Marc Polmans made a ballgame of it on the first day of the qualifying draw at Washington’s storied tennis tournament, these days called the Mubadala DC Citi Open, at Kennedy and 16th St. in Rock Creek Park. Polmans went down 3-6 in the first set to a dominating Thai-Son Kwiatkowski but he dug in against the big-serving Virginian in a close second set, 7-5, and then kept his nerve while using every chance to maintain the shift in momentum to take the third set, 6-2. That’s how it sometimes goes. The fact remains that when you are on the Tour year after year and get into the main draws and get through a round or two, that is not nothing. There must be a lesson there, and not only in Washington during an election year, where hopes rise and fall by the week. Kwiatkowski looked unbeatable in that first set. He held in the fourth game with repeat aces clocked at 136 and 140 mph, followed up by breaking Polmans at love with aggressive groundstrokes, 4-1. He lost the next two games, but took charge again on his next hold which included a huge ace to the T to get to 40-love, followed up by a quick put away on Polmans’ weak return of serve. On Polmans’ next service, Kwiatkowski quickly got a triple break point and it was over on the next rally as Polmans sent a backhand into the net. It was a warm day, upper 80s, but the Stadium court had a respectable crowd for a qualifying match. Polmans played more steadily in the second set, saved a match point in the course of holding the tenth game, suddenly stepped on the gas in the eleventh and, surprise, broke the Virginian’s huge serve. A few flubs and shanks followed, as the tension rose, but Polmans held his serve for the set and in the process evidently got into Kwiatkowski’s head — tennis players call this disrupting the other man’s game — and made the third set almost an embarrassment, winning it 6-2 to close down what had been a close contest. Both in their late 20s, the Australian Marc Polmans and the American Thai-Son Kwiatkowski are still young enough for the breakthrough that they had, and still have, every reason to expect; after all, this is their profession and they both hit beautifully when they want to. That is the problem of course, wanting to do the right thing all the time, another lesson the politicos downtown ought to take to heart. Kwiatkowski played for the Virginia Cavaliers and won the NCAA Men’s singles championship in 2017. Polmans was an Australian Open boys’ doubles champion in 2017 and is a permanent threat in doubles draws, as well as a danger in singles: he has made the second round in all the majors except the U.S. Open. Everyone has heard about winning being not the better thing but the only thing, the fact remains that when you are on the Tour year after year and get into the main draws and get through a round or two, that is not nothing. (READ MORE from Roger Kaplan: The Next Generation Closes the Citi Open) It does not always work out as planned. In the second day of the qualifiers, Polmans almost pulled off another brilliant come-from-behind, going down 3-6 against Maxime Cressy, bouncing back 6-2 in the second, and finally accepting a bagel in the third as the big (six-seven) Max steadied his serve (which had been awful in the second set) and got his serve and volley game going, one of the best on the Tour. He had an uneven 2023 season but the French-American (born in Paris, high school and college in California, he represents the USA in competition) is looking fit and powerful even if the consistency — that mysterious quality again — can slip. There will be a handful of big and strong Americans, all with some consistency questions, at the Mubadala Citi Open. At least two other big service men, Ben Shelton and Reilly Opelka, are ready to trade ace for ace with Cressy. Favorite son Frances Tiafoe, who gets a bye in the first round, will face Cressy in the second if the latter gets there. And there is also a women’s draw, and doubles in both genders, which is more than enough to take distracted minds off politics and the Olympic Games: enough even to be thankful for the weather, which promises to be balmy all week. The post Tennis Spectacle at Rock Creek Park appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

When he quit the presidential race, Joe Biden did the right thing for the Democratic Party but not for the nation. He didn’t resign the presidency. The stumbling, bumbling old man who only works between 10 am and 4 pm, is still president and will be until 20 January 2025. How much more can he — and Kamala Harris — do to the country until then? The mind boggles. Harris won’t end the military’s devotion to wokeness. She will instead worsen this enormously dangerous problem. As this column has often said, Biden had no agenda other than to reverse everything former president Trump did while he was in office. In that, and in that alone, he succeeded except for one thing. Trump’s 2018 cancellation of Obama’s 2015 nuclear weapons agreement with Iran has, so far, escaped Biden mostly because Iran wouldn’t cooperate with any agreement that said international inspectors — even the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency — could access its nuclear weapons development sites. It was Iran’s judgment — a correct one that — that a new agreement wouldn’t benefit it sufficiently. They are confident that their nuclear weapons development will continue without American interference. Never mind that Iran is funding some of the riots and protests in the United States right now. Look for another attempt to revive the Obama 2015 agreement before Biden leaves office. We won’t rehash all of Biden’s failures here. Among the lowlights are the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, radical new spending that caused the worst inflation in forty years, millions of illegal aliens welcomed into this country and so much more, including Biden’s unceasing efforts to pressure the Israelis into a cease-fire agreement that would leave the Hamas terrorists in charge in the Gaza Strip. Because Harris was part of all of this — Biden reportedly wanted her to be “the last person in the room” and thus have the last word on his decisions — she is more than complicit in some of the worst decisions ever made by any U.S. administration. A Harris administration would carry on with Biden’s agenda and perform according to Biden’s low standards. Many conservatives are forecasting that a Kamala Harris administration would be even worse than the Biden regime. In truth, the two would be indistinguishably awful. Let’s start with the rating that then-Senator Harris received from GovTrack.us in 2019: she was found to be the most liberal senator despite the fact that both comically-communist Sen. Bernie Sanders and uberliberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren were in competition with her for the title. (GovTrack is now trying to retract the entry that so labeled her. Too late, boys and girls.) To illustrate further we have only to point out that she has supported defunding the police and also her effort to help bail out the rioters arrested after the death of George Floyd in police custody. Harris is among the most radical of liberals. And let’s remember that in April Biden called Harris a diversity hire. She was chosen for her gender and her color, not because she was the best candidate for the job. In 2021, Harris — despite media caterwauling to the contrary — was appointed Biden’s border chief. During her watch at least eleven million illegal aliens were welcomed into the U.S. Included among them are about two million “gotaways” — among them criminals, terrorists, and others with malicious intent — who eluded the border patrol. (READ MORE from Jed Babbin: Our Border and the Gotaways) Harris will keep the borders open. That is and will continue to be a great threat to national security if she’s elected. Then there’s the fact that Harris is superbly unqualified for the presidency. Neither her education nor her experience qualifies her for the job. And Harris has never been the sharpest knife in the drawer. Despite that, Biden also gave her charge of artificial intelligence. As I have written here and elsewhere, Harris is intellectually incapable of dealing with AI. She can’t even understand its threats and benefits and has done nothing to protect this nation from its dangers. Nor will she if she’s elected president. Biden has forced “wokeness” on our military. If we began today, it would probably take twenty years — and the firing of a lot of generals and admirals — to rid the military of it. Harris won’t end the military’s devotion to wokeness: she will instead worsen this enormously dangerous problem. Harris displayed her complete contempt for Israel by going to a sorority event rather than attend Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Wednesday speech to a joint session of Congress. On Thursday she and Biden met separately with Netanyahu. They again demanded that Israel agree to a cease-fire despite two overwhelming facts. First, Israel has already agreed to Biden’s framework for such an agreement and it is the Hamas terrorists who are the obstacle to getting the hostages released. Second, unless Hamas is eradicated it will retake control of the Gaza Strip and commit more attacks like the one on October 7 that caused this war. After the meeting with Netanyahu, she reemphasized that Israel should end the war in Gaza. Her level of understanding of this war and everything else in foreign policy disqualifies her for the presidency. If she’s elected, Harris will probably try to renew Obama’s 2015 nuclear weapons agreement with Iran. She doesn’t understand that Iran has had, thanks to that agreement and despite Trump’s revocation of it, more than adequate time to develop nuclear weapons. Nor does she understand that Iran will never surrender its nuclear weapons program peacefully. Former president Trump will have to hang all of these facts around Harris’s neck in the coming campaign. Both he and vice-presidential candidate Sen. J.D. Vance must do so relentlessly. Nevertheless, we cannot be overconfident despite Harris’s overwhelming handicaps. There are too many people out there who hate Trump with an irrational passion. He’s not going to win easily, if at all. The post What’s Next for Biden and Harris? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

If you love history, art, beauty, romance, and God, you will appreciate the rare times in your life when all five converge. One such instance occurred to me more than thirty years ago in a little church in Dijon, France. And not even the hideous, satanic opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics last weekend can blemish the memory, only make it more precious. The great Christian triumph made France one of the great arsenals of Western Civilization for a thousand years with its mixture of spiritual and secular power. I was staying with a girlfriend who was studying French at the Centre International d’études Françaises. Jenny was beautiful inside and out, hysterically funny, and wicked smart. One cold night just before Christmas, we went for a stroll around town with no destination in mind. As we neared a vintage chapel, we heard sublime classical violin music emanating from within — Michel Corrette’s Sinfonia I, A La Venue de Noël (In the Coming of Noël). Thoroughly enchanted, we went inside. On stage sat four lovely young women playing string instruments and three young men on trumpets, conducted by an old priest. It was only a rehearsal, so the pews were empty. Jenny and I sat down and bonded. Everything gelled for me — the Christmas spirit, a gorgeous girl, and the wonderful music in a country that celebrated these blessings. French capitulation jokes aside, I cherished France’s vital role in preserving Christianity and advancing artistic beauty. My favorite book of all time is still The Three Musketeers, the immortal tale of male camaraderie (“All for one and one for all”), romantic attraction versus sexual lust (the ultimate femme-fatale villainess, Milady de Winter), and the empiric alliance between Church (Cardinal Richelieu) and State (King Louis XIII). Affection for Alexandre Dumas’ classic novel led me further back into the history of France, to the decisive Christian victory over Islam at the Battle of Tours in 732 AD. Having Islamicized much of Spain at the time, its Muslim conquerors expanded eastward into Frankish territory (pre-France until 987). A massive Arab army attacked the defending Frankish force commanded by Charles (later nicknamed Charles the Hammer — Martel) on the battlefield near Tours. According to the historic tome, the Chronicles of 754, “The northern people remained immobile like a wall, holding together like a glacier in the cold regions, and in the blink of an eye annihilated the Arabs with the sword.” The great Christian triumph made France one of the great arsenals of Western Civilization for a thousand years with its mixture of spiritual and secular power. It birthed the heights of architecture culminating in the magnificent Notre Dame Cathedral, literature (Dumas, Hugo, Flaubert, many others), painting (Monet, Cezanne, Matisse), music (Berlioz, Debussy, Bizet), philosophy (Descartes, Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau), and unbeatable military might. This lasted even past the fanatical bloodshed of the French Revolution and the fall of Napoleon all the way to World War I. Yet even during World War II, in which the French Army was humiliated early on, the indominable spirit of France inspired the world through the 20th century. So much so that one scene in arguably the greatest movie ever made, Casablanca, continued to choke up audiences long after the cynical, countercultural 1960s. Of course, it’s the scene where Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), with the assent of Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), drowns out a chorus of Nazi soldiers by leading a stirring rendition of La Marseillaise. But you can’t beat something with nothing. Charles Martel defeated the Muslims at Tours in the name of Jesus Christ. In the 21st century, like most of Europe, France stopped believing in Christ. Its new gods were leftism, hedonism, narcissism, and big government, which have diminished America as well. France ceased fighting Islamists and instead invited them in by the millions — outsiders hostile to Judeo-Christian Western values. And when the people of France voted in droves to stop them earlier this month, leftist parties united to thwart their own citizens and common sense. (READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: Beauty’s Last Stand — TV Christmas Movies) Five years ago, Notre Dame Cathedral burned. Whether a sign from God or another protest blow against Him hardly matters. For the cathedral inside was already mostly empty of believers, like the Catholic Church in France, reviled by socialist leaders such as President Macron and the mainstream intelligentsia. Consequently, the demonic drag-queen freak show disparaging the Last Supper that opened the Paris Olympics on Saturday came as no surprise to us Christians, despite how badly the perpetrators hoped it would be. We’ll continue going to worship God while they damn themselves. In fact, the only shock was theirs — that enough of us disparaged them as gutless losers. And that some brave Olympic sponsors like C Spire withdrew advertising. So, the Olympics organizers had to issue an apology. But we know that if they had any real courage, they would mock a religion that hates them and their perversions — Islam. Because if they ever did, there would soon be more headless French people than went under the guillotine in the Reign of Terror. Jenny would have laughed at that joke. I kept in long-distance touch with her over the years. A thorough liberal who worked for PETA, she enjoyed my conservative shots at her side, even acknowledging the truth of some of them. She complimented my first two novels, Jake for Mayor and Paper Tigers, but didn’t get to read my third, The Christmas Spirit. She died of breast cancer, which broke my heart. But her sister Caroline told me that until the very end, she often spoke about that magic night we shared at the little church in Dijon. I’m sorry we’ll never have Paris. ***** Where have all the cool men, hot women, and non-woke storytelling gone? For one place my timely new political thriller novel, The Washington Trail, about two DC private eyes, a femme-fatale, and a plot to end America in a volatile election year. Pre-order today, and get it in just two weeks (August 13th). The post We’ll Never Have Paris appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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