Unca Darrell

JUNE 28, 2019 / A primer that helps explain . . .

. . . President Donald John Trump's foreign policy better than he understands it himself.

REALISM, long associated with authoritarian European statesmen such as Otto von Bismarck and Klemens von Metternich, has been consistently portrayed as antithetical to American democratic traditions. During the Cold War, statesmen such as Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski were depicted as amoral or even harboring, in the case of the latter, loyalties to Poland rather than America. But in one form or another, no matter what . . . detractors may claim, realism is at the very heart of American foreign policy. It is what helped America . . . emerge as the dominant power after World War II and during the Cold War.

The realist approach served as a bipartisan foundation for Washington's approach to the world, providing a common framework for identifying and defending American interests abroad. Everyone from Harry Truman to Dean Acheson to Richard Nixon to Henry Kissinger to George H.W. Bush and James Baker . . .

JUNE 27, 2019 / How to read President Trump's job approval numbers

First, most of what you hear is noise. Ignore it. (Shifting metaphors:) Look only at the big picture.

Polling, by definition, is a margin-of-error game.

Pollsters ask a few folks what they think about our president, massage the numbers, and generate a number. If a pollster runs the same poll twice on the same day, the results will almost certainly be different.

Poll numbers wobble from day to day, even if nothing else changes. For this . . .

JUNE 26, 2019 / Don't ask the Democrats' presidential candidates for . . .

. . . a charitable donation. They are more generous with your money than their own.

HERE's a rundown of leading Democrats' donations to charity as a percentage of income based on the latest tax filings publicly available . . . :

Beto O'Rourke: 0.3%