The Europeans wrote the book on how to be successful deadbeats. We got another demonstration of that at the NATO summit this week in Brussels. Some of the chief practitioners of the art of welshing on a debt take a fulsome pride in their deadbeat pedigree.
The good ol' boys, if there were any in Old Blighty, could tell Theresa May how and why she finds herself in such a mess in London, with a Brexit disaster only inches away: "You always go home with the one who brung you to the dance." This is folk wisdom every conscientious mother should impart to her daughter, early and often.
I've got your judge right here: Gentlemen, place your bets. I've got Brett Kavanaugh at 5 to 2, Amy Coney Barrett at 4 to 1, and coming up fast on the inside, Ray Kethledge at 8 to 3. Kavanaugh has been on a bit of a fade, Miss Amy is holding steady over the past 24 hours, and some smart money is trending toward Kethledge. Looks like a down to the wire race.
Litmus test, litmus test, who's got a litmus test? Well, apparently just about every senator on the left. A litmus test -- a standard beyond which one won't go, like Barack Obama's famous red line in Syria -- was once derided as the mark of a rigid mind. Now that the independent mind has gone out of style, everybody wants to impose a litmus test.
Nobody has ever proved that Andy Warhol said "in the future everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes."
Bonnie and Clyde sometimes called themselves "bank inspectors," but they were only kidding. The Palestinian Authority, the famous terrorist collective pretending to be a nation, collects $350 million from the U.S. Treasury every year to pay "salaries" to imprisoned terrorists, make love offerings to families of dead terrorists, celebrate terrorists as heroes, build monuments to dead criminals, and other bad things. And that's no joke.
Barack Obama is miffed because he thinks he collected the tinder for a booming economy, and events ignited a booming economy and the Donald gets the credit. That's pretty fanciful, as most economists will tell you. But now Mr. Obama can watch with a measure of pleasure as President Trump takes heat for using the Obama example of how to deal with the children brought by their families to the hell on the border.
Cutting Texas down to size is always a good thing to do, and if we have to carve up California to do it, well, that's life. The current popular notion in California would divide the Golden State into three new states, something that could be no longer be called Golden but perhaps Plastic, Pewter and Brass.
If Jeff Sessions and Christopher Wray want to clean house at the FBI, they'll be well advised to pack a good lunch. Cleaning this house will be an all-day job. The agency under James B. Comey has been more corrupt than we thought.
One hand giveth, the other taketh it away. President Trump, arriving in Singapore for his man-to-man with Kim Jong-un is, like nearly everyone else in town, giddy with anticipation.
If this is June, it must be time to indict Paul Manafort again. The clock is ticking, and the tic-tocs are getting louder.
The Supreme Court can sometimes twist itself into a pretzel to write law. The court on Monday upheld again the Constitutional principle that freedom of speech includes the right not to speak, but it all but apologized for saying so.
Language is everything, as George Orwell reminded everyone, but today you can get words on the cheap and define them for yourself. A voice at the supermarket self-service check-out advises a shopper to "put your item in the bagging area." Does that mean the can of soup can go on the floor? The bag of potato chips on a nearby pastry bin? All are in the bagging "area."
Memorial Day is done and gone, and millions of Americans probably still don't know what it's supposed to be all about, beyond a picnic with hot dogs and six-packs in the park.
Fake news is everywhere, cluttering desktops, iPads, laptops, iPhones and all the other manifestations of the post-literate era when it's just too much trouble to find a reliable read.
Satchel Paige, the legendary master of the sinking curve ball and famous doctor of philosophy, had a few wise words that Robert Mueller could use just now: "Don't look back, something might be gaining on you."
Colluding, like canoodling, is all the rage. Robert Mueller, like a dog chasing his tail, has been trying for more than a year to find evidence that President Trump colluded with Vladimir Putin and the Russians to cook the 2016 election, which fate, providence, fortune and destiny decreed properly belonged to Hillary Clinton.
Drawing on his Navy SEAL training, Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens asserted Thursday that he will not quit or back down despite a criminal charge and potential impeachment proceedings involving various allegations of misconduct against him.
No man in America is more entitled to the nation's admiration and gratitude for sacrifice than John McCain. He's a hero in anybody's book, with no asterisks. An exclamation point, but no asterisk.
Asking a U.S. senator for his views on morality is the ultimate fool's errand. As the innkeeper of "Fawlty Towers," the British sitcom, was fond of saying in moments of neighborly frustration, "you might as well ask the cat."
