Hasn’t Bill O’Reilly done enough harm beating the drums for America’s failed foreign wars? But he’s still around somewhere, trying to top his earlier act with more of his trademark fever-swamp rants, now offering advice to President Donald Trump on the Iran War. His latest advice is the stuff of world historic war crimes. The danger is acute. The president watches Fox News “incessantly." No one is real in Trump-world unless they are seen on TV. Those who are real assume a larger-than-life influence if they’ve been Fox fixtures. The passageway between Fox News and the Trump administration is...

The mousetrap motif plays a major role in tales and literature, from Shakespeare’s Hamlet who set one to find his father’s murderer, to Agatha Cristie’s famous play, The Mousetrap, that opened in London’s West End in 1952 and is still running today 30,000 performances later. The mousetrap theme is ancient and enduring because the idea is so simple, yet utterly transparent. A trap is baited. Taking the bait leads to the victim’s entrapment or destruction, as anyone can later see. Which is basically how we got into the Iran war. No one expects mice to be smarter than the trap. We should,...

You don’t even have to turn on the financial news. You can tell whether oil prices will be up or down in the morning by simply reading the president’s midnight social media posts. If he announces confidence in the ceasefire with Iran, oil will be down in the morning. If he posts about Iran glowing in the dark or about the stone age, you don’t want to be short petroleum. Here’s a representative example from May 6, posted by The Kobeissi Letter, a capital market commentary: "At 3:40 AM ET today, nearly 10,000 contracts worth of crude oil shorts were taken without any major news. This is...

Some called it "Operation Grim Beeper." That may seem clever to adolescents, but there is nothing funny about the promiscuous mutilation of human beings. On the afternoon of September 17, 2024, thousands of handheld pagers exploded simultaneously across Lebanon. Their purported target? Hezbollah operatives. Forty-two people, including children, were killed by the indiscriminating devices. More than 3,500 were injured in an instant, the booby-trap blast blowing open abdomens and claiming fingers and eyes. Although purchased from a Taiwan company, the pagers were produced by a shell company...