Well, I certainly picked the wrong week to go on vacation. Normally you don’t have to worry about much going down news-wise in August, so I’ve typically taken a week there and the week after Christmas off in nearly a decade of writing this newsletter … and I cannot think of a single time I’ve done that where I felt more absent or overwhelmed by the amount of news I saw flying by every single day.

Today the White House faces a massive crush of challenges, both thanks to the world and of their own making. Their pandemic response has stalled, and they’re desperately throwing out impotent mandate threats — their vaunted plans proven incapable of returning the country to a state of normalcy, even if that’s what they ever really wanted.

Their Afghanistan withdrawal has resulted in the deaths of young Americans in the military and will likely soon lead to the deaths of civilians as well. Top Men are in a finger pointing war in Washington .........