Why not leave? I ask this question of myself and my friends that have served in the Middle East. What do we gain by being there? In Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan? Nothing. And no one I know that has served there is able to tell me any different. I know that there will be those reading this that will tell me that I’m wrong. Other than telling me the Establishment Warmongers that say, “If we don’t fight them there, we’ll be fighting them here.” Nonsense. Utter, complete, stupidity. There’s no Muslim force that’s going to storm the shores of America. Certainly, they can cause harm as we’ve seen them do in France, Belgium, and England, but our immigration policies are different than theirs.

I’m a conservative and believe that that which is not in the best interest of my country should be avoided. We went into Afghanistan to kill Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. We did that, mostly. The problem is that the administration at the time thought that we could rebuild a 7th century society into a 21st century democracy. Nation building. What we’ve discovered in the proceeding years is that we are unable to make a people that has no interest into a Western democracy.

I wrote that in January of 2020. The draft sat in a folder for almost seven years, unfinished — it literally stops in the middle of a word. I never finished it because I never found the ending. I think I have it now, and it isn’t the one I expected: everything since has proven the first half right, including the one place where events overtook it.

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A claim has been going around this week, a few days before the midterm elections: Fox News’ ratings have “plummeted” — down to lows not seen in 25 years — and maybe that tells us something about how Tuesday is going to go.

I checked. And because this is the kind of story that usually turns out to be spin, let me say the surprising part first: the numbers underneath it are real.

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Eight days from now, Americans vote, and there is a real possibility — not a certainty, a possibility — that when the counting is done, the Democrats will hold both the House and the Senate. I want to walk through what that would actually mean, because I don’t think most of the shouting on television has thought past election night. What happens in January if the Republicans lose big? Short version: an impeachment, a frozen government, and a president who is done — not wounded, done. But walk it in order.

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