(Paul Mirengoff) Mail-in voting is fraught with the danger of fraud. The obvious danger is that ineligible voters will cast ballots or have ballots cast in their name. But now comes word from California that eligible voters are in danger of not being able to vote in person on the pretext that they have already voted. And guess what. It appears, anecdotally, that the voters who showed up to vote in the
Author: Paul Mirengoff
What does winning the war on terror look like?
(Paul Mirengoff) David Von Drehle writes that most of the time the war on terror “has felt like war only to the few, the deployed: the special operators, the contractors, the diplomats, the spies, the data analysts. . .the drone pilots. “For the rest,” he complains, “it has felt like mom’s birthday, finals week, the playoffs, just another April.” But when the enemy’s short-term goal is to terrorize populations and its long-tern
Biden at Dover
(Paul Mirengoff) A reader responded to my post about the shunning of Joe Biden by family members of troops who died at Kabul airport with this trenchant message: The heartbreaking ritual at Dover AFB, too often repeated, is inherently theatrical. It fixes our national attention, ignites the glare of media coverage. Every word and gesture is pregnant with emotion and meaning. We know this very well. And our leaders know it, or
Starting the second 20 years of the war on terror on the wrong foot
(Paul Mirengoff) As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, we’re seeing assessments of the 20 year war on terror. We’ll see many more in the next few days. The ones in the mainstream media will probably be along the lines of a piece in the Washington Post by the paper’s book review editor, a leftist of course. He argued that 9/11 put America to the test and America failed. I think
Manchin’s red line
(Paul Mirengoff) Joe Manchin reportedly has told the White House that he won’t support a reconciliation spending bill that exceeds $1.5 trillion. He might not even support one that exceeds $1 trillion, according to the same report. Without Manchin’s support, there can be no reconciliation package. Add $1.5 trillion to the roughly $1 trillion in the bipartisan infrastructure, and the price tag for Republicans losing the Senate comes to around $2.5 trillion.
Poll: Biden below water in seven key congressional districts
(Paul Mirengoff) We’ve discussed the fact that Joe Biden’s approval rating is sinking in national surveys. John Fund points us to what might be an even more relevant survey of Biden’s approval — one that polled seven key House districts, each represented by a Democrat. Biden fares little better in these jurisdictions than he does nationally. He’s underwater in all of them, and by seven points on average: The American Action Network,
The Taliban forms a pro-al Qaeda government, Part Two
(Paul Mirengoff) In an earlier post, I discussed how top jobs in the new Taliban government will be held by leaders with close ties to al Qaeda. But there’s more to this story. You can find a list of the Taliban cabinet members here. It includes four terrorists who were released by the U.S. in exchange for Bowe Bergdahl. The four are: Mullah Norullah Nori (Acting Minister of Borders and Tribal Affairs)
The Taliban forms a pro-al Qaeda government
(Paul Mirengoff) The Taliban has announced the formation of the government that will rule Afghanistan. According to the Wall Street Journal, the Taliban gave no positions of power to other political forces, religious minorities, or women. And it pledged to implement strict Islamic rule. Of course it did. That’s what the Taliban is all about. Did the Taliban at least exclude al Qaeda-linked elements from its government. No, it did not. The
A novel idea for combatting the violent crime epidemic
(Paul Mirengoff) According to the Washington Post, homicides are up 15 percent in Washington, D.C. compared to this time last year. Homicides reached a 16-year high last year. This past weekend, three men were shot to death in Brightwood Park, a middle-class neighborhood in Northwest D.C. that not long ago was considered safe. Violent crime is up about 23 percent in Brightwood Park this year. The Post reports that neighborhood residents are
Joe Biden’s kind of rabbis
(Paul Mirengoff) Fresh off of falsely claiming to have visited the Tree of Life synagogue where a white supremacist gunman massacred Jews, Joe Biden invited seven rabbis to a conference to celebrate Rosh Hashanah. As Daniel Greenfield reports, Biden’s selections, taken as a whole, do not look like the American Jewry, to paraphrase that leftist cliche. Instead, they look like Joe Biden’s leftist political allies. Greenfield writes: Reconstructionists, a secular leftist denomination