In backing John Brennan's right to keep his top-secret security clearance, despite his having charged the president with treason, the U.S. intel community has chosen to fight on indefensible terrain.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper seemed to recognize that Sunday when he conceded that ex-CIA Director Brennan had the subtlety of "a freight train" and his rhetoric had become "an issue in and of itself."

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If ex-CIA Director John Brennan did to Andrew Jackson what he did to Donald Trump, he would have lost a lot more than his security clearance.

He would have been challenged to a duel and shot.

"Trump's ... performance in Helsinki," Brennan had said, "exceeds the threshold of 'high crimes & misdemeanors.' It was ... treasonous."

Why should the president not strip from a CIA director who calls him a traitor the honor and privilege of a security clearance? Or is a top-secret clearance an entitlement like Social Security?

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Friday, deep into the 17th year of America's longest war, Taliban forces overran Ghazni, a provincial capital that sits on the highway from Kabul to Kandahar.

The ferocity of the Taliban offensive brought U.S. advisers along with U.S. air power, including a B-1 bomber, into the battle.

"As the casualty toll in Ghazni appeared to soar on Sunday," The Wall Street Journal reported, "hospitals were spilling over with dead bodies, corpses lay in Ghazni's streets, and gunfire and shelling were preventing relatives from reaching cemeteries to bury their dead."

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Is it any of Canada's business whether Saudi women have the right to drive?
Well, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland just made it her business.
Repeatedly denouncing Riyadh's arrest of women's rights advocate Samar Badawi, Freeland has driven the two countries close to a break in diplomatic relations.
"Reprehensible" said Riyadh of Freeland's tweeted attack. Canada is "engaged in blatant interference in the Kingdom's domestic affairs."

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On meeting with the EU's Jean-Claude Juncker last month, Donald Trump tweeted: "Both the U.S. and the E.U. drop all Tariffs, Barriers and Subsidies! That would finally be Free Market and Fair Trade."

Did Larry Kudlow somehow get access to Trump's phone?

We know not. But, on hearing this, Steve Forbes, Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer broke into the "Hallelujah" chorus of Handel's "Messiah."

"Amen," they thundered in The New York Times.

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