Jan
21
2026

Waist Deep in the Big Glacier

Mr. Ramirez sums up the dangerous absurdity of the moment:

Today's headline is a takeoff on an old Commie's song: "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy". Sorry, but appropriate.

Words from the wise today start with Jim Geraghty, who notes that Trump is Tearing Apart NATO, over a Trinket. After dissecting the famed (but also "unhinged, false, or bonkers") text Trump sent to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre:

I am again reminded of a line of dialogue from The Dark Knight: “What exactly did you think they were gonna do?”

How exactly do you expect good outcomes to be generated by a president who is so erratic, unhinged, ill-informed, and irrational?

In a saner, better world, Trump cabinet officials would be turning to each other and discussing invoking the 25th Amendment, which states:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Oh, no one in the current cabinet would ever dare utter the thought. They’re all Trump loyalists, and if they can distinguish the best interests of the country from their own personal ambitions and access to power, they’re hiding that ability well.

A recent WaPo LTE-writer, a Mr Robert K. Finnell, Rome, Georgia makes a pretty devastating point about what he considers The most alarming Trump quote yet.

Asked recently by the New York Times whether there are any limits on his power, President Donald Trump responded, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” These words from a president should concern all Americans but especially conservatives.

Conservatism was never meant to be a celebration of personalities. It is a commitment to institutions, to restraint, to the slowly learned lessons of history. The system the Founders designed reflects that wisdom. James Madison reminded us that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The problem with government is not that it is evil but that it is powerful. Thus the Constitution was not built for perfect leaders. It was built for ones who are human.

The conservative response to Trump should be firm: No person stands above the system, and no conscience substitutes for the law.

While Mr. Fisher invokes Madison, George Will starts with a quote from The Education of Henry Adams, by, er, Henry Adams:

The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies; a diseased appetite, like a passion for drink or perverted tastes; one can scarcely use expressions too strong to describe the violence of egotism it stimulates.

And he winds up with Churchill:

In Winston Churchill’s biography of his ancestor the Duke of Marlborough, he wrote that the Earl of Sunderland was “one of those dangerous beings” who “have no principle of action; who do not care what is done, so long as they are in the centre of it; to whom bustle, excitement, intrigue, are the breath of life; and whose dance from one delirium to another seems almost necessary to their sanity.” Or is evidence of its absence.

GFW's column is headlined "Greenland, Minnesota, Army-Navy game: Another day, another emergency" And if you need it, here is my last WaPo gifted link for January.

Also of note:

  • And what does he know about the Jewish Space Lasers? Jeff Maurer explains recent revelations about Team Kamala's suspicions. Look: You HAVE to Ask Josh Shapiro if He’s Ever Feasted on Palestinian Flesh.

    Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro recently wrote that when the Harris campaign was vetting him for Vice President, he was asked if he had ever been an Israeli agent. This was part of a vetting process that Shapiro — who is Jewish — describes as being heavily focused on Israel. When Shapiro bristled at being asked if he was an Israeli spy, he says that the Harris staffer who posed the question replied: “Well, we have to ask.”

    And that’s a fair point: You have to ask the governor of Pennsylvania, who was born in Missouri to a Navy veteran, if he’s spying for a foreign government. That is a totally normal question. And also an effective one, because if you ask a spy whether they’re a spy, they typically say “Aw nuts — ya got me!” Because if they didn’t, they’d be liars.

    A responsible vetting process has to ask Shapiro provocative questions. After all: Shapiro is Jewish. He’s been to Israel. His glasses are very Jewish. So, the Harris campaign has to ask questions like: “Are you loyal to the US or Israel?” “Are you part of an international banking conspiracy?” “How will you feel if President Harris’ policies conflict with the Jewish plot for world domination?” And, of course: “If I open your freezer right now, how many dismembered non-Jewish children am I going to find in there?”

    James Freeman (WSJ gifted link) has some fun with similar offbeat questions Kamala's Kops asked Tim Walz, quoting a CNN story:

    The Minnesota governor — whom Harris ultimately picked — was asked by her vetting team if he had ever been an agent of China, prompted by aides’ review of the multiple trips Walz took to China before running for office…

    To be fair, Walz's Sinophilism was pretty overt and weirdly sympathetic toward the Communist regime. But Kamala's vetting totally whiffed on Walz's mishandling of Minnesota's welfare fraud.

  • Free exercise of religion is also "First Amendment activity", Keith. Johnathan Turley isn't impressed with Minnesota's chief law enforcer. “This is First Amendment Activity”: Keith Ellison Denounces the Investigation of Church Protesters.

    Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison yesterday declared that there are no federal grounds for prosecuting the mob that disrupted St. Paul’s Cities Church and declared the conduct to be “First Amendment activity.” Ellison not only supported the protesters as exercising their First Amendment rights in an interview with CNN, but also indicated an unwillingness to enforce state laws violated by the protesters, from trespass to disorderly conduct.

    Ellison is infamous for his prior support for violent groups. When Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison proclaimed that Antifa would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump. His own son, Minneapolis City Council member Jeremiah Ellison, declared his allegiance to Antifa in the heat of the protests this summer.

    I still have some cousins in Minnesota. Pray for them, should you be so inclined.

  • Not. One. Thin. Dime. If you thought Wikipedia was bad before, Ashley Rindsberg has some news for you: it's worse than you thought. Wikipedia Editors Are Helping Iran Rewrite History. (archive.today link)

    While Iranian security forces have killed up to 20,000 protesters since December 2025—with the real toll feared much higher—another battle is being fought in the digital realm. As internet blackouts prevent Iranians from documenting their own repression, pro-regime editors on Wikipedia are working to control how these events, and Iranian history more broadly, are recorded and read by the rest of the world.

    It’s a deliberate dual strategy: Kinetic violence silences dissent at home, and digital propaganda shapes the narrative abroad. Together, they form what Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei calls “vindication jihad”—a soft war in the information space designed to rewrite reality itself.

    This didn’t begin with the most recent protests. An investigation into Wikipedia editing patterns reveals a yearslong, coordinated campaign to sanitize the Islamic Republic’s human rights record. According to a 2024 Times investigation, entries have been systematically edited to downgrade Iranian atrocities. Key details about the regime’s 1988 mass executions—including that victims were women and children murdered extrajudicially, and that current senior officials were involved in the death commissions—were deleted. Information about Iranian official Hamid Nouri’s 2022 sentencing to life imprisonment in Sweden for war crimes has disappeared. References to the 2018 expulsion of two Iranian diplomats from Albania for their alleged involvement in a bomb plot against dissidents have been scrubbed.

    I stopped contributing to Wikipedia awhile back. If you need reasons other than their murder-friendliness, here's an article I linked to back in 2024: The Wikipedia fundraising scam.