There’s just one flaw in Xi Jinping’s plans for global economic conquest. It’s that China has run out of money. The $8 trillion headline figure for the New Silk Road is romantic fiction.

The Belt and Road – as it has become known since maritime links were added to the original Marco Polo caravan route – is China’s plan of infrastructure development and investments in 152 countries and international organizations.  Yes, 152.

It may have made financial sense when China was running a fat current account surplus. This reached 10% of GDP in the final stages of the export boom from 2004 to 2008.

Today, China’s current account surplus has essentially vanished. The International Monetary Fund thinks it will be 0.5% of GDP this year. It will then go progressively negative through the early 2020s.

The only thing uglier than an angry Washington is a fearful Washington. And fear is what’s driving this week’s blitzkrieg of Attorney General William Barr.

Mr. Barr tolerantly sat through hours of Democrat insults at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Wednesday (5/01). His reward for his patience was to be labeled, in the space of a news cycle, a lawbreaking, dishonest, obstructing hack.

Yet the attorney general delivered the transparency Democrats demanded: He quickly released a lightly redacted report, which portrayed the president in a negative light.

What do Democrats have to object to?  Some of this is frustration, some of this is personal, some of this is bitterness.  But most of it is fear.

They smeared him, called him a liar and said he should resign. The same Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee who tried to assassinate the character of Judge Brett Kavanaugh last year pulled the same stunt on Bill Barr — with the same result.

They failed because, once again, they were throwing mud while shooting blanks.

Despite the Dems’ desperate efforts to derail Kavanaugh’s nomination with false accusations, he is now on the Supreme Court. Barr was obviously prepared for his mud bath and was unflappable in the face of Wednesday’s mean-spirited assault, proving himself to be a rock-solid attorney general.

As he said at his confirmation hearing, “I won’t be bullied,” and he wasn’t.  Now they’ve poked the tiger – very big mistake.

Hillary Clinton recently editorialized about the second volume of special counsel Robert Mueller’s massive report.

She concluded of the report’s assorted testimonies and inside White House gossip concerning President Trump’s words and actions that “any other person engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted.”

Psychologists might call her claims “projection.” That is the well-known psychological malady of attributing bad behavior to others as a means of exonerating one’s own similar, if not often even worse, sins.

Psychologist might then conclude her projection means she’s very worried about the certainty of being indicted herself.

The Democrat Party is so unrecognizable today because it’s gone.  The name is still there.  Some of the old faces are there.

But the party of John Kennedy, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Barbara Jordan and Zell Miller is dead.

Today’s Democrat Party is hollowed out by a chronic addiction to hyper-partisan controversies that only mimic the feeling of being alive.  Controversy gives Dems a constant drip of political dopamine they could never find in solving real problems. And they’re hooked now.

So, we’re witnessing a case of shared psychotic disorder that’s driving the party to self-medicate. Drug of choice? Donald Trump. Democrats are so impaired by their craving to “get Trump” that they imbibe day-in and day-out despite the deadly consequences to their party and to the country.

Last year, Ryan Fournier expressed the frustration felt by so many regarding the three men above:

Since then, nothing has happened to any of them.  Here’s why.

We are witnessing an extraordinary collapse of the rule of law in our immigration system as hundreds of thousands of migrants exploit our generous asylum system by making bogus claims of asylum after entering the United States illegally.

Caravan after caravan of illegal aliens from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador continually are pushing toward our border.  Mexico is warning that the “mother of all caravans” – over 20,000 people – is gathering in Honduras.  Border apprehensions exceeded 100,000 in March – the highest monthly total in twelve years.

I just visited the border yet again recently.  Unfortunately, the news is not getting better.  Indeed, there is no end in sight for the current crisis.  Worse, official U.S. policy is creating three massive incentives for the caravans to keep coming.

These three incentives are policies of Obama’s that the Trump DHS has kept instead of eliminating.  Why?

The Russian navy, the Military-Maritime Fleet (Voyenno-Morskoy Flot—VMF), always a poor relation to the Russian Land Forces given geography and national traditions, has been contracting in size since 1985.

Now, as Izvestia announced last month, it is going to decline still further because of a decision by the Ministry of Defense to scrap two major surface vessels and four submarines rather than modernize these aging Soviet-era naval assets (Izvestia, April 18).

Defenders of this decision say these ships will be replaced by more capable vessels, but even they concede that the new craft are not going to join the fleet anytime soon.

All this has sparked a debate in Moscow about whether the Russian VMF is capable of supporting Moscow in the war that Vladimir Putin keeps saying is coming or even in more limited theaters. The overwhelming answer from independent experts is “No.”