Unserious and Reprehensible
Memes, movies, TV shows, and actual war. One of these things is not like the other.
Hmm. Did someone recently say that this White House seems to make policy as if its understanding of the world came from the movies?
Well, I guess that someone was onto something.
Side note: Walter White (“I am the danger”) and Kylo Ren (“More!”) are bad guys in the context of the clips. And Jimmy McGill (“You have no idea what I am capable of.”) is morally compromised, at best, at the point he is quoted.
And since we are communicating via pop culture references:
It really is all amazingly grotesque.
I guess now is a good time to note that the Secretary of Defense thinks that reporting on fatalities is just, as The Atlantic put it: Pete Hegseth Treats Fallen American Soldiers as a PR Problem.
The defense secretary, the man who is supposed to carry this news to the American public and mourn with them, instead whined about the unfairness of it all. “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it,” Hegseth told the reporters, military personnel, and civilians gathered this morning in the Pentagon. “The press only wants to make the president look bad, but try for once to report the reality. The terms of this war will be set by us at every step. As I said Monday, the mission is laser-focused.”
So, unserious and morally reprehensible. Just the sort of people we should all want in charge of the most powerful military the world has ever known.
By the way, while I have more nuanced views than to call a large chunk of Americans “bad” (as per James Joyner’s post this morning), I have no reservation categorizing our current leadership as such. Further, there is a point wherein supporting all of this stuff is, in fact, very bad indeed.
There is some hope that some (although not enough) Americans understand this.
Source: G. Elliot Morris.
The big takeaway from these numbers is that the new war in Iran is very unpopular. Not merely negative-number-so-what unpopular, but worst-ever-support-for-war-when-it-started unpopular. With just 38% of Americans in favor, support for bombing Iran is lower than retrospective support for the war in Iraq was in 2014.
[…]
No president in modern polling history has launched a major military operation with the public already against him. After the September 11 attacks, a November 2001 Gallup poll found 90% of Americans approved of military action in Afghanistan, with just 5% opposed. The Gulf War in 1991 hit 79-80% approval. Gallup measured 76% support for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 (Pew had it at 71%).
Side-note: if this level of unhappiness continues, alongside things like gas prices going up and already existing economic anxieties, the midterms are going to be very, very blue as voters are going to want to register their displeasure. The basic political stupidity of all of this is pretty stunning.
Trump has gotten only the tiniest of rally-round effect, visible in the fact that slightly fewer people disapprove of the war than disapprove of Trump. But Trump has not really lost any of his ~40% base of support, and that’s what matters to him.
Hegseth is cringe inducing. A dry-drunk frat boy asshat who was cast as Secretary of WAR! by a president whose criteria for a cabinet job are (1) blind loyalty, and (2) being telegenic. Candidates with education, intelligence, experience and/or expertise need not apply. You can bet Hegseth’s braggadocious bullshit has echoed around the world, and will certainly be cited as justification when one of our GIs is captured and tortured.
The popularity numbers seem to pretty much mirror Trump’s approval numbers when they have been at their lowest. IOW, it looks like his core supporters are staying from. The cult (of personality) holds! Even though he has completely deserted hisAmerica First claims his core is solid so I dont see him changing course much. Whether or not this turns into some kind of blue wave I think will still be affected by gerrymandering and efforts by Trump et al to control the elections. Personally, I expect the current Iran event to go one for a couple more weeks and then Trump will declare victory. The negative long term effects will take a while to show (similar to the defunding effects of research) so it wont effect elections as much as we hope.
Steve
Had 9/11 never happened, and Bush the toddler tried to invade Iraq, support would have looked a bit higher than this.
A bit higher because, as dim as Bush was, he’d have tried to drum up support beforehand.
On a related, but different topic…what am I missing about Cuba’s big threat to the US? Do Americans even understand what the problem is with Cuba, because I don’t. Not saying I like their system just acknowledging that I don’t understand or view them anything like Iran, etc.
Every time someone points out that his polling is underwater, I say, it’s rarely been net positive. I then ask: Is it below 30%? Well, no, but …
My opinion is that a LOT of things will have to go wrong – this non-war in Iran, prices on commodities like gasoline, the stock market spiraling down – for Trump to truly be in trouble. The ’26 mid-terms could or MIGHT put the brakes on him, but until then.
A deep dive into the cross tabs would be interesting. While it’s true that support for the war is about the level of his support in general, the mix of voters likely isn’t the same. There is lots of unhappiness in MAGAt-land with the war, but they aren’t breaking w/the felon generally and there are anti-trumpers that support Israel and believe Iran needed to be defanged.
@HelloWorld:
Cuba isn’t a threat, but it has been an irritant to a section of the political class for ~65 years and similar to Venezuela, the felon believes that previous presidents weren’t man enough to resolve the irritant, but he is.
We have allowed ourselves to be conditioned to believe our cultural bullshit. En mass.
Popular culture (movies, music, social media short takes) provides ideas that our society ingests, most often whole cloth without discernment. They are taken as truisms and bias confirmation. This constitutes the entirety of the MAGA-thought universe. We are hallucinating on our own fictions. A.I. is about to compound the problem — humans disconnecting from the physical realities that govern their sustainability.
I wonder how long until, and how painful, the “course correction.”
Yes sir, you and your fellow Republicans own this war.
Trump has a history of expressing without a hint of irony an admiration for depraved fictional characters, from Charles Foster Kane to Auric Goldfinger
@Rob1: This is, perhaps, the most important observation of the day.
@Charley in Cleveland:
A Secretary of War in an adminstration that doesn’t have the nerve to actually declare war.
What a farce.
Maybe the should ranmae it again the “Department of Limited Operations, But Also Raining Down Death and Destruction”
The world looks at Hegseth with a mixture of slack-jawed incredulity, horror, and contempt.
It’s like “Beavis and Butthead do Military Operations”
And MAGA can’t work out why nobody else is rushing to support the US in this.
@HelloWorld: The threat that Cuba poses is that all those Cuban emigre’s in Miami/Florida might start voting for Democrats if Republicans don’t destroy the Communist Government in Cuba.
I mean, it’s clear that as Spanish speakers, they aren’t popular with Republicans, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
@Charley in Cleveland: “A dry-drunk frat boy asshat who was cast as Secretary of WAR! ”
What makes you so sure he’s dry?
@JohnSF:
The current US so-called administration is what one turns to when “nazis for Dummies” is way too advanced.
You know, one of the things I recall reading about WWII, specifically, the invasion of Russia by the Third Reich, is that Hitler was successful, to the surprise of the Wehrmacht, in ordering them to “hold firm” the first winter. It worked out ok.
And so he became a one-trick pony, and certain that he was smarter than all his generals.
I feel that there is an analog happening here, and I’m not really talking about the Nazi part. It’s that Trump feels he is smarter than all his advisers, including the political ones, and he has rid himself of anybody who might try and tell him he’s wrong. So he’s going to start this war because he thinks it will pump up his approval rating. But he has such a simple-minded view of the world, he ignores relevant details and facts. He’s definitely not the only person to do this, I kind of see it every day, but certainly he’s one of the most powerful people to do this.
Just today I saw this quote of Arnold Toynbee:
This seems very relevant today, and to not just us. We can murder people, but we can’t murder Iran. They have to decide to end what they are doing themselves. What we are doing is not making that easier or more likely.
As far as the US goes, though, my hopes are placed on another quote, this one from Adam Smith:
@Michael Reynolds: ” But Trump has not really lost any of his ~40% base of support, and that’s what matters to him.”
True… but we’re still only a week into this war. Give it a month with gas prices around five bucks and who knows how many Americans dead and the administration asking congress for hundreds of billions more dollars to pay for it.
The support this was has right now is the highest it will ever go.
Our political guardrails have been decimated by the feckless GOP and that is why such basic political stupidity is potentially survivable now.
As in the general election of 2024, I believe it is too much to ask of our broadly unengaged, misinformation-susceptible voters to serve as the last line of defense against unserious and morally reprehensible people holding so much power. Even after dislodging Trump (assuming we can), we have to hold Congressional Republicans (with their single party control/knee bending) and SCOTUS (with their imperial presidency delusions) accountable for abdicating their roles in preventing the dumpster fire we are living through now.
According to the WaPo and ABC, Russia is providing Iran with intelligence about U.S. targets in the ME.
@Michael Reynolds:
It’s a rare issue in the Trump era that doesn’t fall neatly on partisan lines, but then that in itself seems to be increasingly common these days. There are the occasional hawkish Dems who support the invasion. There’s the Tucker/MTG/Fuentes bloc that have been turning against Trump for a while now, just as neocons like Ben Shapiro are getting starbursts.
@Jay L. Gischer: It may be that the Cuban economy will collapse and some sort of US compliant, if not aligned, government emerges. If so, the Miami Cuban/Republican plan of destroying Cuba to save Cuba may reach fruition. After 66 years. The Maimi Cubans must really love Cuba.
We can’t manage to refund tariffs with receipts. Trying to get grandpa’s land in Cuba back is going to be entertaining. Again, Obama had a plan for Cuba, but it didn’t call for beating anybody into submission, so Republicans couldn’t understand it.
We committed a war crime when we sank the Iranian boat chugging back from India…laden with the Iranian Navy Band. Geneva Conventions require every effort to be made to rescue survivors. We made none.
Add that to the fishing boats being attacked in the Caribbean, and we ARE the assholes.
@wr: It won’t just be gasoline at $5/gal. Catherine Rampell over at The Bulwark calls out the “Warflation”, “Gasoline might be the most noticeable price Trump is turbocharging right now, but it’s far from the only one.
Other energy markets are affected, too. Qatar, which supplies about 20 percent of the world’s liquefied natural gas, halted LNG production after a drone attack. Production there will take weeks to restart.
As a result, downstream firms that require LNG to operate are closing shop, too. For example, the Gulf region is responsible for nearly a tenth of the global aluminum supply. Already this week, multiple major aluminum smelters had to initiate shutdowns; one company says it may take up to a year to restart production.
Production of methanol and other chemicals has also been disrupted. Same with fertilizers used to grow the world’s food supply: Roughly 35 percent of global exports of urea (the most common nitrogen fertilizer) and 45 percent of global exports of sulfur (used to produce phosphate fertilizers) traversed the Strait of Hormuz. Fertilizer prices are already spiking, and American farmers are freaking out. Consumers may see “higher prices for bread within six to 10 weeks, eggs within a few months and pork and broiler chicken within six months,” according to an estimate from food-system expert Raj Patel.”
@Scott F.:
But the point is that the 2024 outcome was, in basic terms, the result of a certain slice of voters simply voting their feelings about the incumbent administration. If that basic dynamic is replicated in 2026, it should be more than enough to give Ds the House and maybe even the Senate.
That’s the point.
@wr:
Exactly.
@Daryl:
The rules of war regarding submarines is that they are not required to surface and attempt rescue if they may endanger themselves doing so.
Sri Lanka has reported another Iranian warship was in the area, so that would apply.
A similar event was the Royal Navy Conqueror sinking ARA Belgrano in 1982.
Conqueror made no attempt to rescue survivors.
Submarine warfare is a rather ruthless business.
otoh, the boat attacks in the Caribbean were probably unlawful.
I recall the tanker war as part of the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s. Both countries attacked each other’s oil shipments through the Gulf. I don’t recall what were the global economic consequences. Though I think oil prices pretty much collapsed in the mid 80s, tanker war and all.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I see your point and agree with it entirely. I look forward to the voters venting their spleen against the GOP and I hope the blue wave is as massive as possible.
My additional point is I want more. I believe that in a stable democracy with strong institutions and political guardrails, I wouldn’t have to fear a collapse of government due to an electorate voting their feelings about the incumbent administration whether that worked to my political favor or not. Our last anti-incumbent wave election alone wouldn’t have left us where we are. Had impeachment been used when warranted, or had the GOP disqualified Trump from the GOP nomination due to J6, or had SCOTUS not invented legal immunity for their party’s ex-POTUS and derailed his criminal conviction, the anti-incumbents could have expressed their displeasure with the incumbent party without giving power to a corrupt convicted felon. That seems a fair request.
It should have been anticipated that the first reaction of Iran would be to shut the Straits of Hormuz.
The remarkable thing is that the US does not seem to have prepared for the two obvious responses to drone treats to tankers: convoys, and seizing Qeshm and the other straits islands.
There seem to be only three USN “littoral combat/mine-countermeasures” ships in the Gulf, and no frigates on hand. The destroyers with the Roosevelt CSG being required for group air defence.
So likely insufficient for convoys.
And can the Saudi and Emirati ships do the job?
Open to doubt.
As for the islands, that needs amphibious/airborne forces, which are not there.
Or, once again, getting the Arabians to do it.
Good luck with that.
If the Straits are not unlocked quite soon, the phrase “global economic crisis” springs to mind.
Not to mention dire economic and food supply issues in the Emirates.
Perhaps the US might ask China and India to send convoy escorts?
Or perhaps not.
I have a suspicion the Pentagon may have made all these points to the administration, but Hegseth was pretty certainly too stupid to make the point, and Rubio too obsequiosly cautious to penetrate Trump’s ineffable idiocy field.
As for Bibi: “honey badger don’t care” probably sums it up.
@CSK:
Putin is helping Iran try to kill Americans. Ukrainians and Europeans are sending personnel to help defend Americans from Iranian drones.
Yet George W. Trump and JD Cheney love Putin and mistreat Ukranians and Europeans. Shameful.
@Jay L. Gischer:
Hitler surprised his generals by his success multiple times, largely by a combination of reckless gambling, good fortune, and opponents incompetence:
Czechoslovakia 1938, (arguably Poland 1939), Norway 1940, France 1940, Balkans/Greece 1941, Russia winter 1941.
What they missed was his quite obvious strategic failures; likely because they were operational commander, and land operations at that, not strategists.
And Hitler also became convinced of his operational genius, and was unable to perceive his strategic incompetence.
Trump also seems to be “getting high on his own supply”, and there’s no-one slamming the table and pointing out the obvious failure modes in his kayfabe excuse for strategy.
“Hormuz, you f@ckin’ fool!”
“Iranian uprising? How does that work, exactly?”
@Michael Reynolds:
IMO partially true. That 40% is all he needs to maintain his iron grip on the Republican party. But I’m pretty sure he knows that if the Rs become the minority party in both Houses it’s an iron grip on a rubber sword.
I’ve said this before but the model of self-interest as the best predictor of Trump’s behavior, which served very well for both his terms so far, is breaking down. There is no profit in war. Little profit in naming everything after himself. I fear he has begun to feel his mortality and is seeking a historical legacy, and a Legacy Trump is potentially far, far more dangerous than a Transactional Trump. Wars to re-make the world are definitely on the menu.
@Mr. Prosser:
This.
The economic consequences of shutting the Gulf hydrocarbon flows are so huge as to beggar belief
(As a tiny addendum, it also borks the global finacial system, but compared to the material effects, that’s just a footnote)
This should have been anticipated and planned for.
I have little doubt Pentagon contingency planning included such things.
But with Hegseth as SecDef and Rubio as SecState/NSA, fat chance of this getting impressed on Trump.
Oddly enough, it’s just such economic consequences that might have made Trump think twice, if impressed that an easy win was not inevitable.
Keeping Hormuz open was possible, given convoy escort forces in place, and force ability to seize and secure the Straits islands.
None such are in place.
It’s just perhaps possible that air attack can remove the drone capabilty sufficiently to make the Straits viable in a timespan short enough to avoid economic disasters.
The Republican Party had better hope it can, because otherwise you can perm global recession, massive inflation spikes, and possibly an ongoing war into the mid-terms.
They may come to regret not voting for Conressional authority over war powers.
@DK:
@CSK:
Remember, they’re just returning the “favor.”
Another artifact supporting Steven Taylor’s premise:
The deep hallucination state.
White House Posts Video Of Iran Strikes Mixed With Call Of Duty Clips To Brag About War
—- Our national hallucinatory state deepens.
@HelloWorld: Trump keeps saying everyone “wants a deal”, Cuba being the latest. Quite what “deal” Cuba could make is a mystery. Promise not to be communist in future, I guess, and let American corporations loot what’s left of its economy. But I can’t help feeling this might not encourage the Cuban regime to fold any time soon:
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-cuba-going-fall-administration-explores-criminal-charges-so-rcna262071
@Kylopod:
Notably “the late great Hannibal Lecter”.