Pun Salad

President Trump has ordered a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria. This is the right decision. The U.S. military presence in Syria has not been authorized by Congress, is illegal under international law, lacks a coherent strategy, and carries significant risks of entangling America in a broader quagmire in yet another Middle Eastern country.

One would think that a GOP administration would have learned the lessons of Obama’s reckless withdrawal from Iraq. American retreats often create power vacuums that are often filled by American enemies. Now, after all the blood spilled and tears shed since the rise of ISIS, Donald Trump is set to make his own version of Obama’s deadly mistake.

Following President Donald Trump's Wednesday announcement that all U.S. troops would be pulled from Syria, political establishment types on the left and right promptly rebuked him for being insufficiently committed to Forever War in the Middle East.

Policing the world's politics and bombing brown people is one of the few things that mainstream Republicans and Democrats can come together on, and now here's Trump, the big meanie, spoiling their fun! Quick, cue rampant paranoia and a lot of Henny-Penny huffing...

'Sabotage,” Paul Krugman calls it. Funny word, that.

Perhaps Professor Krugman, like so many progressives at the moment, has Russia on the brain.

In the penal code of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, that crime — вредительство, “causing damage” — was sometimes referred to as “wrecking,” “diversion,” or “counter-revolutionary sabotage.” The secret police were always on the hunt for the “Trotskyite wreckers” who were, apparently, hiding under every bushel of rotted beets. They were sent to the gulag or shot in the head. Some of the early Bolsheviks had wanted to abolish capital punishment, considering it emblematic of czarist high-handedness. “Nonsense,” said V. I. Lenin. “How can you make a revolution without executions?”

Even Yahoo News’ Matt Bai, a decidedly left-leaning observer, excoriated liberals for not understanding that “Trump knows that every time he flouts the staid convention of the office, every time he does the thing that seems inappropriate among the political set, he’s winning with the chunk of the electorate he still has.”

Sure. The problem is that chunk is not a majority.

Bai’s larger observation — that Trump is so embattled he can’t afford to lose his hard-core supporters — is a good one in the context of gaming out how Trump can survive impeachment. When looking at what advances this administration’s agenda or is good for the Republican party, however, “his base loves it” doesn’t score any points.

Example: There is a time and a place for Steppenwolf’s “Born to Be Wild” and that time happened a half-century ago, and the place was some dorm room where people were rapping about Nixon, man.

The time and place is not the airport bar at 7:30 a.m.

But there it was, blaring out over the speakers while bleary-eyed people spooned steam-table eggs into their faces. Airports exist in a strange limbo where time is irrelevant until it is specifically crucial. It’s never morning or night, it’s just a timeless void you endure until it’s time to board and depart. So of course the bar is open. Someone who’s been up for 17 hours may need a drink. Of course the music is loud and lousy — it’s a bar.

[…] Anti-Zionism might have been a respectable point of view before 1948, when the question of Israel’s existence was in the future and up for debate. Today, anti-Zionism is a call for the elimination of a state — details to follow regarding the fate befalling those who currently live in it.

Note the distinction: Anti-Zionists are not advocating the reform of a state, as Japan was reformed after 1945. Nor are they calling for the adjustment of a state’s borders, as Canada’s border with the United States was periodically adjusted in the 19th century. They’re not talking about the birth of a separate state, either, as South Sudan was born out of Sudan in 2011. And they’re certainly not championing the partition of a multiethnic state into ethnically homogenous components, as Yugoslavia was partitioned after 1991.

Anti-Zionism is ideologically unique in insisting that one state, and one state only, doesn’t just have to change. It has to go. By a coincidence that its adherents insist is entirely innocent, this happens to be the Jewish state, making anti-Zionists either the most disingenuous of ideologues or the most obtuse.

Members of Manchester Proud — a citizens’ coalition committed to uniting the Queen City behind an aspirational vision for its school system — announced Wednesday the group has chosen a firm to help design a new strategic plan for city schools.

Manchester Proud issued a release Wednesday saying after “a rigorous, six month search process” the organization’s Consultant Selection Work Group chose 2Revolutions, LLC to partner with in crafting “an aspirational and achievable strategic plan” for the Manchester School District.

He then explained that what I purchased was something less than “real” beer. It was 3.2 percent, because in Colorado you could only buy full-strength brews in liquor stores. I was floored by the concept. I grew up in New Hampshire, where the native folk “Live Free or Die” and buy booze (and maple syrup and bullets) at country stores. I spent my college years in Montana, where it was so easy to buy beer that even the mule deer were tipsy. And New Mexico? In the Land of Enchantment, whiskey shooters were sold at gas stations behind the counter, right next to Marlboro Reds.