The air is thick with lamentations that our two political parties are tearing themselves -- and the nation -- to pieces. The Republican president has picked a Twitter fight with four Democratic freshman congresswomen, and the Democratic speaker has chosen to violate House rules to pick a fight with the president.

In October 1950, as U.S. forces were reeling from hordes of Chinese troops who had intervened massively in the Korean War, a 5,000-man Turkish brigade arrived to halt an onslaught by six Chinese divisions.

Said supreme commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur: "The Turks are the hero of heroes. There is no impossibility for the Turkish Brigade."

GOP retains edge, but perhaps not as sharp of one as it had following 2010.

— The Supreme Court’s recent decision to stay out of adjudicating gerrymandering doesn’t necessarily change anything because the court had never put limits on partisan redistricting in the first place.

— Republicans are still slated to control the drawing of many more districts than Democrats following the 2020 census, although there are reasons to believe their power will not be as great as it was following the last census.

— How aggressively majority parties in a number of small-to-medium-sized states target incumbents of the minority party following 2020 may help tell us whether the Supreme Court’s decision will lead to more aggressive gerrymanders.

If you were shocked by the images of the Mexican flag flying over an Aurora, Colorado, immigration detention center this weekend, you'll be appalled at an even more disgusting spectacle:

Recording events from public land shouldn't be a crime.

Yet when a woman in Utah, standing by a public road, filmed farmworkers pushing a cow with a bulldozer, the farmer drove up to her and said, "You cannot videotape my property."

President Donald Trump's playground taunt Sunday that "the Squad" of four new radical liberal House Democrats, all women of color, should "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came," dominated Monday morning's headlines.

Living as they do in a bipolar political world where politics consists of Democrats and Republicans and no other ideology is real, media corporations in the United States use "left," "liberal" and "Democrat" as synonyms. This is obviously wrong and clearly untrue -- Democrats are a party, leftism and liberalism are ideologies, and Democratic politics are frequently neither left nor liberal but far right -- but as Orwell observed, after you hear a lie repeated enough times, you begin to question what you know to be true rather than the untruth.

We are all, to some extent, prisoners of the past. Things that have already happened -- or that we remember as having happened -- constitute the world that we know. Anything else is a product of imagination.

When Sir Kim Darroch's secret cable to London was leaked to the Daily Mail, wherein he called the Trump administration "dysfunctional ... unpredictable ... faction-riven ... diplomatically clumsy and inept," the odds on his survival as U.K. ambassador plummeted.

Farewell Ross Perot; Senate races on the fringe of the competitive map; the curious case of Justin Amash.

— Ross Perot, who died earlier this week, provided something of a template for Donald Trump. He also was the best-performing third-party presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912.

— They are not top-tier races, but there have been noteworthy Senate developments on the outer fringes of the competitive map in Kansas, Kentucky, and Virginia.

— Justin Amash’s decision to leave the GOP creates another House swing seat.