From The Desk of Holy Heresy

  Five Years Later, the Graveyard Still Wins ​Look, you don’t need a high-priced foreign policy fellowship inside the Beltway to figure out what happened in Afghanistan. You just need basic historical literacy and the common sense God gave a mule. ​As a college political science student watching the tanks roll in decades ago, the math was painfully obvious on day one: if the Soviet Union, with all their brutal, scorched-earth military machinery, couldn't bend Afghanistan to their will in ten bloody years, what on earth made our Washington establishment think we were going to pull it off? ​We didn’t. We spent twenty years, trillions of dollars, and thousands of American lives trying to build a modern democracy out of thin air, only to watch the entire paper-mache apparatus collapse in a weekend. ​Now, five years after the chaotic withdrawal from Kabul, we get the latest dispatch from the New York Times: the Taliban is marking its five-year anniversary in power, parading captured ha...

The Florida Democratic Party has a once-in-a-lifetime political gift sitting right on its doorstep, and if history is any guide, they are five minutes away from leaving the package in the rain. Let’s not sugarcoat three decades of history: the current administration in Tallahassee has been an unmitigated disaster from day one, preceded by eight years of Rick Scott running the state like a predatory equity firm. Much like neighboring states across the South, Florida has spent thirty continuous years under unchecked Republican rule. What does the state have to show for it? An education system being dismantled for ideological trophies, rising violent crime, crumbling infrastructure, and asphalt-choked urban heat islands that turn entire zip codes into unlivable griddles. In any sane political environment, the Florida Democratic Party would smell blood in the water, pounce on this vulnerability just like Georgia Democrats did, and claw back some dignity. Instead, take a hard, sober look at...