The rhetoric about the so-called “War on Terror” has led us down the wrong path for 20 years. Terrorism is a tactic. We are not at war with terror.

Similarly, our fight is not against radical or extreme Islam. When it comes to the Middle East, particularly Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran, it is imperative that we understand the true nature of the threat.

We are fighting Islamic Fascism—the political idea in which state actors or nonstate actors are using Islam to rule people through the use of violence. This is not about Islam itself, but rather about belligerents hijacking the religion for their own political purposes.

The ongoing war in Afghanistan has shown that we can’t win with just guns and money; we have to win the war of ideas. To permanently defeat the Islamic Fascists, we must first delegitimize their ideology.

The only way to do this is by ensuring the success of two areas being governed in the exact opposite manner, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria and the proposed Nineveh Plains Province.

It is popular on the NeverTrump Right and everyone on the Left to claim that President Trump has “failed” as we head into an election year. But his supposed failures are instructive.  Like Fake News, they are Fake Failures.

Take the wall.  After three years of mockery insisting Trump has not built his wall, he nonetheless has attempted almost every imaginable method to do it. And now the invective over the last few months has begun to alter.

If Trump between 2017 and 2019 was mocked as an obsessive Ahab pathetically and in vain chasing his Great White Wall, he now is being redefined as a dangerous xenophobe, whose American version of the Maginot Line may soon become dangerously reified.

The same ambiguity is true of many of Trump’s other “failures.”

2024? What? Don’t we have the 2020 presidential election to deal with first? Has the fat lady already sung?

Yes, maybe she has.

Just look at the booming economy with lowest-ever unemployment, the utter failure of the Mueller Russia investigation (with severe punishments for the investigators themselves possibly ahead), the embarrassing, ludicrously partisan impeachment – plus Trump’s extraordinarily well-organized, high-tech 2020 campaign under the management of Brad Parscale and Jared Kushner that even the devoutly liberal Axios couldn’t help but admire.

So, on to 2024.

Many wise pundits and political commentators keep saying Nancy Pelosi didn't want to do this impeachment... that she's smarter than this, that she was forced into it by the ridiculous, ignorant women who call themselves the Squad.

These same pundits claim that the Squad is now running the Democrat party.  But this does not make any sense, since Pelosi admitted a week or so ago, when asked why she was rushing impeachment, that the Democrats had been at this for twenty-two months!

Of course they have, for even longer than that.  As several Democrats have admitted, the plan to impeach began while Trump was still a candidate.  The plan is Nancy’s and still is.

From the first years of a century already one-fifth completed, we’ve been told that a new, “ascendant America” — more nonwhite, more culturally liberal, more feminist — was going to dominate our politics for years to come.

But President Trump’s victory in 2016 has made a mockery of the predictions. He wasn’t ascendant America’s choice.

Demographics, it turns out, don’t automatically turn into destiny. Ascendant groups’ triumphalism can coalesce those with opposite values into unaccustomed unity and enthusiasm. Ascendant leaders, not cautioned by sympathetic media, can concoct extreme policies (Green New Deal, anyone?) unsellable to most voters.

Rep. Alexandria O-C (D-NY) (aka Alexandria Occasional-Cortex, herein abbreviated “O-C” may have anticipated a long and prosperous career in Congress, but if the Democrats in New York’s state legislature have their way, the freshman Member may be out of a job as soon as 2022.

According to pollster Frank Luntz, New York is likely to lose a seat in Congress after the 2020 census and Democrats in the state legislature will have to redraw the state’s Congressional districts as a result.

Although there are plenty of places to cut, New York Dems are reportedly eyeing O-C’s Bronx district for elimination because she’s been out of sync with state-level Democrats who control the process.  They really, really don’t like her.

The year 2019 might go down in history as the funniest 365 days in American politics. “Get-Trump” videos work as a pretty good stand-in for funny cat videos: Always taking themselves too seriously, overreacting to stimuli, and exhibiting a hilarious lack of self-awareness.

So, in order to spread some New Year cheer, I have compiled a shortlist of my favorite videos of get-Trumpers and their hilarious hijinks. Let’s get right to the list:

12) If we don’t impeach, he might win the election.

How do the get-Trumpers respond to the argument that the American people can decide for themselves in 2020 whether to get rid of Trump? The ironically-named “Democrats” say, “Yes, and that’s the problem!” No, really. I’m not making this up. U.S. Representative Al Green (D-Texas) was asked, “Are you afraid this talk will help the president’s re-election?” Green responded, “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected.”

The Wall Street Journal sends a daily email to subscribers with highlights from the news. Today’s (12/26) email begins:

“Stocks and bonds are staging an extraordinary run. They are on track for their biggest simultaneous gains in more than two decades. The S&P 500 has soared 28.6% this year, while a bond rally has pushed the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note down by three quarters of a percentage point. Yields move inversely to prices.

Behind this year’s gains: An improving economic outlook, progress on trade and the Fed’s interest-rate cuts.  The progress on trade includes, most recently, China’s announcement that it will lower tariffs on more than 800 product categories.”

And that’s just for openers for good news for all Americans.

Republicans dismiss Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to transmit the impeachment articles to the Senate as a weak stunt. They do so at the peril of both the Constitution and President Trump. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may be a master tactician, but Mrs. Pelosi is no slouch.

It’s now been more than a week since the House impeached Mr. Trump, and Mrs. Pelosi has yet to name impeachment managers or formally send over the paperwork. Democrats claim they are delaying in the name of “fairness,” withholding the articles until Mr. McConnell agrees to new witnesses and evidence in a Senate trial.

Republicans are ridiculing the tactic, pointing out that Mrs. Pelosi has no authority to dictate the form of a Senate trial and no leverage over Mr. McConnell.

Both points are true but irrelevant. Republicans err in thinking Mrs. Pelosi’s goal is to craft a Senate trial to her liking—and even in presuming Mrs. Pelosi wants a trial at all.

[Note by JW:  This is absolutely one of VDH’s best.  Here is the money quote.  Consider sending the quote to everyone you know.

 “If and when fascism comes to America, it will not arrive with jackboots, stiff arms, and military uniforms. The attempt to suppress political opposition in anti-constitutional fashion, to regiment the economy by denying constitutionally protected freedoms, and the efforts to change the Constitution to reflect political utility, will come under the auspices of ‘equality,’ ‘fairness, ‘saving the planet, and ‘social justice—as a way to combat ‘climate change,’ ‘racism,’ ‘homophobia,’ and ‘sexism’.”  ---Victor Davis Hanson

Be sure and read and absorb this masterful VDH essay entire. – JW]

We hear a great deal these days about the “deep state,” especially as it applies to the Trump Administration. The president’s supporters use the term to describe the entrenched federal bureaucracy and what they believe to be its efforts to derail the president’s policies.

Until recently, the president’s critics have dismissed the idea of a deep state as a crazy right-wing conspiracy.  But, in fact, the deep state is a particularly virulent form of the “administrative state,” which has been described by such scholars as John Marini, Ronald Prestritto, and Paul Moreno as a perversion of constitutional self-government.

It is a “fourth branch of government” that fits nowhere within the scheme of the Constitution as understood by its authors. It is enabled by Congress’s unconstitutional delegation of its legislative powers to the executive, leading to the creation of the pestilent “alphabet agencies” that plague American life.

Last Thursday (12/19), the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, Mark Galli, wrote an editorial calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump.

In my view, this editorial only serves to confirm one of the sadder realizations of my life: that religious conviction guarantees neither moral clarity nor common sense.

The gist of the editorial -- and of most religious and conservative opposition to President Trump -- is that any good the president has done is dwarfed by his character defects.

This is an amoral view that says more about Galli than it does about the president. He and the people who share his opinion are making the following statement: No matter how much good this president does, it is less important than his character flaws.

Why is this wrong?