"Under such undistinguished chiefs as careerists Mike Morell (2011-2013) and current Director John Brennan, the CIA has become a partisan, politicized agency that exists primarily to tell Obama what he wants to hear -- which is to hear and see no evil from the Muslim world. Meanwhile, the National Security Agency, which largely deals with signals intelligence, was badly stung by traitor Edward Snowden, who made off with bushels of secrets and decamped to Russia. Even the fiercely independent FBI came under intense political pressure from the Justice Department during the recent investigation of Hillary Clinton's e-mails.

"Several recent presidencies have foundered on wishful, willful blindness to reality -- Lyndon Johnson with Vietnam, Jimmy Carter with the Soviet Union and Iran, Obama with Islam. Others have suffered the consequences of faulty field work and institutional rivalry, such as George W. Bush in Iraq; by the end of the Bush administration, the White House was relying more on the Department of Defense than what insiders sometimes call the Langley Home for Lost Boys, so untrustworthy did Bush and his advisers deem the CIA that had badly burned them."

"Fake news is making news.

"Warnings are going up about phony stories raging across the internet and influencing our politics. One implication is that false reporting helped do in Hillary Clinton, and are another reason Donald Trump is not the legitimate president.

"Like so many things, fake news seems to be in the eye of the beholder. The leaked Clinton campaign emails, for example, may have been despicably obtained and strategically released, particularly if it was the Russians who purloined them, but they appear genuine. ...

"Many of those sounding the loudest warnings about fake news are also its biggest purveyors. Clinton recently lectured America about what she called an epidemic of fake news. Yet there may never have been a phonier story than the one she sold to the American people claiming an anti-Muslim video triggered the deadly Benghazi embassy attacks."

"Since the election, Democrats have really been down in the Trumps. Despite the tantrums and protests, it strikes me that Democrats must be okay with this state of affairs. Sure, they claim he's Hitler with a spray tan, and on some level they might even believe this. But short of establishing that half the country are total masochists -- the safety word is 'MAGA' -- why are they doing everything in their power to make sure he runs roughshod over them and wins so much he gets sick of winning? Because that's what Democrats are doing.

"If I wanted to discredit an entire political party, I'd do exactly what Democrats, grassroots and party bosses alike, are doing: whining and making excuses at every opportunity, right up to insisting there must be some fantastical way to overturn a decisive electoral drubbing.

"The first step here should be to shut up and do some meaningful self-reflection about why Democrats lost. Yet precious few smart and influential Democrats are actually doing this. To paraphrase Mark Twain, it's better to remain silent and be thought a loser than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

"The world has turned itself upside down. Only yesterday the liberals and the left (the 'progressives,' as they want to be called) regarded the CIA as the locus of evil, the gang that couldn't shoot straight, forever poisoning gentle minds with a diet of conspiracy and tall tale.

"In those gloomy days of the Cold War, where every day was seasoned with a sharp wind and a cold rain, it was the Democratic intellectuals who were forever chiding the rest of us that the Soviet Union was not so bad, the Russians just wanted to be understood and maybe deserved an occasional cuddle. It was the Republicans and other conservatives who were mindless rubes who imagined there was a mad Russian under everybody's bed.

"Now the CIA, in the liberal/left's fevered dreams, is the last bulwark of the republic, the last remaining hope to turn the 2016 election result on its head and deprive Donald Trump of the victory he won. The Russians, it now turns out, are just as bad as the conservatives said they were."

"'Miss Sloane', the gun control thriller starring Jessica Chastain, over the weekend posted one of the worst performances of the past 35 years for a movie in wide release.

"The movie pulled in $1,167 on average at the 1,648 theaters across the country it was shown in. It made $1,922,300, meaning it was the 11th-highest grossing movie in the country. It is number 79 on Box Office Mojo's list of Worst Opening Weekend by Per-Theater Average since 1982.

"That means 'Miss Sloane' earned less money per theater than 'Pride and Prejudice and Zombies', 'Shaun the Sheep Movie', 'Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace', and 'Gigli'."

"Donald Trump had barely finished announcing his pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency before the left started listing its million reasons why Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt was the worst nomination in the history of the planet: He's an untrained anti-environmentalist. He's a polluter. He's a fossil-fuel fanatic, a lobbyist-lover, a climate crazy.

"Mr. Pruitt is not any of those things. Here's what he in fact is, and the real reason the left is frustrated: He's a constitutional scholar, a federalist (and a lawyer). And for those reasons he is a sublime choice to knock down the biggest conceit of the Obama era -- arrogant, overweening (and illegal) Washington rule. ...

"If Mr. Pruitt does this successfully, and on the way crushes the current president's legacy, Mr. Obama will have only himself to blame. His abuse of federal power helped elect a new generation of state attorneys general and Washington Republicans passionately devoted to a states' rights agenda. They'll be advising Mr. Trump not just on environmental policy, but on health care, labor policy, entitlement reform. Say hello to the federalist revival."

"[W]hat really makes Reid stand apart is his nihilistic pursuit of victory at all costs, with no regard for anyone else's good name, and certainly none for his own.

"The Senate and political Washington are worse for Reid's service. We'll be ready to regret his departure from Capitol Hill when the nation no longer has reason to regret that he ever arrived there."

"What is astounding, post-election, is the total lack of contrition Democrats have displayed for ignoring the workingman and -woman bloc that has been the party's horn of plenty. The only regret they display is that they lost the election, not the voters.

"What Democrats, academics and pundits keep refusing to see is that the loss was never about Trump's candidacy; it was all about how Democrats have increasingly lost touch with their voters outside of coastal America -- until those voters finally hit their breaking point.

"'The Democratic Party has become a coastal elitist club and if there is any decision or discussion made to broaden that within the ranks it is squashed,' said Dane Strother, a legendary Washington, DC-based Democratic strategist."

"In 1987, American diplomats in West Germany warned President Reagan not to mention the Berlin Wall when he visited the city. The State Department and the National Security Council repeatedly deleted 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall' from the speech that the president was to deliver. He ignored them, to very good effect.

"Their freakout was similar when Reagan called the Soviet Union 'evil.' But the Soviet Union was evil, and speaking the truth helped bring about good. ...

"Trump's Taiwan phone call was no clueless fumble. Taiwan specialists on Trump's team planned the call for weeks. ...

"Trump's brusque dismissal of the niceties is refreshing, and have elicited a measured and somewhat hesitant response from Beijing. This is good, they have already stopped assuming that America will kowtow."

"Will President Obama betray our military one last time by pardoning Bowe Bergdahl? ...

"Bergdahl abandoned his comrades in a combat zone and bobbed up with the terrorists.

"Desertion in the face of the enemy is the second-gravest military crime, just behind willful fratricide. Although Pentagon sycophants continue to deny it, Bergdahl's former platoon mates and others who served in Afghanistan when Bergdahl fled his post believe that good men died as a consequence of the massive search for the runaway (which paralyzed other military actions).

"Within days of Bergdahl's disappearance, a senior general in Afghanistan admitted to me that we knew Bergdahl had deserted. He claimed that a decision had been made not to go public with the charge to avoid adding to his parents' pain.

"What about the pain of the parents whose sons never came home?"