I LIKE DAVID FRENCH, BUT THIS IS AHISTORICAL BULLSHIT:

I mean, let’s just look at the presidents of my lifetime: JFK: Adulterer, drug user, made his brother (!) Attorney General, shady mafia connections, stole election. LBJ: Adulterer, much cruder than Trump, started Vietnam War. Nixon: Honestly, better than LBJ but the source of the term “Nixonian.” Ford: Nice guy, failed president. Carter: Nice guy, failed president. Reagan: The GOP gold standard, but a multiply-divorced Hollywood actor whose administration was marked by nearly as much scandal-drama as Trump’s. (Just look up Justice Gorsuch’s mother). George HW: Nice guy, but longtime adulterer and failed president. Bill Clinton: I mean, come on. George W. Bush: Personal rectitude in office, though he’s been a bit of a dick since Trump beat his brother. Iraq War thing didn’t turn out too well. Mediocre judicial appointments and little attention to domestic reforms. Gave us TSA. Obama: Far more scandals, and far more abuse of power, than Trump. And does French forget that Trump was running against Hillary?

But at any rate, the American people had a chance to decide if they wanted a man like Trump in the White House, and they decided that they did. And Trump’s now polling better than Obama did at this point in his presidency, and will almost certainly rise in the polls post Mueller report.

I mean, most of our successful presidents weren’t nice guys — FDR makes LBJ and Nixon look like pikers — and most of the nice guys in that office were failures as president. And Trump’s behavior in office is, by comparison with his predecessor, better, if cruder.

And in terms of his actions, well, Trump’s actual performance in office is looking pretty good. The economy is booming, foreign policy is going better than under his creased-pants predecessor, regulations are being slashed, and the courts are being better-stocked than any Republican president in my lifetime, including Reagan, ever managed.

Against that record, schoolmarmish disapproval pales in importance. But you want an America where a better man than Donald Trump can be a successful president? Then you have to make a better America, not least by crushing the power of the existing, awful, ruling class. And guess what: That’s what Trump’s doing. The NeverTrumpers, meanwhile, have chosen to ally themselves with the problem.

As James Taranto says, NeverTrumpism seems to be primarily an aesthetic phenomenon, and to indulge in it you have to think that our existing ruling class is more attractive than Trump. De gustibus non disputandum est, but I don’t feel that way at all.

Related:

Plus:

CREEPY UNCLE JOE: Democrat Makes #MeToo Claim Against Joe Biden: He Smelled Me and Kissed My Head. “Flores said that pictures of Biden touching other women inappropriately made it more difficult to keep silent, referring to Biden nuzzling the neck of Secretary of Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s wife, kissing Sen. Chuck Grassley’s wife on the lips, whispering in women’s ears, and snuggling women on the campaign trail.”

Flashback: It’s time to talk about former Vice President Joe Biden, the open sexual predator.

Biden Swims Naked, Upsetting Female Secret Service Agents:

“Agents say that, whether at the vice president’s residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude,” Kessler writes in the book – due for release Aug. 5.

“Female Secret Service agents find that offensive,” he writes.

“Biden likes to be revered as everyday Joe,” an unnamed agent told Kessler. “But the reality is no agents want to go on his detail because Biden makes agents’ lives so tough.”

Plus: Washington Post: What Are We Going To Do About Creepy Uncle Joe Biden?

And: ‘Creepy Veep’ Joe Biden ‘nuzzles’ wife of colleague and claims he is friends with lots of Somali cab drivers.

Also: Joe Biden’s Woman-Touching Habit.

Related: Talking Points Memo: Why Does Creepy Uncle Joe Biden Get A Pass From Liberals?

Plus:

AND JOURNALISTS WONDER WHY NOBODY BELIEVES THEM NOW? Journalists lauded former Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from all matters involving the investigation of allegations of collusion between 2016 Trump campaign aides and Russian interests in order to avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interest.

But what about the mainstream media’s conflicts of interests? Journalism ethics dictate that journalists never make themselves part of the story, but, as the Last Refuge’s Sundance makes clear, there have been more than a few reporters who made themselves part of “The Resistance” to President Donald Trump, via the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his staff.

Virtually all of the major mainstream media players are involved in this kind of ethical corruption, but Exhibit A is the meeting first reported by Sara Carter of federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman with four AP reporters to discuss the investigation of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort.

As Sundance writes, “later it was revealed that Andrew Weissman, Robert Mueller’s #1 special counsel prosecutor, was coordinating investigative efforts with the full support of four AP reporters who were giving Weissman tips.  That’s information from journalists to use in his court filings and submitted search warrants.  Make sure you grasp this: The AP journalists were feeding information to their ideological allies within the special counsel.”

Put another way, instead of getting information from their sources to be reported to the public, it appears that these AP operatives effectively made themselves researchers for Mueller’s operation, via a federal prosecutor long known to have committed serious violations of judicial ethics.

They joined the team they were supposedly covering.

No wonder Sundance asks:

“Think about a New York Times, CNN, New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, Yahoo News or Washington Post journalist now having to write an article deconstructing a foundation of two-years worth of lies they participated in creating. Do we really think such a catastrophic level of corrupted journalism could reconstitute into genuine reporting of fact-based information?”

Not gonna happen.

REMEMBERING JOHN MCCAIN: “John taught us how to lose.”

Going back four decades, starting with the 1980 election, 15 men and women have been nominated for president by our two major parties. Until now, only one of them had left us — Ronald Reagan, born in 1911, who announced his withdrawal from public life in 1994, a quarter-century ago.

Four of these nominees are now past 90 and two more, including McCain, passed 80; seven passed the 70 mark in recent years, and just one, Barack Obama, is under 65. We’re used to having them around. In contrast, 40 years ago there were only five living presidential nominees, Presidents Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon, plus landslide losers George McGovern and Barry Goldwater.

John McCain does not belong in landslide loser territory. His loss by 7 points to Barack Obama in 2008 was the widest margin since 1988, but his 45.6 percent of the popular vote was just slightly under President Trump’s 45.9. The difference in the result was that Hillary Clinton ran 5 points behind Obama.

“John taught us how to lose,” his friend and colleague Lindsey Graham said on the Senate floor Tuesday. He was referring especially to McCain’s gracious concession speech on Election Night 2008, rallying Americans to support the first black president. This was indeed a national service, one Hillary Clinton failed to provide eight years later.

Indeed.

BYRON YORK: Next step: House Intel asks Trump to declassify rest of FISA application; tantalizing clues about pages 10-12 and 17-34.

The release of a heavily-redacted version of the FBI’s application for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to wiretap onetime Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page has spurred calls to remove the redactions, to un-black out the pages blacked out by the FBI before the document was made public.

The long sections of censored material have made it impossible to reach definitive conclusions about the warrant application. It has also led to the publication of de-contextualized sensational accusations. For example, page 8 of the original warrant application contains a passage which begins with two blacked-out lines, then includes the words “the FBI believes that the Russian Government’s efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other individuals associated with Candidate #1’s [Donald Trump’s] campaign,” and continues with more blacked-out material. Is there a critical prefatory clause in that sentence fragment? The answer is unclear.

Defenders of the FBI have begun to argue that the blacked-out portions contain the truly powerful evidence that supports their position.

“There is clearly information the government provided separate and apart from ‘Source #1′ (Steele) and open source info — and that fact that all those paragraphs are redacted suggests supporting info from OTHER sensitive methods and sources,” tweeted CNN commentator Asha Rangappa, a lawyer and former FBI agent.

It’s a point that is impossible to assess as long as the application remains heavily redacted. Which is why House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Devin Nunes — the man most responsible for bringing the application to light in the first place — is asking President Trump to declassify the rest of the warrant application.

“We want the president to take care of the rest of these redactions, so there is full transparency and sunlight for everyone to see,” Nunes told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham Monday night.

Well, stay tuned.

POLITICAL SPYING: Trump campaign vet: Informant used me to get to Papadopoulos.

Sam Clovis, a former national co-chairman of the Trump campaign, is one of three Trump figures known to have been contacted by FBI informant Stefan Halper during the 2016 presidential campaign. Clovis received an email, out of the blue, from Halper, whom he did not know, on August 29, 2016 — after Halper had been in touch with Carter Page and just before he contacted George Papadopoulos.

Page and Papadopoulos were peripheral, sometime, volunteer Trump foreign policy advisers, but they are key figures in the investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia to rig the 2016 election. Clovis, who is not suspected of any wrongdoing, has testified and been interviewed for a total of 19 hours, by his own count, before special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators, before Mueller’s grand jury, and before the House and Senate intelligence committees.

During all that testifying, Clovis never knew about Halper’s connection to the FBI. Only recently, from news reports, has Clovis learned about Halper’s true role. And that has prompted Clovis to re-play his brief and seemingly inconsequential encounter with Halper in light of a wealth of new information.

If the parties were reversed, we’d already be hearing cries of “constitutional crisis” and demands that the FBI be disbanded.

BYRON YORK: When did Trump-Russia probe begin? Investigators focus on mystery months.

Revelations that an FBI informant insinuated himself into the Trump campaign have led some congressional investigators to rethink their theories on how and why former President Barack Obama’s Justice Department began investigating the 2016 Trump presidential effort.

Most reporting has focused on the July 31, 2016, creation of a document formally marking the beginning of the FBI counterintelligence probe targeting the Trump campaign. The document, known as the electronic communication, or EC, is said to have focused on the case of George Papadopoulos, the peripheral Trump adviser who has pleaded guilty to lying to special counsel Robert Mueller about his contacts with people connected to Russia.

Most of the key events of the Trump-Russia investigation — the Carter Page wiretap, the wiretap of Michael Flynn’s conversations, the presentation of Trump dossier allegations to the president-elect — took place after the formal start of the FBI counterintelligence investigation.

But now comes word of the FBI informant, described in various accounts as a retired American professor living in England. The Washington Post reported that, “The professor’s interactions with Trump advisers began a few weeks before the opening of the investigation, when Page met the professor at the British symposium.”

A few weeks before the opening of the investigation — those are the words that have raised eyebrows among Hill investigators. If it was before the investigation, then what was an FBI informant doing gathering undercover information when there was not yet an investigation?

What, indeed?

MICHAEL BARONE: Collusion, Anyone?

As the likelihood of the charges of Trump campaign “collusion” with Russia seems headed toward zero, the likelihood of proof of a different form of “collusion” seems headed upward toward certainty.

The Russia collusion charge had some initial credibility because of businessman Trump’s dealings in Russia and candidate Trump’s off-putting praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was fueled by breathless media coverage of such trivial events as Jeff Sessions’ exchange of pleasantries with the Russian ambassador at a Washington reception.

And, of course, by the appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel. But Mueller’s prosecutions of Trump campaign operatives were for misdeeds long before the campaign, and his indictment of 13 Russians specified that no American was a “knowing participant” in their work.

Now, there’s talk that Mueller is winding up his investigation. Whenever he finishes, it seems unlikely his work will fulfill the daydreams so many liberals have of making Trump go the way of Richard Nixon.

Meanwhile, the evidence builds of collusion by the Obama administration’s law enforcement and intelligence personnel in trying to elect Hillary Clinton and defeat and delegitimize Donald Trump in and after the 2016 presidential election.

The investigation of Hillary Clinton’s illegal email system was conducted with kid gloves. One glaring example of impropriety came when FBI Director James Comey was given (and accepted) Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s order to call it a “matter” rather than an “investigation.” Clinton aides were allowed to keep her emails and destroy 30,000 of them, plus cellphones. They were not subject to grand jury subpoenas, and a potential co-defendant was allowed to claim attorney-client privilege.

On June 27, 2016, Lynch clandestinely met with Bill Clinton on his plane at the Phoenix airport — a meeting that became known only thanks to an alert local TV reporter. Lynch supposedly left the decision on prosecution to Comey, who on July 5 announced publicly that Clinton was “extremely careless” but lacked intent to violate the law, even though the statute punishes violations intentional or not.

Contrast that with the collusion of Obama officials with the Clinton campaign-financed Christopher Steele/Fusion GPS memorandum alleging Trump ties with Russians. Comey and the Justice Department used it, without divulging who paid for it, to get a FISA warrant to surveil former Trump campaign operative Carter Page’s future and past communications — the “wiretap” Trump was derided for mentioning.

Similarly, when Comey informed Trump in January 2017 of the contents of the then-unpublished Steele memorandum, he didn’t reveal that the Clinton campaign paid for it. Asked on his book tour why not, he blandly said he didn’t know.

Well, we know.

CONRAD BLACK: The Anti-Trump Effort Backfires.

As the parallel investigations and diluvian leaking have unfolded, the anti-Trump Resistance has received a series of gradually suppurating mortal wounds. The Steele dossier was commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign; over a hundred FBI agents and Justice Department lawyers expected Hillary Clinton to be charged criminally, and President Trump was correct in saying conversations by his campaign officials had been tapped, a claim that was much ridiculed at the time. Deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe testified that the Steele dossier was essential to obtaining a FISA warrant on a junior Trump aide (Carter Page), and McCabe and former director James Comey’s rabidly partisan helper Peter Strzok, and his FBI girlfriend Lisa Page, texted suggestions for influencing the FISA judge in the case. The judge recused himself, voluntarily or otherwise, after granting the warrant. Mueller set up his “dream team” of entirely partisan Democrats; McCabe failed to identify to the Bureau his wife as a member and beneficiary of the Clinton entourage and political candidate in Virginia; and the fourth person in the Justice Department, Bruce Ohr, met with Steele, and Mrs. Ohr helped compose the Steele dossier.

The Justice Department inspector general, Michael Horowitz, whose report is expected imminently, showed the FBI director, Christopher Wray, findings about Andrew McCabe’s conduct that caused him to retire McCabe prematurely. The Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), one of the few centers of unquestionably ethical and nonpartisan conduct in Washington, advised the attorney general to fire McCabe.

The wheels are coming off.

BYRON YORK: House GOP delivers blow to Trump-Russia collusion story. Will others follow?

It has long been the key question of the Trump-Russia affair: Did Donald Trump’s presidential campaign collude with Russia to influence the 2016 election? Now, we have the first official, albeit partisan, answer.

“We have found no evidence of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians,” said Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee Monday as they released findings from a 14-month Trump-Russia investigation.

GOP Rep. Mike Conaway of Texas, who formally oversaw the committee probe, said, “We found perhaps bad judgment, inappropriate meetings, inappropriate judgment in taking meetings.” But no collusion.

Committee investigators looked at the events often cited as evidence of collusion. They looked at the June 9, 2016 meeting in Trump Tower in which Donald Trump Jr. and other top campaign officials talked to a group of Russians who promised, but did not deliver, damaging information on Hillary Clinton. They looked at the activities of peripheral Trump advisers George Papadopoulos and Carter Page. They looked at the allegations in the Trump dossier. They looked at all that, and they could not find a thread connecting events into a narrative of collusion.

“Only Tom Clancy or Vince Flynn or someone else like that could take this series of inadvertent contacts with each other, or meetings, whatever, and weave that into a some sort of fictional page-turner spy thriller,” Conaway said. “But we’re not dealing with fiction, we’re dealing with facts. And we found no evidence of any collusion, of anything that people were actually doing, other than taking a meeting they shouldn’t have taken or inadvertently being in the same building.”

The collusion question is the most contentious of the Trump-Russia investigation. Some Democrats have long said we know enough now to prove collusion. Indeed, just last month, Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said, “There is already, in my view, ample evidence in the public domain on the issue of collusion if you’re willing to see it.”

When Republicans released their findings, though, Schiff did not mention collusion. . . .

Would-be believers in collusion could suffer another disappointment later this year when the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee releases its report. Shortly after the House findings were made public, the chairman of that committee, Sen. Richard Burr, told CNN he has not seen evidence of collusion in the more than a year his committee has been looking for it.

It’s as if the whole thing was invented out of whole cloth, to keep the Democrats’ troops riled up after Hillary’s unexpected and humiliating defeat.

HUGH HEWITT IN THE WAPO: The Nunes memo revealed a damning omission. “Having reviewed hundreds and hundreds of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant applications as the final stop between the FBI and the desks of Attorneys General William French Smith and Edwin Meese III, I read the Nunes memo as revealing one major fact that stands out above all other revelations: The FISA warrant for surveillance on Carter Page (and the three subsequent renewals of the warrant) omitted a material fact. While the FBI admitted that the information came from a politically motivated source, the bureau did not disclose that the source had been financed by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. That is a damning omission.”

SO THE FBI SUPERVISOR WHO WAS TEXTING ABOUT HOW MUCH HE HATED TRUMP is the one who interviewed Mike Flynn. “A supervisory special agent who is now under scrutiny after being removed from Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office for alleged bias against President Trump also oversaw the bureau’s interviews of embattled former National Security advisor Michael Flynn, this reporter has learned. Flynn recently pled guilty to one-count of lying to the FBI last week. . . . Strzok was removed from his role in the Special Counsel’s Office after it was discovered he had made disparaging comments about President Trump in text messages between him and his alleged lover FBI attorney Lisa Page, according to the New York Times and Washington Post, which first reported the stories. Strzok is also under investigation by the Department of Justice Inspector General for his role in Hillary Clinton’s email server and the ongoing investigation into Russia’s election meddling. On Saturday, the House Intelligence Committee’s Chairman Devin Nunes chided the Justice Department and the FBI for not disclosing why Strzok had been removed from the Special Counsel three months ago, according to a statement given by the Chairman.”

This stinks to high heaven. But wait, there’s more involving shady FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe:

According to another source, with direct knowledge of the Jan. 24 interview, McCabe had contacted Flynn by phone directly at the White House. White House officials had spent the “earlier part of the week with the FBI overseeing training and security measures associated with their new roles so it was no surprise to Flynn that McCabe had called,” the source said.

McCabe told Flynn “some agents were heading over (to the White House) but Flynn thought it was part of the routine work the FBI had been doing and said they would be cleared at the gate,” the source said.

“It wasn’t until after they were already in (Flynn’s) office that he realized he was being formally interviewed. He didn’t have an attorney with him,” they added.

Comey was lecturing us about the FBI’s professionalism and integrity just today. Pathetic. This looks like a sleazy, deliberate trap.

Related: Roger Simon: Trump’s Right: The FBI’s In Tatters.

TRUMP VERSUS THE DEEP REGULATORY STATE: Unfortunately the Wall Street Journal op-ed by Christopher DeMuth is behind the pay wall. But it’s a fine essay and worth quoting at length.

Federal regulation has been growing mightily since the early 1970s, powered by statutes that delegate Congress’s lawmaking authority to mission-driven executive agencies. Beginning in 2008, the executive state achieved autonomy. The Bush administration during the financial crisis, and the Obama administration in normal times, decreed major policies on their own, without congressional authorization and sometimes even in defiance of statutory law.

President Trump might have been expected to continue the trend. As a candidate, he had railed against imperious Washington and promised to clear regulatory impediments to energy development and job creation. Yet he also was an avid protectionist, sounded sometimes like an antitrust populist, and had little to say about regulatory programs like those of the Federal Communications Commission and the Food and Drug Administration. He was contemptuous of Congress and admiring of President Obama’s unilateral methods. Clearly, this was to be a results-oriented, personality-centered presidency.

The record so far has been radically different. With some exceptions (such as business as usual on ethanol), and putting aside a few heavy-handed tweets (such as raising the idea of revoking broadcast licenses from purveyors of “fake news”), President Trump has proved to be a full-spectrum deregulator. His administration has been punctilious about the institutional prerogatives of Congress and the courts. Today there is a serious prospect of restoring the constitutional status quo ante and reversing what seemed to be an inexorable regulatory expansion…

The essay goes on to say Trump has appointed qualified, reform-oriented agency leaders (a first indicator that he’s serious). He has turned away from “unilateral lawmaking” (a second indicator). Unilateral lawmaking is a diplomatic term for Obama’s questionable or blatantly unconstitutional executive orders (like spending “billions without a congressional appropriation to subsidize insurance plans on the ObamaCare exchanges”).

Finally:

A third indicator is the introduction of regulatory budgeting, which sounds tedious but is potentially revolutionary. The idea goes back to the late 1970s, when the new health, safety and environmental agencies were first issuing rules that required private businesses and individuals to spend tens of millions of dollars or more. It seemed anomalous that this should be free of the disciplines of taxing, appropriating and budgeting that applied to direct expenditures. Jimmy Carter’s commerce secretary, Juanita Kreps, proposed a regulatory budget as a good-government measure; Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D., Texas) introduced legislation; and several academics (myself included) worked out the theory and practicalities in congressional reports and journal articles.

The idea never went anywhere.

Well, it never went anywhere until now.

THAT’S WHAT WORRIES ME: Biden 2020? It’s Not as Crazy as It Sounds.

Al Hunt:

To see why they’re not crazy, start with this fact of political life: When an incumbent runs for re-election, the contest is a referendum on him. A challenger, to be successful, must offer an appealing alternative that better addresses whatever’s bothering people. Jimmy Carter, the outsider, beat President Gerald Ford in 1976 in the shadow of the Watergate scandals. Ronald Reagan defeated Carter four years later by showing resolve that resonated during the Iranian hostage crisis. Bill Clinton’s domestic focus had broad appeal in 1992, the first presidential contest after the end of the Cold War, against the veteran cold warrior President George H.W. Bush.

After three-and-a-half years of Trump, what will swing voters be looking for? A grown-up who is committed to getting things done by trying to bridge the bitter partisan divide. A person with experience in governing, savvy about the ways of Washington and wary of national-security booby traps. A reputation for incorruptibility to drain the ethical swamp of the Trump years.

More than most outsiders, new faces or ideological purists, the 74-year-old former senator and vice president could fit that bill.
…
A politician first elected in 1970 is not going to be the face of the future. But after the exhaustion, trauma and incompetence of the Trump years, voters will look for stability, solidity, maturity, global experience, civility and integrity. Biden checks all the boxes.

These are indeed Heinlein’s Crazy Years — we just live in them.

OUT ON A LIMB: Jon Gabriel is defending Steve Martin’s “King Tut” from an attack by James Lileks.

To modern eyes, “King Tut” was cheesy and lame. But in 1978, that was the point.

That decade served up a slew of “important” stand-up comedians who were edgy, cynical, and highly political. George Carlin issued diatribes on capitalism and religion. The far-funnier Richard Pryor was laser-focused on racial injustice. Andy Kaufman intentionally alienated club crowds with his anti-comedy. Robert Klein and David Steinberg were high-brow intellectuals. And nearly every comic lectured America about Vietnam, Richard Nixon, and the hollow hypocrisy of bourgeois life.

Then along came Steve Martin. Sick of the conventional joke formula, he spent years crafting a stand-up act without punchlines. And the way to make audiences laugh sans jokes was by acting silly. He paraded around in bunny ears and a fake arrow through his head, embarrassingly contorting his body to sell the act. All the while, he pretended to be just as self-important and overly earnest as his fellow comics. The juxtaposition is what made it funny. (See his intro to the song above.)

The tastemakers took themselves far too seriously to risk looking silly; they had to be smarter than the audience. Although highly intelligent, Martin presented himself as the dumbest, least self-aware guy in the room. Instead of educating Americans on their evils, he brought back comedy to its actual function: making people laugh.

In a way, he was doing what the original Star Wars did in 1977. After a decade of bleak, dystopian sci-fi, George Lucas revamped the old Flash Gordon serials into a fun, popcorn-friendly escapism.

If there’s one good thing that came of the Carter administration, it’s that having to lay off a Democratic president temporarily forced Saturday Night Live into a much more apolitical stance than its first season, and as a result, the show created some of its most accessible, timeless work. In the show’s early episodes, the cast openly campaigned on air for the ERA and went after Gerald Ford, history’s original greatest monster, which such intensity when his press secretary stupidly agreed to host an episode that one of its writers (and then-wife of producer/creator Lorne Michaels) later admitted, “The president’s watching. Let’s make him cringe and squirm.”

As Michael J. Lewis wrote at Commentary in 2010, you can see the temporary interregnum in the culture war via the show’s choice of hosts: the openly political George Carlin hosted SNL’s very first episode; by the third season, Martin’s repeated apolitical appearances on SNL made him a superstar.

WEIRD, FROM WHAT I’VE SEEN IN THE PRESS AND ON SOCIAL MEDIA, ABSOLUTELY NOBODY EXCEPT A FEW NEANDERTHALS AGREES WITH TRUMP: Only 23% Favor Transgenders In Military.

A poll conducted less than one month prior to President Trump’s decision on Wednesday to reverse an Obama-era policy that allowed transgender individuals to serve openly in the military found more people opposed than supported it.

Rasmussen surveyed 1,000 likely voters on the topic in late June, almost exactly one year after then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced the shift last summer.

“The U.S. Department of Defense now allows transgender people, those who identify with and want to live as the opposite sex, to serve openly in the military,” the survey said. “Is this decision good for the military, bad for the military or does it have no impact?”

Only 23 percent of people surveyed responded that it was good, while 31 percent said it was bad. The largest bloc of respondents, 38 percent, said it has no impact.

As the Washington Examiner reported earlier today, a Military Times poll conducted last December found 41 percent of active-duty troops believed the policy hurt military readiness, while only 12 percent said it helped.

Who knew?

DAVID GELERNTER ON THE FAILURE OF THE “CONSERVATIVE RESISTANCE:”

Conservative thinkers should recall that they helped create President Trump. They never blasted President Obama as he deserved. Mr. Obama’s policies punished the economy and made the country and its international standing worse year by year; his patronizing arrogance drove people crazy. He was the perfect embodiment of a one-term president. The tea-party outbreak of 2009-10 made it clear where he was headed. History will record that the press saved him. Naturally the mainstream press loved him, but too many conservative commentators never felt equal to taking him on. They had every reason to point out repeatedly that Mr. Obama was the worst president since Jimmy Carter, surrounded by a left-wing cabinet and advisers, hostile to Israel, crazed regarding Iran, and even less competent to deal with the issues than Mr. Carter was—which is saying plenty.

But they didn’t say plenty. They didn’t say much at all. The rank and file noticed and got mad. Even their supposed champions didn’t grasp what life under Mr. Obama was like—a man who was wrecking the economy while preaching little sermons, whose subtext was always how smart he was, how dumb they were, and how America was full of racist clods, dangerous cops and infantile nuts who would go crazy if they even heard the words “Islamic terrorism.” So the rank and file was deeply angry and elected Mr. Trump.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. They’d rather see the country collapse than risk being called a racist by Rachel Maddow. “Country over party” indeed. But Trump has brought along his own people, who are doing a lot better at engaging the left than the Bill Kristol/David Frum beltway types. As I wrote:

Yet the tea party movement was smeared as racist, denounced as fascist, harassed with impunity by the IRS and generally treated with contempt by the political establishment — and by pundits like Brooks, who declared “I’m not a fan of this movement.” After handing the GOP big legislative victories in 2010 and 2014, it was largely betrayed by the Republicans in Congress, who broke their promises to shrink government and block Obama’s initiatives.

So now we have Trump instead, who tells people to punch counterprotesters instead of picking up their trash.

When politeness and orderliness are met with contempt and betrayal, do not be surprised if the response is something less polite, and less orderly. Brooks closes his Trump column with Psalm 73, but a more appropriate verse is Hosea 8:7 “For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” Trump’s ascendance is a symptom of a colossal failure among America’s political leaders, of which Brooks’ mean-spirited insularity is only a tiny part. God help us all.

But if you don’t like Trump, you really won’t like what comes after Trump, if the “resistance” succeeds. Luckily for Trump, the resistance seems mostly to be a bunch of self-important clowns and Antifa thugs.

JOHN HINDERAKER: How Many Countries Were Spying On Trump?

So just about every Western intelligence service was collaborating with the Obama administration in trying to elect Hillary Clinton. Yet, amazingly enough, they failed.

The blindingly obvious point that the Guardian tries to obscure is that the combined assets of all of these agencies failed to find any evidence of collaboration between the Trump campaign and Russia. We know this, because the Democrats have pulled out all the stops. Both before the election, and especially after the election, they have leaked furiously to try to discredit President Trump. If there were any evidence of collusion between Trump (or even obscure, minor “advisers” like Carter Page) and Russia, there would have been nothing else in the Washington Post or the New York Times for the past five months. But they have nothing.

What was really going on seems clear. Everyone involved in this story thought that Hillary Clinton was sure to win the election. Why? Because they read the Washington Post and the New York Times. Plus Real Clear Politics and 538. The suggestion that the Russian government tried to swing the election to Donald Trump is ridiculous. The Russians thought that Hillary was the certain winner, and if–a big if–they carried out a primitive phishing expedition into Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s email account, and subsequently sent the DNC emails to Wikileaks, it was to cause trouble for Clinton after she became president.

Likewise, British intelligence and the other agencies mentioned by the Guardian thought there was no doubt but that Hillary would win. How could they curry favor with the new administration, expected to be Obama’s third term? By feeding negative information about the opponent who was sure to lose, even though there was no real significance to the intelligence provided.

That’s what happened. The fact that liberals still try to push the “Russia” story, even when it is obvious that they are out of ammo, is pathetic.

Well, no. The story about Trump/Russia collaboration was, I’ve hypothesized, created as a cover once he was elected and it was clear the reality that he’d been spied on would come out.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD HARSHES THE NARRATIVE: Trump Isn’t Sounding Like a Russian Mole: Trump’s core global strategy is intended to destroy any illusions in Moscow that Russia is a peer competitor of Washington’s.

A Trump administration is going to be four years of hell for Russia: a massive American doubling down on shale production along with a major military buildup. Trump is, in other words, a nightmare for Putin and a much, much bigger threat to Putin’s goals than President Obama ever was or wanted to be.

If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:

Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran

That Trump is planning to do precisely the opposite of these things may or may not be good policy for the United States, but anybody who thinks this is a Russia appeasement policy has been drinking way too much joy juice.

Obama actually did all of these things, and none of the liberal media now up in arms about Trump ever called Obama a Russian puppet; instead, they preferred to see a brave, farsighted and courageous statesman. Trump does none of these things and has embarked on a course that will inexorably weaken Russia’s position in the world, and the media, suddenly flushing eight years of Russia dovishness down the memory hole, now sounds the warning that Trump’s Russia policy is treasonously soft.

This foolishness is best understood as an unreasoning panic attack. The liberal media hate Trump more than they have hated any American politician in a generation, and they do not understand his supporters or the sources of his appeal. They are frantically picking up every available stick to beat him, in the hopes that something, somehow, will Miloize him.

So blind does hatred make them that they cannot understand how their own behavior is driving American public opinion in directions that bode ill for liberals in the future. In the first place, suppose Donald Trump does not in fact turn out to be the second coming of Benedict Arnold. Suppose instead, as is much more likely, that he turns out to be a very hawkish president, one who quite possibly will make George W. Bush look like Jimmy Carter. The media and Democratic Party leaders will have staked huge amounts of credibility on a position that turns out to be laughably untrue. Six months or a year from now, they will have to flip from calling Trump an anti-American traitor and Russian plant to calling him a dangerous, fascistic ultranationalist whose relentless hawkishness is bringing us closer to World War Three.

The press and the Democrats — but I repeat myself — will make that flip without a moment’s hesitation or acknowledgment.

Plus: “The media wants to cast Trump as both Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler; but you can’t give the Sudetenland to yourself.”

OUT LIKE FLYNN: The Political Assassination of Michael Flynn.

Eli Lake:

Representative Devin Nunes, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, told me Monday that he saw the leaks about Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak as part of a pattern. “There does appear to be a well orchestrated effort to attack Flynn and others in the administration,” he said. “From the leaking of phone calls between the president and foreign leaders to what appears to be high-level FISA Court information, to the leaking of American citizens being denied security clearances, it looks like a pattern.”

Nunes said he was going to bring this up with the FBI, and ask the agency to investigate the leak and find out whether Flynn himself is a target of a law enforcement investigation. The Washington Post reported last month that Flynn was not the target of an FBI probe.

The background here is important. Three people once affiliated with Trump’s presidential campaign — Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Roger Stone — are being investigated by the FBI and the intelligence community for their contacts with the Russian government. This is part of a wider inquiry into Russia’s role in hacking and distributing emails of leading Democrats before the election.

Flynn himself traveled in 2015 to Russia to attend a conference put on by the country’s propaganda network, RT. He has acknowledged he was paid through his speaker’s bureau for his appearance. That doesn’t look good, but it’s also not illegal in and of itself. All of this is to say there are many unanswered questions about Trump’s and his administration’s ties to Russia.

But that’s all these allegations are at this point: unanswered questions. It’s possible that Flynn has more ties to Russia that he had kept from the public and his colleagues. It’s also possible that a group of national security bureaucrats and former Obama officials are selectively leaking highly sensitive law enforcement information to undermine the elected government.

The chatter against Flynn — and it has come from Democrats, Republicans, and the intelligence community — has been longstanding, intense, and in the end, effective. The motives for it also seem to come from across the spectrum: Partisanship, #NeverTrump, and for those concerned about his Russian ties, honest patriotism. It would also be too kind to say that Flynn is unloved by the I.C. following his troubled tenure as head of D.I.A.

But what really happened? It’s impossible to say, but if the intelligence community is still at war with the Trump Administration even after collecting Flynn’s scalp, then we we’ll know at least part of the answer.

ALSO:

Russia isn’t the only busy intersection between the White House and Congress, either.

FROM JOEL KOTKIN, AN IDEA SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK: Decentralize government to resolve country’s divisions.

America is increasingly a nation haunted by fears of looming dictatorship. Whether under President Barack Obama’s “pen and phone” rule by decree, or its counterpoint, the madcap Twitter rule of our current chief executive, one part of the country, and society, always feels mortally threatened by whoever occupies the Oval Office.

Given this worsening divide, perhaps the only reasonable solution is to move away from elected kings and toward early concepts of the republic, granting far more leeway to states, local areas and families to rule themselves. Democrats, as liberal thinker Ross Baker suggests, may “own” the D.C. “swamp,” but they are beginning to change their tune in the age of Trump. Even dutiful cheerleaders for Barack Obama’s imperial presidency, such as the New Yorker, are now embracing states’ rights.

As in the antebellum period, American politics sadly reflects two increasingly antagonistic nations. One can be described as a primarily urban, elite-driven, ethnically diverse country that embraces a sense of inevitable triumphalism. The other America, rooted more in the past, thrives in the smaller towns and cities, as well as large swaths of suburbia. Sometimes whiter, the suburbs are both more egalitarian and less reflexively socially liberal.

This division worsened in the Obama era, whose city-centric approach all but ignored the interests of the resource-producing regions of the country, as well as the South. In contrast, under Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter, Democrats were joyously competitive in these areas, assuring that the party was truly diverse, rather than simply the lap dog of the littoral constituencies.

With the GOP now in control of Washington, the coastal areas are becoming, to paraphrase President Obama, the new clingers, whether on the environment, racial redress or gender-related issues. Now they fear, with good reason, that the very administrative state they so eagerly embraced could come back to undermine their agenda even at the local level.

The problem is, I don’t think the blue states have “learned their lesson” about big government. They’re still all for it, and will happily wield it against the Deplorable Classes whenever they manage to get back in control. Unless you can do something about that, I don’t think you can successfully sell limited government. Maybe a constitutional convention could do something.

KARL ROVE: A Preview of Obama’s Post-Presidency.

Mr. Obama still doesn’t understand that the GOP’s victories in ’10, ’14 and ’16 were repudiations of his policies. In the podcast, he argued that rural voters were wrong to vote Republican because his administration “devoted more attention, more focus, put more resources into rural America.” The idea that Democrats “abandoned the white working class,” he added, is “nonsense.” In other words, country folks should stay bought and the working class is too dumb to understand what’s good for them.

While saying it was time for “new voices and fresh legs,” Mr. Obama threatened that if “some foundational issues about our democracy” arise after he leaves office, he might “weigh in.” He also promised his presidential center would help young people become “organizers, journalists, politicians” by providing “tools for them to bring about progressive change.”

The IRS may get indigestion at such partisan use of a nonprofit, but Republicans should do cartwheels about these pledges, since it was Mr. Obama’s leadership that helped produce the biggest GOP dominance in nearly a century.

Mr. Obama will be the first ex-president since Woodrow Wilson to remain in Washington. Given the tone of his interviews, he could well become a carping, persistent presence in our nation’s capital.

We’re years past Carter being Obama’s best-case scenario.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Nato puts 300,000 ground troops on ‘high alert’ as tensions with Russia mount. The 1980s called, yada yada.

UPDATE: So I just read this piece about Trump and nukes and got a sudden premonition: If Hillary’s elected, she’ll wind up nuking somebody. Maybe it’s just echoes of the Goldwater joke. . . .

ANOTHER UPDATE: Flashback: ‘No First Use’ Nuclear Policy Proposal Assailed by U.S. Cabinet Officials, Allies; Obama’s disarmament agenda hits significant roadblock on opposition from Kerry, Carter and Moniz.

A proposal under consideration at the White House to reverse decades of U.S. nuclear policy by declaring a “No First Use” protocol for nuclear weapons has run into opposition from top cabinet officials and U.S. allies.

The opposition, from Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter and Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, as well as allies in Europe and Asia, leaves President Barack Obama with few ambitious options to enhance his nuclear disarmament agenda before leaving office, unless he wants to override the dissent.

The possibility of a “No First Use” declaration—which would see the U.S. explicitly rule out a first strike with a nuclear weapon in any conflict—met resistance at a National Security Council meeting in July, where the Obama administration reviewed possible nuclear disarmament initiatives it could roll out before the end of the president’s term.

During the discussions, Mr. Kerry cited concerns raised by U.S. allies that rely on the American nuclear triad for their security, according to people familiar with the talks. The U.K., France, Japan and South Korea have expressed reservations about a “No First Use” declaration, people familiar with their positions said. Germany has also raised concerns, one of the people said.

Mr. Carter raised objections to the “No First Use” declaration on the grounds that it risked provoking insecurity about the U.S. deterrent among allies, some of which then could pursue their own nuclear programs in response, according to the people familiar with the discussions. North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and Russia’s actions in Europe have also complicated any change to the U.S. nuclear posture for the Pentagon.

Mr. Moniz, who weighs in on nuclear issues for the Department of Energy, also expressed opposition to a “No First Use” posture, according to a person familiar with the discussions.

As people note in the comments, what Trump has actually said on nukes, as opposed to what people are saying about him, tracks US policy pretty closely.

STEPHEN GREEN’S DEBATE WRAPUP:

(Forgive any typos, run on sentences, bad punctuation, etc. I’m flying without a net and with four (?) bourbon-rocks.)

The Kraken was indeed released.

Now, to be fair, the Kraken had been asleep for a long time, stuck in that watery cage. When the gates finally opened, he didn’t roar right out and smash a bunch of ships or Medusas or whatever.

(Forgive me. I haven’t watched the movie in years.)

Instead, the Kraken hit the snooze button (waterproof, presumably) a couple of times, yawned, choked on some seawater, burped, dog paddled out of the cage, and then looked awkward and sheepish because the Argonauts spent the next ten minutes pointing at his morning wood.

Well.

I think I’ve stretched the Kraken metaphor thinner than Ursula Andress’ toga, so let’s switch gears.

For all the lovely camaraderie of the last couple of minutes, it’s clear that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump loathe each other. Instead of a 90 minute town hall format, there’s no doubt that both candidates would eagerly agree to a debate held in a Roman Colosseum, to the death.

And, yes, we would be entertained.

But we have to talk about tonight’s debate, which is unlike anything I’ve ever seen, going back to when I was a child barely older than my oldest son, watching Reagan take on Carter.

I’ve seen them all. I’ve drank to most of them. Most have faded into nothingness.

This one, however, might linger.

I’ve never seen one candidate come on so week, then reverse course — in his own limited, almost demented fashion — so strongly.

I’ve never seen another candidate, so thoroughly programed, act as though her various subroutines had been corrupted by one of those nasty Russian viruses.

And all of this was after we began a presidential debate — a debate to determine the next President of the United States! — by talking about the proclivities of a major-party candidate who had once grabbed about grabbing women by…

Well, let’s not go there. We’ve said too much already.

This was not, in the end — or at almost any other point, really — a serious debate on the issues.

But it was a deadly serious contest between two people too unserious to be president.

However.

One of those unserious people demonstrated tonight that he is at least serious enough to recover from his many self-inflicted wounds, and in the most adverse and public circumstances.

Round 3 is ten days from now. I don’t know what to expect, because nothing from the first debate prepared us for anything from tonight’s debate.

But I can tell you this much: As pure entertainment, I’m looking forward, for once, more to the debate than to the cocktails.

Okay, that’s huge.

LIE OF THE DECADE: Obama’s ransom payment to Iran out-lies Hillary and even his own Obamacare mendacity, Jed Babbin writes at the American Spectator:

Obama has said repeatedly that the deal blocks all of Iran’s paths to nuclear weapons, which is precisely the opposite of the truth. Hillary won’t disturb Obama’s lies about the Iran deal because it’s as much a part of her legacy as it is a part of his.

Obama’s lies — on Islamic terrorism, Iran, Syria, Russia, China and the rest — will remain undisturbed if, as seems likely, America elects the woman Safire labeled congenital liar as president. On Iran, Obama’s lies deserve the label “historic” because they will shape our history, and those of our allies.

When presidential lies are synonymous with policy, our nation is in great danger.

Indeed™. Or as Glenn warned in 2011, “Up to now, comparisons with Carter were a tool of Obama’s critics. From now on, they’re likely to be a tool of his defenders. Because as bad as Carter was, Obama is shaping up to be worse. Much worse.”

Of course, Carter hasn’t lacked for leftwing apologists to spin even his most embarrassing moments. The scrotal torque-inducing spin to defend his successor’s myriad disasters will be astonishing to witness in the coming years.