Programming note: At 7pm US Eastern I'll be checking in with Jesse Watters on Fox News Primetime live across America. Hope you'll join us.
~Chinese state media have now joined the Taliban in gleeful trolling of the flailing hyperpower:
When you feel life is going nowhere, just think: with
4 U.S. presidents
20 years
2 trillion dollars
2,300 soldiers' lives...the regime of Afghanistan changes from Taliban to... Taliban
Isn't this Social Media crapola supposed to be the one remaining skill of the developed world? As James, a First Week Founding Member of The Mark Steyn Club from Texas, put it earlier today:
Apparently our Hashtag Industrial Complex is as hollow and weak as everything else.
You ain't seen nothin' yet: In a couple of weeks, the Taliban will be celebrating the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 by gamboling and frolicking in the US Embassy at Kabul, the second most expensive embassy in the history of embassies, costing north of three-quarters of a billion of borrowed federal moolah.
~I've found almost all allegedly "conservative" commentary of the last few days shallow and oblivious, and realized yet again how much I missed Rush - not the guest-hosting, but the man himself, the Mayor of Realville whose view of the situation has been painfully absent this last week.
With that in mind, I thought you might like to take a three-quarter-of-an-hour break from America's Suez moment and enjoy this finale to our friend James (Snerdley) Golden's series Rush Limbaugh: The Man Behind the Golden EIB Microphone. For this postscript, James has collated various vignettes from the life of America's anchorman, as told by yours truly, Rudy Giuliani, Megyn Kelly, Scott Baio, Mary Matalin and others. It's a timely reminder of who and what we're missing right now. Click below to listen:
~It was a very busy weekend at SteynOnline, beginning with the latest edition of The Mark Steyn Show, in which I tried, unsuccessfully, to conceal my contempt for the Potemtagon, the State Department and other organs of the United States Government - especially Thoroughly Modern Milley. Saturday saw a new episode of Mark Steyn's Passing Parade, looking at two generations of minor pop celebrity. Later, for our weekend movie date, Rick McGinnis considered a film starring one of my favorite actresses (if not Rick's), Dorothy Malone - and also Jack Carson, the uncle of Rush's beloved chief of staff, the late Kit Carson, whom I also miss very much. My Sunday column found me considering the meltdown of a superpower, and our Song of the Week offered a thought for the week: "What a Diff'rence a Day Makes."
Our marquee presentation was my ongoing audio serialization of Jack London's Burning Daylight as it rattles toward its climax - click for Episode Forty-One, Episode Forty-Two and Episode Forty-Three. Part Forty-Four airs tonight.
If you were too busy getting trampled in the dust outside Hamid Karzai International this weekend, we hope you'll want to check out one or three of the foregoing as a new week begins.