ANALYSIS: Trump’s ‘Syraqistan’ strategy is a success — and a failure.

The centerpiece of the new campaign has been simple. “I would bomb the sh*t out of them,” as then-candidate Donald Trump explained in November 2015 of his intended strategy against ISIS. Indeed, he has. According to the U.S. Air Force, 29 percent more munitions were dropped by U.S. aircraft on Iraq and Syria in 2017, the first year of Trump’s presidency, than in 2016, the last year of Obama’s presidency.

Trump has also struck a fine balance post-ISIS. He has wisely resisted calls to flood Syria with U.S. troops, even as he has remained willing to strike at Bashar al-Assad’s regime for egregious atrocities — a position the U.S. public supports. Recent polling by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, for example, finds that seven-in-ten Americans support future airstrikes in Syria if Assad uses chemical weapons again.
War yields no shortage of suffering and destruction. All things considered, however, Iraq and Syria have gone well for Trump, and he has been widely credited for as much. But less acknowledged is that the president has employed a nearly identical strategy in Afghanistan. If anything, in fact, the campaign in Syria and Iraq has been the more restrained effort.

Two-and-a-quarter times more munitions were dropped by U.S. aircraft on Afghanistan in 2017 under Trump than in 2016 under Obama, according to the U.S. Air Force. Trump has, in short, let slip the dogs of war, and bigly. After all, the president wasn’t shy about using the military’s most powerful non-nuclear bomb, the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb, in Nangarhar province in April 2017, reportedly killing nearly a hundred. Nor does the aggressive campaign show any signs of abating. The number of munitions dropped in April 2018 was the highest for any single month since 2012.

But if the campaign in Iraq and Syria has gone well, then Afghanistan has been a dud. The Taliban and other insurgents have more than doubled the percentage of Afghanistan’s 407 districts under their control in the last two years. Today, just 56 percent of Afghanistan’s districts are controlled by the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, down from 60 percent a year ago and 71 percent two years ago.

Afghanistan might not actually be the graveyard of empires, but it’s certainly a black hole for good intentions.

ANDREW MCCARTHY: The Obama Administration’s Hypocritical Pretext for Spying on the Trump Campaign.

It has been credibly reported that Halper, a longtime source for the CIA and British intelligence, was tasked by the FBI in the Trump-Russia investigation to make contact with and get information from at least three Trump campaign officials. He even sought a role in the campaign from co-chairman Sam Clovis. Page, on the other hand, was the target of four FISA court surveillance warrants, which enabled the Justice Department and FBI to monitor him for a year, starting at the height of the 2016 campaign.

To obtain such a warrant under FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978), the FBI and Justice Department must convince a judge that there is probable cause to believe the target is an agent of a foreign power — in Page’s case, of Russia. As we’ve previously outlined, because Page is an American citizen, the Obama administration had to have told the court that he was either: (a) “knowingly engage[d] in clandestine intelligence gathering activities for or on behalf of [Russia], which activities involve[d] or may [have] involve[d]” federal crimes; or (b) “knowingly engaged in any other clandestine intelligence activities for or on behalf of [Russia], that were undertaken “pursuant to the direction of an intelligence service or network of [Russia],” and that “involve[d] or [were] about to involve” federal crimes.

Assuming the Obama administration told the FISA court that Page was a clandestine agent of Russia, I’d make two observations: First, the only publicly known allegations that Page was engaged in such clandestine activities come from the Steele dossier, and appear to be unverified.

Second, Page has never been charged with a crime, which would be odd if the FBI had been able to verify its FISA application claims — posited four times over a year of surveillance — that he was engaged in activities that appeared to be federal crimes.

That is odd, especially for a “remarkably scandal-free Administration.”

ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY. Surprise: Attack in Belgium That Had All the Hallmarks of Islamic Terrorism Was In Fact Islamic Terrorism.

SCHOOLED: Army Ranger and Benghazi Survivor Shoots Down David Hogg on Gun Control. “Thank you for confirming it’s not the gun, it’s the person.”

WHAT SOCIALISTS USUALLY DO WITH MONEY: What Happened to Jill Stein’s Recount Millions? They collect it in the name of the common good, then they spend it on themselves and their cronies.

ANDREW KLAVAN’S LEFTESE DICTIONARY: “A: IS FOR “ANTIFA.”

HISTORY LESSON: On May 31, 1852, Julius Richard Petri was born.  He was the inventor of the … uh … Julius dish … something like that.

HELEN PUT IT UP AS “IN THE MAIL” EARLIER, BUT LET ME ADD MY PLUG TO WARD FARNSWORTH’S The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual. As the introduction notes, the Stoics are seen as unemotional, but what they were really expert in was managing all the emotions that humans have in ways that help us to live happier, better lives. It seems to me that this should be getting as much attention as, say, Jordan Peterson’s work.

From the preface:

This is a book about human nature and its management. The wisest students of that subject in ancient times, and perhaps of all time, were known as the Stoics. Their recommendations about how to think and live do not resemble the grim lack of feeling we associate with the word “Stoic” in English today. The original Stoics were philosophers and psychologists of the most ingenious kind, and also highly practical; they offered solutions to the problems of everyday life and advice about how to overcome our irrationalities, that are still relevant and helpful now.

Yes.

TO THE AIRBRUSHES, COMRADES! ‘Roseanne’ reruns pulled from multiple channels after star’s racist tweet. They sure do move fast to make someone an unperson now.

ANN ALTHOUSE:

“While all pharmaceutical treatments have side effects, racism is not a known side effect of” Ambien.
Tweets the manufacturer of Ambien, quoted in “Sanofi, the company that makes Ambien, rebuffed the assertion Wednesday on Twitter.”

But “racism” is an abstraction, a label applied to what Roseanne did — which was to tweet “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj” in reference to Valerie Jarrett.

We don’t know what motivated those words. Perhaps it was real racism, but it could also have been a wild, reckless urge to outrage or a confused angry silliness. What was Roseanne’s emotional state at the time of the tweet, and does it have any relation to any of the known side effects of Ambien?

The American Addiction Centers website discusses the possible cognitive impairment that Ambien users have experienced, and I’ll just excerpt some of the things that could be related to a stupid expression like Roseanne’s:

Difficulty concentrating
Disorientation to place or time
Loss of emotional affect…
Excessive sedation
Confusion and disorientation…
Hallucinations
Impaired judgment
Aggression

Sanofi’s snark is first rate, but it doesn’t exclude the possibility that Ambien was Roseanne’s problem. That said, blaming Ambien sounds lame — and yet, ironically, making a lame excuse could be caused by Ambien. Lame excuse-making could be the result of confusion or disorientation or impaired judgment.

Drudge is tweeting about this stuff. It might have been better for Sanofi to keep its mouth shut here.

OUR EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM: Should We Scrap It?

OPEN THREAD: Do that comment voodoo that you do so well.

YOU CAN HAVE MY KIDS’ LEMONADE STAND WHEN YOU PRY IT FROM OUR COLD, DEAD FINGERS:  Steve Hayward is ready to bring out the pitchforks.

FASTER, PLEASE: New drug may treat difficult lung, pancreatic cancer tumors.

BASED ON THE EVIDENCE PRESENTED, ANALYSIS: CORRECT. Steve Miller Is A Mensch.

TOMORROW’S NEW YORK POST FRONT PAGE:

But this is actually serious prison-reform stuff. And Kim’s not the only one talking with Trump. There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit there that Trump can pluck, and not only is that worth doing, it will resonate with the black and hispanic (and poor white) communities. Plus, note that Kim and Kanye are operating as a team.

WOW: BUZZFEED UNEARTHS JOY REID POST QUESTIONING 9/11; LOOSE CHANGE TRUTHER DOCUMENTARY ‘WORTH TAKING A SECOND LOOK.’

To be fair, Reid works alongside Brian Williams and Al Sharpton; being a fabulist is a career enhancer at NBC.

HARVEY WEINSTEIN INDICTED BY NY GRAND JURY ON RAPE, CRIMINAL SEXUAL ACT CHARGES.

YOUR DAILY TREACHER INCLUDES NEWS YOU CAN USE: No, You Don’t Need to Defend Roseanne Barr.

THOSE PLACES ARE CHEAP FOR A REASON: Retiring abroad: great health care, cheap rent. Here’s the catch. “No matter what else the United States is, it is probably the most convenient country on the planet. . . . You can get almost anything you want, almost any time you want with a phone call or the click of a mouse. The rest of the world is just not like that.”

AT AMAZON, save in Amazon Instant Video.

Plus, deals on Game Downloads.

JOHN MCGINNIS: To Restrain Populism, Revive Federalism.

BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME: How The British Invasion Became White America’s Introduction to Black Blues Music.

IN WORLD WAR II, THOUSANDS OF YOUNG MEN JUMPED OUT OF AIRPLANES. Some 16 of them survived parachuteless falls. “Looking at this list of gannets two particularly impressive cases stand out of individuals that got through without help of snow and other natural safety belts: Alan Magee who fell thousands of feet onto St Nazaire train station, smashing through the glass roof (a brake?); and Paddy McGarry who survived a fall of over ten thousand feet and who was not found for a week. There are great men among great men and there are exceedingly lucky men among lucky men…”

DOES REGULATON BREED FINANCIAL ILLITERACY? “The lulling effect of regulation can take a number of forms. One involves removing the downside from certain financial decisions. Mandatory insurance of bank accounts guarantees a depositor’s balance up to a certain amount — $250,000 in the U.S., £85,000 in the UK — taking away any incentive to evaluate the creditworthiness of individual banks. Government guarantees of student loans and mortgages shift credit risk from debtors to taxpayers, rewarding carelessness on the part of both borrowers and lenders.”

The Peltzman Effect is everywhere.