The Oasis for
Rational Conservatives
Tuesday, February 24, 2026
Happy Good Friday! This is a day of celebration for all Christendom – as the ancient Catholic catechism says, on this day, “Christ showed His great love for man, and purchased for him every blessing.”
And tonight, Passover begins for Jewish people around the world. Pesach Sameach!
Coincidentally, this is a good Friday for America, as proclaimed on the cover of today’s (4/19) New York Post:
And we’re just getting started. What a week – here we go!
We’ve seen maps of Africa all our lives – but most people have little if any grasp of just how large Africa is. It’s gargantuan – and with a bewildering number of countries. 50 in all. I’ve had the good fortune to have been to every one.
As I have learned, often the hard way, traveling in Africa is daunting – and often outright dangerous, extremely so. It is Africa’s misfortune that out of its vast size and over four dozen countries, there is a surprisingly small number of places that are both safe and worth going to.
Political instability, ethnic strife, humongous corruption and street crime are so widespread across the continent, you have to search hard for exceptions.
Plus, even if those were absent, where are there places that are really cool, bucket-list cool worth all the expense, time, and effort to get to and experience?
What’s in the special counsel’s findings is almost as revealing as what’s left out.
By the fall of 2017, it was clear that special counsel Robert Mueller, as a former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was too conflicted to take a detached look at a Russia-collusion story that had become more about FBI malfeasance than about Donald Trump.
The evidence of that bias now stares at us through 448 pages of his report.
President Trump has every right to feel liberated. What the report shows is that he endured a special-counsel probe that was relentlessly, at times farcically, obsessed with taking him out.
No wonder Obama talks of a circular firing squad, because Democrats are drawing a bead on other Democrats with malice. aforethought, and mayhem in their hearts.
Being intersectional (enjoy all the Urban Dictionary definitions) means never having to say you're sorry, and it also means demanding that everyone else say they're sorry.
Feminists like Pelosi are Islamophobes, gays like Buttigieg are racists, blacks are homophobic, and white men like Biden and Sanders are misogynist and classist, as the case may be.
No goofier notion ever invaded American political thinking than the idea of a coalition based on entitled victimhood and invented identity. Do Democrats want a Trump Landslide in 2020?
Pete Buttigieg is the latest star to emerge from Democrats’ 2020 pack, which is no surprise since he exhibits all the tropes we have come to associate with this party in the era of its Trump derangement.
On the evidence just of his attacks on Vice President Mike Pence, Buttigieg is a shameless liar, a calculating character assassin and an anti-religious/anti-free speech bigot, motivated by a virulent hatred of his political opponents, especially those who have been good to him like Pence.
Buttigieg’s chosen target is one of the most decent human beings in politics, who was supportive of Buttegieg both before he revealed he was gay and after.
Using a gracious and decent opponent as a prop in a hate campaign against Christians for political gain, tells you how low Democrats have sunk this electoral season.
The media’s bias has never been subtle, but its disinterest in a presidential candidate’s track record has never been this blatant.
Mayor Buttigieg’s candidacy is being covered as if he weren’t the mayor of an actual city with actual problems. Instead his prospects have been covered purely in terms of his identity, a gay millennial, his past career before taking office, and his current witticisms and applause lines.
At no point in time does the media stop to tell the viewers and readers it is regaling with stories of Mayor Buttigieg’s charm that he runs “one of the most dangerous cities in the United States,” according to USA Today.
South Bend is a crime-infested bloody mess, for which its mayor for the last eight years bears responsibility. And he has the gall to run for president?
I used to be a professional bridge player, a member of the “Omar Sharif Bridge Circus.” Sure, I believe in omens. Like most all card players I’m superstitious.
But my Italian friend Christian Rocca is surely right to point out that we have to start with the hard facts about the Notre Dame fire: the cathedral wasn’t destroyed, most of its treasures were saved, the damage will be repaired, nobody died, and the fire was not an omen of the decline and fall of Western civilization.
If anything, the very sad accident—as it seems to have been—suggests a very different theme, a theme of Western strength and endurance, perhaps even Western vitality and faith that many of our wisest and most eloquent thinkers see in perilous decline.
Take two examples from two or our very best, Rod Dreher and Dennis Prager. I must disagree with both.
Today (4/17), the Islamist dictator of Sudan for 30 years, Omar al-Bashir, was incarcerated in Kober Prison in Khartoum, the maximum security prison that held so many of the political prisoners Bashir put there. He was overthrown by his own military last Thursday (4/11).
Putin has now lost his key to his goal of an African Empire for Russia.
On orders from Russian President Vladimir Putin, his agent Yevgeny Prigozhin—popularly known as “the cook” because of his ownership of a catering company—has inserted “political technologists” in at least 20 African countries.
The Kremlin has for years viewed Sudan as an important base for this operation on the African continent. But the recent coup in this country shows how fragile and changeable is the foundation on which that Russian effort is based.
Donald Trump says “trade wars are good and easy to win” if your foes depend on your market and you can break them under pressure.
You see, he knows that China’s majestic and elegantly-stable GDP figures are best seen as an instrument of political combat. Which is why he proclaimed victory when the Shanghai equity index went into a swoon over the winter. This is classic Trumpian gamesmanship.
It is in China’s urgent interest to puncture such claims as trade talks come to a head. Xi Jinping had to beat expectations with a crowd-pleaser in the first quarter. The number was duly produced: 6.4%. Let us all sing the March of the Volunteers.
“Could it really be true?” asked Beijing-based Caixin magazine. This was a brave question in Uncle Xi’s evermore totalitarian regime.
Of course it is not true.
What’s that deafening sound? Wow it’s loud, like squeals from an entire sounder of stuck pigs. Oh, look! It’s the Democrats and their media lap poodles squealing in terror over Bill Barr about to slit their throats.
The AG’s Senate testimony on Wednesday (4/10) did it. TTP attached the video of his words to Kim Strassel’s Barr Brings Accountability this morning (4/12).
Yes, Roger Simon is right, that POTUS’ replacement of testicularly-atrophied Jeff Sessions is The Democrats’ Worst Nightmare.
When you watch the video in Strassel’s, note carefully Barr’s words after he says “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal.” He then says, “I’m not talking about the FBI necessarily but intelligence agencies more broadly.”
You can bet all three of Obama’s intelligence directors – not just FBI’s Comey, but CIA’s Brennan and National Intelligence Director Clapper – hearing those words suddenly noticed the red laser light dot over their hearts and said to themselves, “OMG, he’s targeting me!” You betcha.
All right, I confess. I am a nesophile. I’m addicted to nesophilia. It’s not on any list of psychiatric disorders, however. The term was invented – a “neologism” – by one of the 20th century’s most eminent philosophers, Sir Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997) in 1938 while in Ireland.
When there, he combined the Greek word nesos – island, with philia – love, and declared he was a nesophile – a lover of islands. That’s me.
I suppose that’s obvious by now – for I’ve lost count of the number of islands I’ve written about on TTP
And there are so many more to go! Yet I’ll be writing only about ones that are interesting, not even if they’re famous. I just got back from Majorca and Ibiza, for example. Nice enough, pretty enough – but, frankly, boring. There’s no real there there, as Gertrude Stein said about Oakland, California.
So let’s take a quick look at some islands that would blow Gertrude Stein away – such as the one that has the bed Napoleon died in.
Indeed. Here's what Trump’s foes have to be scared about.
No doubt a lot of former Obama administration and Hillary Clinton campaign officials, opposition guns for hire, and media members are stunned and scared that the Justice Department finally has a leader willing to address the FBI’s behavior in 2016
They all worked very hard to make sure such an accounting never happened. Only in that context can we understand the frantic new Democrat-media campaign to tar the attorney general.
Though they were excruciatingly obnoxious to William Barr at Tuesday's (4/09) House Appropriations subcommittee hearing, Democrats would be well-advised to lay off the attorney general, maybe even treat him with kid gloves, because he holds a good deal of the future of their party in his hands.
In fact, he is positioned to make that party bleed as perhaps no one in history. And it only makes it worse that he is clearly such a straight shooter.
The big story from Barr's testimony then before the subcommittee was not that the AG plans to release a redacted version of the Mueller report within a week or even that those redactions will be color-coded four ways and annotated to explain the reasons for the edits.
Here's the real big story, and it’s really big.
