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Currently, the historian Thucydides is the object of debate among those within the Trump Administration and its critics, who, like scholars of the last three millennia, focus on lots of differing Thucydidean personas. https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/26/everyone-suddenly-quoting-thucydides/

Did Thucydides warn in deterministic fashion about ascendant powers like Athens that disrupt the existing order of Sparta and its Peloponnesian League—and thus prompt preventive attacks from established nations (“the Thucydides trap”)?

Is the historian thus a guide to how to handle a rising China? Or did he remind us how wrong-headed (but nonetheless free and correctable) choices can turn a tense situation into a catastrophe?

Was Thucydides, an admiral and man of action, a voice of the aristocratic elite, or sympathetic toward small landowners who were neither oligarchic nor radically democratic?

Translated into modern terms, was he like-minded with the contemporary elite Washington establishment or a likely supporter of what are now the forgotten Red-State middle classes between the coasts?

Did he despise the reckless democracy that exiled him, or develop a grudging respect for its dynamism and powers of recovery from its own self-inflicted wounds—and become especially complimentary of Periclean leaders who can act forcefully within democratic checks and balances?

Some 2,400 years after Thucydides wrote the Peloponnesian War, scholars still argue over why and how he crafted his history.

Unchanging Human Nature and the Thin Veneer of Civilization
Are there, then, any guiding principles in reading his history that are beyond debate and must be respected in all current and often politicized efforts to channel the great historian?

In fact, there are two.

One, Thucydides assumes that human nature remains unchanging and thus he thinks his history will transcend the Peloponnesian War and become “a possession for all time” (ktêma es aei) that can enlighten us about wars and their consequences across time and space. On that score, he was quite right. Today his history is still mined for wisdom about conflict in the present waged by people inherently no different from Spartans and Athenians of the past. Thucydides would approve of his contemporary utility. He certainly did not believe that enlightened intellectuals, with reliance on resources like greater education and wealth, can change the nature of man and thereby always eliminate war through rational compromise and higher wisdom.

Two, Thucydides believes that the veneer of civilization is precious and thus when ripped off—by the plague at Athens, the revolutions at Mytilene and Corcyra, the ultimatums to and dialogue with the Melians, and the expedition to Sicily—man’s innate nature is revealed as savage and reduced to its circumstances. He is of the tragic, not the therapeutic, bent, and at odds with the later Tacitean sense of the noble savage.

Six months into the Trump presidency, it seems safe to say that America has never had a political experience like the one he has brought to the White House. He has sparked a stark raving mad #resistance from the left that makes Bush Derangement Syndrome look fair and balanced. The news media hang on his every tweet. Hollywood is practically self-combusting in panic and disbelief. Climate change Cassandras are melting down. Illegal aliens are feeling the heat as well. He has even thrown his own party into turmoil. All of this hysterical disarray has resulted from the impact not of a movement or a Party, but of one man, Donald Trump.

Now a new documentary offers some thoughtful commentary on President Trump’s agitating arrival on the political scene. Produced, directed and edited by Agustin Blazquez, The Trump Effect: Deprogramming the American Mind features author and filmmaker Laurence Jarvik musing upon the rise of Trump and how this iconoclastic President is changing the way Americans think about ourselves and the world. Over the course of an hour of discussion, Jarvik’s primary thesis is that Trump is dismantling the politically correct ideology that has dominated American political discourse since 9/11, which will lead the way to a newfound freedom and unification of a country on its way to becoming great again.

Laurence Jarvik is the editor and publisher of Penny-A-Page Press and the author of PBS: Behind the Screen and Masterpiece Theater and the Politics of Quality. He is also the director of Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die, a documentary about America’s indifference to the plight of European Jews during the Holocaust. Agustin Blazquez is the Cuban filmmaker behind a seven-part Covering Cuba documentary series and the founder of UnCovering Cuba Educational Foundation, a non-profit organization.

“The Trump effect,” Jarvik begins, “is the deprogramming of the American mind, and Trump is the Deprogrammer-in-Chief.” Since the traumatic terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Jarvik notes, “Americans have somehow been programmed, indoctrinated, sort of fed a lot of fantasy ideology, whether it’s in schools, whether in the media, whether in politics,” and the brainwashing and fear induced by this PC totalitarianism is similar to being immersed in a cult. The process of breaking free from its grip is not unlike the process whereby a cult follower is deprogrammed.

Jarvik is hopeful that Trump can break this spell; indeed, he is already doing it. “The techniques Trump is using are the same techniques used by deprogrammers,” he argues. “First they have to discredit the cult leader… [Trump] did it with the Clintons and the Bushes, and he did it with President Obama.”

“The second step is to show the contradictions between what they say and what they’re going to do on a policy or action level. Again, he did that,” and “that’s where the tweets come in.” Jarvik notes that Trump uses Twitter to constantly bombard the public with information and attacks on leftist hypocrisy and policy failures.

“The third stage,” Jarvik continues,

which is the tipping point in this, is that you have to get the cult member who is being deprogrammed to recognize reality. The cult creates a fantasy world that you live in. Once the cult follower is shown the leader can’t be trusted, that the policies make no sense, and then is exposed to what reality is, the former cult person can begin to think for him- or herself. So Trump has really been carrying out this experiment and deprogramming the whole country.

In this respect, Jarvik states, “Trump, far from being a Hitler figure,” which is the left’s constant refrain, “is a liberator.” Trump’s reliance on Twitter plays into that. Jarvik observes that it’s as if Trump saw the role that social media played in the so-called Arab Spring revolution and said to himself, We can have a Twitter revolution right here in the United States. Once Trump began to dominate Twitter with his round-the-clock tweets, Twitter felt the pressure and began censoring people, exposing the left’s authoritarian impulses. Trump showed that, as the great critics of totalitarianism like George Orwell and Arthur Koestler demonstrate in their novels, all it takes is one man to lead the way in challenging the power structure, and others will be inspired to follow suit. The next thing you know, a revolution is under way.

A great many misconceptions have built up around Trump, says Jarvik, and it’s important that they be dispelled. People have to realize, Jarvik insists, that “what Trump is most of all is a realist who represents a non-ideological, practical approach that is very much in keeping with his New York business background.” As a political outsider, Trump “was the right man at the right time because he wasn’t encumbered by all the constraints that other [politicians] had.”

Jarvik makes the interesting point that Trump, having come essentially from the entertainment world, is very familiar with the left but has rejected them, like a dissident to the Party. That makes him especially hated and dangerous. David Horowitz, the left’s most despised apostate, knows this experience intimately.

As for Trump breaking the chains of political correctness, Jarvik cites an insightful example. “Nothing is more politically incorrect than beauty pageants,” which absolutely outrage feminists. “Trump is the president who owned beauty pageants,” says Jarvik, and thus Trump has, in a way, helped to usher a renewed appreciation for beauty back into a culture that has been wallowing in PC ugliness.

Noting that nothing Trump’s critics hurl at him seem to derail him, Jarvik asserts that Trump is “pretty much bullet-proof.” “If Reagan was the ‘Teflon President,’” he says, “you could say Trump is the ‘Kevlar President.’” Jarvik is optimistic that the Trump presidency will move the nation forward and ultimately even resolve our political polarization.

Check out more of Laurence Jarvik’s thoughts in The Trump Effect below, and get more information about it here.

My heart is with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which last night published an editorial defending Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the so-called Russia investigation. Unfortunately, my head cannot go along because the editors miss important points.

Preliminarily, the Journal addresses an aspect of President Trump’s unseemly public critique of his AG that has bothered me, too. Trump has said that if Sessions had informed the White House that he’d recuse himself from the Russia investigation, Trump would have nominated someone else for AG. The Journal counters that “the contours” of the investigation were not clear to Sessions until he started on the job in February.

I’m not sure I buy that — at least not completely. The FBI, CIA, and NSA released the non-classified public version of their report in early January. They indicated that there was an ongoing investigation of Russia’s interference in the election, and they spelled out the agencies’ theory that Putin had been trying to help the Trump campaign. Given that Sessions was a key figure in the Trump campaign and was about to take a position in which the FBI would answer to him, there were enough red flags to raise the prospect of a conflict situation.

Still, regardless of Sessions’s state of knowledge about the investigation, Trump was briefed on it in detail by the agency heads. Why should anyone assume it was incumbent on Sessions to raise any conflict-of-interest concerns? Trump was better informed on the matter. If, in nominating an AG, it was important to the incoming president to know the nominee’s position on disqualification, it was incumbent on Trump (or someone on the staff vetting nominations) to raise the issue. Obviously, we don’t know what discussions took place between the president-elect and his AG nominee. Assuming they failed to discuss this topic of great importance to Trump, however, I fail to see how that is Sessions’s fault — or at least, solely or principally Sessions’s fault.

Now, to the main point. As I recounted in yesterday’s column, Sessions expressly based his recusal on Section 45.2 of Title 28, Code of Federal Regulations. But that provision does not support his recusal. It says disqualification is necessary only if there is a criminal investigation or prosecution for which a prosecutor has a conflict of interest. The Russia investigation is not a criminal investigation; it is a counterintelligence investigation, which, for the reasons I outlined in the column, is saliently different from a criminal investigation.

In defending Sessions’s blind eye to this distinction, the Journal’s editors assert:

Some legal sages say this means Mr. Sessions did not have to recuse himself because this was a “counterintelligence,” not a criminal, probe. But you have to be credulous to think [the FBI’s then-director James] Comey would ignore potential crimes if he found them in the course of counterintelligence work. Mr. Sessions might have become a subject of the probe because of his meetings with the Russian ambassador.

This is wrongheaded. To take on the snark first, it is not a matter of being a “legal sage.” It was Sessions who cited a legal regulation as the basis for his recusal. It doesn’t require sagacity to point out that the regulation doesn’t say what he claims it says.

While everyone is fixated on President Trump’s unbecoming and inexplicable assault on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the media has been trying to sneak away from the “Russian collusion” story. That’s right. For all the breathless hype, the on-air furrowed brows and the not-so-veiled hopes that this could be Watergate, Jared Kushner’s statement and testimony before Congress have made Democrats and many in the media come to the realization that the collusion they were counting on just isn’t there.

As the date of the Kushner testimony approached, the media thought it was going to advance and refresh the story. But Kushner’s clear, precise and convincing account of what really occurred during the campaign and after the election has left many of President Trump’s loudest enemies trying to quietly back out of the room unnoticed.

Cable news airtime and in-print word count dedicated to the nonexistent collusion story appear to be dwindling. Democrats and their allies in the media seem less eager to talk about it, and when they do, they say something to the effect of “but, but, but … Kushner didn’t answer every question … He wasn’t under oath … There are still more witnesses … What about this or that new gadfly?” They are stammering. And it hasn’t taken long for news producers and editors to realize that the story is fading.

At last, the story that never was is not happening.

There are a few showstoppers from Kushner’s testimony that make it obvious to any fair-minded, thinking person that there was no collusion with Russia. In his own words, Kushner makes it clear that his actions were innocent but, at times, misguided and ill-conceived. He plainly states he had “hardly any” contacts with Russians during the campaign and found his June 2016 meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and the infamous Russian lawyer to be an absolute “waste of time.”

Democrats and their allies in the media have exhausted themselves building a scandalous narrative surrounding the Russian lawyer meeting, but according to Kushner, the meeting was so useless that he “actually emailed an assistant from the meeting after [he] had been there for ten or so minutes and wrote ‘Can u pls call me on my cell? Need excuse to get out of meeting.”’ Maybe the collusion didn’t take very long, or maybe he realized what the lawyer had to say was a useless farce and he wanted to get on with his day.

Sara Carter of Circa is citing three anonymous sources in an exclusive report identifying a suspect in the investigation of the criminal leak of classified information from the FBI. Are you shocked to learn that the suspect is highly placed, highly regarded and a close friend of James Comey? She writes:

FBI General Counsel James A. Baker is purportedly under a Department of Justice criminal investigation for allegedly leaking classified national security information to the media, according to multiple government officials close to the probe who spoke with Circa on the condition of anonymity.

FBI spokeswoman Carol Cratty said the bureau would not comment on Baker and would not confirm or deny any investigation.

This comes as Department of Justice Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he would soon be making an announcement regarding the progress of leak investigations. A DOJ official declined to comment on Circa’s inquiry into Baker but did say, the planned announcement by Sessions is part of the overall “stepped up efforts on leak investigations.”

Baker, like Mueller and Comey, seems to have accumulated a lot of positive adjectives, such as “distinguished,” from his beltway colleagues.

Baker was appointed to the FBI’s general counsel by Comey in 2014 and has had a long and distinguished history within the intelligence community.

After working as a federal prosecutor in the Criminal Division of the Department of Justice during the 1990s, he joined the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review In 1996, according to his FBI bio. (https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/pressrel/press-releases/james-a.-baker-appointed-as-fbis-general-counsel).

In 2006 Baker received the George H.W. Bush Award for Excellence in counter-terrorism—the CIA’s highest counter-terrorism award, according to his biography. During Baker’s long and distinguished career he received the “NSA’s Intelligence Under Law Award; the NSA Director’s Distinguished Service Medal; and DOJ’s highest award— the Edmund J. Randolph Award.”

He sounds like quite the public servant. An image like Comey’s and Mueller’s.

Never forget that Baker may be totally innocent of leaking, and it may be others:

A federal law enforcement official with knowledge of ongoing internal investigations in the bureau told Circa, “the bureau is scouring for leakers and there’s been a lot of investigations.”

Baker will no doubt have the full protection of the safeguards built into our criminal justice system, should he be indicted. The leaks will not stop until prison sentences are handed down for some “distinguished” members of the deep state.

Slavery in America, typically associated with blacks from Africa, was an enterprise that began with the shipping of more than 300,000 white Britons to the colonies. This little known history is fascinatingly recounted in White Cargo (New York University Press, 2007). Drawing on letters, diaries, ship manifests, court documents, and government archives, authors Don Jordan and Michael Walsh detail how thousands of whites endured the hardships of tobacco farming and lived and died in bondage in the New World.

Following the cultivation in 1613 of an acceptable tobacco crop in Virginia, the need for labor accelerated. Slavery was viewed as the cheapest and most expedient way of providing the necessary work force. Due to harsh working conditions, beatings, starvation, and disease, survival rates for slaves rarely exceeded two years. Thus, the high level of demand was sustained by a continuous flow of white slaves from England, Ireland, and Scotland from 1618 to 1775, who were imported to serve America’s colonial masters.

These white slaves in the New World consisted of street children plucked from London’s back alleys, prostitutes, and impoverished migrants searching for a brighter future and willing to sign up for indentured servitude. Convicts were also persuaded to avoid lengthy sentences and executions on their home soil by enslavement in the British colonies. The much maligned Irish, viewed as savages worthy of ethnic cleansing and despised for their rejection of Protestantism, also made up a portion of America’s first slave population, as did Quakers, Cavaliers, Puritans, Jesuits, and others.

Around 1618 at the start of their colonial slave trade, the English began by seizing and shipping to Virginia impoverished children, even toddlers, from London slums. Some impoverished parents sought a better life for their offspring and agreed to send them, but most often, the children were sent despite their own protests and those of their families. At the time, the London authorities represented their actions as an act of charity, a chance for a poor youth to apprentice in America, learn a trade, and avoid starvation at home. Tragically, once these unfortunate youngsters arrived, 50% of them were dead within a year after being sold to farmers to work the fields.

A few months after the first shipment of children, the first African slaves were shipped to Virginia. Interestingly, no American market existed for African slaves until late in the 17th century. Until then, black slave traders typically took their cargo to Bermuda. England’s poor were the colonies’ preferred source of slave labor, even though Europeans were more likely than Africans to die an early death in the fields. Slave owners had a greater interest in keeping African slaves alive because they represented a more significant investment. Black slaves received better treatment than Europeans on plantations, as they were viewed as valuable, lifelong property rather than indentured servants with a specific term of service.

These indentured servants represented the next wave of laborers. They were promised land after a period of servitude, but most worked unpaid for up to15 years with few ever owning any land. Mortality rates were high. Of the 1,200 who arrived in 1619, more than two thirds perished in the first year from disease, working to death, or Indian raid killings. In Maryland, out of 5,000 indentured servants who entered the colony between 1670 and 1680, 1,250 died in bondage, 1,300 gained their right to freedom, and only 241 ever became landowners.

Law-enforcement officials across the nation are taking extraordinary new precautions against a growing threat to their ranks: fentanyl, a drug so toxic that just a few grains can kill.

Kevin Phillips, a deputy sheriff in Harford County, Md., recently felt the drug’s wrath when he responded to an increasingly routine call of drug overdose, opening a nightstand in the home while searching for heroin.

“About two or three seconds after I shut it, my face started burning. I broke out in a sweat,” said Cpl. Phillips, who was rushed to the hospital for treatment after overdosing on fentanyl that had been mixed into the heroin.

Authorities swiftly set a new policy: deputy sheriffs must treat drug seizures like an active shooter incident—to slow down and evaluate the scene—in this case ensuring they have elbow-length gloves, protective masks and safety glasses.

Law-enforcement encounters with fentanyl nationwide rose to more than 14,000 in 2015 from about 1,000 in 2013, according to federal data. Fentanyl, which is 50 times more powerful than heroin, has been used legally for decades, including as a painkiller for cancer patients. But in the past five years, illegal forms of the drug, often produced in China and Mexico, have quickly spread throughout the country and contributed to a broader opioid epidemic that has killed tens of thousands of people.

Two to three milligrams of fentanyl—the equivalent of five to seven grains of table salt—is enough to cause respiratory depression, cardiac arrest or death, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which issued new guidelines for first responders in June. Overdosing can occur from inhaling or touching fentanyl, which drug dealers often mix with heroin because it is cheaper and has a higher potency.

“[Fentanyl] is a new challenge, a game changer for law enforcement,” said Harford County Sheriff Jeffrey Gahler. “It could be anyone exposed.”
Deadly MenaceLike law enforcement agencies across the U.S., the New York City Police Department isincreasingly coming into contact with fentanyl. Number of times the NYPD found the drugin narcotics cases.THE WALL STREET JOURNALSource: New York Police DepartmentNote: 2017 data is projected.
2014’15’16’1702505007501,0001,2501,5001,7502,0002,2502,5002016×1,383

It’s not just humans at risk.

While executing a narcotics search warrant in October, officers from Broward County Sheriff’s Office in Florida directed three trained dogs—Primus, Finn and Packer—to sniff around a house. The dogs soon because drowsy, found it difficult to stand and eventually adopted blank stares and became unable to move, said Det. Andy Weiman, the head dog trainer. The dogs were later determined to have overdosed in a house where fentanyl was found. They were treated at an animal hospital and were back at work the next day, he said.

Law-enforcement officials are quickly overhauling their procedures for handling fentanyl and other forms of the drug.

THE KOREAN WAR Jun 25, 1950 – Jul 27, 1953

The news is full of commentary, policy suggestions and criticisms of the present crisis with aggressive and dangerous behavior by North Korea’s present leader Kim Jong-un. The Korean War fought from June 25th, 1950 until July 27,1953 is hardly mentioned, although the latest records indicate that 36,574 were killed and 103,284 wounded in action and as late as 2017, 7,800 soldiers remain unaccounted for. In the aftermath of World War 11, In August 1945, Korea was liberated from Japan which had invaded and annexed Korea in 1910. Stalin’s demands for “buffer zones” in Asia, created the 38th parallel, which divided the nation into the People’s Republic of (North)Korea and the Republic of (South)Korea, to be administered by the Russians and the Americans respectively. The Communist regime in the north was run by then 33-year-old Kim Il Sung (the grand-father of North Korea’s present dictator) whose patrons were Stalin and Mao Tse-Tung.

When thousands of North Korean troops who fought on Mao’s side in the Chinese Civil War returned to North Korea, Kim Il Sung redeployed them along the 38th parallel, and escalated provocations which resulted in an invasion of the Republic of South Korea on June 25, 1950.

On June 27th, at the urging of the United States, the UN Security Council voted in favor of armed resistance to North Korea which persuaded President Truman who was reluctant to enter into armed conflict so soon upon the heels of World War 11 to commence the defense of South Korea. There were armed contingents from Turkey, England Canada and Australia, but America sent 90% of troops so it was really America’s war.The United States would deploy the Seventh Fleet of the U.S. Navy in the Taiwan Strait and send massive air and naval power to the area. In spite of warnings and caveats from The Joint Chiefs of Staff, troops were committed on June 30th and the draft, still in place, increased the numbers of active duty troops to roughly 700,000 Army and 90,000 battle-ready Marines.

There were military triumphs and an equal number of serious reversals.In July 1950, when General Douglas MacArthur was given command of U.S. troops in Korean The North Korean Army drove south to the nation’s capital Seoul.On September 15th, approximately 80,000 marines landed at Inchon with minimal losses. Supported with massive air power the United States forces halted the advances of Kim Il Sung and by end of September they recaptured the capital and North Korea’s forces retreated.

However, Chinese/North Korean forces swiftly responded with a massive counterattack which Secretary of State Dean Acheson described as the worst American defeat since the battle of Bull Run during the Civil War. By December the North Korean armies pushed American troops southward and reoccupied Seoul in early 1951. This was a major defeat for the American forces subsequently blamed on “poor intelligence.”

In late January American strategy was reassessed, and under the command of General Matthew Ridgeway, who had been called in after the landing in Inchon, and after intense fighting American/Korean forces retook Seoul and again, pushed north of the 38th parallel. By April 1951 the fighting stabilized along what ultimately became the “demilitarized” zone and the South was secured.

On April 11, 1951, Truman demanded MacArthur’s resignation and the Supreme Command was turned over to General Ridgeway. Most historians agree that MacArthur was insubordinate and declassified documents have indicated that Truman distrusted him. Others posit that Truman was determined to wind down an increasingly unpopular war.

The war settled into the pattern it would follow for the next two years: Although formal negotiations to end the conflict actually commenced on July 10th of 1951, bloody fighting along the 38th parallel continued until 1953. U.S. forces engaged in several battles known as “active defense.” By this time, under the capable command of Generals Ridgeway and Van Fleet the US forces had already gained ground and in operations named “Roundup” “Killer” and “Ripper” had successfully repelled all Chinese/Korean forays. Fighting continued on hills called Pork Chop, T-Bone, Heartbreak Ridge and Old Baldy and the US forces continued their gains on the combined forces of North Korea and China, whose offensives all subsequently failed. The North Korean army was rapidly disintegrating and the Chinese turned their full attention to their land redistribution and “re-education” policies.

When Harry Truman announced that he would not run for another term. NATO’s Supreme Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, decided to run for the presidency on the Republican ticket.

The Democrat nominee Adlai Stevenson, Harry Truman’s choice, failed to gain momentum or populist support against a war hero. The war became so unpopular that the New York Times endorsed Eisenhower, whose platform promised a quick end to the war. He won by a landslide.

In November, 1952, a victorious Eisenhower fulfilled his campaign vow and traveled to Korea to help pave the way for the armistice which formally ended the war.

On July 27, 1953 the 38th parallel remained the front line of both north and south and a final armistice was signed. The Americans whose determination and military prowess had decimated and dispirited North Korea, had the ability and intention to “roll back Communism” but instead, they rolled back the war.

July 27th is the 64th anniversary of that armistice.

There was no conclusive victory, no surrender, and nothing gained for the West or Korea. It is also important to note that America’s hand picked President of South Korea Syngman Rhee refused to sign the agreement. Kim Il Sung consolidated one of the most brutal regimes in Asia. On his death in 1994, his son took control and has catapulted North Korea into a bellicose nuclear power which exports weapons and technology to all America’s enemies. And his son Kim Jong-un continues the Kim legacy of tyranny.

On January 23, 1968 after literally hundreds of violations of the armistice, North Korean torpedo ships seized the American spy vessel The Pueblo. The captain surrendered after stalling in an effort to destroy classified documents. The crew members were imprisoned, tortured, humiliated and forced to praise their captors. All efforts to free them were considered “unworkable” by President Johnson who was beset by the Vietnam War. The crisis ended 10 months later after the United States signed a letter of contrition and apology.

That is the pitiful legacy of America’s first unfinished war, establishing a pattern which haunts the free world and our allies today leaving thugs and despots in place. Wars are now fought until nations get tired of them.

In war, only the continued application of overwhelming force and total surrender will subdue and destroy enemies. That is how the Nazis were defeated and how Japanese imperialistic Shinto was dismantled.

How we will deal with present enemies- Iran, North Korea, and radical Islamic Jihad is anyone’s guess.

The Democrats have sensed weakness, and chosen this moment to pounce. To capitalize on Donald Trump’s low approval ratings they are rolling out Elizabeth Warren (38 percent approval), Nancy Pelosi (29 percent), and Chuck Schumer (26 percent). Delivering the message that the party has fresh ideas are three emissaries who are a combined 211 years of age, deploying a phrase — “a better deal” — that harks back to the hottest policy proposals of 1933. To prove they’re in tune with the concerns of middle America the Democrats are dispatching emissaries from Harvard, San Francisco, and Brooklyn. Oh, and the Democrats’ chief problem, according to the Democrats? Americans just aren’t mentally supple enough to understand how great our program is for them.

“Too many Americans don’t know what we stand for,” Schumer declared in a Trump-voting county of Virginia on Monday. “Not after today.” Mark it down, kids: July 24, 2017, was the day the Democrats finally clarified their message. Democrats will no longer have to moan What’s the Matter with Kansas, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Wisconsin? Because Monday is the day the right-learning parts of the country learned that Schumer, et al., have better ideas than the Republicans do.

The latest Democratic anthropological field trip to establish contact with the alien life forms known as Trump voters is focused on economic issues. That sounds wise. But far from being too subtle for Meathead America to understand, the progressive economic agenda is, as always, simple: You get the goodies you want now, someone else will pay, and never mind the future consequences. Who wouldn’t find such a platform enticing? You might as well tell a junior-high school, “Free PlayStation and Mountain Dew.” If the Democrats could stick to buying votes with other people’s money, they’d be dangerous.

As a matter of fact they are dangerous, now and always, for precisely this reason. Raising the minimum wage, one of the Democrats’ cornerstone ideas in their latest re-re-re-rebranding, is popular because it’s a simple fix that provides tangible benefits with invisible costs. Lower-rung workers get a bigger paycheck and the pain is hidden from view in the accounting divisions of faceless corporations. Never mind that a $15 national minimum wage would backfire and render many working Americans unemployed in the future. Government-dictated lowering of drug prices is popular too, never mind the invisible follow-up cost of hampering innovation that will extend lives in the future. The Democrats’ economic policy is sufficiently tempting that if elections were held tomorrow, with generic Democrats on the ballot, they might well manage to retake the House and the White House.

We all knew what Watergate was. We knew what Iran-Contra was. And the Lewinsky scandal. And the purported outing of Valerie Plame. Up until now, each time a special prosecutor has been sicced on a presidential administration, we’ve known what the allegations were. Our views about whether the conduct involved warranted such debilitating scrutiny may have diverged sharply. But at least we knew what the investigations were about, what the presidents and/or their subordinates were accused of doing.

That’s because what they were accused of doing was criminal. You need a prosecutor only to investigate crime.

The id-in-chief is on the verge of forcing his attorney general out — and with him, much of the conservative base that got past its wariness of Donald Trump because of Jeff Sessions’s support. Yet, as the appearance of scandal engulfs the administration, we still don’t know what crimes Trump and his subordinates are suspected of committing. Or even if they are suspected of committing crimes at all.

Mind you, the “Russia investigation” — the investigation with no specified crime — has already factored heavily in the dismissals of a top White House staffer and the head of our country’s premier investigative agency. Now it seems the nation’s top federal law-enforcement officer is on the brink. There is background noise about indictments, pardons, and impeachment. But we still don’t know what the allegation is. Or if there is one.

At the risk of trying our readers’ patience, I am going to beat a dead horse I’ve been wailing on since the first days of the Trump-Russia controversy. I do it because someday we may look back and realize the debacle was driven by the confusing label of “counterintelligence investigation,” which has obscured, well, everything.

The confusion starts with the label itself. When you hear “investigation” you think crime. But counterintelligence is not about rooting out crime; it is about divining the intentions of foreign powers. It is not enough to say that crime is not its focus. Crime is not permitted to be its focus.

In the counterintelligence context, because the government is not trying to build a criminal case, the constitutional protections that apply in criminal investigations are significantly diminished. Thus, if the government pretextually exploits its counterintelligence authorities to conduct criminal investigations, serious legal problems arise. The 9/11 controversy over “the wall” — the infamous regulations that prevented information-sharing between counterintelligence and criminal agents — occurred precisely because the Justice Department was overeager to demonstrate its determination to keep the two realms separate.

Counterintelligence work would be more accurately described as “information gathering and analysis” than as an “investigation.” Investigations are about collecting evidence in order to prosecute crimes.

This is expressly reflected in federal regulations — specifically, the ones that control when a “special counsel” should be appointed and when an attorney general should recuse himself. These things come into play only when criminal activity has occurred. They are not applicable to counterintelligence probes, which usually don’t involve prosecutors at all.

There is a need for an attorney general to disqualify himself, or for a special counsel to be appointed, only when the AG or the Justice Department at large is beset by a conflict of interest. How do we know whether there is such a conflict? We look at the known crime, or the factual basis for suspecting a crime. We then ask whether some political or personal connection to the criminal transaction under examination disqualifies the AG or the Justice Department from participation. To answer the question, “Is there a conflict?” we look at the criminality that must be investigated or prosecuted.