WASHINGTON — So let me get this straight: President Trump ordered the removal of American troops from northern Syria, knowing that Turkey would invade, seize and occupy Kurd-occupied land.

WASHINGTON — Presidential aspirant Beto O’Rourke, thrashing about in an attempt to be noticed, says tax exemptions should be denied to churches and other institutions that oppose same-sex marriage. O’Rourke’s suggestion, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s plan to tax the “excessive” exercise of a First Amendment right, and the NBA’s painful lesson about the perils of moral grandstanding illustrate how progressivism has become a compound of self-satisfied moral preening and a thirst for coercion.

WASHINGTON — Beto O’Rourke, innovative for interpreting a failed Senate campaign as a steppingstone to the presidency, is now famous for (1) his use of profanity on the campaign trail, (2) his pledge that “hell, yes” he wants to confiscate AR-15s and (3) his proposal to tax religious institutions that don’t approve of gay marriage.

Twice near the start of the last Democratic presidential debate, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News tried to pin Elizabeth Warren down on whether her vision for Medicare for All would require a middle-class tax increase. Twice she didn’t answer him. It was the perfect opening for one of the other contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination to charge her with evasiveness and force her to reckon fully with the costs of her ambitious plans and the profound difficulty of enacting them.

Even by the dismal standards of the 1400s, Christopher Columbus was a terrible human being.

Donald Trump, an ongoing eruption of self-refuting statements (“I’m a very stable genius” with “a very good brain”), is adding self-impeachment to his repertoire.

WASHINGTON — The judge took 130 pages to explain that Harvard’s “holistic review” admissions policies — which include ascribing particular attributes to certain ethnicities, such as Asian Americans, and assessing the value to Harvard of those attributes — are, considering 41 years of Supreme Court precedents, permissibly race-conscious.

WASHINGTON — Dictators. Always so humorous.

The rhetorical intensity of Donald Trump’s anti-impeachment campaign, measured on a scale of one to 10, has begun at 11.25. The whistleblower is “almost a spy” who may be guilty of “treason.” House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., should be arrested for “treason.” Both are part of a “COUP” which — if successful — could provoke a “civil war.”

If you like your politics orderly and by the numbers, and if you can’t stand having to come to terms with people of very different views and backgrounds, here’s a piece of advice: Don’t bother being a Democrat.

In one presidential scandal, an anonymous government official dubbed “Deep Throat” provided the crucial information that helped break the case. In the other, it’s an anonymous government whistleblower.

In 1973, as a student journalist, I stood against the back wall of the ornate Senate Caucus Room and scribbled notes as the Senate Watergate Committee held hearings on the tangled misdeeds of President Nixon.

There are observers, including critics of President Donald Trump, who are skeptical of the push for impeachment. Not because he hasn’t earned the contempt and sanction of Congress, but because the politics are too risky. Will the public support an impeachment investigation in an election year, or will it turn away in disgust over “dysfunction” in Washington? Does Trump, who thrives on attention and chaos, want impeachment? Does he want his opponents to devote their time and energy to something that can only divide and polarize the public?

If Donald Trump were to tweet that 9 is a prime number, that Minneapolis is in Idaho, and that the sun revolves around the Earth — “Make Earth Great Again!” — would even five Republican senators publicly disagree with even one of the tweets?

We long ago established that Donald Trump is a bad guy. We’ve multiple times said, “This is it. They’ve got to get rid of him.” So what’s so new and awful that the president of the United States must now be impeached?

WASHINGTON — Every good story needs a hero, and the saga of Brett Kavanaugh’s rise to the Supreme Court has provided one: Leland Keyser.

WASHINGTON — In the Trump era, a columnist risks appearing like the boy (or girl) who cried wolf. Time and time again, we say this scandal is the big one.

There’s so much we don’t know about the whistleblower complaint concerning President Donald Trump. But here are four things we do know:

The genius of Barack Obama lay in the fact that Americans looked at him and could believe in almost anything. The left of the Democratic Party saw the revolutionary incarnation of hope, the promise of sweeping social change, and, in a black president, the overturning of America’s original sin. The center saw a measured product of Harvard Law School, a prudent reformer, a man of mixed identity and the middle ground.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — What happens on Hong Kong Island does not stay there. The ongoing tsunami of discontent washes over this island, which, like Hong Kong, is navigating the choppy waters of relations with the same large and menacing mainland neighbor. This nation — which is such psychologically, if not in diplomatic nomenclature — has a presidential election in January that seems certain to be influenced by alarm about Hong Kong’s current unhappy experience with the legalistic fudge of “one country, two systems,” which the incumbent president, Tsai Ing-wen, Taiwan’s first female president, rejects.