On the beach
Last week hundreds of people gathered on Australia's beaches, waiting to be evacuated from a continent in flames. It was like a terrible conflation of Dunkirk and Nevil Shute's 1957 novel of post-nuclear catastrophe. This week, it feels like we are all on the beach, and the little boats aren't coming.
We should have seen expected this back in 2012, when Trump noticed how much Barack Obama was doing stuff wrong and gave this Abbott and Costello interview to Hugh Hewitt. He alone could fix it, of course, and because this is not a democracy, he got his chance. New Year revelers crawled out of bed to learn that General Qasem Soleimani of the Iran Revolutionary Guard had been assassinated by the United States because he was about to do bad stuff, and absolutely not because of any terrible fake impeachment. They also soon learned that Soleimani occupied a place in Iranian hearts comparable to Douglas MacArthur for many Americans, and that the streets of Tehran were echoing with their rage. The fact that we may be stumbling blindly into a war was no reason to call off the Pimps and Traffickers Ball at Mar-a-Lago, of course. Excited as he always is by distant violence, Trump spent the day tweeting threats to destroy 52 Iranian religious and cultural sites (one for each of the 1979 hostages, in case you forgot) and barely civil "notifications" to Congressional leadership as required by law. Message received: today al-Shabab killed three Americans at a base in Kenya. It begins.
Mike Pompeo hit the Sunday morning stroke-fests to assure everyone that we're all much safer now in spite of the heightened security in every city and airport, the Iranian-Americans who got ICEstapo'd at the Canadian border, the thousands of deployed troops, the panicky Iraqi parliament ordering their "allies" out of the country, nothing to see here. Ignore those who actually know things, like Susan Rice. Don't worry, be happy. Killing the odd bin Laden or al-Baghdadi completely shuts down the organizations they headed, just as shooting down Admiral Yamamoto crippled the Imperial Japanese Navy. It's so much easier to be an idiot if you don't know history. And Number One Idiot was so energized, he hit the golf course this morning.
Twice before, to the world's astonishment, the United States held national elections during wartime, and twice the incumbents were re-elected. Does anyone else see where this is going?
We should have seen expected this back in 2012, when Trump noticed how much Barack Obama was doing stuff wrong and gave this Abbott and Costello interview to Hugh Hewitt. He alone could fix it, of course, and because this is not a democracy, he got his chance. New Year revelers crawled out of bed to learn that General Qasem Soleimani of the Iran Revolutionary Guard had been assassinated by the United States because he was about to do bad stuff, and absolutely not because of any terrible fake impeachment. They also soon learned that Soleimani occupied a place in Iranian hearts comparable to Douglas MacArthur for many Americans, and that the streets of Tehran were echoing with their rage. The fact that we may be stumbling blindly into a war was no reason to call off the Pimps and Traffickers Ball at Mar-a-Lago, of course. Excited as he always is by distant violence, Trump spent the day tweeting threats to destroy 52 Iranian religious and cultural sites (one for each of the 1979 hostages, in case you forgot) and barely civil "notifications" to Congressional leadership as required by law. Message received: today al-Shabab killed three Americans at a base in Kenya. It begins.
Mike Pompeo hit the Sunday morning stroke-fests to assure everyone that we're all much safer now in spite of the heightened security in every city and airport, the Iranian-Americans who got ICEstapo'd at the Canadian border, the thousands of deployed troops, the panicky Iraqi parliament ordering their "allies" out of the country, nothing to see here. Ignore those who actually know things, like Susan Rice. Don't worry, be happy. Killing the odd bin Laden or al-Baghdadi completely shuts down the organizations they headed, just as shooting down Admiral Yamamoto crippled the Imperial Japanese Navy. It's so much easier to be an idiot if you don't know history. And Number One Idiot was so energized, he hit the golf course this morning.
Twice before, to the world's astonishment, the United States held national elections during wartime, and twice the incumbents were re-elected. Does anyone else see where this is going?
posted by Buttermilk Sky at 6:51 PM
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