Signs of life at the Supreme Court.

Is the Supreme Court stirring itself to do what it was established to do, which is to say, act as the last bulwark against governmental encroachment upon the proper functioning of the Constitution? Have they at last taken notice of a hyper-partisan and abusive Department of Justice?

Two current cases suggest that possibility.

The first is Fischer v. United States. The High Court is considering the way in which January 6 defendants are being prosecuted by the Department of Justice. Joseph Fischer, the named appellant in the appeal to the Supreme Court of a lower court ruling, is a proxy for more than 150 individuals who were charged in the wake of the Capitol riot of January 6, 2021.

Fischer, et.al. are charged by DOJ with “obstruction of an official proceeding” under the Sarbanes-Oxley financial crimes law that was passed in the wake of the collapse of Enron in 2001. They face up to 20 years in prison. Fischer argues that the DOJ impermissibly stretched the Sarbanes-Oxley statute to cover a crime it was never supposed to cover so as to maximize the punishment of January 6 defandants.

At least some of the Supremes are taking notice. During oral arguments, Justice Neil Gorsuch asked the solicitor general representing the DOJ, “Would pulling a fire alarm before a vote qualify for 20 years in federal prison?”

That question was intended to call attention to Democratic Congressman Jamaal Brown, who did just that to delay a vote he knew his side was going to lose. Brown was not prosecuted. Gorsuch’s question thus also highlighted the difference in prosecutorial treatment by the DOJ as determined by one’s party affiliation.

In Trump v. United States, the former president asserts immunity for acts taken while in office. The acts in immediate question have to do with Trump’s objections to irregularities that he and many others allege altered the outcome of the 2020 election. The government alleges that Trump’s vociferous objections incited the events of January 6 and that he should therefore be held criminally liable.

As to immunity, DOJ argues that the motivations of the president should determine if those acts are immune, and further asserts that DOJ should have sole discretion to divine presidential motivation. Justice Samuel Alito questions such sweeping DOJ discretion, “…given its history of abusive partisan prosecutions.”

Of apparent concern is the increasing proclivity by a deeply politicized and highly partisan Department of Justice for using its enormous prosecutorial power to corral, stifle and silence political opposition.

Presidents make decisions every day. Motivations for those decisions are varied and complicated and almost never cut and dried. Any decision can be second guessed.

Trump’s lawyers argue that presidents would be effectively paralyzed by the constant fear that such ex post facto second guessing by a politically hostile DOJ could lead to prosecution upon leaving office.

That would gut the presidency.

Based on what we’ve seen at oral arguments, it appears that the Supreme Court has at last taken notice of these very real constitutional concerns.

It’s about time.

Decisions in both cases will come this summer.

Buckle up.

The mythology of elite higher education.

Go to Merriam-Webster.com and look up the word, “myth.” You’ll see six definitions. Events in the current news cycle cause the definition marked “2a” to pop off the page. It reads:

…a popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or someone; especially: one embodying the ideals and institutions of a society or segment of society.”

Consider this definition as you look upon the mayhem at our elite universities. The esteem in which American society holds top-tier universities has truly attained mythic status. Schools such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia and rest of the “Ivies” on the east coast, and schools like USC, UCLA and Stanford on the west coast, are generally perceived as among the best universities in the world. At one time that perception may have been rooted in reality. At one time, the selectivity of these schools and the academic rigor meant that their graduates could count themselves among the best of the best.

But five decades of incremental leftist takeover of these top-tier schools have exacted a heavy toll. To an alarming degree, the academic rigor and institutional commitment to honest and open debate that once defined our elite universities has been corrupted by tenured faculty committed to leftist indoctrination.

The result can now be seen in the antisemitic chaos that has engulfed schools like Columbia and UCLA and that has left the administrations of these institutions looking feckless and weak.

That state of play now calls our attention to definition “2b” of the word, “myth.” It reads:

an unfounded or false notion.”

To the extent that schools like Harvard, Yale and Columbia were at one time among the very best in the world, here in 2024 such is no longer the case. If you doubt me, turn on your TV and watch as privileged, coddled, mostly white liberal kids are allowed to make idiots of themselves even as they are aided and abetted by their unaccountable leftist professors.

Certainly, there are still great professors at these schools teaching really bright kids really important things. Certainly, these schools continue to offer rigorous course material that prepares students for success at the highest levels. But that remaining healthy academic tissue is being crowded out year-by-year, semester-by-semester by the metastatic advance of radical leftism.

It’s no coincidence that the craziest of the crazy protests are happening on the most elite of our college campuses and that those campuses are in the most liberal precincts in the country.

Which means that if you aspire to have your college-aged son or daughter attend one of these elite universities, you are aspiring to a myth.

A diploma from Harvard, Columbia, Yale, etc. will cost about $350,000 yet won’t carry the cachet it once carried nor be the evidence of a superior education that it once was.

Or, put another way – there have been no antisemitic protests at schools in the heartland of the country such as UT Tyler, Wichita State or Kansas University.

No sir.

Those kids are too busy getting ready for finals.

Coming full circle at Columbia University.

Some good comes from everything – even the worst of things.

In support of that assertion, I offer the anti-Jewish, anti-American, pro-idiot protests now happening on elite college campuses such as Columbia University. The good that I see is the growing awareness – particularly among the parents of college-aged kids – that something has gone terribly wrong in American higher education.

It has been a long time coming. Those of us that are old enough remember the campus protests of the 1960s. We have, in a way, come full circle. Columbia University was the site of the first of a series of demonstrations against the Vietnam War on college campuses that began in the spring of 1968.

At Columbia, militant students staged protests that included taking over Hamilton Hall, a building that housed both classrooms and administration offices. Administrators at Columbia were eventually forced to call in the NYPD to restore order. (Give them credit. At least those kids understood what they were protesting.)

The March 1968 Columbia University protest is credited with starting the campus protest movement. It’s also credited by some scholars with pushing American higher education sharply to the left. In his book, The Closing of the American Mind,” University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom said, “American universities were no longer places of intellectual and academic debate, but rather places of ‘political correctness’ and liberalism.”

So, here we are, 56 years later back at Columbia, and that leftward push now has American higher education on the edge of the Marxist abyss. Examples abound. Here’s one.

Thanks to the reporting of Cal Thomas at Townhall.com, we are introduced to Professor Mohamed Abdou, who is described on Columbia’s website as, “…a North African-Egyptian Muslim anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition and decolonization.”

Said professor Abdou on his social media feed, “Yes, I’m with Hamas and Hezbollah and Islamic jihad.”

(And to think you can get this for your kid for just 90 grand a year.)

The good that comes from this is that even the casual observer can now see the leftist rot in American higher education in its full flower.

That clarity has parents asking very pointed questions about what a lifetime spent saving up is going to pay for at the colleges their sons and daughters want to attend. Wealthy alums are closing their checkbooks. New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is one such alum. He made that announcement this week, saying, “The school I love so much – the one that welcomed me and provided me with so much opportunity – is no longer an institution I recognize.”

It took a long time for the higher education pendulum to swing so far to the left. It will take time for it to swing back. But perhaps that swing has begun. If so, good for Bob Kraft and others like him. And good for the parents who are asking the tough questions. Perhaps we are seeing a long overdue awakening and a critical first step on the long road to restoring sanity to American higher education.

Hannity is right. Journalism really is dead.

Several years ago, Bob Schieffer of CBS News spoke to journalism students at SMU in Dallas. I was an unofficial guest.

The moderator asked Schieffer about disintermediation in media. That is to say the internet’s empowerment of bloggers and social media posters – the people who no longer need to be at a place like CBS to practice journalism.

“Well,” laughed Schieffer dismissively, “that’s not journalism. We have editors. We have standards. Before something gets on the air, it has been fact checked and vetted. That’s not the case with some random person out there reporting on the internet,” he said, with a self-satisfied smile.

I will go to my grave regretting what I’m about to tell you.

As I say, I was a guest. I had no standing. The event was for the students. I therefore felt bound to mind my manners and to not create an awkward moment for the organizers. So, at Q&A time, I refrained from asking the obvious question.

So, Mr. Schieffer, where were your vaunted editors and fact-checkers and what happened to your lofty newsroom standards with respect to the phony 30-year old letter that Dan Rather featured on ’60 Minutes’ saying that George W. Bush shirked his duty while in the National Guard? Wasn’t it in fact, sir, a blogger – a ‘random person out there’ – who debunked the fakery and in so doing, did the real journalism on that story?”

Please forgive me – I will never forgive myself – for not asking that question.

It was then that I began appreciating just how smug, insulated, provincial and toweringly condescending the members of America’s elite media really are. These people live together in a bubble and spend their days affirming to one another their own superiority. Nothing penetrates the bubble.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: How are these people “mainstream?”

This Schieffer anecdote illuminates what has happened since last week’s column in which we detailed how Uri Berliner, an NPR editor of 25 years, blew the whistle on NPR’s ever-increasing and ever-more obvious leftist bias.

Berliner’s thoughtful essay at The Free Press provided an opportunity for some much-needed introspection at NPR. A thoughtful response to his exposé would have been to convene a meeting of top brass and editors and rank & file reporters to consider the possibility that Berliner has a point.

But NPR – along with ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, et.al. – have no interest in any point that Mr. Berliner might have. Their sole interest is the advancement of their predetermined leftist narrative. Nothing can come in the way – least of all a balanced assessment of facts and a considered hearing of dissenting points of view.

So, NPR suspended Berliner for five days and told him he’d be fired if he dared speak out again. Berliner has since resigned.

Example made. Problem solved.

Sean Hannity says it all the time and I’m afraid he’s right. Journalism in America is dead.

That’s no small thing. The need for an informed citizenry in a free republic is enshrined in our very founding documents.

The accelerated devolution from that ideal is going to cost us. Dearly.

A liberal journalist’s full confession.

Uri Berliner is a senior business editor at National Public Radio – NPR. He has been there for 25 years. This week he did the unthinkable. He pulled back the drapes, threw the windows open wide and let disinfecting daylight shine into the newsroom at NPR.

In a Tuesday Free Press article, Berliner gives up the game on what is still called “journalism” in America.

That someone like me might be critical of NPR isn’t particularly noteworthy. But Berliner’s article is especially noteworthy because of his inside status and because of his self-description as a Sarah Lawrence-educated, Subaru-driving New York liberal. “I fit the NPR mold,” he says. “I’ll cop to that.”

Give the man props. I have met few liberal coastal elites capable of such personal insight.

In his amazingly detailed and candid essay, Uri Berliner blows the whistle on the left-wing bias that guides every important editorial decision at NPR. As an example, he admits that NPR went all in on the Russia collusion story solely because they thought it would hurt Donald Trump. Here he is on Bari Weiss’s podcast called, “Honestly.”

After a while we started covering Trump in a way like a lot of the legacy news organizations – that we were trying to damage his presidency. Anything we could to harm him. And I think what we latched on to was Russia collusion, like a lot of news organizations, which was, as I write, sort of catnip, although it was just rumors and a lot of it based on pretty shoddy documents or evidence. It wasn’t really solid. But I think it was compelling.

In other words, they just couldn’t help themselves.

RELATED: The New York Times revealed

Berliner further admits that for as much as they wanted to damage Donald Trump, they on the other hand didn’t want to damage Joe Biden. So, they made a purely political — as opposed to journalistic — decision to ignore the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Berliner’s piece has muzzle velocity. It’s nothing short of a full confession.

But the real story here isn’t NPR per se. It’s American brand name journalism in general. Take Berliner’s story, and wherever NPR appears, substitute any of ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, the New York Times or the Washington Post. The story still stands up.

Berliner’s essay gains significance the more you think about it. It does nothing less than help explain why we, as a society, are at each other’s throats.

It was Thomas Jefferson who said:

It is to me a new and consolatory proof that wherever the people are well-informed they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.”

But journalism in America has abandoned the mission of helping the people be well-informed and has taken up political activism instead. The horrifying results are now on display.

To be sure, Uri Berliner is still a coastal liberal. But give him credit.

He’s at least honest.

America in need of therapy.

Some time ago I attended the seminar of an ordained protestant minister who gave up the pulpit in favor of going into private practice as a licensed therapist. He called his practice, “Reality Acceptance, Inc.”

It was his observation that if he could get patients to accept reality – which is to say accept the truth – the need for therapy would go away.

He told us that getting patients to accept reality is much easier said than done. Most patients, he said, would rather rationalize their pathological behavior than face the uncomfortable process of changing it. He went on to say that of all the animal species on Earth, the human species is the only one capable of rationalization.

And there you have a near perfect explanation of our politics today. A very large proportion of the people who vote are engaged in rationalization on a massive scale. Let’s take just two examples.

Unfettered, unvetted mass illegal immigration is unsustainable and dangerous. It hurts everyone, but none more so than minorities and poor people. Mass illegal immigration poses a threat to national security, public safety, public health, and public education. Illegal migrants crowd out American citizens for base labor and entry level jobs, which disproportionately hurts minorities and poor people. This is true whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat.

But Democrats believe that they will ultimately profit from illegal immigration by creating a massive cohort of people who, being dependent upon the kinds of liberal social welfare benefits that Democrats support, will vote accordingly. They rationalize that kind of cynicism by telling themselves that they’re helping poor people have a better life. They choose not to acknowledge that what they’re really doing is making poverty permanent.

Regarding poor people and social welfare benefits, the massive federal spending that funds those benefits is also fiscally unsustainable and dangerous. Among its many ill effects is the resulting inflation, which makes it increasingly difficult for people to afford food, transportation and shelter – thus increasing the need for social welfare benefits. This is also true whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat.

Those are just two examples. There are many others ranging from a woke and shrinking military that is fixated on gender pronouns at the expense of readiness to DEI programs that are bringing about the very ill effects of racism that DEI programs are supposed to address to colleges and universities that have abandoned classical education in favor of progressive indoctrination.

The reality is that we can’t afford illegal immigration, we can’t afford massive federal deficits, indoctrination over education never ends well and we suffer a weak and woke military at our peril.

These are the sorts of things that the majority of us once accepted as realities. The fact that such broad acceptance no longer exists goes a long way toward explaining the candidacy of a polarizing guy like Donald Trump.

So, grab the tissue box. America is going to be spending a lot of time on the therapist’s couch.

The prophecy of George Orwell.

The word “Orwellian” is an adjective that describes a societal condition that English author George Orwell regarded as antithetical to the ideals of a free and open society. His famous 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, centers on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation. It was Nineteen Eighty-Four that put the pejorative term “Big Brother” into the cultural lexicon.

American entrepreneur Gordon Bowker, one of the co-founders of Starbucks, perfectly defines Orwellianism:

Orwellianism isn’t just about big government. It’s about authoritarianism coupled with lies.”

Bowker’s definition is aptly applied to the Biden administration. The latest example comes from the Environmental Protection Agency. This week, the EPA released a slew of strict automotive exhaust regulations intended to aggressively push adoption of electric vehicles via the mechanism of regulating internal combustion vehicles out of existence. The stated goal is for EVs to comprise 70 percent of new vehicle sales by 2030 – just six years from now.

This EPA regulatory zeal is driven by a Biden administration fixation on climate, a fixation that borders on being a fetish.

We haven’t the space for a dispositive discussion on the reasons that an ill-considered headlong mass conversion to EVs is a bad idea. The full list is too long.

But the short list includes the fact that EVs are too expensive for most people to buy (particularly in the absence of the individual federal tax credits that have propelled EV sales so far); the fact that the mining of rare earth minerals necessary for making EV batteries does enormous environmental damage; and the fact that the U.S. power grid as it sits doesn’t come close to having the capacity to charge millions of electric vehicles.

Oh, and there’s one more reason. Consumers don’t want them. Just ask Hertz Rent-a Car CEO Stephen Scherr, who this week was pushed out of his job for having bet too heavily on EVs to the tune of billions of dollars in losses.

But it’s not really about EVs anyway.

What it’s really about is who gets to decide how you live your life. Here’s a hint. The Biden administration doesn’t think it’s you. And they won’t stop with cars.

They’re on to cows. Flatulent cows pass gas that the enviros tell us is destroying the climate. Don’t be shocked when the USDA regulates beef into scarcity driven by unaffordability.

If your car is relatively new, it’s already trackable. When you start getting punitively taxed on your excessive mileage, remember that I warned you.

Did you install one of those smart thermostats that you can control with your phone? Great. If you can control it, so can your government-regulated electric utility. Big Brother will decide for you if your house is cool enough.

Your car. Your house. What you eat. What else?

Control over your life by an Orwellian bureaucracy acting beyond the reach of the ballot box is limited only by the imagination. And if nothing else, leftists have vivid imaginations.

George Orwell was more than a novelist. He was a prophet.

What really matters.

For the umpty-umpth time, please let me disclaim that I know that Donald Trump is an imperfect human being. I’ll stipulate that he can be painfully boorish. I acknowledge that he is given to exaggeration (though I simultaneously point out that his exaggerations are usually grounded in clearly observable truth).

He frequently “punches down” against his critics when remaining silent would better serve. His name calling is too often gratuitous.

I also say again that I wish these things weren’t so.

But with that said, he also has his virtues – principal among which is that he isn’t insane. And given what we’ve suffered these past three-plus years from the Biden administration, that alone recommends him for a return to the White House.

Allowing 10 million poor, unskilled, unvetted migrants from every corner of the globe to cross into the country illegally and then remain here unsupervised is insane.

Certifiably insane.

It’s insane because self-harm is prima facie evidence of mental illness. And current administration immigration policy is the very embodiment of national self-harm.

In any large population cohort, there is a statistical certainty that a percentage of them will be criminals, drug dealers and other bad actors. Allowing millions of people to pour into the country illegally guarantees the importation of criminals and fentanyl just as it guarantees the importation of an uncomfortably large number of incipient terrorists.

Proposing a national budget that intentionally adds $3-plus trillion to an already unsustainable and life threatening $34 trillion national debt is insane.

Turning the armed forces into a national social experiment in gender identity is insane.

Mandating a poorly considered rush to electric vehicles that will result in deep dependence upon China – our principal adversary – for the batteries to power them is insane.

Trump may be unlikable to some. But he’s not insane.

Since his now famous escalator ride in 2015, I have had countless conversations with people – Democrats and Republicans – who can’t stand Donald Trump. Those conversations usually go something like this:

“I hate Trump.”

“Why?,” I ask.

“He’s just horrible.”

“OK, which of his policies as president did you find to be so horrible?”

“Well, his tweets, and the way he puts people down and calls them names and the way he has treated women.”

“OK, I might not disagree with you on those things. But my question was about policy. Which of his policies did you object to?”

At this point, the person I’m conversing with – stuck for an answer to my policy question – usually says something like,

“Well, let’s just agree to disagree.”

Look, if you just don’t like Trump’s personality, that’s fine. But personality isn’t policy and policy is what matters. Particularly now.

Trump’s immigration policy was sane. His foreign policy was effective. His regulatory policy unleashed enormous economic growth. Ditto his energy policy.

It comes down to this. The country was more prosperous and the world less dangerous when Donald Trump was president.

Consider that and consider what we have now I’ll happily put up with Trump’s personality shortcomings.

Buckle up.

I recently returned from a broadcasters conference in Washington, D.C.

At a Tuesday session, we listened to a pair of political pros – one Democrat and one Republican – brief us on the state of the presidential race. They told it straight. No party spin. No talking points. Just a candid assessment of where things stand.

The Dem was honest about Biden’s vulnerabilities. The Republican was equally candid about Donald Trump.

They agree that 2024 is going to be a Trump-Biden rematch.

The impression the Dem gave was one of accepting – without directly coming out and saying so – that the odds now favor Trump. The Republican cautioned to never underestimate the unique Republican capacity for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

One of them – and I honestly now can’t remember which – said something important. He said that we’ve never had full acceptance of the results of 2016. That fact colored what was already going to be a contentious, COVID-colored 2020 election.

Buckle up, then, for 2024.

I recall saying to my wife a week or so following the 2016 election that the Dems – gobsmacked by Trump’s unthinkable victory – would need a little time to have their freakout before eventually getting over it.

Boy, was I wrong.

In addition to members of Congress promising impeachment even before he was inaugurated, in addition to demonstrations by women wearing headgear intended to represent more southerly anatomy, in addition to celebrities holding up beheaded effigies of Donald Trump, official Washington – aided and abetted by the Hillary Clinton campaign – spun up the “Russian collusion” yarn to explain Hillary’s otherwise (to them) inexplicable loss.

The three-year Mueller probe – intended to delegitimize Trump’s presidency – followed. The FBI, the Department of Justice, top Dems and top members of the corporate media all knew the Russian collusion story was a crock. It didn’t stop them.

As to 2024, any doubt as to Trump becoming the GOP nominee was laid to rest on Super Tuesday. Doubts as to his likelihood of returning to the White House diminish in direct proportion to Joe Biden’s cratering poll numbers.

The Real Clear Politics average of polls has Trump leading by a factor greater than the margin of error in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada — four of the six battleground states. If you’re betting the grocery money, put it on Trump.

And if you thought the lefty meltdown was over the top in 2016, just wait. If Trump wins, this hissy fit will be several orders of magnitude worse. The Left will stop at nothing to cripple a second Trump administration. Nothing will be out of bounds.

2016 is going to seem like a church social.

And be clear about this. Though the incandescent reaction by the Left will be targeted full force upon Donald Trump, he’s not really the target.

The real target is you – for being so manifestly stupid; for showing such blatant disrespect for your social and intellectual betters; and for having the temerity to vote for the candidate of your own free choosing.

Seeing the race with perfect clarity.

I am a man of many deficiencies. (Ask my ex-wife.) But being muddled and confused and unable to see things clearly is not one of them.

I have superb clarity as to the 2024 Republican primary season.

It’s over.

Oh, sure, we have Super Tuesday next week. Fifteen states – including California and Texas – are holding primaries (or in the case of Alaska, a caucus). Nearly three quarters of the delegates needed for the nomination are still up for grabs.

After Super Tuesday, there will still be 30 state primary elections on the calendar. These things are what keep Nikki Haley going.

But none of it matters. It’s over. The remaining primaries are mere formalities. Donald Trump is the Republican nominee.

I’m not the least bit confused as to what that means. It means pure and simple that Republicans have a binary choice. Get on board with Donald Trump, or, run the all-too-real risk of giving Joe Biden what would certainly be a catastrophic second term.

There is no third option. Thus, the word, ‘binary.’

For all who have expressed concerns about a Trump 3.0 candidacy – present company included – it’s time to get over it. We’ve had our say.

Yes, Trump is given to verbal excesses that gain him nothing while costing him with independents and moderates. Yes, it’s entirely appropriate to worry about the effect that the avalanche of grotesquely unfair attacks on Trump by the unhinged Left and the partisan media will have on those independents and moderates. Yes, Trump’s legal challenges are draining precious time and resources – and will continue to do so all the way to November.

These concerns have all been given due consideration. Republican primary voters have made their decision. They want Donald Trump.

If you call yourself a Republican or a conservative, it’s time to respect that decision and get behind it.

The polls show Trump leading by a factor greater than the margin of error in four of the six battleground states. That’s great. Make no mistake, though. Joe Biden could still win the election. So far this year, the Dems have raised half again more money than the Republicans. That matters.

But here’s what matters more. If Biden wins, it will validate the abominable tactics of the increasingly radical Democratic Party. “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime,” – a quote attributed to Joseph Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria – will become standard procedure against every Republican candidate for president from now on.

Another 10 million of the world’s poor (along with unknown numbers of its criminals) will pour into the country across our southern border.

Crime will further destroy cities.

And Lord alone knows what Xi Jingping and Vladimir Putin will do. (Hint: nothing good.)

So, Nikki Haley, you Never Trumpers, you “traditional” Republicans. The country is on the line. Whatever your concerns about Trump, they are dwarfed by the cold, relentless, unremitting fear of a second Biden term.

So, get over it and get on board with the Republican nominee.

It’s crunch time.

The wisdom of John Adams.

John Adams was the first vice president of the United States and he didn’t much care for the job. He is famously quoted as having described it as:

…the most insignificant office ever devised.”

But in a less famous quote, he also said:

I am vice president. In this I am nothing. But I may be everything.”

All our adult lives we have largely looked upon the party nominee’s selection for VP through Adams’s insignificant office lens. We pay only nominal attention to who the presidential nominee picks as a running mate, and that attention is almost totally driven by political considerations. We talk about how the VP nominee might help with this or that group of voters, or how the VP nominee might help bring his or her state across the finish line in the Electoral College.

But events today call upon us to consider the office from Adams’s “I may be everything…” perspective.

Here’s why.

The White House’s contortions of language to the contrary notwithstanding, it is now obvious to any observer possessed of even the tiniest shred of objectivity that President Joe Biden is badly diminished.

Just listen to the progression of his decline.

Here he is at the Vice-Presidential debate against Paul Ryan in Danville, KY on October 11, 2012 (and disregard what he says and instead concentrate on how he says it):

Let’s look at where we were when we came to office. The economy was in freefall. We had the Great Recession hit. Nine million people lost their job. One point seven, $1.6 trillion in wealth lost.”

That was a bit more than 11 years ago. He sounded sharp.

Here he is from the second presidential debate against Donald Trump in Nashville in October 2020.

I represent all of you, whether you voted for me or against me. And I’m going to make sure that you are represented. I’m going to give you hope. We’re going to move. We’re going to choose science over fiction.”

A little weaker but still OK.

But here he is last Friday in East Palestine, Ohio:

I also want to thank…uh…, EPA administrator here with me…[unintelligible]…okay…Administrator Regan…as well.”

Political pundits are punditing as to whether he hangs on to become the 2024 Democratic Party nominee. What about hanging on to the end of his term? If he doesn’t, here’s what we get to take his place:

Talking about the significance of the passage of time. Right? The significance of the passage of time. So when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time.”

That was Vice President Kamala Harris – someone I regard as an industrial strength idiot – a year ago in March in Sunset, Louisiana.

The two presumptive nominees for president in 2024 are 81 and 77 years old. If elected, either will be a one-term president.

Which is to say, 2024 will likely prove that John Adams was right. The vice president could very well be everything.

Let’s hope, at the very least, that Donald Trump picks accordingly.

The leadership we wish we had.

I’m only a casual football fan. I can’t run down the names on the roster for the Dallas Cowboys. My life doesn’t go on hold every Sunday afternoon in the fall. I like the game. I like watching it. But I’m not eaten up with it.

I do watch the Super Bowl every year. Only I tend to avoid Super Bowl parties in favor of watching in my own chair eating my own food. And when the game is over, I’m over it.

But I’ll admit. This Super Bowl got to me.

I watched this Super Bowl with a bit more interest than usual for the simple reason that we in East Texas had a dog in the hunt named Patrick Mahomes. I don’t usually care who wins. This time I did.

The game was boring until it wasn’t. And with it tied at the end of regulation, it was anyone’s ball game. Given how well the San Francisco defense had held the Chiefs all day, some of the smart money was on the ‘Niners to win it.

But when Kansas City held San Francisco to a field goal and got the ball, I said to my daughter, “Kansas City’s going to win this thing.”

And they proceeded to prove me right.

With everything on the line, Patrick Mahomes’s performance was a thing of beauty. You could see the coming victory on his face when he took the field following the touchback of the San Francisco kickoff.

Watching him lead his team when it was win-or-go home, watching him convert two fourth downs and one third & long on the way to setting up first & goal, was a tour de force. He was calm. He was confident. He was in charge.

In the post-game show, wide receiver Mecole Hardman, who caught the winning touchdown pass, said of Mahomes:

How much confidence is there in the world? Whatever that is, that’s what we have in him.”

One of the virtues of NFL football is the fact that it remains a pure meritocracy – among the last in the culture. The ideologically blinded scolds of wokeness and DEI have exactly zero influence in roster decisions. The only way to get a job playing football in the NFL is to be the very best of the best. I am fond of saying that the worst player on the worst team in the NFL is one hell of a football player.

This Super Bowl got to me because of the state of things all around it. The country is a mess. The political leadership – on both sides of the aisle – doesn’t evoke the confidence among Americans that Chiefs players have in Mahomes.

What a relief then, however momentary, the Super Bowl was. For a few hours, talent, hard work and confident, selfless leadership were given the room to flourish.

According to the TV ratings, we ate it up.

In our politics, we don’t have an analogue to Patrick Mahomes. The Lord knows we could use one.

Dangerous and uncharted territory.

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: This column is a revision and a re-posting of the column that I originally published Thursday afternoon. This reposting was necessitated by developments that occurred shortly after that original publication.

Yesterday, Robert Hur, the special counsel appointed to investigate the mishandling of classified material and documents by President Joe Biden – mishandling that spans decades dating back to when he was a senator – released his report and recommendation to Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The report is damning. Not so much for the criminality that it reveals. But instead for the reason given for not prosecuting that criminality.

In a nutshell, Robert Hur’s report recommends that Biden not be prosecuted for the reason that he is too old and his mental faculties too diminished for a jury to convict him. Here’s a quote from the report:

Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,”

Merrick Garland and the country are now in a quandary. Either Biden is, as he angrily asserted in a hastily called press conference last night (more on that presser in a moment), fully in possession of his faculties, in which case he is prosecutable for multiple felonies. Or, he is, as special counsel Robert Hur reported, too old and senile to be prosecuted.

Which means he is therefore unfit to be President of the United States.

The nominal greatest nation on the planet is now in uncharted territory. It’s now indisputable that the president’s ability to remember important facts and to form and express a coherent thought is embarrassingly bad and rapidly getting worse.

Here’s an example from a press conference Wednesday at which he couldn’t remember that it’s Hamas against which Israel has been fighting since October 7.

There is some movement and I don’t wanna… I don’t wanna… [long pause] [mumbles] …choose my words. There’s some movement… there’s been… a response… from… the, uh… the… the… there’s been a response… from… the opposition… but uh… it uh… [voice off camera suggests, ‘Hamas’]… yes, I’m sorry, from Hamas…”

But last night’s presser that Biden called on the fly in an attempt at damage control from the special counsel’s report, was an order of magnitude worse. Biden was simultaneously angry and confused. Here is an example. He brought up the subject of the Israeli war in Gaza and then said this:

As you know, initially, the president of Mexico, Sisi, did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in. I talked to him.”

President El-Sisi isn’t the president of Mexico. Mexico is nowhere near Gaza or Israel. El-Sisi is the president of Egypt.

Given the cognitive infirmity that is obvious and undeniable and that is now of record in a criminal investigation, it makes perfect sense that Biden’s comms team has had him avoiding live interviews and debates and press conferences to the greatest extent possible. Last night was a perfect illustration.

But he’s still the president. The ability to form and express a cogent thought is implicit in the job description. So, too, is the capacity to immediately call to mind the names of world leaders and the names of our geopolitical adversaries.

Members of the political pundit class (on both sides of the divide) will spend much time on the question of what Biden’s rapid and obvious decline means for the 2024 election.

I have a much more sobering question.

Knowing that China’s Xi Jingping has read Hur’s report and that he saw that calamitous presser last night, to what degree are his nefarious designs – and those of the world’s other geopolitical gangsters – emboldened by the now undeniable and alarming state of Biden’s mental decline?

It’s a long nine months until election day. If you’re not asking yourself that question, and if you are then not scared to death by the obvious answer, you’re not paying attention.

The choice is becoming startlingly clear.

I have been taken to task by some of you who listen to me on the air at KTBB 97.5 FM in Tyler-Longview, Texas — or who follow me here on this site — for being anti-Trump.

Let me hasten to say it. I am not anti-Trump.

From 2017 to 2021, I posted dozens of articles on this site in full-throated support of his presidency. (You can sample some of those articles here, here, here, here, here and here (among many others). I believe that Trump’s policy successes during the four years of his presidency speak for themselves. Economic growth was robust. Unemployment was at historic lows – most particularly among blacks and Hispanics, two demographic groups who saw the lowest unemployment rates since records began being kept. For the first time in 30-plus years, real wages for the middle class began to rise.

Trump energy policy resulted in the lowest inflation-adjusted prices for gasoline and diesel since the 1960s, and the first time that America could claim energy independence since the Truman administration.

The Abraham Accords were, at last, bringing real peace to the Middle East. Bad actors like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jingping and Kim Jong Un were minding their manners.

And in stark contrast to what’s happening today, the southern border with Mexico was well under control and illegal border crossings were at their lowest levels in recent memory.

Trump had, by most objective measures of policy, an extraordinarily successful presidency.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t had concerns about him. As of this writing, he is doing very well in the polls. But I believe it would be a huge mistake to underestimate the Herculean challenge he faces in his attempt to become Grover Cleveland II in 2024.

I worry about his appeal to independent and moderate voters – the very cohort that ultimately determines the outcomes of American presidential elections.

That concern drives my worry about his ability to generate a cheat-proof margin in the key swing states that will decide the election. I further worry that his penchant for unforced verbal errors will cost him just enough votes in those states to cost him those margins.

Not only do I worry about these things, but I also staunchly defend my right to worry. The prospect of a second Biden term frightens me to my core.

But my worry beads aside, I recognize that the voters have had – or will soon have – their say. Barring some sort of cosmic intervention, Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president. I therefore acknowledge the resulting binary choice. It’s Trump vs. Biden (or some other far-left loon that the Dems will put up when Biden’s growing decrepitude makes it impossible for him to carry on).

That is, as the cliché says, a ‘no brainer.’

The border catastrophe alone is enough to disqualify Biden. Add in a weak economy, a shrinking middle class, unsustainable federal spending, a historically weak American military (against the backdrop of a world on fire that he is wholly unprepared to address), and the case against Joe Biden becomes the unequivocal, undeniable, full-stop case for Donald Trump.

Little more need be said.

What would you do?

What would you do if you were in Governor Greg Abbott’s shoes? I ask because of an encounter I had with a woman in New Hampshire this past Tuesday. I was outside a voting location in Manchester collecting interviews for our coverage of the New Hampshire primary.

I asked as she was leaving the polling place if she would talk on camera to the folks in Texas. She made a face and said, “Eewww, Texas.” I smiled and said, “Oh, my goodness, why the face about Texas?,” and she said, “Your governor is a racist.” (Some of the voters who would talk to us can be seen here.)

I’m going to guess that she called Greg Abbott a racist for two reasons. One, he’s famously taking a firm stand against the tidal wave of illegal immigration washing over our border with Mexico because he obviously hates people with skin darker than his. That’s backed up by reason number two; any disagreement with a liberal on any subject at any time in any context for any reason is because of racism.

If not for illegal immigration, no one in New Hampshire would know Greg Abbott’s name. But he has locked horns with the Biden administration over this very contentious subject. At immediate issue is Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, Texas.

Eagle Pass is a town of about 28,000 that sits on the bank of the Rio Grande River. Across the river, 300 feet away, sits the city of Piedras Negras, Mexico. The city of Eagle Pass, together with its city park, are now a flash point in the illegal immigration crisis currently gripping the country.

In a letter Wednesday to the Biden administration, Governor Abbott said,

Under President Biden’s lawless border policies, more than six million illegal immigrants have crossed our southern border in just three years. That is more than the population of 33 different States in this country.”

Though it’s not military in nature, Texas is being invaded at Eagle Pass. Thousands cross the bridge and cross the river every day. The costs to the state and to local governments is both staggering and unsustainable.

Article 4, Section 4 of the Constitution provides that the federal government must defend states against invasion. Article 2, Section 3 provides that the president shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Biden is doing neither.

So, Governor Abbott has taken matters into his own hands. He is putting the incoming hordes on busses and sending them to “sanctuary cities” (to the great chagrin of the liberals that run those cities). And he has put up concertina wire in Shelby Park.

The Biden administration is angry. Lawsuits have flown in both directions. Nice liberal ladies in New Hampshire now make faces when they hear the name ‘Texas.’

But I ask Biden and I ask my grimacing New Hampshire liberal lady, given a relentless flood of impoverished and unskilled illegal migrants in need of food, housing, clothing, and medical attention costing in the hundreds of millions of dollars, what would you do if you were in Gregg Abbott’s shoes?

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