by JONATHAN COOK

Beinart: no longer welcome by the Ziocons.

Nazareth

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here are few places in Israel where its apartheid character is more conspicuous than the imposing international airport just outside Tel Aviv, named after the country’s founding father, David Ben Gurion.

Most planes landing in Israel have to circle over the West Bank before making their descent. Below, more than two million Palestinians living under cruel Israeli occupation are barred from using the airport. Instead, they depend on capricious decisions from military officers on whether they will be allowed to cross a land border into Jordan.

They are comparatively better off than nearly two million more Palestinians in besieged Gaza, who are denied even that minimal freedom.

Meanwhile, a similar number of Palestinians living ostensibly as citizens inside Israel have to run a gauntlet of racial profiling checks before they can board a flight.

Armed security guards at the perimeter entrance listen for Hebrew spoken with an Arab accent. Passports are branded with barcodes that can entail humiliating interrogations, delays, strip searches and security escorts on to planes.

Security alone could never have justified the arbitrary and sweeping nature of these decades-old practices against Israel’s largely quiescent Palestinian minority.

Racial profiling at the airport was always chiefly about controlling and intimidating Palestinians, collecting information on them and ghettoising them. Palestinians struggled to get out, while Arabs and Muslims struggled to get in.

But these efforts to “lock in” Palestinians have become all but futile in recent years as globalisation has shrunk the world. Prevent a Palestinian attending a conference in New York or Paris and they will deliver their talk via Skype instead.

But the controls long endured by Palestinians and Arabs are now being turned more agressively against other kinds of supporters. With escalating criticism worldwide and the rapid growth of an international boycott movement, the circle of people Israel wishes to “lock out” is growing rapidly.

For foreigners, Ben Gurion airport is the gateway not only to Israel but to the occupied territories. It is the main way they can witness firsthand the appalling conditions Israel has imposed on many millions of Palestinians.

There is an ever-growing list of academics, lawyers, human rights groups, opponents of the occupation and boycott supporters detained by Israel on arrival and subjected to questioning about their political views. Afterwards they are denied entry or required to keep out of the occupied territories.

In an ever more interconnected world, Israel can identify those it wants to exclude simply by scouring Twitter or Facebook.

The problem for Israel is that increasingly those most critical of it include Jews.

That should be no surprise. If Israel argues that it represents Jews everywhere, some may feel they have a right to speak out in protest. Recent polls suggest that an ideological gulf is opening up between Israel and many of the Jews overseas it claims to speak for.

The latest victim of Israel’s political profiling is Peter Beinart, a prominent American-Jewish commentator. He regularly appears on CNN, contributes to prestigious US publications and is a columnist for the Jewish weekly Forward.

Last week Beinart revealed that he had been detained on landing at Ben Gurion, separated from his wife and children and “interrogated about my political activities” for an hour. After repeated assurances that he was simply attending a family bat mitzvah, officials allowed him in.

Beinart is no Noam Chomsky or Norman Finkelstein, dissident Jewish thinkers who have harshly criticised Israel’s policies – and been denied entry as a result.

His views echo those of many liberal American Jews no longer willing to turn a blind eye to Israel’s systematic abuses of Palestinians. In detaining him, Israel effectively declared that it no longer represents millions of Jews overseas. It made clear that the core message of Zionism – that Israel was created as a sanctuary for all Jews – is no longer true.

The right-wing government of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants fealty from Jews overseas – public support, donations, lobbying on domestic governments – but not their opinions.

Further, Netanyahu’s Israel wants Jewry divided, with Israel determining which Jews are considered good and which bad. The measure of their virtue is no longer their support for a Jewish state but blind allegiance to the occupation and a Greater Israel lording it over Palestinians.

That divide is increasingly apparent inside Israel too, with growing numbers of dissident Israeli Jews reporting that they have been pulled aside for questioning on landing at Ben Gurion. They are being explicitly warned off political activism, in a setting intended to imply that their continued citizenship should not be taken for granted.

After an outcry over Beinart’s detention, Netanyahu made a formulaic apology, calling his treatment an “administrative error”.

Few believe him. Israel’s liberal daily Haaretz called it the latest “systematic error”. The paper argued that in the “best tradition of benighted regimes”, Israel had drawn up “blacklists to silence criticism and to intimidate those who don’t toe the line”.

Certainly, the current questioning and bullying – not as passengers prepare to board a flight but as they arrive in Israel – has little to do with security, any more than it does when Palestinians and other Arabs are abused at the airport.

Rather, Netanyahu wants to send a loud message to progressive Jews in Israel and abroad: “You are no longer automatically considered part of the Zionist project. We will judge whether you are friend or foe.”

That is intended to have a chilling effect on progressive Jews and send the message that, if they want to visit family in Israel or attend a wedding, funeral or a bar mitzvah, they should stay loyal or keep quiet. From now on, they must understand that they are being monitored on social media.

These are just the opening salvos in the Israeli right’s war against Jewish dissent. It is a slope liberal Jews will find gets ever more slippery.

A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

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Things to ponder

While our media prostitutes, many Hollywood celebs, and politicians and opinion shapers make so much noise about the still to be demonstrated damage done by the Russkies to our nonexistent democracy, this is what the sanctimonious US government has done overseas just since the close of World War 2. And this is what we know about. Many other misdeeds are yet to be revealed or documented.

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

The liberals’ depiction of Trump as a full-blown Hitler has yet to impress the working class, who looks upon this intra-class brawl between the nation’s privileged sectors with increasing disgust but not much comprehension.

This article by Paul Street [Corporate Media: the Enemy of the People] provoked the following response:

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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By Joanne Laurier, wsws.org

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]obin Williams: Come Inside My Mind is an HBO feature documentary directed by Marina Zenovich (Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, 2008). The film opens with a voice-over by Williams over a blackened screen: “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to pump neurons, we are about to enter the domain of the human mind.”

For the next 99 minutes, Zenovich attempts to live up to that promise—or forewarning. She succeeds for the most part, but the task of placing this particular mind in its broader context proves more difficult.

Robin Williams (1951–2014) was an exceptional comic whose ability to create personalities and move among them seemed at times almost supernatural. He contained within himself an apparently infinite number of human types.

His career spanned nearly four decades, from the late 1970s until his death four years ago. This was a tumultuous period, but not an easy one for artists. For historical and ideological reasons, its immense contradictions were not readily accessible even to sensitive artists.

It is disappointing, but not surprising, that Zenovich shies away from the complexities of the epoch, including the ones that must have helped undermine Williams’ psychological state. As the WSWS wrote at the time of his death: “One cannot avoid the conclusion that an artist of Robin Williams’ caliber was especially vulnerable to the blows delivered relentlessly by the existing social setup—with its endless glorification of all that is base and rotten (that is, its adulation of the rich and their values)—to a human being’s innate sense of decency. The fate of Robin Williams’—for all its poignancy—is a highly visible manifestation of the extreme distress in which so many millions of Americans live.”

As the movie explains, Williams was born in Chicago. His mother, whom he describes as a “comedy maven,” was a former model originally from Mississippi, and his father a senior executive for Ford Motor Company, responsible for the Midwest region. Both he and his father were fans of iconic comedian Jonathan Winters, whose rapid transformations into multiple characters Williams would come to mimic. 

In 1973, he began studying acting at the Juilliard School in New York City, where he and Christopher Reeve were the two students accepted into the Advanced Program by famed producer-director John Houseman. (In one of the movie’s many video clips, Williams is shown flying his baby son around the room during the latter’s christening in homage to the infant’s godfather, Reeve, best known for his role as Superman.)

Williams left Juilliard in 1976. Two years later, he appeared in an episode of Happy Days as “Mork from Ork” and the instant and immense popularity of the character led to Mork & Mindy, which ran for four seasons.

Williams was at his best outside the framework of situation comedy or formulaic Hollywood filmmaking. In Zenovich’s film, we see him describing his improvisational method as “the instant meshing with the audience. It’s like sex without the guilt.” He further explains that “a character can be a comic actor more than a comedian. I don’t tell jokes. I just use characters as a vehicle for me, but I seldom just talk as myself.” And later in the film: “There’s a real incredible rush, I think, when you find something new and spontaneous. I think your brain rewards that with a little bit of endorphins going.”

In the course of Come Inside My Mind, comics such as Eric Idle (Monty Python) and Billy Crystal pay moving tributes. Comic and talk show host David Letterman observes: “In my head, my first sight of him was that he could fly because of the—the energy. It was like observing an experiment. Something special…We knew that whatever it was Robin was doing, we weren’t gonna get close to that.”

One of his writers, Bennett Tramer, explains that “being a writer for Robin’s standup is like being a pinch hitter for Barry Bonds. You’re not necessarily needed, except for special circumstances. But it’s interesting to see how he would build a bit. He had a lightning-fast mind, but it wasn’t like everything he did came to him that night. There was real work and preparation. There was a real thoughtful, analytical process behind it. It probably took him longer to explain it to me than coming together in his mind.”

The feverish approach and the need to maintain it took their toll. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Williams became a cocaine addict. The tragic death of fellow comic and actor John Belushi from a drug overdose in 1982 impelled Williams to quit, but he spent a lifetime fighting various addictions.

One commentator states that: “He just didn’t operate like normal people. He was very vulnerable that’s for sure. He held onto a lot of things and internalized a lot of things. He felt everything.”

Close friend Crystal notes: “He needed that little extra hug that you can only get from strangers. It’s a very powerful thing for a lot of comedians. That laugh is a—is a drug. That acceptance … that thrill is really hard to replace with anything else.”

Only a few of Williams’ comedy bits can be reproduced in this review, as his physical performance and vocal delivery were, in most cases, at the heart of the performance:

“Yes, God made babies cute, so you don’t eat them. How many people do you know that you would let shit on you, piss on you, keep you up all fucking night? They wake up at five o’clock in the morning, and I don’t know what drug they are on—is there some sort of Fisher-Price cocaine…?”

“A woman would never make a nuclear weapon. They would never make a bomb that kills you. They’d make a bomb that makes you feel bad for a while. See? It’d be a whole other thing. That’s why there should be a woman president. Don’t you see? That’d be a wonderful thing. Be an incredible time for that. There would never be any wars, just, every 28 days, some intense negotiations.”

In 1986, Williams teamed up with Whoopi Goldberg and Crystal to found Comic Relief USA, an annual HBO benefit to raise money for homelessness. And in 1988, he appeared with Steve Martin in an off-Broadway production at New York’s Lincoln Center of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Poster for Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind

At the 2003 Critics’ Choice Awards, Williams was nominated, along with Daniel Day-Lewis and Jack Nicholson, for the Best Actor award (for One Hour Photo). Day-Lewis and Nicholson won in a tie. Williams was then invited on the stage to speak: “Thank you. I want to thank Jack Nicholson and Daniel Day-Lewis for giving me this piece of paper. Has their names on it, not mine. And I’m glad to be left out of this incredible group. I want to thank Jack for—he is, to me, the greatest actor, and Daniel Day-Lewis, the greatest actor. And…I’m just a hairy actor. And it’s been a wonderful evening for me to—to walk away with nothing. Coming here with no expectations, leaving here with no expectations…it’s pretty much been a Buddhist evening for me. Thank you.”

Williams’ son Zak lovingly says: “His pathos was seeking to entertain and please. And he felt when he wasn’t doing that, he was not succeeding as a person. And that was always hard to see because in so many senses, he is the most successful person I know and yet he didn’t always feel that.”

Come Inside My Mind treats Robin Williams’ explosive comedy as well as his darker side, but largely ignores the social circumstances in which he matured and worked. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, it was not possible to be in New York City and San Francisco and not absorb something of the epoch’s radicalism. The receding of that radical, free-spirited wave had consequences for artists like Williams, whether he was aware of them or not. He was somehow stranded, brilliantly isolated, attempting single-handedly through his routines to make up for the increasing coldness and selfishness of the times.

The disappointments and retrogression of the 1980s and 1990s, at the height of Williams’ popularity, had to affect his art and emotional condition. There is a slightly hysterical and desperate side to his comedy, fueled at times by drugs and alcohol.

To one extent or another, at considerable cost, he accommodated himself to the ethos of the era—if only to the degree of never commenting on it. (Other than in a few jokes, such as, “I believe that cocaine is God’s way of saying, ‘You’re making too much money.’”) The Wall Street madness, the eruption of militarism, the devastation of industries and cities such as Detroit and Chicago never entered into his comedy.

Williams: “There’s all these drugs—Zoloft, Prozac. I want to have one drug encompassing it all. Call it ‘Fukitol.’ I don’t feel anything. I don’t want to do anything—Fukitol. The closest thing to a coma you’ll ever be.”

At one moment in Come Inside My Mind, Williams reveals: “I did three years of just insane shit… just getting worse and worse and worse. We have these things called ‘blackouts’ as alcoholics. It’s not really blackouts. It’s more like ‘sleepwalking with activities.’ Kind of strange. I believe it’s your conscience going into a witness protection program…As an alcoholic, you will violate your standards quicker than you could lower them. You will do shit that even the devil would go, ‘Dude!’”

Charlie Chaplin captured in indelibly comic images the central dilemmas of his historical moment. Williams’ movies, through no fault of his own, were made during the weakest period in Hollywood’s history up to that point. With a few exceptions and despite a number of marvelous moments, his films were often marred by sentimentality and “family values.” The best known include Popeye(Robert Altman, 1980), The World According to Garp (George Roy Hill, 1982), Moscow on the Hudson (Paul Mazursky, 1984), Good Morning, Vietnam (Barry Levinson, 1987), Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, 1989), Awakenings (Penny Marshall, 1990), The Fisher King (Terry Gilliam, 1991), Mrs. Doubtfire (Chris Columbus, 1993), The Birdcage (Mike Nichols, 1996) and Good Will Hunting(Gus Van Sant, 1997).

Whatever Williams may have thought he was doing, his numerous appearances before the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan helped lend credibility to those neo-colonial wars. In 2005, Williams told USA Today, “I’m there for (the troops), not for W,” referring to President George W. Bush. Nonetheless, it is not a healthy legacy.

Come Inside My Mind does not attempt to offer an explanation for his suicide. It registers his death as a sad event that greatly affected large numbers of people, including fellow performers.

Williams, as the WSWS wrote, had a “manic delivery and his obsessive desire to please or win over an audience, which seemed to know no bounds or restraints, suggested a fragile mental state. One had to wonder what life was like ‘offstage,’ if there ever were such a thing, for such a personality. How could he possibly be satisfied with everyday life, everyday conversation?” In the Zenovich documentary, comic Lewis Black asserts that Williams “was like the light that never knew how to turn itself off.”

His obvious and highly amused sense of the weirdness and complexity of the world made his comedy initially hum with life. This sustained him for decades, but was finally beaten out of him by a combination of career disappointments, social and political disappointments, and severe physical ailments.

“You’ve got to be crazy. It’s too late to be sane. Too late. You’ve got to go full-tilt bozo ’cause you’re only given a little spark of madness, and if you lose that…you’re nothing. Note, from me to you…Don’t ever lose that, ’cause it keeps you alive.”

At another moment, he was more optimistic: “And that’s what’s exciting, the idea you could explore creativity at any price is like—this is what we’re kind of dealing with as artists, comedians, writers, actors. You’re going to come to the edge, you’re going to look over, and sometimes you’re going to step over the edge, and then you’re going to come back, hopefully.”

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

BE SURE TO PASS THESE ARTICLES TO FRIENDS AND KIN. A LOT DEPENDS ON THIS. DO YOUR PART.

Three notorious billionaires that cast a long shadow on American affairs: Mark Zuckerberg controls Facebook; Koch owns an energy/industrial trust, with terrible influence on climate change, and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a fanatical Zionist, makes American policy more pro-Israel than already is. Just about every billionaire has a nefarious influence on the destiny of the US nation and its policies across the globe.

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]ocumentary film maker Marc Levin has a 'must see ' film entitled Class Divide about the gentrification of the West Chelsea area of Manhattan ( 23rd street around 9th and 10th Avenues). HIs former documentary, Hard Times: Lost on Long Island ( 2012) followed four individuals who lost their financial sector white collar jobs after the 2008 Wall Street housing bubble burst. Viewing the film was disheartening, as we watch how devastated people who still believed in the false narrative of The American Dream can become. In Class Divide we learn that the western  part of Chelsea, NYC is the fastest growing real estate sector in the entire city of New York. What was once mostly a low income working stiff neighborhood now hosts high rises and townhouses that cater to the super rich... not even just the 1%, rather the 1/4 of the 1%! Imagine a townhouse across from a Chelsea public housing project that sells for $ 10 million . For real! The sad irony to all this is that in 1937 director William Wyler made a film called Dead End, based on Sidney Kingsley's play of the same name. In the story a high rise apartment building catering to the 1/4 of the 1% of that day was built at the dead end of a really poor neighborhood in Manhattan (perhaps even the same Chelsea area). And they wonder where anger and rage against the super rich can come from.

---

In Levin's Class Divide there is a private school called Avenues : The World School  right in the heart of West Chelsea, a few steps from where very poor people live. The tuition is around $ 40,000 a year... more than three or four times what those in the housing project earn... if they even have a job. In other apartment buildings on that street, the ones that the poor and low income have been living in for generations, landlords are making concerted efforts to get those folks out. There is gold in them there hills! In the spirit of Noblesse Oblige, the school does offer free tuition for low income kids. Let's see , from a student enrollment of 1,200 they allowed 40 such kids in for free... which is around 4%. The rest of the neighborhood kids go to the usually underfunded and underequipped public school nearby. Levin interviewed some of the rich kids who attend the Avenues school, and one can see how naive they  really are concerning income polarization in Amerika. Nice kids who obviously never had to deal with what the poor kids must deal with every day in their apartments. Shades of Wyler's Dead End.

The real sad reality of both of these films is the lack of understanding of how things should be. A nice couple in Dead End, he an unemployed  architect and she a factory worker on strike, assumed that one has to accept the fact that there must be super rich people. Ditto for many of  the poor residents of West Chelsea and the rich kids attending the Avenues school ( none of their parents were interviewed by Levin... one wonders why ). Everyone just sends out the vibes that 'These are the cards we are dealt, and we can only play the hand the best we can.' There are many steps that we working stiffs and unemployed working stiffs must take in order to really ' take back ' our country from the 1/4 of 1 %.*.

The primary step is perhaps to come to the realization that NO ONE should be earning mega millions of dollars each year while the rest of us are one or two or maybe, if lucky, four or five paychecks away from being forced out on the street. We who ' know better ' should teach our young that Socialism is not totalitarianism, or fascism. Rather, it can be a solution to this terrible and deadly income polarization our nation has been operating under.

* The author is correct in pointing that the famous phrase "the 1%" signifying the super rich in America that owns and controls everything (including the entire political class and the media) are far fewer than 1%. In actuality they are way fewer than 1 in 400, as the author suggests, to be precise no more than 0.0001647, or about 560 out of 340 MM inhabitants. This yields a more correct figure, 0.0001647, which is not so easy to memorize as the simpler "1%" but once understood far more powerful. One in a hundred sounds exclusive, but 1 in 100,000 sounds obnoxiously inegalitarian, which it is. Those figures provide an eloquent snapshot of a non-existent democracy.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn, New York, longshoremen. He has been a freelance columnist since 2001, with more than 300 of his essays posted, besides The Greanville Post, on sites like Consortium News, Information Clearing House,  Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op-Ed News, Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust., where he writes a great deal about the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has an internet interview show, "It's the Empire... Stupid" with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at paf1222@bellsouth.net

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

by Jake Johnson, staff writer, Common Dreams

---

"The First Amendment does not permit the president to revoke security clearances to punish his critics."

CIA's Brennan—mastermind of the Russiagate psyops, and he knows it.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hile Democratic senators, corporate talking heads, former national security officials, and Twitter pundits issued dire proclamations about the "dangerous precendent" President Donald Trump set on Wednesday by revoking former CIA Director John Brennan's security clearance for obviously vindictive and political reasons, critics of America's far-too-powerful intelligence apparatus were quick to express how little sympathy they feel for Brennan, given his utterly horrendous track record of defending torture and masterminding the Obama administration's deadly drone program.

"John Brennan is being punished by not being able to find out who got droned yesterday, I hope he's ok," joked Splinter's Libby Watson.

 

john brennan is being punished by not being able to find out who got droned yesterday, i hope he's ok https://t.co/wD2Y2TFqWp

— libby watson (@libbycwatson) August 15, 2018

But while well-established critics of the American national security state refused to shed a single tear for Brennan—or, for that matter, any of the other former intelligence officials on Trump's so-called enemies list—the very fact that Trump has such a list and is using the power of the presidency to punish the individuals on it sparked alarm among journalists and civil libertarians.

"Trump's action is unconstitutional because he's punishing political speech, and unethical because he is lying to cover it up."
—Norm Eisen, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington

"The First Amendment does not permit the president to revoke security clearances to punish his critics," Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, argued in a statement on Wednesday, referring to the fact that the officials on Trump's list have frequently denounced the president on television.

"Brennan's record is full of grave missteps, and we have been unsparing in our criticism of his defense of the CIA torture program and his role in unlawful lethal strikes abroad," Wizner added. "But Trump's revocation of Brennan’s clearance, and his threats to revoke the clearances of other former officials for the sole reason that they have criticized his conduct and policies, amount to unconstitutional retaliation. They are also part of a broader pattern of seeking to silence or marginalize critics, which includes forcing staff to sign unconstitutional non-disclosure agreements."

2 true things:
1. John Brennan ≠ hero. We @ACLU unsparingly criticize his defense of CIA torture & his role in unlawful lethal strikes abroad.
2. The First Amendment doesn't allow Trump to revoke Brennan's security clearance to punish political criticism.https://t.co/91Tav2tWEQ

— Hina Shamsi (@HinaShamsi) August 16, 2018

The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald—who has been similarly unsparing in his assessment of Brennan's record and dismissive of those who reflexively "revere anyone who occupies high positions in the U.S. national security state"—echoed the ACLU in a series of tweets on Wednesday, noting that while Brennan is a "war criminal" and a "pathological liar," it is nonetheless "dangerous to allow a president to impose punishments for criticisms."

In sum:

1) @JohnBrennan is a war criminal, a pathological liar & an advocate of torture & torturers.

2) Ex-CIA officials exploiting their security clearance for profit is abusive & they don't need it.

3) It's dangerous to allow a President to impose punishments for criticisms.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) August 15, 2018

Medhi Hasan, Greenwald's colleague at The Intercept, captured the absurdity of Trump's standard for who should and shouldn't have access to classified information by noting that the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, still has a security clearance—a fact that clearly shows Trump's decision to revoke Brennan's clearance was based on a petty grudge, not any reasonable "national security" concerns.

 

I'm no fan of John Brennan but the idea that the former director of the CIA no longer has security clearance but Jared Kushner - Jared Kushner! - does is just... laughable.

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) August 16, 2018

As the New York Times reported on Wednesday, the White House's statement announcing that Brennan's security clearance has been revoked was dated July 26—an indication that the decision to punish Brennan was actually made weeks ago, fueling speculation that the Trump administration timed the announcement to control the news cycle and distract from other controversies, such as former White House official Omarosa Manigault Newman's insistence that Trump is in a state of "mental decline" and that she has a tape of the president using the n-word.

Intended as a distraction or not, former White House ethics chief and chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) chair Norm Eisen argued in a tweet on Wednesday that Trump's revocation of Brennan's security clearance was a flagrant violation of the Constitution.

"Trump's action is unconstitutional because he's punishing political speech, and unethical because he is lying to cover it up," Eisen concluded.

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The Russian Peace Threat examines Russophobia, American Exceptionalism and other urgent topics

Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found