On Friday, February 24th, the Trump administration issued a “gaggle” against reporters from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, and Politico, prohibiting them from gaining access to the White House press briefing. The ban was quickly followed by a boycott of the press meeting by Time magazine and the Associated Press. To their credit, these two outlets did what White House reporters should have already done – stop attending press conferences dominated by obvious fabrications, distortions, and propaganda. If MSNBC’s Morning Joe can divorce itself from the lies of Kellyanne Conway, certainly the New York Times can too, right? But losing access is the ultimate kiss of death in corporate journalism. The core of this system is based on maintaining access to high-level officials, so being blacklisted from press briefings is a devastating blow to establishment reporters. More

In the annals of human conflict, the Gulf War of 1991, when the US dispatched half a million troops and a huge armada of ships, planes and tanks into the desert south of Iraq and Kuwait and then crushed Iraqi forces in both those countries in a six-week blitz from Jan. 17-Feb. 28, surely has to rank as one of the most one-sided wars since Hitler’s Wehrmacht marched through Holland in four days in 1940.

That war, called Operation Desert Storm by the Pentagon, was really just a massive live-fire exercise for US forces, which suffered only 146 casualties, 35 of them in “friendly-fire” incidents and 111 to enemy fire. Iraqi losses were estimated at 35,000, most of them killed in US air strikes as they were trapped trying to retreat to Iraq up a Kuwaiti highway that became known as the “Highway of Death,” where fleeing Iraqi troops -- most of them hapless draftees -- were bombed and strafed mercilessly and nonstop as they sat trapped in an epic traffic jam caused by strategically destroyed vehicles along the route. More

“Chaos,” “dismay,” “radically inept” — those are just a few of the recent headlines analyzing Donald Trump’s foreign policy.

In truth, disorder would seem to be the strategy of the day. Picking up the morning newspaper or tuning on the national news sometimes feels akin to opening up a basket filled with spitting cobras and Gabon Vipers.

But the bombast emerging for the White House hasn’t always matched what the Trump administration does in the real world. The threat to dump the “one-China” policy and blockade Beijing’s bases in the South China Sea has been dialed back. The pledge to overturn the Iran nuclear agreement has been shelved. And NATO’s “obsolesce” has morphed into a pledge of support. More