Charles Krauthammer

“This was not a subject that was on anybody’s mind until I brought it up at my announcement.”

With both presidential nomination contests having been scrambled by recent events — the FBI taking control of Hillary Clinton’s private email server and a raucous, roiling GOP debate — the third edition of the Racing Form is herewith rushed into print.

Christianity, whose presence in the Middle East predates Islam’s by 600 years, is about to be cleansed from the Middle East. Egyptian Copts may have found some respite under Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, but after their persecution under the previous Muslim Brotherhood government, they know how precarious their existence in 90 percent Muslim Egypt remains. Elsewhere, it’s much worse. Twenty-one Copts were beheaded by the Islamic State affiliate in Libya for the crime of being Christian. In those large swaths of Syria and Iraq where the Islamic State rules, the consequences for Christians are terrible — enslavement, exile, torture, massacre, crucifixion.

“Thank you Planned Parenthood. God bless you.”

When you write a column, as did I two weeks ago, headlined "The worst agreement in U.S. diplomatic history," you don‘t expect to revisit the issue. We had hit bottom. Or so I thought. Then on Tuesday, the final terms of the Iranian nuclear deal were published. I was wrong.

We need a pick-me-up. Amid the vandalizing of Palmyra, the imminent extinction of the northern white rhino, the disarray threatening Europe’s most ambitious attempt ever at peaceful unification — amid plague and pestilence and, by God, in the middle of Shark Week — where can humanity turn for uplift?

The devil is not in the details. It’s in the entire conception of the Iran deal, animated by President Barack Obama’s fantastical belief that he, uniquely, could achieve detente with a fanatical Islamist regime whose foundational purpose is to cleanse the Middle East of the poisonous corruption of American power and influence.

After a massacre like the one at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., our immediate reaction is to do something. Something, for politicians, means legislation. And for Democratic politicians, this means gun control.

It’s time for a new strategy in Iraq and Syria. It begins by admitting that the old borders are gone, that a unified Syria or Iraq will never be reconstituted, that the Sykes-Picot map is defunct.