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.

Special Counsel Mueller was himself appointed in rather strange circumstances.

Former FBI director James Comey deliberately leaked his own confidential notes about conversations with President Trump, hoping to prompt appointment of a special investigator to investigate a president — whom he said, also under oath, that he was not investigating.

Comey’s ploy worked all too well. Department of Justice officials, now in the Trump Justice Department but who once served in Barack Obama’s administration, selected Comey’s close friend and long associate Robert Mueller as investigator.

From that germination, an innate conflict of interest was born — given that Mueller’s appointment assumed that Comey himself would not come under his own investigation, a supposition that may be increasingly untenable.

Okay — one such conflict of interest swallow does not make a discredited spring.  But then, we now have an entire flock of such swallows.  Let’s count them.

By now it should be clear to every sentient American that the Mueller "investigation" is not an investigation at all.  It is, as President Trump and others have noted, a witch hunt.

As surely as the witch trials that began in 1692 were driven by hatred and hysteria, this one, too, is driven by hatred, intolerance, and fear.

The progressive left still refuses to accept the outcome of the 2016 election and has been trying to undo it by any means necessary.  The "collusion with Russia" meme was and remains a non-starter, so now the real motive for Mueller's appointment as special counsel is evident for all to see.

It was always to find a way to remove Trump from office.  The question now is:  Why is this travesty being allowed to continue?

The Alabama Senate election was about everything except Alabama.

And in the end, Alabamans stayed home and let the inevitable turnout tide of passion politics take its course. Minority voters rallied to Obama. Republicans stayed home. And the GOP is now holding on to a bare one-seat Senate majority.

The Democrats had abandoned Alabama, along with much of the South. They weren't interested in Doug Jones until they smelled weakness. And they still aren’t interested in representing Alabamans now. They just want another Senate seat to bring them closer to blocking and impeaching President Trump.

Alabama isn’t a place to them. It’s another chess piece in a Washington D.C. game that they can use to block judicial nominations, shut down the government and reverse the results of the previous election.

They have Alabama now, but history suggests that unless they learn the lessons that cost them their former strongholds in the South, they won’t hold on to the seat that they paid a very pretty penny for.

In the wake of President Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital last week (12/06), the “experts” crowding the media predicted strategic calamity: Vast, violent protests and a wave of terror would sweep the Muslim world in the coming days.

Instead, the largest demonstration anywhere this weekend was the funeral procession for Johnny Hallyday, the “French Elvis.” Nothing in the Middle East came close.

We have witnessed, yet again, the carefully phrased anti-Semitism of the pristinely educated; the global left’s fanatical pro-Palestinian bias; and the media’s yearning for career-making disasters.

But rather than waves of protest, the waiting world got tepid statements of disapproval from otherwise-occupied Arab governments.  An act of justice for Israel did not ignite Armageddon.

That’s because “Palestine” is so over.  Here’s why.

After Jack Wheeler wrote Trump Ends the Snipe Hunt for Middle East Peace last week (12/07), then discussed President Trump’s admiration for our 9^th President Andrew Jackson in the HFR of 12/08, I posted comments on the Forum connecting what I saw were the dots.

Jack was kind enough to ask that I flesh out my comments in a TTP article.  I’ll start with a synopsis.  If that intrigues you, read on!

My Synopsis

This will be interesting to watch. No one before Trump has attempted to apply Jacksonianism as a cure to the problems created by the Balfour Declaration.

History says that it might work. Jacksonian concepts of merit and decentralized federalism, deregulation, and local banking (vs politicized banking, racial, religious, and class identity politics) superseded the lingering European ideas that the British had counted on to re-conquer the United States with the War of 1812.

If President Trump’s approach works in the Middle East, then unleashing this proven antidote to socialism and identity politics will affect many more political regions than just the land between Egypt and Israel.  Particularly ours

The strength of the Jacksonian attitude is with its ability to break logjams and make things happen.  The Wikepedia entry for Jacksonian Democracy is worth reading, as you’ll quickly see the parallels between Jackson and Trump.

Here, I want to make an analogy between the Palestinians of our day and the Woodland Indians of Jackson’s time.

The president's decision to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem announced yesterday (12/06) is already sending the usual suspects into a tizzy.

The famous Arab Street, we are told, will be erupting.  The despicable fascist that runs Turkey has warned of imminent disaster.  And the president of France is doing what the French usually do vis-a-vis the Jews -- well, not quite that bad.

But the real question is how the Palestinians themselves will react once the dust has settled.

Will they continue decades of self-destructive violent protests that have led many of us to believe they never had an interest in a two-state solution in the first place, that it was all posturing for handouts?

Or will they grow up and realize the time has come to negotiate to a conclusion and accept the responsibility of their own state and the adult compromises that would naturally entail?

By finally moving U.S. policy at least two degrees off years of unimaginative stagnation, Trump has forced the Palestinians  to face some measure of reality.  But he is not alone. They are also being challenged forcefully by Congress.