"What did you do in the Iran War, Daddy?"

 

Luckily, nothing.

For the first time in my adult life I've been completely uninvolved in a U.S. war - or whatever this clusterfuck is - in the global hinterlands. It's given me an interesting perspective.

I didn't think it was possible to craft a geopolitical scheme that combined fairly blatant foreign economic and political opportunism (or, to be more honest, the combined Deadly Sins of Greed and Wrath) with domestic indifference (and a huge helping of cynicism and outright lying and deception) more 1) strategically misinformed, 2) tactically inept, and 3) operationally mismanaged than Dick n' Dubya's Excellent Iraq Adventure.

Yet, here we are.

But what feels even stranger to me is the way this is playing out here in the Land of the Big PX.

Which is to say; it isn't.

I thought I'd seen the ultimate in "American Empire" in the complete indifference of the U.S. public to the actual conduct of the wars in Southwest Asia during the Oughts and Teens. Outside of the occasional spasm of reaction to breaking news like the recent USS Abraham Lincoln stories, today the Great Unwashed can't even be bothered with the most performative sorts of yellow-ribbon-magnet "patriotism".

Even with gasoline prices reflecting the effect on petroleum production and processing and the multi-billion-dollar cost of this futile air and sea warring providing the usual Republican scolds the opportunity to discuss slashing public pension programs like Medicare and Social Security, there's been absolutely no public outcry.

I've seldom seen the U.S. military put on such a visible collision of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence since the Fredricksburg Campaign of December 1862.

The public response?

Zero. Zip. Nada. Not a goddamn thing. 

Not even when we're smacked in the face with shit like this:

That's...I honestly don't know what the hell to say about this beyond "WTF..!?"

Especially when you combine that with the move to dispatch the USS George Washington group to CENTCOM to replace the Lincoln. The geopolitical incoherence of this combined with Tubby's public backhand to the ROK is pretty stunning.

It removes INDOPACCOM's primary naval power projection piece, and has domino effects through the entire U.S. naval strategic planning setup. There's an internet commenter who blogs as "Empty Bag of Ducks" who put up a fairly thoughtful dive into the Washington/Lincoln move that's worth quoting in full:

 "I want to talk about the USS Abraham Lincoln (and her relief by the GW) in terms of strategic risk, readiness, and morale. For those curious about high level military decision making, you might be surprised by how much time (should) is spent discussing risk.  Let’s talk “risk to mission” first.

Risk to mission is pretty much what it sounds like.  In this case, what is the risk to INDOPACOM’s mission for the GW, the only carrier currently deployed in theater, to be transferred to CENTCOM.  As the only forward deployed nuke carrier, the GW clearly has a role in IPC’s mission.

Clearly, a question from Hegseth to the IPC Cdr should have been, can you conduct your mission without the GW?  Or, how do you categorize the risk, and what actions do you recommend to mitigate the risk? This is essence of strategic risk.  We never have everything we need, so we have to make risk informed decisions and decide if the risk is acceptable. Of course, the mitigation actions also have risks associated with them since there’s always a robbing Peter to pay Paul, but the goal is to move down the risk ladder.

Next is “risk to force” which really gets us into the realm of readiness.  By deploying the GW out of theater, what is the impact to the rest of the carrier force (and associated escorts)?  Is one of the mitigations to pull another carrier out of scheduled maintenance early, or defer a carrier? The Ford is an example of what happens when you extend a vessel well beyond a scheduled deployment cycle.  Every decision that you make that is outside the Navy’s force generation model has ramifications leading to decreased readiness.  At some point you have to buy that readiness back.

And to do that you’re likely going to have to accept increased risk to mission at some point by pulling carriers out of service for extended maintenance, repair and overhaul.  Then there’s the impacts to the readiness of the crews and air wings.  Over time, those degrade during a deployment...there’s simply the physical and mental weariness created by operating for months on end in a high stress, high optempo environment.  That’s why the COA of keeping the Lincoln on station was likely not viable.  You can break a unit, and you can break a force.

 Which is to what degree is Hegseth breaking the force (or at least the Navy)?  Resiliency is intrinsically tied to morale, so the experience of the Lincoln should make us wonder what is the morale across the force? hat’s an open question, and I don’t know the answer, but there are plenty of warning signs that should give a true leader, and not a martinet like Hegseth, real pause and cause them to put their senior enlisted leaders and IGs to work exploring.  Good leaders don’t fear the truth."

But, as we've discussed here, the current Secretary of DefenseWar is not that leader. 

MAJ Pushups is locked into a testosterone-fueled roid rage vision of combat-centric videogame-play "leadership" that's all about shooting things and blowing stuff up and not boring details of LOGPACs and supply chains. 

I've read people making fun of Sun Tzu's admonitions to the rulers of medieval China about things like "Remember, soldiers need food", but it's fairly clear that the China of Sun Tzu's time had more than it's share of Hegseths and, yes; they needed to be reminded of things like that. Hegseth doesn't have a Sun Tzu and the effects are showing up in the Gulf.

What he, and his mad king, appear to have managed so far is to:

Lock the United States into a difficult position in the Middle East. The Iranian hierarchy has little motivation to accommodate Trump's need for a "win" (and no reason to trust that he'll keep any sort of "terms" in an agreement short of a full-on capitulation "win"), the Gulf States have little reason to continue providing support for U.S. operations in hopes of some sort of escape from this trap, and the Israel of Netanyahu is always going to keep poisoning the water in hopes of accomplishing Bibi's Final Solution to the Palestine problem, meaning prolonging the fighting to keep the PM out of fucking jail.

Further toxify the relations between the U.S. and former allies in Europe and Asia. No one wants to get dragged into their wingman's stupid brawl, so neither the EU or any of the Asian democracies are or are likely to step up in a way that will appease Trump or aid in his war. Indeed; if I was Poland, or South Korea, or any other former U.S. geopolitical partner with a large, powerful, potentially aggressive neighbor such as the PRC or Russia (or North Korea, for that matter...) I'd be looking hard to make other arrangements for my protection that don't involve the U.S. Even when his death frees us from the Phantom Trump Menace the fact that the U.S. public (combined with it's electoral system) placed this clearly incompetent wannabe-tinpot-caudillo back on the throne means that We the People can't be trusted to do that again with some other gormless (or vile, stupid, and otherwise unfit) idiot.

Make it clear that the competing Powers (including the minor "nuisance powers" like the DPRK) can act with impunity up to some point (and that point seems very poorly defined, so the possibility of one or more crossing it into a hot war or something dangerously close is increasingly risky). 

 

The current Administration's behavior makes it clear to me, at least, that any other polity that looks to the U.S. for assistance needs to be prepared to offer up a massive bribe to have any hope, and the problem with even that is feeling assured that someone as avaricious as Trump will stay bought. 

Go a long way towards destroying the logistical, operational, and managerial competence that was the strength of the U.S. military system. Here at MilPub we've discussed to death the problem with U.S. geopolitical/military strategic thinking (or, more specifically, the lack of it). And I'm not going to argue that the U.S. government has done a terrific job since 1953 in picking it's fights, or figuring out how to accomplish it's geopolitical objectives without fighting.

But when it gets into a fight, the U.S. has - generally - managed the operational, theater-level management, and logistical sides of the conflicts fairly well. 

The Fourth Gulf War may well be the first time since the Spanish-American War that the U.S. has shown a Third World/thug-army (think Saddam's or similar sorts of warlord militaries) level of operational incompetence. 

(As an aside, friend of the Pub Sven asked in the comments on the last post whether this clear showing of the Trumpkins' wholly incompetent ass to "the troops" will shake the snuffies' allegiance to the MAGA Creed. My comment is that it hasn't on the civilian side - the rock-bottom level of support for Trump looks like it's settled above the Crazification Factor into about 30 to 35% - and GIs in general tend to be more "conservative" than the public at large. The GOP is the only "conservative" game in the U.S. political town, so the joes and mollies are likely to grumble but stick with Their Guy. 

Meaning that if Trump orders them to seize ballots in November? They almost certainly will.)

And let's not even go into the whole "catapults will be saved...by steam!" and moving carrier islands forward and Trump "battleships". The examples from the last Great Power whose Leader liked to fiddle-fuck around with warship and warplane and military vehicle design and construction are...not good ones.   

Where does this leave the "rest of us"?

I don't know.

Not in a good place, surely.

The problems that this Administration, and this war, have exposed, are multivariate and difficult to solve. The "guardrails" of unwritten Executive conduct, as stressed as they may have been by former "imperial" Presidencies and undeclared "wars", are visibly meaningless to the current regime. The primacy of the Congress, as supposedly written into black-letter Constitutional law, has proven to be utterly meaningless when the majority Party in the legislative branch cowers in terror of it's own Chief Executive. The notional competence of the Judiciary to reign in Executive or Congressional illegality has been shown to be illusionary when the highest court can be captured by the faction(s) committing those illegal acts (as well as the Executive responding to the slightest check with the Jacksonian "well, let him enforce it..." sneer).

I keep coming back to the conclusion that Bret Devereaux came to months ago; that while it's not possible for both parties to win a war, it is possible for both sides to "lose". Mutual destruction - in the short and long term - is very clearly not just probable but likely the longer the war drags on. Or one side exhausts itself defeating the other to the point where a third power can then defeat the "winner" of the original dispute.

Will we someday look back at the Fourth Gulf War as the United States' Syracuse Expedition, and Donald Trump as America's Alcibiades?

Surely, though...at least the last of the Alcmaeonidae had better hair.

Right? 

(cross-poseted to MilPub) 

Catching up 2: White House White Trash

I'm not sure what more I can say about the astounding descent into howling madness that is Trump 47 than what I've already said over and over and over again.

 
Except that the scum in the GriftSkyBlue Reflecting Pool is the least-toxic scum currently associated with this Administration.

It's difficult for me, who lived through Nixon criming and Reagan selling missiles to the mullahs and Dubya getting GIs waxed in Southwest Asia and Felony Fats 45 helping kill millions with a preventable pandemic disease, to really get my mind around how utterly, jaw-droppingly, ridiculously awful the Second Coming of Tubby has been and will be.

Except this evening it's all going to be there. As Jim Wright sums it up:

"Jumping dirt bikes. UFC cage fights. Roaring 4-wheelers. Gratuitous military displays. Way too loud redneck music. Port-O-Potties and overflowing trashcans full of Taco Bell and McDonalds. All it needs is a Donut Burger stand and a 4-H cowbarn."

Words alone don't begin to describe the white trash tackiness of the Orange Fuhrer's Führergeburtstag. Here's the visual:

 

I...I...fuck. Words fail me.

All this lacks is a sagging couch on the West Portico and a rusted-out Oldsmobile up on blocks where the Rose Garden used to be.

Why is this a problem?

Because, frankly, I know that the world is full of people who love this grubby low-rent shit. The point is that the people who are supposed to be "leaders", the people We the People elect to do the hard work of governance, are supposed to be better than that.

I don't want to have some redneck goober in the Oval Office. In the Senate. Fuck, I don't want to have them in my local county commission.

Yet here we are.

And Trump being Trump - which is to say, a liar and thief - of course there's a grift:

"The Ultimate Fighting Championship announced on Friday that it will pay bonuses to fighters in a form of cryptocurrency issued by Trump family business World Liberty Financial at the heavily publicized White House mixed martial arts event on Sunday."

Sweet Baby Jesus. If you wrote this as part of a crime novel not even the most credulous reader would buy it.

There's no bottom to this cesspit. And no visible realistic way to fight free of it, because 1) somewhere between 25% and 40% of the U.S. public love and want it, and 2) the Constitutional framework we have now makes it entirely too easy for that toxic minority to tear the country down to the level of this ignorant crap and difficult to shove it back down into the shithole where it belongs.

I have no idea what comes After Trump.

But I don't think it's going to be good.

 
The brightest promise of this nation, the lofty aspiration of Liberty and Justice For All, of Equal Justice Under Law, of true republican equity, has always been more of a hope and ideal than a real thing.

Founded by wealthy white men, many of whom were slaveowners, it's hardly surprising that in the history of this nation the wealthy have always taken more than their share. 

The Rest of Us have had to fight over the scraps, and those of us even further on the margins, whether from birth or gender or color or belief or...well, all the other "other" things that have set us apart from the rich, the well-born, and the able...have been driven even further down and out, harassed and punished for the crime of not being rich or white or male or "Christian" and every other thing the wingnut horde hates. 

That those plutocrats have managed to convince a critical minority of the "rest of us" that, as one of the characters in the awful musical 1776 says, “...most men with nothing would rather protect the possibility of becoming rich than face the reality of being poor.” 

Or of being on top for being male, or het, or "conservative" or every other damn thing this Administration represents. 

The United States has had two immense upheavals where the original white plutocracy was challenged.

 
One was a civil war.

In theory it was "won" by the foundation of a Second Republic that pulled the people the First Republic had locked into slavery into the body politic.

The "Civil Rights Era" of the late Fifties and Sixties tried to fulfill the promises of Reconstruction (and the social revolutions of the Seventies and Eighties tried to continue that, to do the same for other pushed-down minorities such as women and people who didn't match the conventional stereotypes of gender, sexuality...).

 
The other was a depression that so threatened the nation with the specter of popular revolution that it forced the wealthy to cede a portion of their wealth and power to the masses.

The original thrones and dominations of 1789 haaaated both of these, and have worked tirelessly to reverse and destroy them. 

Much of the Second Republic was undone by the end of the 19th Century. We're now in the process of undoing the New Deal as well as whatever remains of the Civil Rights acts and the individual liberties won between then and 2016.

Looking at this Sunday evening's trashfire at the supposed People's House, it's hard not to believe that the white trash is winning.

And difficult to imagine how the rest of us can fight our way out of the binding they're working constantly to impose on all of us they hate and despise.

(Next: Okay, well...how's it going out in the People's Republic of Portland, then..?)

"Siri, what killed the most U.S. soldiers in the final year of World War 1?"

 

Asking for this dumbfuck:

Mind you, this fits with this overpromoted dumbass' worldview, where pushups always trump logistics (yswidt) and military learning. 

His abysmal ignorance of why the US military has been aggressive about things like preventive medicine, field sanitation and hygiene since 1941 explains a lot (tho this jackass is on record boasting that he doesn't wash his hands after dumping a load, so YMMV...).

I wrote a whole series on "The Imperial Japanese Army in WW2: What Went Wrong", and one of the single biggest failures that hammered the 大日本帝國陸軍, Dai-Nippon Teikoku Rikugun was the whole manly-man/bushido cult of warriorness that neglected beans and bullets for swords and spirit. 

The notion that somehow a poorly-supplied, under-resourced and -armed fighting force would beat more logistically and tactically competent enemies because of some sort of mystical whatever-the-Japanese-is for "cult of the badass"?

That's our boy!

So when I see stuff like this sad Fourth Gulf War Navy chow:

 

I think, yep, that's Major Pushups at work.

If the present Administration has a constant through-line, it's that if you can think up some way to do the dumbest thing possible in the clumsiest, most ridiculous way, the Trump people will find some thing that is so much more idiotic to fuck up in a way so ludicrous that you would dismiss it as an improbable fiction? That's what they'll do.

If it wasn't that innocent people will be hurt and killed by this dumbfuckery I'd just laugh.

Instead it makes me so goddamn furious I long for a sharp knife and their throats. 

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) 

Another day ending in "y"...

...bringing with it more Trumpfuckery. 

Given the utter firehose of stupid shit these nitwits produce it's hard to decide whether to yawn, scream, or try and find discounted dimension lumber for the many, many guillotines this Evil Clown Posse so desperately needs and deserves. 

I do have a couple of random links to read and ponder before that, though.

First, from the ever-useful Techdirt, this extended discussion of the recent release of a couple of Elmo's DOGEboys stumbling and blabbering about the fundamentally ignorant and nihilistic methods, if such they may be called ("I see no method at all, sir..."), they employed in doing whatever the fuck they were doing. 

It's good that Masnick lays out the indictment of these callow techboys, and yet...what the fuck else should anyone have expected from this whole DOGE nonsense?

It was obvious from the jump that Elmo didn't actually give a shit about federal government "efficiency". What he wanted was to get inside and wreck the place. 

 

Like almost all these tax-fattened scabrous techbros he hates the entire notion of collective governance if it doesn't further fatten his wallet or pimp his ride. The whole fucking point of DOGE was to insert these gooning wankers inside the GSA to yeet confidential information useful for making money and in the process jerk the public around to increase skepticism in the notion of government of, for, and by the People.

You need fucking TikTok videos of a couple of these useless DOGE wingnuts actually saying the quiet parts of all this out loud? 

That just confirms that you were way too credulous and gullible in the first place, to the point where it should be a matter of real weight whether or not you should be issued a credit card or allowed to operate heavy machinery. 

Then, from the military history blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, another extended rumination, this on the Fourth Gulf War. 

Bret Devereaux breaks it down - the preconditions, the circumstances leading to the initial attacks, the current situation, and the potential likely outcomes - in a clear and easily understandable fashion.

The nut graf, in my opinion, is that the whole "who's "winning", who's "losing" arguments miss the point; that there's a reason that, as irking a geopolitical irritant the mullahs have been to the Gulf region, there were damn good reasons that U.S. governments all the way back to Reagan's time resisted the impulse to do more than huck the occasional round downrange at them.

Many of those reasons are all over the current news cycle; Iran's response attacks on regional neighbors, effective closure of the Persian Gulf, and the potential long-term destabilization of the region, or many parts of it.

Worse, as Devereaux points out:

"And you may then ask, here at the end: if I am saying that Iran is being hammered, that they are suffering huge costs, how can I also be suggesting that the United States is on some level losing?

And the answer is simple: it is not possible for two sides to both win a war. But it is absolutely possible for both sides to lose; mutual ruin is an option. Every actor involved in this war – the United States, Iran, arguably Israel, the Gulf states, the rest of the energy-using world – is on net poorer, more vulnerable, more resource-precarious as a result.

In short, please understand this entire 7,000+ word post as one primal scream issued into the avoid at the careless, unnecessary folly of the decision to launch an ill-considered war without considering the obvious, nearly inevitable negative outcomes which would occur unless the initial strikes somehow managed to pull the inside straight-flush. They did not and now we are all living trapped in the consequences."

Although it's also worth pondering this, from earlier in the piece; that the U.S. airstrike on the purported Iranian nuclear storage/production facility back in June of 2025 wasn't just a bit of the usual big-stick Great Power dick-waving..

(which I, at least, thought at the time given that it didn't seem to make sense any other way.) 

...but was actually a major geopolitical mistake because:

"The problem with that strike is that attacking in that way, at that time, meant that Iran would have to read any future attacks by Israel as likely also involving attacks by the United States. So Iran would now have to assume that an Israeli air attack was also likely an American air attack (emphasis mine, not Devereaux's). 

It was hardly an insane assumption – evidently according to the Secretary of State, American intelligence made the exact same assessment.

But the result was that by bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities in June of 2025, the Trump administration created a situation where merely by launching a renewed air campaign on Iran, Israel could force the United States into a war with Iran at any time. (again, emphasis mine)

It should go without saying that creating the conditions where the sometimes unpredictable junior partner in a security relationship can unilaterally bring the senior partner into a major conflict is an enormous strategic error, precisely because it means you end up in a war when it is in the junior partner’s interests to do so even if it is not in the senior partner’s interests to do so."

It's funny - in a "not-funny-like-a-clown" but in the funny-how-sometimes-something-that-looks-idiotic-really-IS-idiotic way - that Trump, a living embodiment of insecure manospheric compensatory tics, who insists that only HE is "the decider", that he's the Ultimate Alpha Male, was trick-fucked into becoming Bibi Netanyahu's Bitch because he's some combination of too stupid, gullible, aggressive, and ignorant to realized that before waving his kinetic dick back in 2025.

 
But, yeah, here we are.

To me the even-bigger problem is that probably about a quarter of the U.S. public are actually okay with all this stupid fuckery, and there's probably another third that either doesn't know, doesn't care, or doesn't understand.

Meaning here we will continue to be.

Is there a way out of this dystopian mess?

Without a better electorate in a better country?

I don't see it. 

Chocolate soldiers

You've probably figured out that I hold the current Administration in low esteem.

That said, the "problem" with the United States of America, as currently constituted, is that means that my opinion, and my ability to take any sort of effective action based on that opinion, means exactly jack and shit and, as the saying goes, Jack has left town.

So I'm effectively powerless as an individual.

I suppose I could, if I chose, become a sort of dangerous nuisance. 

Figure out a way to ambush the local ICE thugs. A successful vehicular ambush, especially the first vehicular ambush of a guerrilla campaign, isn't that hard to pull off, provided you can assemble the materials on the downlow and the targets are arrogant and careless.

It's not getting caught putting together the IED, or, if that goes well and the ambush happens, repeating that initial success now that the targets are alerted and proactive that's the hard part. Without an organization larger than myself alone, without a network of intelligence assets, solid effective security, a collection of safe places to hide or lay low, guerrilla allies...there's a reason that most wannabe urban guerrillas have very brief careers.

That game's not really worth the candle. I want to beat these motherfuckers, not get killed or rot in prison just taking down only a handful of their Einsatzgruppen grunts.

No. To defeat these sonsofbitches takes power. And in a republic, notional as our "republic" may now be, power means numbers.

So I went to the meeting of the local "anti-MAGA" organization last weekend.

I'm not going into detail. For one thing, OPSEC. For another, well...let me describe the meeting.

The venue, a run-down sort of backstreet sort of ballroom hung with the faded decorations of a dozen low-budget quinceaneras, was full of Portland lefties. Mostly middle-aged or elderly. Somewhere between late-hippie-chic through solid working class cits to goths and fetish kids. Overwhelmingly white (Portland, y'think?). Lots of teachers or teachery-looking people, and a scattering of pretty obvious union reps.

One of the "organizers", a fairly bougie-looking young-middle-aged white woman, introduced the group by name and a generic mission-statement, and then handed things over to a youngish artsy-looking white woman and that's where, in my unhumble opinion, things started going completely off the fucking rails.

Because she led the group through the music and lyrics, and then the bulk of the group spent the next eight or ten minutes singing a song.

And we're not talking stirring battle hymn. No International here. No Marseillaise. Not even one of the rousing old union battle songs like Bread and Roses.

There was something about love. And being worth fighting for. Not giving up. It was all very affirmative, and uplifting, with not so much as a whisper about hordes of prisoners of starvation, slaves, traitors, or conjured kings.

And that set the tone for the whole thing.

There was a very earnest, collective-wisdom sort of DIYism to the whole magilla, the idea that if people just gathered in little groups they would somehow come up with ideas of how to smash a fascist state.

To me it reeked of how I perceived Occupy back in 2011.  

As I wrote in that post, the Sixties Left has a lot to answer for by the way it convinced many of us on the modern left that simply singing and marching and shouting and sitting-in would beat the massed power of capital, mass media, and all the might of the police-military-industrial-governmental complex.

Compare that to the progressive organizations that succeeded in their resistance. like the SCLC and NAACP and the Civil Rights era groups, the AFL, CIO, UMWA, and the other labor union organizations of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The Indian National Congress. Solidarnosc. The African National Congress.

All these had 1) an actual strategy that involved an entire range of acts, from pure theater to violent protest, and some notion of how and where these would be applied, and 2) an actual structured leadership - often fractious, even infighting - but leaders and a hierarchy below them that were there actively planning the attacks on their opponents down to the detsils of who, when, where, and with what. 

The New Left's intellectual successor Occupy Wall Street and these lovely people at the quinceanera place all seem to suffer from the goofy fuzzy-logic cloud-leadership that is to my mind the very worst hangover of the Sixties protests. 

People like John L. Lewis and Gandhi and Nehru and MLK were in many ways unlikeable, manipulative, cunning sons-of-bitches. The Left since their time seems to have absorbed the wrong lesson, which is that to get to a beneficent end you need to be a beneficent person, and that to end organized repression you have to be unorganized.

Two years later I quoted Robert Reich on the failure of Occupy:

"But Occupy eschewed political organization, discipline, and strategy. It wanted to remain outside politics, and outside any hierarchical structure that might begin to replicate the hierarchies of American society it was opposing.

So when mayors, other public officials, and university administrators cleared the Occupy encampments by force — encampments that had become the symbol of the movement — nothing seemed to remain behind. Some Occupiers made plans for further actions, but a movement without structure, discipline, and strategy proved incapable of sustaining itself."

Yep. 

The ANC didn't beat apartheid in South Africa because Nelson Mandela was a secular saint or because the cause was just and the arc of history bends towards justice.

No, it won because it was organized. It was ruthless when it needed to be. It won because it worked the press and international organizations and got funding and took appalling losses in lives and careers and health and hopes. And, yes, because Mandela was a secular saint.

But. 

Having UmKhonto weSizwe skulking about in Angola and Rhodesia didn't fucking hurt, either. 

At the end of this thing the original organizer asked the group to say how the meeting had made them feel (in the opening presentation there had been some discussion about "compassion fatigue" and how stressful it was dealing with ICE and Trumpenscum) and got responses like "empowered" and "hopeful" and "energized".

That's when I realized that this had been more of group-therapy session than planning resistance to fascists, more about "self-actualization" and feelings than setting up cells to surveil the fash and resist the cops and soldiers.

Well. Fuck. 

Look, I'm chuffed that the blow-up frogs and dancers and protestors have been fighting fucking ICE here and have to some extent forced the bastards to go low profile. I'm glad that the decent people of Portland want to beat the MAGAt scum, want to damn Trump and all his works.

But...gang, look. ICE is still here. Still doing their evil shit. We haven't "stopped" them.

These damn people don't give a shit whether you feel empowered. They respect nothing but force and fear. If you can't face up to that beating them will require gaining the power to make them fear you, well...if they won't respect law and regulation - and they don't - and if they won't respect your votes - and they won't - what will you do then?

Songs are fine. But, as the song said, you can praise the Lord so long as you pass the ammunition. Real resistance to evil means faith and works. Empowerment is fine, so long as it also includes a healthy dose of steel.

What this meeting thing was?

Was not that. 

As another observer of famous clusterfucks might have said, "C'est ravissant, mais ce n'est pas la guerre: c'est de la folie." - It's cute, but it's not war: it's foolishness.

 Sounded better in the original French, too.

A day ending in "y"...

So, after a year of magisterial thumb-sucking the U.S. Supreme Court issued it's ruling that confirms, in the same sense that your eyes "confirm" seeing a barn in broad daylight, that, no, the executive branch cannot - simply by calling some random things an "emergency" - grift the power of the purse explicitly assigned to the legislative branch by the foundational documents of the republic.

Tl:dr; fuck you, Fatso, your "big beautiful tariffs" are illegal.

I'll get back to this in a bit, but the most annoying-to-the-point-of-infuriating part of this is the whole "No, duh?" part.

Everyone with a functioning hindbrain knew this the moment the felonious fucker came storming off his gilded toilet to announce that We the People were going to do a big ol' round of McKinleynomics. I wrote a whole post about this idiocy back in April 2025 when the nitwit spammed everything with his first round of them, and then revisited the subject with my own Tariff Tale in November. 

(Oh, and at this point I should throw in the most recent chapter of my personal encounter with Dumbfuck Don's Tariff Turgidity, in which I received a reply to my disputation of duties in January, 2026. UPS sent me the following:

"I am the Post-Entry Researcher assigned to the attached dispute. Your shipment has been flagged for aluminum duties, and U.S. Customs requires the attached Section 232 form to be completed. If the items do not contain aluminum, please enter the commodity name in the description field and indicate “N/A” in all remaining fields."

Okay, now; keep this in mind. The time and expense of all of this nonsense, from the billing for, and initial payment of, the duties on the object (a replica sword manufactured in Japan), the additional 200% tariff demand, my dispute of the additional demand, and now UPS' dispute of my dispute, were being borne by U.S. citizens. Neither a nanosecond nor a penny of this stupidity was coming from Tozando, the Japanese retailer.

Per UPS the duties on aluminum imposed by the administration's both then- and now-clearly-illegal fuckery were, indeed, 200%. Which sent me back to the calculator and, after that, the laptop keyboard, to compose the following reply:

"Here's the Section 232 Form with the information from this item, based on the following:
The item is a replica sword.
The aluminum is contained only in the blade.
The weight of the blade is approximately 5kg
The amount of aluminum in the blade is 13.5% per the manufacturer's declaration.
Based on this the approximate weight of aluminum is approximately 0.675kg.
The price of aluminum in Japan is listed as $86/ton for Q4 2025.
Therefor the value of the aluminum in this item is ($86/907.185)*0.675, or about  $0.14."

At which point I came damn near to dropping three dimes in an envelope and mailing them to the Post-Entry Researcher's address in San Diego. I resisted, but, fuck, it was a damn near-run thing.

I'm debating whether to now go ahead, or turn around and demand my initial $54 back from Felony Fats' crew of gormless idiots).

Here's the larger, and more infuriating, point of my ranting about this. It's just one more goddamn thing that this crew of acephalic numbskulls does every fucking day. And...

What's

The 

Fucking

Value

Of 

ANY 

Of 

This 

Trumpy

Bullshit?

To any of us not 1) in the two-yacht income brackets, or 2) utterly baked in gibbering racist, sexist, xenophobic, Christopathic lunacy to the point where "fucking with those people" is "in my best interests" (i.e. nuttier than a Snickers bar). 

I mean, pick one. Any one. Of the fucking things these treasonous Nazi fucks have wrangled up over the past year and change, like these ridiculous (and now officially illegal) tariffs.

Deporting everything and everyone in sight? Drywallers, bean and pear pickers? Bodega grannies? School kids? (Oh, and ass-beating and murdering random passersby in the process)?

Sluicing tax cuts to fatcats?  

Pimping coal mining?

Deregulating everything in sight so the fatcats and coal miners and all the other GOP remoras get to wet their fucking beaks while the world overheats and the clean air and water disappear?

Trashing things like the vaccinations and the medical care and research and disease control that made 20th Century medical care the safest and healthiest in human history (for those who could afford it, anyway...)?

Doing bizarre, random, vicious and/or stupid acts of violence all over the place, from South and Central America to the Middle East as they destroy the post-1945 Western alliance systems?

And that's just the legal stuff. We haven't even turned towards the grotesquely Trumpy corruption that makes Warren Harding's crew look like rank amateurs and the policeman in Arrijan green with envy.

At least the OG Nazis had World War 1 and Versailles and occupation and hyperinflation and depression to blame. And actual, no-shit Commie Reds right next door.

Doesn't excuse the murderous fuckers, mind. But you can see how Joachim and Marta Mittagessenkasten could see voting for the sonsofbitches.

What's our excuse?

That transsexual illegal Haitian porch pirates are cooking up Labrador au gratin? 

Give me a fucking break.

That, as I've repeated over and over, is the truly infuriating piece of all this Trumpfuckery.

It's more than the destruction. It's more than all the toxic "isms" aimed at people just trying to live a life; poor people, brown people, immigrant people, non-binary people, gay and lesbian people, liberal people, urban people. It's more than the vile, repugnant, evil shit that these fucksticks love and plan and do every fucking day.

It's the obvious pointlessness for everyone - liberal or MAGAt - who's not living off daddy's trust fund or some sort of credit-default swap scam or who isn't, as noted above, so mentally baked as to be functionally an intellectual house plant.

None of this shit "makes America great".

If the average Republican wasn't in a Trump cult the GOP would have been tossed in the trash bin of history after 2008 the way they were for the two decades after their post-1929 plutocratic fellatio made it clear whose trouser snake they were Hoovering.

 (I see what I did there)

Here's the problem for the rest of us, though.

The mention of 2008 dredges up the ugly reality that, much as the non-insane factions of political power are an order of magnitude better than the MAGAtraitors, they're not that great for the rest of us.

It was as plain as a dog in the daylight that the wealthy, the financial rentier class, the finance bros and banksters, the government "regulators" and fiscal manipulators that were and are in their pockets, are largely in control of the government's hand on the economy. Fiscal policy. Tax policy. Employment and education and almost every other aspect of life in the United States is grotesquely tilted in the direction of the "rich, the well-born, and the able".

It's not "conspiracy theory" for those of us not born with a trust fund to suspect that even if every MAGAt was raptured tomorrow the chances of us and ours getting a better deal for medicine, for college, for solid, reliable, good, rewarding work followed by an honorable and comfortable retirement are...not exceptionally high.

Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, & Money has an excellent explanation of the problems with the notion that "we" just need to "take the country back from the MAGAts" by voting out Republicans and then joy and happiness will reign: 

"The approach required by this profounder corruption (the "financialization" or elite capture of the economic as a whole, of the sort that 2008 was a symptom, not a cause) is not recovery: returning to where we were means going back to a state of affairs that was manifestly unsustainable. To borrow from the architect of the Democratic Party’s most enduring platform, any recovery that simply restores things as they were will see us all right back where we are now before too much time has passed. Franklin Roosevelt argued in 1934 that the nation needed not merely recovery but “reform and reconstruction . . . much of our trouble today and in the past few years has been due to a lack of understanding of the elementary principles of justice and fairness by those in whom leadership and business and finance and public affairs was placed.” Reconstruction—Roosevelt was well aware of the word’s legacy after the Civil War—meant that leadership, and the conditions that kept them in place, “had to be corrected.” 

My only quibble is that it needed more ropes and lampposts, just as 2008 should have, but you take what you can. What we need, though, is a thorough cleansing of the Augean stable of corrupt elite wealth and privilege that has metastasized in the American system. A complete revision of the post-Reagan tax-cut-and-deregulation schemes that have returned the nation, economically and socially and politically, to 1929 if not 1899.

The failure of the First Reconstruction must be reversed, and the success of the Revolt of the Rich and the Rise of the Second Confederacy that has taken place over the past forty-six years, must be destroyed.

Can the United States post-2025 do that?

I'm not sure.

But, goddamn it, we have got to fight for it.

Because the alternative is to be ruled by these idiots.

 

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...