what they found, and they still couldn’t beat him.”

“Sounds great,” I said, so why are you depressed?”

He sighed. “Every publisher I sent it to rejected it as being too implausible to sell to readers.”

It was hard to talk much as the place was rocking. There was a private room to the side, packed with white collar criminal defense counsels drinking champagne and downing tenderloin. Every single one of them had fat retainers to defend the accused, the top brass of the FBI and former Department of Justice officials.

Presidential administrations by law must publish strategic manifestoes.

Indeed, the Goldwater–Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of October 4, 1986 required every subsequent government to issue periodic and formal national strategic strategy blueprints.

Most of these documents dating from the Reagan Administration are blah-blah boilerplate announcements of the obvious.

They offer platitudinous promises of a sober internationalist United States leading the world in promoting global institutions while using its preeminent strength to partner with allies to counter perceived rising threats, such as rogue nations or terrorism. And so on.

The Trump Administration has just released (12/18) its first National Security Strategy.  Here is the White House Summary.  Here is the Full NSS Text as a pdf download.

But to be frank, it is unlike most all prior manifestoes. The contrast with the 2015 Obama doctrine (his last, there was none in 2016) is stunning.  Let’s take a look at why it’s so stunning.

There was a lot of good news in President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) — the document which finally told the truth about climate change: that green activists pose a bigger threat to U.S. security than anything the climate can manage.

But nothing in the NSS is likely to provoke quite so much fury among environmentalists as one of the clauses buried among another of the Trump administration’s recent reform measures: the bit in the tax-reform package which permits part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to be opened to oil exploration.

Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) has long been a Sacred Polar Bear for environmental campaigners. It’s their line in the snow: the ne plus ultra of pristine wilderness, majesty, and loveliness to be preserved at whatever cost. Democrats have been fighting to prevent it being developed for oil since the 1970s.

So Trump’s announcement that soon oil companies will be allowed to explore there is about as a big a provocation as if he’d turned up to the Sierra Club’s summer vegan barbecue, spit-roasted a baby manatee, and served it up with a snail darter reduction and spotted owl sauce.