NO MORE MR. NICE GUY!
A warning from the Commander-in-Chief to the crazy bastards.
Checking in on our fearless leader, I see he’s put out this cheery message this morning:
I continue to wonder how the press would have reacted to this had Sleepy Joe Biden posted it. But, of course, he’s almost four years older, which changes everything.
The fact that we have to treat governing by tweet as legitimate is just insane.
Also: the attempt to turn the closure of the Strait into some kind of genius move we wanted is just something to behold.
Just to note that Trump’s Brown Shirts have killed more innocent Americans than Iran.
But boasting about war crimes you’re going to commit is kind of whacky.
Trump’s entire political career has been based on his defenders saying x not y, with x and y being words like seriously and literally. (The same formulation is now AI canon, not surprisingly.) With Iran, he’s dug himself a hole: x = y even for his base, and now he’s repeating himself. We’re in a reboot of last week’s BIG VICTORY, and there’s no equivocation remaining.
And the Straight being opened for business only by Trump is a lie which doesn’t work. I can’t explain why. I think it has to do with intuition about what can be lied about and what can’t. Like you can lie about being a Christian and voting for a guy with 400 sexual assault allegations, but you can’t like to yourself about only Trump being able to open the Straight of Hormuz. I think there’s something about that type of empirical fact, and Trump doesn’t understand that, because it’s outside his experience of lying.
What’s frightening is that Iran is watching an adversary with a very weak hand unravel all on its own. In a normal country, there would have been a military coup. Trump would be shot in the head and his body burned simply out of obedience to ritual. But America doesn’t have rituals other than worshipping power, so there’s no real guidance there.
I guess if anyone else launched a misguided war against a fourth rate regional power, and wound up hurt almost as bad as the enemy, they’d also go insane with rage and regret, and the realization they were that stupid.
El Taco just had a head start.
@Steven L. Taylor:
You didn’t close the strait, I closed the strait. The President of the United States “negotiating” like he’s in a third grade schoolyard argument.
All he had to do to TACO out of this was lift our blockade and declare he’d opened the strait. And, once again, he didn’t take the opportunity.