The Return of Baghdad Bob

Soooo..? How's our Splendid Little Gulf War going this week!?

 Well, Felony Fats supposedly gave one of his patented Fireside Weaves Wednesday evening. I say "supposedly" because I didn't listen to it...

(Confession; it's not so much the projectile vomit of lies, more lies, and even weirder "is this even a lie? WTF?" that comes out of Orange Foolius' piehole that keeps me away from his YouTube fodder; it's the tone. The actual sound of him; that nasal, whiny, Queens-white-trash thing he always does. No matter what he actually says - and Jim Wright does a perfectly good job of describing his Wednesday word salad - it's that nails-on-a-blackboard sound of his voice that drives me to instant loathing. So I read the transcript.)

...but apparently we've won. 

But we're going to keep winning for just another Infrastructure-Week-slash-GOP-heathcare-plan-units (hint: two weeks) and then...something something build a Victory Arch.

The IRGC and whoever else is sending the commo check messages from Tehran seem to disagree that "...we are on the cusp of ending Iran's sinister threat to America and the world." and as Clausewitz (drink!) would remind us, the enemy gets a vote, too, so.

Included in that vote are the numerous Iran-connected Shiite militias in Iraq, which, since all this explosive winning ("Their leaders, most of them and the terrorist regime they led, are now dead,") has removed the IRGC liasons that acted as strategic dampers on the angry Shiite guys in the basement of the Basra Rite-Aid, are now coming out of the woodwork, as anyone who'd lived through Dick n' Dubya's Excellent Iraq Adventure would have told you was as predictable as a Republican lying about immigration, health care, or Social Security. 

From the link:

"For years, Iranian-backed groups like Kataib Hezbollah have targeted U.S. and coalition bases, headquarters, embassies and other facilities in Iraq. While these groups have been supported by Iran with funding, weapons, intelligence and command and control, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has also reigned them in. With the IRGC fighting for its own survival now, and its command and control structure decimated, their grip over the militias has loosened."

Y'think? And even if those IRGC C&C operators were in place, why would they want to go all kumbaya on the angry boys from the Muqtada al-Sadr Memorial Marching and Chowder Society? Why would the Iraqi militias want them to?

Fuck. If I were a twenty-something taxi driver in Mosul, y'know what?

I'd be hating on some American ass. Any American. ALL Americans.

Because it'd feel like every ten or twenty years the fucking ferenghis show up and just kill a shitload of people who look like me. 

For "reasons". Kuwaitis. Oil. "Freedom". Geopolitics.

Me in my taxi with the Twelver iconography and the radio tuned to that Emirati pirate hip-hop station? Like I give a shit about the "reasons". These murderous sonsofbitches are about as welcome as a dose of the clap. If I had the chance to blow some Yankee bastard into fun-sized pieces, y'think I wouldn't take it?

Meanwhile back here in the Land of The Free Because Of The Brave? What are We the People getting for all this multibillion-dollar gold-plated explosive winning?

"President Donald Trump on Wednesday said it’s “not possible” for the federal government to fund Medicare, Medicaid and child care costs, arguing that it should be up to the states to “take care” of those programs while the federal government focuses on military spending."

Ummm...

Talk about saying the quiet parts out loud. 

Oops. 

Of course, Tubby's spokesliars had race out and walk, no, run, his blabber back inside the Bodyguard of Lies, because showing the rubes too much of the script behind the GOP kayfabe might actually scare some of the less-uninformed normies:

“President Trump was referring to rooting out the billions of dollars of fraud in these vital programs — and his record proves he will always protect and strengthen Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” White House spokesperson Olivia Wales said in a statement. “The President proudly signed historic legislation eliminating taxes on Social Security benefits for nearly all seniors and barring illegal immigrants and other ineligible individuals from fraudulently receiving Medicare and Medicaid benefits. The Trump economic agenda will continue to lower costs, making everyday life more affordable for hardworking American families.”

Okay. "Waste, fraud, and abuse"? 

Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha(gasp)hahahahahahahaha... 

Suuuuure, Livvy. Gotcha. Enter the DOGE Boyz, pursued by a bear. 

Back in the day there was this guy; 

 

Muḥammad Saʿīd Al-Ṣaḥḥāf. He was the Saddam-version of the Nightly News, and was tagged with the nicknames "Comical Ali" and "Baghdad Bob". His job was to rep the Iraqi "version" of what was happening as the Westerners blew the ever-loving hell out of Iraq.

He was widely mocked; ridiculed because his "version" was - had to be, given the one-sided nature of those earlier Gulf Wars - a ridiculous farrago of lies, evasions, bullshit, and bombast.

And, no matter how hard he spun his version, the brutal reality of those wars - that Saddam's Iraq was hopeless before reality, that his master had no plan, no scheme, no one secret trick that would have allowed Bob's bullshit to become fact - meant that in the end he was and is remembered only as a sad, tattered clown whose performance was nothing but a tawdry sideshow, a kayfabe of nonsense that was buried beneath a charnel heap of death.

Whose American authors were, in turn, shown to be fools for the fooling, liars and cheats that lied and cheated for nothing, whose imperial ambitions came, in the end, to ruin and merciless hatred. 

The ironic twist to the end of Tale of Baghdad Bob is that, in the fullness of time and the foolishness of the goddamn American public...

 ...his enemy has become him, the speeches of his enemy's leader have become as bloated with lies and foolishness as his speeches were, and those lies have come full circle, and the meaningless pile of destruction has turned round upon it's maker.

(Cross-posted to MilPub) 

The cheaper the crook...

 

...the gaudier the patter.

I didn't waste my time watching Felony Fats' Big Beautiful Lie-o-palooza last night. I don't, usually; these things are always polititheater, regardless of who delivers them. I might have listened to FDR, had I been around then, but I can't think of anyone else who's stood up at that rostrum worth spending an hour (or damn near two, in Tubby's case) hearing talk shit about how fucking great things are.

I read some excerpts from the transcript. The best description I've seen comes (as I'd suspected it would) from salty sailor Jim Wright: "If a psychotic off his meds gave a disassociated rambling speech to the inmates in the middle of the dayroom while being chased by the interns at the local home for the criminally insane it would look a lot like this."

Beyond that? I only got two reactions, the first being the quote from the Maltese Falcon that opens this post.

The second, though, was prompted by this line from Fatso's interminable Weave-of-the-Union: "I've always wanted the Congressional Medal of Honor, but I was informed I'm not allowed to give it myself... If they ever open up that law, I'll be there with you someday,"

This isn't the first time this draft-dodging fuck has talked up the idea that his ginormous ass deserves the nation's highest decoration for bravery. Supposedly some time earlier he'd said:

“I decided to go to Iraq. I was extremely brave. So brave in fact that I wanted to give myself the Congressional Medal of Honor, I said to my people, ‘Am I allowed to give myself the Congressional Medal of Honor?’”

There have been some Chief Executives who could have had a legitimate call on a high award for valor. This boastful bastard? Don't make me laugh.

The mere thought of this bloated nitwit in the same grid square as the MOH makes the Army sergeant that lives in my head reach for a sturdy piece of dimension lumber, wishing for ten minutes in a locked supply room alone with his criminal ass to provide him with some wall-to-wall counseling on how he isn't just not just unfit to wear the medal but utterly unfit to empty a urinal overfilled by the lowliest private in military history.

No, it's not radio silence...

 ...it's the damn Frontiers post.

How this joint - blog and country - feels at the moment.

I've finally got to the crux of the biscuit - the collision between the German "strong right wing" (the three right wing feldarmee) and the Allied left (principally the French 5re Armee and the British Expeditionary Force).

The thing is (to give away the plot) that there were several critical reconnaissance problems that affected the way both sides maneuver forces assembled, moved, and fought, and to analyze them I had to break the last half of August 1914 into a ridiculously granular level - literally day-by-day - of detail, and that's taking forever.

While I'm doing all this my country is going completely to a madman's Hell in a handbasket, and I'm not sure what else there is to say about it.

Put aside the usual GOP MAGAt bullshit - the basso continuo of stupidity, greed, racism, sexism, xenophobia, half a dozen other fucking toxic -isms - and it's the jaw-dropping stupidity of the Second Fraudulency Administration's cunning plans that hits so hard.

Seriously.

It's not the greed. It's not the criming. It's not the fascism.

Those were baked in from the moment this fucking country re-elected Felony Fats.

It's the utterly pointless, pinheaded, stop-me-before-I-shoot-myself-in-the-dick moron-grade dumbfuckery.

Let's gloss over the whole insane "Get Greenland!!!" side arc and focus on the real Krown Jool of Boneheadedness that these fucksticks are chasing;

"Mass Deportation Now".

Stop and think for a moment.

Who does this whole lets-chase-down-brown-folks-and-disappear-them benefit?

More to the point...how in Beelzebub's Fucking Hell does deporting random geezers, bodega grannies, drywallers, tomato pickers, and busboys even benefit you and me, Joe and Molly Lunchpail, Mister and Missus Average American? 

Are these people "criminals" in the "roll you for a nickel and stab you for the extra dime" sense?

Ohhellno. We've been over and over this. It makes no sense for 99.9% of anyone in this country illegally to go around criming and getting a police spotlight shining on them. Most undocumented people are the opposite; trying to keep on the downlow and below the cops' radar so they can make a living.

Are they "taking your..." fill in the blank here; job, house, tax dollars?

Pretty much no. The jobs most of these people are doing are those that legal citizens are largely loth to do; farmwork, meat processing, construction, "hospitality" (read hotel maids and waitstaff). They can't collect entitlements without, again, popping up on radars they don't want to attract. They're not manipulating the rental and housing markets. How? They rent houses or apartments just like citizens, and the cost of those rentals is determined by the owners and landlords, the availability by developers and zoning rules.

So how does 86ing them in job lots help you and me..?

 .

 .

. 

Take your time. I'll wait.

Okay, now. Here's the one place I'll agree with the fucking idiot Trumpkins: having a mass of people in a country who lack citizenship is troubling.

I've written about this over and over, and can't express it better than I did in 2017:

"...to be a stateless person, a non-citizen, in a foreign nation is not a good thing.

It's not good for the person, who has no civil rights, who is outside the protection of the civil law, and who is, therefore, hideously vulnerable to all sorts of malefactors.

And it's not good for the nation, that has this indigestible mass of non-citizens within it prey to crime and violence, exploited by employers and living in fear of taking part in the civil life of the community.

So. The bottom line really is; if you are a citizen of Mexico, or Ireland, or Bali...you belong in Mexico, Ireland, or Bali unless you are a legal resident or visitor of where-ever-it-is-you-are; in this case, the United States."

Yep. Still true. 

In a sane polity We the People would have a simple, orderly process for people who want to come to this nation, regardless of who or what they are, to get on the track to citizenship. Learn the Common Tongue (English) speedily, become conversant with the conventions of citizenship...

(and as a note here, the appallingly low level of civics knowledge of the supposed citizenry in this country is, or should be, a scandal. Way too many MAGAts get away with talking the shit they do because Joe and Molly don't have the fundamental understanding of the principles contained in the founding documents or a knowledge of this nation's history to refute the traitors' bullshit.)

...and become part of the quilt of people and culture and ideas that are the promise of this nation; equal justice under law. Liberty and justice for all.

The surface trappings of all this Trumpian lunacy - masked ICEstapo goons in the street, ridiculous lies about eating pets, secret prisons - is just the foam on the Latte' of Mindless Racist Xenophobic Stupidity of the MAGAt horde. Meaning that we could arrest, convict, and jail Felony Fats and his entire coterie of fools, assholes, and Nazi pals, and we'd still have this problem...because of the millions of the fucksticks around us who luuuurve them this nonsense.

So, nope.

We're not getting out of this with One Weird DeTrumpification Trick.

ICE.

Tariffs.

Antivaxx loonies.

"Entitlement" cuts to finance tax gimmees for fatcats. 

"antifa".

Greenland, Venezuela, Panama, Gaza, Iran...

They're all going to be problems for decades. The plutocrats who are the force that gives MAGA meaning are getting their tax giveaways and deregulation. The Christopaths are getting the Bible-banging. The MAGAts are getting the "I love eating shit so long as the people I hate have to eat more shit" they crave.

Between them the rest of us are fucked.

And, like I've been saying over and over; it's not just that we're caught in the MAGA dystopia.

It's that this is Stupid Dystopia. This is getting handed your ass because you let the world's most ignorant hillbilly chucklefucks into the control room of the nuke plant because you were pissed off that your email signature could include pronouns.

Christ on a fucking crutch.

 

On tonight's episode of "Our Idiot President": "HVPI"

When I was a grunt medic we had a cynical nickname for ourselves: "high-velocity projectile interceptors".

Because we knew that in a real shooting war - a war against a peer enemy - that was very likely what was going down on our Field Medical Cards.

GIs, specially grunts, get shot. Or fragged by random artillery rounds. Or step on mines. Or get blown up by command-detonated boobytraps (now we call them "IEDs" like they were something new, but they're as old as gunpowder). 

So when Our Idiot President demanded that GIs be deployed to our own cities (at least the ones he hates, like Chicago and Portland and D.C.) I had two genuine fears.

The first, and most obvious, was the reason for 18 U.S.C. § 1385; that using soldiers against your own people is bad for the soldiers and bad for the people. Bad for the people because, duh, military dictatorship. But bad for the soldiers because they become associated in the public mind with military dictatorship.

Soldiers are poor "peacekeepers", at best, and the worst examples of military occupation have always been fraught with the danger that the soldiers, trained to respond to threat with immediate, lethal, as-overwhelming-as-possible force, will go ballistic on the civilians around them.

That's bad enough when those civilians are "foreigners". When they're your own people?

Fuck that noise.

(As an aside, when I heard that the Nitwit-in-Chief was kicking around the idea of sending one of the battalions of the 82nd Airborne Division I facepalmed so hard I knocked my cap off. Infantry in general and paratroops in particular are reeeeally bad domestic occupiers; they're among the most kinetic of infantry soldiers by both training and inclination. It comes as no surprise that among the most lethally idiotic moments in recent Western occupation operations - the 1972 "Bloody Sunday" shooting in Derry, and April 2003 protest fusillade in Fallujah - both had paratroops on the occupying side doing the murdering.)

But the second was for the troopers themselves.

Because they had only two options, both of them exceptionally poor.

Option 1 was to treat the city and the citizens where they were deployed as an active and dangerous enemy. In other words, like the paras in Derry or the 325th in Fallujah. Treat everyone as a potential guerilla, treat every encounter as a combat patrol. Go out of the wire locked and loaded and looking for trouble.

That would have set up a Bloody Sunday or Fallujah April as surely as the sun rising. At some point there'd be one of those "checkpoint shootings" that were a daily routine in Iraq, and all Hell would break loose.

But Option 2 was to treat it like what it is; a ridiculously pointless piece of political theater. Loaf about in a gaggle or three, scroll on your phone, pass the time, just kinda hang out...like this:

That's a "One grenade'll get y'all!" clusterfuck if ever I've seen one.

But how else can you "occupy" one of your own cities that's not in open revolt? Without creating a 100% chance of the checkpoint shooting inevitable in Option 1?

Since this is The Land of The Free and the Home of the Insanely Over-armed, that was also inevitably leading to this:

You knew where this was going, right?

Of course Felony Fats has seized on this grim little horror his own stupidity and incompetence set in motion to help push his little Nazification project of ridding the precious pure American blood and soil of the taint of evil foreigners, dusky invaders, liberal traitors, and...well, every other fucking thing the bloated sonovabitch hates.

I have no idea what the poor GIs were doing when they were ambushed, but I'll bet you all the money in your pocket that it was some version of "standing around with their thumbs up their asses"; something utterly worthless. They were torn apart - or killed - for nothing. 

Nothing.

There's nothing about any of this that makes any kind of sense. There's almost nothing about it that can be made to make sense; it's all just a hollow shell of nothing.

I have no idea what any possible value there is in any of this; Trump's lunatic war on blue cities, whatever his legionaries are supposed to be doing, what happened to make an Afghan drive from Washington state to D.C. to kill two randos in tree suits, the larger war on "immigrants"...any and all of it.

It just looks from here like stupidity running head-on into angry assholishness then bursting into flames and sailing off a cliff into a cesspond.

And we've got three more fucking years of it.

Christ, WASSSSSSSF... 

Quiet desperation

I've tried.

I was sure I could get enough ridiculousness out of this idiotic "Portland is burning!" Trumpenonsense to dope up an "Acting 1st Lawes..." piece.

But.

I just can't.

This has become...whatever "reeeally fucking not funny" is.

The President of the United States is an unhinged moron, a complete and utterly lethally dangerous fool, acting on the delusions that exist only in his addled head as well as direction from the dangerously evil, greedy monsters that prowl around him.

And We, the People, can do nothing to stop or deter or delay this.

He's going to send soldiers to peaceful cities, his ICEstapo goons are going to try and gin up unrest to justify violent force, because this ninny has nothing inside his fat head outside greed and bile and prejudice.

And We can do nothing to change that, or to stop it.

I honestly don't know what more to say. We are at the nonexistent mercy of Nazis, the real-honest-to-God-no-shit variety as well as every flavor of other White Christopathic Scum that rides with the old school swastika-suckers.

And We can do nothing to change that, or stop it.

Well. 

We can vote. 

Sure.

In a year. And hope that the Nazis don't do what Nazis do; use force and fear to make that vote meaningless. And trust that they'll do what they haven't for the past year; bend the knee to the popular will and the laws and customs of the nation.

There's armed resistance, of course.

And without an invading army to destroy the occupation forces?

Ask a Soviet partisan or a French resistant or a survivor of the Polish Home Army how that goes.

So what can I say? That if, as they surely will, the MAGAts refuse to allow, or accept the results, of the popular vote, the choice is between hopeless rebellion or desperate inaction? 

Well, here I am, saying just that.

It infuriates me. Infuriates as in the old cartoon where the vulture says "Patience, my ass. I want to kill something."

It provokes nothing as much as murderous rage. Rage at the MAGAt scum. Rage at my own political faction who couldn't be arsed to turn out last year to defeat the MAGAt scum. Just...rage.

I'm sorry.

I wish I had more hope. I wish I had an eloquent prescription for escaping the jaws of this vise of thug fascism, of restoring the promise of the nation I grew up in.

I don't.

I'm going to try and come up with some sort of content this autumn. I still need to finish the "Frontiers" series. I still love to write...I just need to find something to write about other than the state of my nation.

Because if I do I'll find myself right back here, my gaze darkened, my fists clenching in a hate that begs, that longs for, that craves the sweet feel of the parting of throats under the blade. 

Getting it so completely, utterly, totally fucking wrong

 

 

So that thing where "You don't know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don't."?

 

This is "I went to the Wharton School of Economics and slept thru the lecture on "The Great Depression: Wha'happen?"  

 

From the link:

"But the country began abandoning them when it created a federal income tax in 1913, the president says. Then, “in 1929, it all came to a very abrupt end with the Great Depression. And it would have never happened if they had stayed with the tariff policy,” Trump said in announcing his tariff plan last week.

Referring to Smoot-Hawley, he added, “They tried to bring back tariffs to save our country, but it was gone. It was gone. It was too late. Nothing could have been done — took years and years to get out of that depression.”

Getting the "Lesson of Hawley-Smoot" completely, totally fucking wrong and ass-backwards?

 

Y'think?

"Smoot-Hawley raised import tariffs by an average of 20% on thousands of goods, causing many top U.S. trading partners to retaliate. International cooperation on non-trade issues also declined, including on defense matters, helping clear the way for the rise of Hitler, Richardson said.

“There were some industries where they made profits,” Richardson said of Smoot-Hawley. “But overall, people in the U.S. and people around the world were losers.”

U.S. manufacturers saw foreign markets for their goods evaporate and output and consumer spending sank still further. Hawley lost the 1932 Oregon Republican primary in his district, and Smoot was defeated in November, as Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt trounced Hoover for the presidency."

Fuck me runnin'. If you wrote this as anything but "news" it would be dismissed as an improbable fiction. 

WASSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSF

Intermission II: Weird Ass Boogaloo

 To follow up on the political part of my last post...

The Lawyers, Guns, & Money gang are having a good laugh over the latest Trump weirdness story:

"My take here, not that it matters, is that Trump is now in some sort of twilight mental world in which his lifetime habit of bullshitting — saying stuff that he doesn’t know and doesn’t care whether it’s true or not — is blending with his age-related cognitive deterioration, to generate stories like this, that Trump more or less believes are true at the moment he’s confabulating them, to the extent he believes literally anything, which to be fair is not much."

In the post they dredge up an old something I remembered about Tubby because it ran head-on into my military history fetish. 

This:

This weird fake "monument" supposedly dates back to the Oughts when Tubby bought the Northern Virginia golf club within which he set up this goofball thing.

IIRC when the story broke during his 2016 campaign Tubby's apologists tried to spin this as commemorating the 1861 "Battle of Ball's Bluff", one of the many early-war Union debacles. See, the narrative ran, that's what he means! Take him seriously but not literally!

One teensy little problem with that.

The two places - the battle site and the golf course - are nowhere even close. The red rectangle in the upper left is Ball's Bluff, the smaller square in the right center is this goofy plaque:

Ball's Bluff is over ten miles upriver from the golf course.

The essence of a good lie is that it has just enough proximity to some hard truth(s) as to be at least remotely plausible. You have to squint hard to see the lie.

The essence of good bullshit is similar; it can't be completely ridiculous. It has to have at least some elements of what sound like possibilities. If it's just flying donkeys? No, that's not effective bullshitting.

That's what I don't get about the MAGAt cult.

I have a certain wry appreciation for a clever liar, or an accomplished bullshitter, or a cunning grifter.

It takes a certain amount of wit, inventiveness, and brass to be one or all of them.

This stuff? The lies and bullshit that Tubby spews?

It's not even trying.

It's lazy. It's idiotic. It's childish.

History (and literature) is full of people who led others through a mixture of wit, nerve, inspiration, and brass...mixed in with genuine ideals and goals as well as some inspirational bullshit and even some outright lies. 

It's the old "Saint Elizabeth of Hungary" thing - you start with a lie and then make it true.

History is also full of ignorant liars and bad bullshitters.

The outcomes of following the leads of people like that are usually...very, very bad. Children's Crusade bad.

I get that there's a bunch of angry people who want an angry person to lead them against the people they're angry at.

But this joker?

Seriously?

THIS guy?

He can't even fucking lie right.

 

And if they give him to us again in November, we're gonna find out just precisely how wrong that will be.

Dr. Donald J. Trump on the subject of viral intelligence, April 10, 2020

“This is a very brilliant enemy. You know, it’s a brilliant enemy. They develop drugs like the antibiotics. You see it. Antibiotics used to solve every problem. Now one of the biggest problems the world has is the germ has gotten so brilliant that the antibiotic can’t keep up with it.

We’re fighting…not only is it hidden, but it’s very smart. Okay? It’s invisible and it’s hidden but it’s…it’s very smart.”



Something is intelligent...but I'm not sure it's anything (or anyone) involved in this statement.


And this is the head of state of the most powerful nation on Earth.


We are so, so, so, so, so, so, SO fucked.

What's Arabic for "C. Turner Joy"?

Here's the problem.

It may very well be possible that Iranian assets are striking oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman.

It is definitely likely that the Trump Administration would lie about whether that is possible or probable, or both, or neither.

That's the drawback of letting your system foist an incorrigible liar and a coterie of New Gilded Age grifters into the highest executive offices; you then don't know whether you can trust them not to lie you into a shooting war.

If the administrations of Kennedy and Johnson - that were staffed with genuinely intelligent and experienced foreign policy players - lied us into Vietnam, and the Lesser Bush administration - that was crock-full of wingnuts, imperial fantasists, outright kooks, as well as the Stupidest Man on the Face of the Earth - lied us into Iraq, I sure as hell don't trust THESE gomers not to lie us into some sort of idiotic whack-a-Persian blood hunt based on some sort of moron idea that it'd take normal humans smoking a full ounce of prime weed then drinking two cans of sterno and a half-rack of Old English 800 to come up with.

I sure as hell hope the rest of my countrymen aren't stupid enough to let the Trumpkins play this game.

And goddamn if it's not time to repeal that #@!%$!#! AUMF.

Update 6/14: The lies have already begun:

"The Japanese owner of the Kokuka Courageous, one of two oil tankers targeted near the Strait of Hormuz, said Friday that sailors on board saw "flying objects" just before it was hit, suggesting the vessel wasn't damaged by mines. That account contradicts what the U.S. military said as it released a video Friday it said shows Iranian forces removing an unexploded limpet mine from one of the two ships that were hit. Company president Yutaka Katada said Friday he believes the flying objects seen by the sailors could have been bullets. He denied any possibility of mines or torpedoes because the damage was above the ship's waterline. He called reports of a mine attack "false."

As Sven points out in the comments, The U.S. hasn't been an honest player in the field of foreign policy for a long time, and this administration is a more prolific and consistent liar than most of the previous ones.

IMO this is a patently crude attempt between the Trumpkins and their Saudi pals to gin up a casus belli. If the US public and Congress falls for it, well, as a well-known foreign policy expert once said: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...won't get fooled again!"

And Jim Wright, as he often does, is asking the question that EVERY news agency should be asking: "Cui bono?".

Who would benefit from a US-Iran dustup? Especially one that would, as it inevitably would, raise the price of petroleum?

Hmmm.

Update 6/26:

"Strategy? I don't need no steenkin' strategy? I have guns! I take YOUR strategy!"

What a fucking maroon.

At least he's good for a laugh now and then...

In a dim, dirty hostess bar on a sultry backstreet in the Pham Ngu Lao district of Valhalla, a bunch of the tattered shades of the boys from the 66th NVA Regiment and the 1/7th Cav take a break from pounding warm "33" beer and talking shit about the ARVN to stand up, drop their khaki and OD trousers, and hang a collective moon on the guy who couldn't run from their war fast enough but now claims that he would rush a mad gunman barehanded.

Over at the corner table Trung sĩ Vo and Staff Sergeant Baker spit sourly on the filthy floor and yell at the hostess for another round, cold this time, goddammit, but Hạ sĩ Nguyen thinks that the idea of Five-Deferment Donnie as a rootin' tootin' heeeero is so fucking funny he spits beer out his nose and Private Bookwalter has to pound him on the back so hard that he hits his face on the table and the whole squad, including Loi the B-girl, breaks up laughing.