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The federal government is shut down, we’re about to hit the debt ceiling (with disastrous economic consequences), and no resolution is in sight. How did this happen?

The main answer, which only the most pathologically “balanced” reporting can deny, is the radicalization of the Republican Party.

the G.O.P. has become “an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

After weeks of dithering, Trump all but excused the federal government of much responsibility. Instead, he turned to the only the real power left in the land: America’s brands.

it’s worth focusing on the initial embarrassment — on the sorry fact that in order to provide its citizens tests for a pandemic disease, the wealthiest and most powerful nation had to desperately finagle the services of volunteer coders at Google.

During the Great Depression, Franklin D. Roosevelt assembled a mighty federal apparatus to rebuild a broken economy. Lyndon Johnson used federal power to bring civil rights to the South. Ours was the sort of government that promised unprecedented achievement, and delivered.

One of the most lethal leadership failures in modern times unfolded in South Africa in the early 2000s as AIDS spread there under President Thabo Mbeki.Mbeki scorned science, embraced conspiracy theories, dithered as the disease spread and rejected lifesaving treatments. His denialism cost about 330,000 lives, a Harvard study found

“We’re unfortunately in the same place,” said Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at U.C.L.A. “Mbeki surrounded himself with sycophants and cost his country hundreds of thousands of lives by ignoring science, and we’re suffering the same fate.”

“I see it as a colossal failure of leadership,” said Larry Brilliant, a veteran epidemiologist who helped eliminate smallpox in the 1970s. “Of the more than 200,000 people who have died as of today, I don’t think that 50,000 would have died if it hadn’t been for the incompetence.”

even though Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney weren’t culture warriors or evangelical Christians, in the popular imagination their legacy of incompetence has become a reason to reject social conservatism as well.

Just as the post-Vietnam Democrats came to be regarded as incompetent, wimpy and dangerously radical all at once, since 2004 the Bush administration’s blunders — the missing W.M.D., the botched occupation — have been woven into a larger story about Youth and Science and Reason and Diversity triumphing over Old White Male Faith-Based Cluelessness.

Of all the Iraq war’s consequences for our politics, it’s this narrative that may be the war’s most lasting legacy, and the most difficult for conservatives to overcome.

What had changed was the self-assurance of the people. By autumn 1989, the protest movement had gained sufficient confidence to take advantage of this incompetence.

In contrast, Stasi files demonstrate how members of the regime did not trust their colleagues, or their subordinates — and that this lack of trust gravely undermined their ability to blunt the rising revolution.

When one of the regime’s most loyal subordinates, a Stasi officer named Harald Jäger who was working the Nov. 9 night shift at a crucial checkpoint in the Berlin Wall, repeatedly phoned his superiors with accurate reports of swelling crowds, they did not trust or believe him. They called him a delusional coward. Insulted, furious and frightened, he decided to let the crowds out, starting a chain reaction that swept across all of the checkpoints that night.

There can be only one explanation for this kind of behavior: White House officials, and many others in Washington, really do not feel they are living in a fully legal state. True, there is no communist terror; the president’s goons will not arrest public officials who testify to Congress; no one will be murdered if they walk out of the White House and start campaigning for impeachment or, more importantly, for the invocation of the 25th Amendment, the procedure to transfer power if a president is mentally or physically unfit to remain in office. Nevertheless, dozens of people clearly don’t believe in the legal mechanisms designed to remove a president who is incompetent or corrupt

You can imagine why this would be. Leading members of Congress might resist invoking the 25th Amendment, which would of course be described by Trump’s supporters as a “Cabinet coup.” The mob — not the literal, physical street mob, but the online mob that has replaced it — would seek revenge. There may not be any presidential goons, but any senior official who signs his or her name to a call for impeachment or removal will certainly be subjected to waves of hatred on social media, starting with a denunciation from the president. Recriminations will follow on Fox News, along with a smear campaign, a doxing campaign, attacks on the target’s family and perhaps worse. It is possible we have underestimated the degree to which our political culture has already become more authoritarian.

Maybe we have also underestimated the degree to which our Constitution, designed in the 18th century, has proved insufficient to the demands of the 21st.

One thing the two men share is a recklessness that looks like courage in the eyes of their supporters, but which also sabotages the work of policymaking and diplomacy.

On the lengthy efforts of Mrs. May's government to arrive at a compromise with Brussels, Mr. Trump scoffed that “deals that take too long are never good ones.”

nobody has any idea what “hard” Brexit actually means in policy terms. It is not so much hard as abstract. “Soft” Brexit might sound weak or halfhearted, but it is also the only policy proposal that might actually work.

We must now reckon with this fact: Human history is the bumbling-about of self-deluded and incompetent doinks. Surely you are not going to deny that. It is nothing so much as a series of pratfalls by inept leaders and the suckers who follow them toward doom. Their incompetence is a historical force in the lives of each and all of us.

It is now painfully clear that we’ve overestimated intelligence as a world-changing force; it is idiocy that holds sway

The traditional culmination of a philosophy of history is to identify the goal, end or destination of the whole human saga. I speculate that the Trump-Kim dialectic is the final stage, in which history simultaneously realizes and annihilates itself, and us with it.

This strange endurance is a central fact of our present politics. We have an empty majority, a party that can rule but cannot govern

whether you’re a conservative who wants to reform the G.O.P. or a liberal who wants to crush it, you need to wrestle with why Republicans keep getting returned to office even though it’s clear that debacles like what we’ve been watching on health care are what they’re likely to produce.

One possibility is that this is a temporary situation, a transitional moment — that the Republican majority seems uncanny because it is a walking corpse, that Americans vote for Republican politicians out of a Reagan-forged habit that just takes a long time to fully break.

There is an unprecedented flood of illegal crossings at the U.S. southern border. Those in the media not obsessed with canine evictions at the White House or the Meghan-Harry interview are starting to ask if this is President Biden’s border crisis. 

he president’s press secretary even claims they didn’t know how the number of daily illegal entries – as though the White House doesn’t know what the Department of Homeland Security knows. (Spoiler alert: illegal crossings have soared to about 6,000 per day, six times the level that the Obama administration considered to be a crisis.)

This approach differs dramatically from how previous administrations responded to chaotic border conditions. Rather than rushing to secure the border, the Biden team appears to be sending processors to the border for the purpose of moving illegal immigrants into the U.S. as quickly as possible. 

A US judge has granted a stay of execution to Lisa Montgomery - just hours before the only woman on America's federal death row was due to be given a lethal injection.

Montgomery's lawyers had argued she was mentally incompetent to be executed, saying she was born brain-damaged.

Lisa Montgomery strangled a pregnant woman in Missouri before cutting out and kidnapping the baby in 2004. Montgomery, now 52, would have been the first female federal inmate to be put to death in almost 70 years had her execution in Terre Haute, Indiana, gone ahead as scheduled on 12 January.

News that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s latter-day tsar, is making plans to cling to power indefinitely comes as no surprise. All the same, it is deeply worrying for Putin’s prey – principally the Russian people and the western democracies.

Russia under Putin’s grim tutelage has grown notorious for cronyism and corruption on a vast scale, repression of domestic opponents and free speech, and military aggression and disruption abroad.

Yet it appears Putin does not want to emulate out-and-out dictators in other countries by making himself president-for-life – the path chosen by China’s Xi Jinping. He values a veneer of democratic legitimacy.

n fact, seeing men like Grayling continue to fail upwards is deeply traditional. Far from being an aberration, it is in keeping with the spirit of the political age: an aggressively misplaced nostalgia.

there is an aspect of Brexit and the calibre of its ascendant personnel that has always felt karmic. Grayling’s wildly overpromoted slapdashery is precisely the level of failure and incompetence you might have found in, say, the British Raj. Had he been born under earlier stars, you can absolutely see Chris dashing off a few catastrophic boundary changes for Louis Mountbatten, or ruining a province only to be rewarded with a bigger one. The difference is that we’ve brought it all home now. Having run out of other countries to do it to, Britain is now British empiring itself.

Law professors David Pozen and Kim Lane Scheppele present “executive underreach” as a species of leadership failure that’s as destructive as executive overreach, defining it as:ADa national executive branch’s willful failure to address a significant public problem that the executive is legally and functionally equipped (though not necessarily legally required) to address.

But crucially, the paper links this phenomenon to fundamentally illiberal and anti-democratic tendencies: Hostility to science and expertise; and the leader’s abiding faith in his ability to confuse the public with disinformation as a substitute for acting in the national interest, all typical of “demagogic populists” like Trump and Bolsonaro.

all this can be understood as a manifestation of illiberal, anti-democratic impulses.

In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of warfare. With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints, frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.

Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.

They underscore how three presidents — George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump — and their military commanders have been unable to deliver on their promises to prevail in Afghanistan.

shouldn’t it puzzle us that Romney is so “incompetent” (also from Noonan), given his deserved reputation for, well, competence? He founded one of this country’s most successful financial firms, turned around the flailing Salt Lake City Olympics and was a successful governor. How did he get so clumsy so fast?

the problem is not Romney but the new Republican Party. Given the direction in which it has moved and the pressures from its most extreme — yet most powerful — elements, any nominee would face the same challenge: Can you be a serious candidate for the general election while not outraging the Republican base?

Why won’t Romney, an intelligent man, fluent in economics, explain his economic policy? Because any sensible answer would cause a firestorm in his party.

the church does not allow nations to take up arms and go to war merely when they have a high moral cause on their side. Justice is necessary, but it is not sufficient:

Peaceful means of ending the evil in question need to have been exhausted, there must be serious prospects of military success, and (crucially) “the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.”

What this teaching suggests is that we should have a strong bias in favor of peaceful deliberation so long as deliberation remains possible.

There is a serious prospect, however, that Democrats will choose No. 1. There would be many reverberations for our politics. But chiefly, the United States would cease to have a center-left party and a center-right party. Both radicalized institutions would exaggerate our national differences, becoming the political equivalent of the hard-left and hard-right media. And the cause of national unity would be damaged even further.

Democrats should not overlearn the lessons of a close election. Option No. 3 is the Democratic future on the presidential level.

But for the foreseeable future, Democrats will also need a dash of No. 2, including a more accommodating attitude toward religion and associational rights.

On Sunday, the president-elect again rejected the Russian role, adding that he was smart enough that he didn’t want or need a daily briefing.

If what is gained is not used or wanted or is labeled as suspect or corrupt — by what moral authority does a director put his people at risk?

Then there is the ethic of the intelligence profession, captured by the gospel of John’s dictum in the agency’s headquarters lobby — that the truth will set you free.