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Its hard to believe that, given majority control of both chambers of Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court and all the statewide offices in Montana except two the Republican Party still cant enact its agenda. But the reality is theyre in total chaos characterized by savage in-fighting, crazy decisions, and being so distracted they appear incapable of even maintaining the state and nation, let alone making us great again.

President Trump is rattling the world with his threats of unleashing fire and fury on North Korea a move that would result in the deaths of millions of people throughout the region and radioactive poisoning of the air and water for the rest of the planet.

Apparently our science-challenged president cant comprehend that we all share and breathe the same atmosphere and there is no border wall that will keep radiation released by destroying North Koreas nuclear facilities from American shores and skies. Perhaps, cossetted in one of his towers, he never heard of the radiation that has already traveled to West Coast from Japans Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown. And that was just one reactor. If our unhinged president actually launches his threatened attack on North Korea, it will release so much radiation from destroyed nuclear reactors, bombs and stockpiles, it will dwarf the damage done by Fukushima.

Of course his locked and loaded military threats serve to provide a dramatic diversion from the ongoing Russia investigations of Trump, his family, friends and political appointees. But diversions are merely sideshows to the very real and serious business of running a nation with more than 325 million people, meeting their most pressing needs, and assuring a brighter future for them, their children and grandchildren.

But the Republicans will have their backs against the wall when Congress returns from its August recess, since it will face a daunting series of challenges including raising the debt ceiling and hammering out a budget in about two weeks before the nation risks default. If that wasnt bad enough, the U.S. Postal Service announced late last week it would not be able to come up with $6.9 billion less than four days worth of military spending by October to pay for future retiree health and pension benefits as required by law and may have to disrupt day-to-day mail delivery. But apparently while Trump is busy whacking Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell about the head and shoulders and suggesting he retire, issues like delivering the mail take a back seat to the ever more heated rhetoric pouring out of the White House these days.

Closer to home, Montana has its own unhinged Republican in Secretary of State Corey Stapleton, who continues to insist theres massive voter fraud here. Meanwhile, hes also claiming theres some threatening connection between states that have legalized recreational marijuana and mail-in ballots, saying in February: If you look at the three states that have done it, you can see that populism and direct democracy at its best, all three states, Oregon, Washington, and Colorado, they do all mail-in ballots and theyre all-marijuana-all-the-time states too. Is that what you want? Because thats what youre going to get. Really? And here we thought we were just mailing in our votes.

If this is the best Republicans can do, theyre going to have a very tough time come mid-term elections next year. Reckless threats, fantasy voter fraud and a complete lack of achievement isnt governance its incompetence, plain and simple, and to their peril a majority of Americans now recognize it for exactly that.

George Ochenski's column appears each Monday on the Missoulian's Opinion page. He can be reached by email at oped@missoulian.com.

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Republican chaos escalates - The Missoulian

George Will | Syndicated Columnist

Southern Gothic is a literary genre and, occasionally, a political style that, like the genre, blends strangeness and irony. Consider the current primary campaign to pick the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in Alabama vacated by Jeff Sessions. It illuminates, however, not a regional peculiarity but a national perversity, that of the Republican Party.

In 1985, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was nominated for a federal judgeship. Democrats blocked him because they considered him racially "insensitive." In 1996, he got even by getting elected to the Senate. Twenty years later, he was the first senator to endorse Donald Trump, who carried Alabama by 27.7 points. Sessions, the most beloved Alabaman who is not a football coach, became attorney general for Trump, who soon began denouncing Sessions as "beleaguered," which Sessions was because Trump was ridiculing him as "weak" because he followed Justice Department policy in recusing himself from the investigation of Russian involvement in Trump's election.

On Tuesday, Alabama's bewildered and conflicted Republicans will begin picking a Senate nominee. (If no one achieves 50 percent, there will be a Sept. 26 runoff between the top two.) Of the nine candidates, only three matter Luther Strange, Roy Moore and Rep. Mo Brooks.

Strange was Alabama's attorney general until he was appointed by then-Gov. Robert Bentley to Sessions' seat. Bentley subsequently resigned in the wake of several scandals that Strange's office was investigating or so Strange's successor as attorney general suggests when Bentley appointed him. The state Ethics Commission, which had scheduled an Aug. 2 hearing into charges of campaign finance violations by Strange, recently postponed the hearing until Wednesday, the day after the first round of voting.

Twice Roy Moore has been removed as chief justice of the state Supreme Court. In 2003, removal was for defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court regarding religious displays in government buildings. Re-elected, he was suspended last year for defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision regarding same-sex marriages.

Yet Brooks is the focus of ferocious attacks on behalf of Strange, who ignores Moore. The attacks are financed by a Washington-based PAC aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. This Washington Republican establishment strenuously tried but fortunately failed to defeat now-Sens. Marco Rubio and Ben Sasse, of Florida and Nebraska respectively, in their 2010 and 2014 primaries. (The Rubio opponent the PAC favored is now a Democratic congressman.)

The current attacks stress some anti-Trump statements Brooks made while chairman of Ted Cruz's 2016 Alabama campaign. For example, Brooks criticized Trump's "serial adultery," about which Trump has boasted. The PAC identifies Brooks, a conservative stalwart of the House Freedom Caucus, as an ally of Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren. Another ad uses Brooks' support for Congress replacing the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force with an updated one, and his opposition to interventions in Libya and Syria, to suggest that Brooks supports the Islamic State.

Brooks contributed financially to Trump's general-election effort, and has named his campaign bus the "Drain the Swamp Express." He says he supports Trump's "agenda," including potentially its most consequential item ending Senate filibuster rules that enable 41 senators to stymie 59. Strange sides with McConnell against Trump in supporting current rules. Yet the PAC's theme is that Brooks' support of Trump is insufficiently ardent. Such ardor is becoming the party's sovereign litmus test.

In one recent poll, the three candidates are polling in the 20s, and Moore is leading. A runoff seems certain, and if Moore is in it and wins, a Democrat could claim the Dec. 12 general election.

"Anything that comes out of the South," said writer Flannery O'Connor, a sometime exemplar of Southern Gothic, "is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic." But, realistically, Alabama's primary says more about Republicans than about this region. A Michigan poll shows rocker-cum-rapper Kid Rock a strong potential Republican Senate candidate against incumbent Debbie Stabenow. Rock says Democrats are "shattin' in their pantaloons" because if he runs it will be "game on mthrfkrs."

Is this Northern Gothic? No, it is Republican Gothic, the grotesque becoming normal in a national party whose dishonest and, one hopes, futile assault on Brooks is shredding the remnants of its dignity.

George Will's email address is georgewill@washpost.com.

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GEORGE WILL: 'Republican Gothic' in Alabama primary - Tuscaloosa News

Prime Minister Narendra Modi seems to want fundamental changes in Indias pluralistic democracy and not for the better. Photograph: EPA

When the British departed from the subcontinent 70 years ago, the most appropriate epitaph was probably provided by an Indian official who remarked: You British believe in fair play. You have left India in the same condition of chaos as you found it. The months that followed the partitioning ofBritish India seemed to confirm the nature of the gift of independence. The subcontinent endured a lawless, bloody anarchy that encompassed some of the 20th centurys greatest migrations and crimes. Born in blood were two newly created nations of mostly-Hindu India, and Pakistan, a Muslim homeland in south Asia, as well as about 500 feudal autocracies, which ranged from princely states some as large as a European nation to village-sized chiefdoms. When the British predicted there would be many more partitions, it was because the former colonial masters thought no one can make a nation out of a continent of many nations.

In Pakistan, that forecast came partly true, thanks largely because of an attempt to impose a single language Urdu on its most populous province, East Bengal. By 1971, after a civil war in which India played a part in stoking, Pakistan had been cleaved in two. The unfinished business of princely states remains: continuing revolts in Pakistans Baluchistan, Indias Kashmir and Manipur are rooted in identities distinct from the nations that swallowed them up. However, gloomy prophecies of fragmentation have been proved wrong decade after decade in India despite the poverty and diversity. It is perhaps Indias greatest achievement that one-sixth of humanity now cast their votes regularly in free and fair elections.

Unlike democracy in the west where voters first had to be rich men, then adult men and later women, Indias democracy came into being peacefully in 1951 with its first general election where every citizen irrespective of gender, caste, creed, religion, occupation, wealth or level of literacy got to vote. It is also a democracy where the military have been confined to their barracks in peacetime. Almost alone in the non-western world barring a brief interruption in 1975 India has clung doggedly to its democratic convictions. Voting is only one part of a liberal democracy. Indias noble aim of political equality is undermined by a creaking criminal justice system, flagrant interference in its public institutions and the inability toeliminate large-scale political corruption. Freedom ofexpression, necessary for true democracy, does not exist in full measure. India is a land of taboos where almost every fundamentalist be it religious, linguistic or regional cancall for books to be banned or film sets burned. That India was the first country to ban the Satanic Verses is a blot onits democracy.

Indians were once in academia described as Homo Hierarchicus, a species of human who most intensely practised inequality. This in-built discrimination chained Dalits and women for centuries. Indias laws abolished untouchability and made men equal to women, yet in practice violence and prejudice continue. Thanks to casteism and bigotry against Indias tribal peoples, the country is home to the worlds largest slave population. However, we can see examples ofeveryday equality between people in India. The link between a persons occupation and their caste is weakening, thanks in part to the worlds biggest affirmative action programme. Theres also evidence that women are choosing their own spouses, abigshift in a nation where marriage was seen as a contract between families.

In an Asian century, India has long been considered as a democratic counterweight to its larger authoritarian neighbour, China. Last year Indias economy grew faster than Chinas, although alarming pollution levels suggest Delhi risks making many of Beijings mistakes. Worryingly, Indian and Chinese troops have in recent weeks been engaged in a tense Himalayan standoff. But Indias biggest threat is internal. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is an impressive politician but he also runs a government backed by rightwing Hindu extremists who condone and actively support violence against minorities, especially Muslims. Like its less-peopled cousin, the European Union, India works because no single culture or language is central to its identity or mandatory for unity. Mr Modi seems to want fundamental changes in Indias pluralistic democracy and not for the better. The quest for equality and the rule of law have shown impressive resilience in India, but they are under threat from within.

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The Guardian view on India at 70: democracy in action - The Guardian

Vice President Pence assured U.S. allies in South America on Monday that the Trump administration will work with them to address the crisis in Venezuela as the country descends into a "dictatorship."

"The American people will always come alongside allies like Colombia should this crisis continue to drive a greater refugee flow into Colombia and neighboring countries," Pence told reporters gathered at a chapel in Cartagena, Colombia.

The vice president, whose trip comes days after President Trump declined to rule out a military option in Venezuela, said he was asked by Trump to send a clear message during his trip to the Nicolas Maduro regime that the Venezuelan leader's attempt "to change the laws and the structures and ultimately, the constitution in Venezuela to full dictatorship [is] simply unacceptable."

"The United States is going to continue to send a message of resolve and determination," Pence said, reiterating that the U.S. has "many options with regard to Venezuela to ultimately make it possible for the people of Venezuela to see their democracy restored."

White House officials have said Pence's visit to Colombia and other allies in South America is meant to turn up the pressure on Venezuelan President Maduro, who has sought to consolidate power in the country by installing a controversial constitutional assembly and replacing the attorney general, who was a forceful critic of the Maduro machine.

Pence will travel to Buenos Aires, Argentina, later Monday, followed by stops in Chile and Panama City.

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Pence: US determined to see 'democracy restored' in Venezuela - Washington Examiner

Welcome to the sound of silence. As of noon next Monday, the lives of Londoners will no longer be punctuated by the bongs of Westminster. Those 10ominous strokes which herald ITNs News at Ten will seem incongruous not apt. For Big Ben (the clock and tower to which that great bells name has spread), is due for repair and the tolling will cease for the next four years. The builders are certainly taking their time about it.

Big Ben has been silenced before, of course: to protect Parliament from German Zeppelins (in case the bombers could hear the bells); for the funerals of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher; for briefperiods of maintenance work. But on this occasion its as if the city were having a heart transplant. While surgeons tinker away at the pulmonary arteries, we are left staring at a monitor that is flatlining.

Big Ben, as his name suggests, is less a giant grandfather clock...

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Silencing Big Ben is like stopping the heartbeat of our democracy - Telegraph.co.uk