The Mississippi Republican primary ended with Chris McDaniel—a Tea Party challenger whose supporters had been involved in the trespassing of a nursing home (to film the dementia-afflicted wife of his opponent) and a locked courthouse (where election materials were kept)—“crying foul,” as the Times put it, and dispatching emergency poll watchers when it became clear that more black people than usual were voting. Just voting—which is one of the few things in this Mississippi contest that one might expect to see in an election. And those votes, by many accounts, appear to have helped Senator Thad Cochran, the incumbent, narrowly survive the runoff with McDaniel Tuesday night, with just over fifty per cent of the vote; he’d been behind McDaniel in the first round, in which neither got an outright majority. The Tea Party thought that it had this one.

Donald Trump is angry about the settlement the city reached, this weekend, with the Central Park Five—the men who had, as teen-age boys, been wrongly convicted in the “Central Park jogger” rape case and been called animals by just about every institution in this city. The rape had been committed between 9 or 10 P.M., on an April evening in 1989; someone had beaten the jogger so badly and so brutally that by the time she was found, hours later, stripped and covered with mud, she had lost three quarters of her blood. The police detective on the scene told reporters that her body had already turned cold; she wouldn’t have survived much longer. The woman, as she later let the world know in a book, was Trisha Meili, then an investment banker at Salomon Brothers; she had been bashed in the head and remembered nothing. The rest of New York, though, was sure of what had happened to her, and who was to blame. Here was the headline in the Daily News, on April 21, 1989:

WOLF PACK’S PREY
Female jogger near death after savage attack by roving gang

Three hundred Americans are going to Iraq—or no more than that, anyway, President Obama said on Thursday. They will be “advisers” to the government there, as it fights militants associated with the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham who are moving across the country. The President said that the advisers would not go into battle themselves: “American combat troops are not going to be fighting in Iraq again.” Rather, they would find other ways to be helpful, if they could, and “assess how we can best train, advise, and support Iraqi security forces going forward.”

In his State of the Union address, in January, President Obama said, “When I took office, nearly a hundred and eighty thousand Americans were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, all our troops are out of Iraq.” It was a boast, not an apology. The descent of Iraq into open civil war in the past week has not, to judge from his remarks on Friday, fundamentally changed that view. He did grant that it was alarming that the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, “a terrorist organization that operates in both Iraq and in Syria,” had made what he delicately called “significant gains” in Iraq. (That is, it has taken control of more than one city.) He said that he wasn’t entirely surprised—things hadn’t been looking good in Iraq for a while, and we’d been giving the government there more help. “Now Iraq needs additional support to break the momentum of extremist groups and bolster the capabilities of Iraqi security forces,” he said. After all, as he put it, “Nobody has an interest in seeing terrorists gain a foothold inside of Iraq.” But there were limits: “We will not be sending U.S. troops back into combat in Iraq.”

George Will is a victim: a victim of a particular thing he calls “victimhood,” which comes with “privileges,” nice things that George Will, or people like George Will, don’t get to have. And this thought, in a column that Will published this past weekend in the Washington Post, is not just attached to a standard rant about, say, affirmative action. Colleges and universities have now learned, he writes, “that when they make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate”; he sees this quite plainly in “the supposed campus epidemic of rape, a.k.a. ‘sexual assault.’ ” Students and educators, in Will’s world, are being swarmed by covetous young women.

How do three campaign officials come to be discovered locked in a courthouse—one in which primary precinct returns are also locked—in the middle of the night? Put differently, can the race for the Mississippi Republican Senate nomination look any more like playground pretense of what a political campaign should be?

The story here starts with a primary race between Thad Cochran, who has been in the Senate for thirty-six years, and a Tea Partier, Chris McDaniel; each got about forty-nine per cent of the primary vote, forcing a runoff in three weeks. And yet this campaign has veered away from health-care reform to trespassing. Weeks before the courtroom night visitors, a blogger who supported McDaniel made his way into a nursing home to get pictures of Cochran’s wife, who suffers from dementia. (The campaign said that it didn’t send him and doesn’t like what happened.) Two cases of unauthorized entry in one race, which isn’t even at the general-election stage yet, does seem like a lot.

Is it better, at Guantánamo, to be bad—even to be, as Senator John McCain said, of the five prisoners traded for Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl this weekend, “the hardest of the hardcore”? Being, say, a Taliban leader means that you are important to someone who might have a way to bargain you out of there. That doesn’t seem to be true of the seventy-eight prisoners still at Guantánamo—more than half the present total of a hundred and forty-nine—who have been cleared for release, and are sitting there still. They are not the ones who were taken away by Qatari diplomats on Saturday. That is not an indictment of the deal itself, though there are questions enough about it. But the Bergdahl case, and the dismay with which it’s been greeted, is as good an illustration as any that we’ve had in a while of why Guantánamo does not make sense.

These five prisoners, known to be Taliban commanders and officials, were ones the Obama Administration had said should be held indefinitely, because they posed a threat. However, it was not prepared to charge them with any crime. One thing that the angry response to the trade revealed is that the implicit definition of “indefinite,” in many quarters, was “forever.” But indefinite means indefinite; when you have what, despite the frippery of various review boards, are essentially extrajudicial imprisonments based on the judgment of the executive, you might have people who get out a lot sooner than one would expect, too. Want to be more sure that the people now at Guantánamo stay prisoners for an extended period of time? Then convict them of something; give them a sentence.

“I will not be a part of a political slugfest on the backs of dead Americans. It’s just plain wrong, and it’s unworthy of our great country,” Hillary Clinton writes in a chapter of her forthcoming book, “Hard Choices,” which Politico got a look at. The particular slugfest this chapter is about is the attack on a U.S. diplomatic installation in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012, in which four Americans were killed. “Those who insist on politicizing the tragedy will have to do so without me,” she writes.

“Without me”—what will that mean, in practical terms? Will she just, when asked about it, decline to respond? (“Many of these same people are a broken record about unanswered questions. But there is a difference between unanswered questions and unlistened to answers,” she writes, according to Politico.) One does understand Clinton’s impatience with the way that Benghazi has been turned into a conspiratorial shorthand. Relying on quiet disdain, if that is the plan, might be a more efficient tactic if it didn’t seem like she was a candidate for President in 2016. An alternative is to shame her critics into silence a bit more loudly, by making the case that just saying the word Benghazi is a sign of poor political character. But however much they may seem to blur together, Benghazi is distinct from trumped-up scandals like Travelgate, or deeply personal ones like the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Update: On Friday morning, Eric Shinseki resigned as the Secretary of Veterans Affairs.

“Enlistment” is the word that we use for joining the military. You are entered onto a list; you put your name down. And much of the experience of the military is described by movement from one list to another—for a platoon, a deployment, or honors. When a soldier is killed, part of the memorial can be a final roll call—a last, ritual calling of the name of the dead along with those in the unit who survived. These are public lists: the most public of all are the monuments on which the names of the war dead are inscribed, for everyone to read.

That gets to the emotional heart of the Veterans Affairs scandal: at a V.A. hospital in Phoenix, veterans were not put on the lists for appointments where they belonged. They were shunted off to a secret waiting list, one that was a lie. The hospital did this to hide how long it was making patients wait for care. It blotted out their names and their needs; it struck them, dishonorably, from the rolls. And an interim inspector general’s report, released on Wednesday, said that the department had received complaints indicating a national problem. As bad as the situation, in the last few weeks, seems to have been, the report suggests that it may have been even worse. It is not just a matter of health care at a level lower than what veterans deserve, or a balky database: it is a fundamental insult.

“We have now been in Afghanistan longer than many Americans expected,” President Obama said on Tuesday, standing in the Rose Garden. There are other words that come to mind besides “expected”—hoped, feared, dreaded—but, twelve and a half years after our troops went into that country, it’s hard to argue with the basic point, or with Obama’s air of weariness. He had come out to say that, of the thirty-four thousand or so troops now in Afghanistan, nine thousand eight hundred would stay past 2014—a date he’d set, last year, as the end of combat operations. The rest would leave by 2016, except for “a normal embassy presence in Kabul, with a security assistance component.” Then we’d be done.