Well, it appears that the mullahcracy in Iran is still steamed over the death of their military mastermind Quassam Soleimani, the chief of so-called Quds Force – sort of the Iranian SS, I have always thought. On the one-year anniversary of that momentous drone-zap (a consummation quite overdue in my opinion) the president of Iran directly threatened the life of President Trump. Talk is cheap, and Iranian threats of dire revenge are the equivalent of those teeny and nearly worthless Spanish 1-peseta coins, which were struck from aluminum in the early 1990s, about the size of a child’s fingernail and looked like nothing so much as doll money. But still … the militant Muslims of Iran are certainly dedicated and determined sufficiently to have racked up any number of lesser-known and less-protected hits, so I wouldn’t be surprised at all if this was something more than just tough talk for the benefit of their domestic audience and fans of Islamic mayhem in other countries.

The consideration which kept me awake for a good while after I thought of it earlier this week was a conviction that if Iranian assassins truly had a go at President Trump, a goodly number of our so-called intelligence, law-enforcement and members of the intelligentsia and media would either sit back and passively watch it happen and feeling mild satisfaction at the spectacle. And that would be at best; at worse, they would be actively assisting. I’d hoped for decades that at the core of the CIA was a hard-disciplined and able handful of agents for which the notorious bumbling of the larger agency was merely a cover (a CIA front for the CIA, if you will), and that the common local law-enforcement interpretation of the FBI as “Famous But Incompetent” was merely a kind of interservice joshing … but after the last four years, I must regretfully concede that yes, they are on the other side. They have sold out the good of the nation and the respect of ordinary American citizens for a mess of pottage, gone partisan-political. Those prominent in the political swamp of DC have likely sold their souls to the Chinese, or for variety, various iterations of the Muslim Brotherhood. I expect that the particularly brazen have sold themselves to both.

I have no idea of what will happen tomorrow in Washington DC – and no particular hopes, either. Only a primal fear that unless enough of us have the determination and the skill to resist what is coming down the track towards us … we are done as a civilized, democratic republic.

Comment as you wish.