China

Why aren’t spy stories sexy anymore? The revelations last year that Beijing destroyed America’s espionage ring inside China a few years ago, including executing a number of US informants, got a brief flurry of attention and then subsided beneath the waves. News reports of American bureaucrats arrested for passing information to the Chinese have also barely raised eyebrows. Now the ex-CIA agent suspected of being the mole that led to the collapse of America’s spy operations in China has been arrested, though on a lesser charge of simply possessing classified information. How long before Americans turn back to Donald Trump’s tweets or the latest #MeToo charges?

The first election day since Donald Trump was elected president a year ago brought a funereal mood to Washington that you could feel on the streets. The swamp, apparently, remains undrained. Elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey and for mayor in New York City cheered the locals a bit, producing the expected victories for Democrats. Virginia was the most consequential of these. It seemed a harbinger of the next presidential race. The moderate, decidedly un-Trumpian Republican Ed Gillespie was accused of making ‘ugly racial appeals’ — this for expressing the opinion that the statues of Virginia’s Civil War heroes should not be razed in a frenzy of revisionism.