All in the Game

The Retreads

They Still Think We're Waiting Three rooms, one week, and the quiet part said out loud The three showed up this week and said the quiet part out loud. They still believe the country is waiting for them to explain what happened. Obama on taste, Iran, and the unfinished bill Barack Obama stood in Cleveland and Detroit and treated the last decade as an interruption of his plan. On the White House he offered the line that landed: the current president “seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV,” and “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam…

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The Empty Platform

Democrats Will Regret Running an Issueless Campaign Democrats have entered the final stretch of the 2026 midterms without a domestic platform they can defend. Their campaign rests on opposition to Donald Trump, the promise of investigations, and a generic claim of “government corruption” that they have attached to the current administration. They name affordability as a problem and then decline to offer a remedy that survives contact with either the record of the last Democrat administration or the proposals still endorsed by their candidates. The structure is familiar. It is the same structure that failed the out-party in 1998 and again…

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Defeat Them

Defeat Them Rush Limbaugh spent his career telling the country one thing. Democrats must be defeated. He said it on the air every day. He put it on the cover of the February 2001 Limbaugh Letter. A Roman warrior stands in EIB armor against the coliseum. The words beneath the figure are simple. Defeat Them! That cover was not decoration. It was the operational summary of the work. The same imperative applies now. The radicalism that treats political opponents as existential threats has announced itself in advance. The statements began with Sen. Elissa Slotkin and Sen. Chris Murphy. They continued with…

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Where’s Jimmy?

Where is James Talarico? Twelve days. An empty calendar. Campaigns abhor a vacuum. Ken Paxton put the question to a San Antonio crowd with the president in the building. Where is Talarico? Twelve days. The chant did not need a speechwriter. It needed an empty calendar, and the calendar was empty. A Senate nominee does not get to vanish for two weeks in October and have the silence treated as neutral. Nature abhors a vacuum. Politics abhors one faster. The space fills. It fills with theories, with old footage dressed as news, with a spokesman’s sentence that answers less than it…

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The Ultimate Cipher

The Lie Needs a Voice Two rooms. One mouth. No self. A cipher is a person through whom someone else's text is read. The room writes. He pronounces. N.B. March 4: Why Talarico Won't Win Texas. September 15: Losin' Texas. September 29: Deductible Jesus. Same file. Last week was the theology. This week is the man who needs two scripts. You have now seen the same man occupy two rooms and deny that the door exists. On September 9, Brooke Taylor put the question to him in English Texas still speaks. He said he would oppose men in girls' sports if…

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Deductible Jesus

Talarico's Campaign Theology The clip is the house theology with a punch line. N.B. March 4: Why Talarico Won’t Win Texas. September 15: Losin’ Texas. Same file. The church is no longer backdrop. It is the source code. Andrew Breitbart was right. Politics is downstream from culture. James Talarico’s culture has a street address. St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin raised him. Jim Rigby baptized him, married his parents, and has been his pastor since he was two. Talarico has said so himself. That pulpit taught him what to do with Jesus. The Senate race is the delivery system. The deductible…

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The Angry Elf

The Terrible Temperament Michigan is hiring a senator, not a terrible temperament. I have watched Abdul El-Sayed long enough to stop treating each eruption as a one-off. They are not one-offs. They are a temperament. Michigan is not hiring a temperament. Michigan is hiring a senator. Call him what the tape made him. The Angry Elf. Small man energy aimed at bigger rooms. A dare where an answer belongs. A lecture where a neighbor would use a noun. Hard questions do not get absorbed. They get upgraded into a fight, a wound, or a second creed for a second audience. That…

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The Deadly Results of Democrat Policies

Illegal. Released. Again. Crime, immigration, and fraud are one chain. November is the sequel. I wrote in May that crime, illegal immigration, and fraud would be major midterm issues. I have written the fraud half of that sentence until the cows come home. The last ten days handed the country the staple. A coalition of Democrat states went to court to keep welfare off the green-card test. A rideshare driver who should never have been here was charged with raping a seventeen-year-old girl in Maryland after New York had already let him walk on a sex-abuse arrest. Same week. Same argument.…

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The Art of the Hemisphere, Part VII

The Infinite Life Greenland did not have to change hands. The lock on the door did. N.B. Read Parts I, II, III, IV, V, and VI of this series. See also Trump’s Greenland Gambit. May 8 was the mineral proof. August 28 closed the southern flank. Friday recorded the north. President Trump posted that the United States had entered an “Infinite Life” agreement with the Kingdom of Denmark and Greenland: permanent control over security “and all other needs,” no cost to the United States, no end date, and a rule that no adversary may put a base, a troop presence, or…

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Walking the Line

The Classroom Is the Census Heritage was never a photograph. Coppell already did the counting. I live in Plano, Texas. I have watched this county change from the parks, the drop-off lines, and the streets I walked with my kids. I wrote that change into Restore the American Melting Pot in April. I wrote the native-versus-native split into Divided Among Ourselves the next day. I wrote the H-1B housing tape into American Families Gain Ground in June: puja rooms, spice kitchens, Dallaspuram, then the first slack in the line when the visa tap tightened. This week the country tried to have…

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