People keep shooting at, or in the general vicinity, of the president. Yet everyone seems surprised that a random lunatic with access to a firearm might try to become famous by murdering a well-known individual, even though this is literally the dream of thousands of unstable, gun-wielding Americans.
No, there is no way out of our Second Amendment nightmare without even more death or a national catastrophe of some type.
There is also no way out of Iran without American troops getting killed or American credibility, what little of it remains, going up in flames like the Stars and Stripes at a Taliban rally.
Consider that the “costs of Trump’s folly include far more than the thousands of deaths and tens of billions of dollars the Pentagon has spent on the war.” All that is bad enough, but in the best-case scenario, we will get a shitty deal that will reopen a strait “that was open before the pointless war he started, with [Iran] demonstrating its control over the strait and potentially extracting fees plus sanctions relief.” That’s in addition to the hundreds of dead children, with U.S. embassies badly damaged, “U.S. standing in the world obliterated, and U.S. munitions badly depleted.” Also “prices are up everywhere, and more global economic fallout to come.” Furthermore, Putin has been “strengthened and enriched,” while we endure a “profoundly shameful episode in American history no matter what happens next.”
Again, that is the best-case scenario.
We arrived here because an oblivious megalomanic surrounded himself with cabinet members who exhibit “lickspittling, bootlicking, groveling, kowtowing adulation and unctuously servile toadyism.” And now all of them — every macho-postering moron and reality-denying jingoist — are shocked that the Iran war is breaking Trump and has “significantly damaged American credibility and influence in the region.”
Who could have foreseen this — other than every president before Trump, every Middle East expert, and most of the people who have more than nine brain cells in their heads?
In addition to the inevitable quagmire and/or defeat, what has made the “outcome of the war so embarrassing was Trump’s conduct during it—not only the constant lies and dissimulations about why he had launched the conflict and what he hoped to achieve from it but, even more, the spectacle he presented of unhinged, unaccountable American power.”
But on the plus side, we got some great footage of shit blowing up.
Totally worth it.
