Week of War of Whims
War of Vibes, War of Contradiction, War of No Planning, War of Surprises, Terror Cells, Trump Shoes, Money in Politics, SCOTUS Corruption, Age, Religion, Cats

1. Carter was a loser

and

2. Everything is risky

She reviews now released intelligence analyses and finds Trump missing the more basic, essential lesson.

The Department of Defense posts a review:
The piece describes (accurately) how the Eagle Claw failure led DOD to professionalize Special Operations and institutionalize a lot of other kinds of coordination, lessons learned that have served the US well since then.
 
Chief among the lessons, though, is that you don’t just make shit up as you go along.
 
Yet that is precisely what Trump has been doing.

It occurs to me that, while demonstrating a talent for inciting conservative gatherings, drawing that lesson would require what Trump is known for resisting:

He doesn’t like to read.
He doesn’t like to think.

Key Headline:
Happy Christmas MAGA (Iran War is Over) Republican political ideology; The Eternal Now

Okay, The Eternal Now is descriptive.

I might have gone with Instant Forever!

From Built In:
Schrödinger’s Cat, as a thought experiment, states that if you seal a cat in a box with something that can eventually kill it, you won’t know if the cat is alive or dead until you open the box. So, until you open the box and observe the cat, the cat is simultaneously dead and alive.

Tommy Christopher puts together the multiple paradox laden explanations:

• It’s a war but it isn’t a war. Only an excursion.
• We won but we haven’t won enough.
• It’s very complete but we still have a long way to go.
• We most definitely did not blow up an elementary school for little girls, but we’re investigating to find out if we blew up an elementary school for little girls.
• And, of course, our forces completely and finally obliterated Iran’s nuclear program last year, and we had to attack again now in order to completely and finally obliterate Iran’s nuclear program.

Tommy presents a video montage of similar examples.

George Orwell’s 1984 comes to mind, of course.
I also think of Lewis Carroll and childlike logic games.

From Through the Looking Glass:
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean “a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice objected.
 
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean–neither more nor less.”

 
In Letters from an American, historian Heather Cox Richardson explains how the weird, shifting, explanations for the war in Iran promote widespread instability beyond the Middle East. They make the world nervous about US whimsy in other regions.

This remind you of anything?
When reporters asked about what Trump meant by unconditional surrender, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt seemed to say that unconditional surrender meant whatever Trump decides it does whenever he decides what the goals of Operation Epic Fury are.

The same analysis is now available in audio format, as Richardson narrates in podcast.

Which raises a couple of questions: Why are those terror cells still out on our streets? WHY Isn’t He Going After Them?.
What’s with ICE going after all those grandmothers, kids, and Home Depot workers instead?

Homeland Security has for years routinely gotten together with other intelligence agencies and sent notices to law enforcement about what sort of terror threats to look for.

This time, they come up with a 5-page bulletin for local police with what Iranian plots might target US locations.

Sound good so far?

The White House blocks it from being sent to any police department anywhere.

What sort of nutcase would want to prevent local law enforcement from knowing what threats to be on the alert for?

After the 9/11/2001 attacks:
My son was born 90 days after the attacks. I brought him home to our Arkansas farm.
 
I sobbed, knowing my youngest son was entering a different world than his older brother. The post 9/11 world was coming into focus, and this baby would live a different reality. He would never know the safety we felt prior to the attacks.
 
He would never know a world without the threat of planes used as weapons of mass destruction.
 
That baby boy grew up to be a soldier. An officer in the Army National Guard. He also has a wife and a sweet baby of his own now.
 
I am incredibly scared for him under this regime.

She doesn’t appreciate the current administration’s careless, cavalier approach to intervention, treating young people as cannon fodder in whimsical war:

He illustrates that, besides tragic death, huge empires have collapsed because of unnecessary wars fought by mistake.

His main point: there is a reason, a reason dictated by history, that Congress has been assigned the duty to declare war.
He mentions, but goes beyond, the word games the administration plays. They simply do not treat war with the seriousness it deserves.

And, of course, Trump treats a solemn return of remains of those killed as an interruption to his golf game:

The lack of seriousness is reflected in the shiftiness of rationale:

The looking glass definitions go beyond the executive branch as Republicans in Congress twist themselves into knots to keep away, far away, from their Constitutional duty:

Until we know for sure that Congressional authorization is not needed.
It isn’t war. How do we know it isn’t war?

In Canadian satire, The Beaverton reports as Americans demand to know who they have to bomb to lower gas prices.

Dave Dubya disagrees on several grounds, but primarily to what he sees as a widespread implicit approach that is unnecessarily binary: unless you approve of the attack, you must support the theocracy, oppose the existence of Israel, and hate Jews.

On Infidel and Darrell:
(They don’t allow my comments at their blogs and Darrell accused me of being a communist.) The former says I’m part of the “ignorantsia”, and the latter says, critics “either don’t know and understand the history with Iran and the evil that the regime has perpetrated, or they simply hate Trump more than they love their own country. Often times I think both are factors.”
 
Obviously, no discussion is possible with anyone who demeans those who question Trump’s war.

Friendship and profound respect may keep me from detecting the us v them binary perspective in the views of my three friends.

As I see it, motivation is central to at least part of the discussion, but from a different direction.
Former Prime Minister of Israel, the late Golda Meir, often acknowledged that the tragedy of war goes both ways:

The tactics of Hamas and seemingly those of the Iranian theocracy, in hiding behind civilian population centers, seem to justify the rest of her quote:

Golda Meir’s expressed sadness at the loss of life lent credibility to Israeli efforts to minimize civilian casualties, most certainly to claims not to actually target innocents.

That concern was not shared by Hamas in Gaza. The religious fanatics in Iran have demonstrated their deadly intent, not just to Jews, not even to domestic opposition, but even to those who do not hate with the requisite intensity.

Sadly, the contrast between Meir and what we see from Benjamin Netanyahu is striking.
If Hamas hides behind children, if those in charge of Iran put military centers near schools and centers of civilians… well, no problem.
Children? Well, they were there, weren’t they?

The death of innocents provokes an oscillation between public indifference and actual enthusiasm. That may not reflect his real feelings, but that is not easily detectable from the outside.

As I understand the term, I am a Zionist. Thousands of years of continuous hatred, brutality, and mass murder targeting Jews raises historical necessity not shared by most religious or ethnic groups. Most of us see the need for a national sanctuary specifically for Jews. And that nation must be defended.

Does that support for Israel, as some imply, as a few insist, require support for Israel’s current government, Trump’s weird timing for attack, Constitutional violations, and Hegseth type enthusiasm for the death of civilians?

Really?

From the official White House account on Valentine’s Day:

Reasonably easy question:
Would you like to take three guesses as to whom it was referring as “daddy”?

Key pattern:
And this is by no means the only such reference. It’s become quite common in the MAGA cult to allude to Dear Leader, either explicitly or implicitly, as a father figure.

Great Headline:
Marco Rubio Literally Can’t Fill Trump’s Shoes

Posted separately, voters really don’t like what Trump is doing to the economy.

WH enthusiasm:
The first time I saw her mounted on that wooden T-shaped frame, I knew Kristi Noem was an absolute natural at terrifying animals.

Watch out for more Trump vibes.

One small problem: ICE won’t drive them because they all have ICE written in the sides in huge letters.

Kind of goes against the whole masks so nobody knows who we are motif.

He provides several examples, one of which is a proposal offered by Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressional Representative Ro Khanna.

Their legislation would increase, by a relatively small percentage, taxes on billionaires, with a $3000 break going to any taxpayer with an income under $150,000 a year.

Baby steps.

Journalist Brian Beutler has filed a request under Freedom of Information Act for a file that, so far, the DOJ has not included in the Epstein files, involving rape victim accusations against Trump.

He publishes the request, minus the name of the victim, even though it may reduce the chances of getting the file.

In that case, why publish it?
…it better advances the public interest: first, by drawing further attention to the existence of these documents; second, by alerting the public to the administration’s actionable legal obligation to release them under the combined authorities of FOIA and the Epstein Files Transparency Act—so that the government can’t violate the law quietly.

So the cover-up itself becomes evidence, at least to the interested public. It pertains to Consciousness of Guilt. Wouldn’t an innocent person push for release of everything?

The accusation itself is horrifying.

The accomplice, the one who shot the victim pleaded out and got a long prison sentence.

Sonny Burton was sentenced to death. It took 35 years of trials and appeals, but the execution was set for this week.

In Scotties Playtime ali redford opens her mail and gets good news for Sonny Burton.

You may prefer a complete transcript [PDF].

Core sponsor:
This corrupt Supreme Court has a lot to answer for.

driftglass suggests the extreme right has something to fear from Kat Abughazaleh.

Her response has been to post a video making fun of their attacks:

He later is furious with Right Wing Watch for taking his views out of context, proving it by encouraging readers to watch an entire 45‑minute video.
Right Wing Watch patiently posts his litany of objections and adds another video for the context he insists is absent.

One clue:
At a Pentagon briefing about the escalating war with Iran, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stepped to the podium to deliver what should have been a sober assessment of a volatile conflict. Instead, the briefing became something else entirely. It was a mix of bluster, disputed claims about battlefield success, and overt religious rhetoric that should scare hell out of anyone who believes war must be guided by reason rather than ideology.

Above the rest of us:
You know who I’m talking about: those friends, family members, coworkers, classmates, and social media acquaintances who tone-police us for surveying the monumental destruction being inflicted upon our fragile Republic and its people and being livid. Those people.

Dave charts his future:

More news:
On the other hand, my wife, Michelle, who turns 61 in a week and is highly competitive, immediately, upon hearing about it, took the test and, with me monitoring her, scored a legit 9 out of 10. Which for me is good news and bad news. The good news is, her health trajectory seems to be excellent. The bad news is, she may eventually decide to return to her home planet.

Even the internal debate may be unnecessary:
The vast majority of the creative folks I know are entirely comfortable with the idea that you have to pay bills, and sometimes that means doing less than 100% creatively fulfilling work in order to keep the proverbial roof over one’s head.

This made me wonder about humankind’s continuing search for exotic hobbies: