Friday morning roundup

Kimberley Strassel at the WSJ on the two moments in FBI director James Comey's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday that prove he intended to pass on recommending indictment for Madam BleachBit. Who has been leaning on him, and what form has it been taking?

Just when you thought maybe the south Asian subcontinent was no longer a place of hair-raising tension, the following chain of events has occurred: an Indian military base in Kashmir was attacked, leaving 18 soldiers dead. India retaliated with "surgical strikes." And now the Pakistani defense minister is threatening India with nuclear destruction.

The Stupid Party's lack of a spine is nearly as big a factor in the flatlining of post-America as the machinations of the Freedom-Haters:

The big story of the new Continuing Resolution is of course that Congressional Republicans caving to President Obama and affirmatively funding Planned Parenthood.

But there's a lesser-known story that's almost as big of a Republican failure: in addition to failing to protect the unborn, they also failed to protect the Internet.

Michael Brendan Dougherty  at The Week coins a term that I think is quite useful: esoteric Trumpism. It's the notion that Squirrel-Hair is an emblem of something much bigger than himself, that he embodies some kind of supposed recognition that the ideological fault lines that characterized American - indeed, Western - political life are now obsolete. Dougherty takes four arguments one hears from esoteric Trumpists and shows them to be utter hooey.