The British are hosting talks on opening the Straits of Hormuz.
The intellectual toddler King Donny is threatening to take the US out of NATO, which he cannot legally do.
Things are going to get very bad.
The illegitimate demented octogenarian would be king will address the nation tonight.
April 2, 2026
King Donald, his popularity sinking like a rock and facing the inevitability that Congress is not going to vote to fund an additional $200B for his losing vanity project war against Iran, came on to television last night to try to explain and get support for it.
I didn't watch it. I've been to nursing homes and, while I'm ashamed to say it, they make me uncomfortable.
It was the usual pile of shit. The war will be over soon, we're going to bomb Iran into submission, they've been at war with us for 47 years, other people should do the hard job of fixing the Straits of Hormuz that we broke.
We haven't been at war for 47 years, nobody is going to take on the ground fighting opening the Straits would require, the war won't be over soon. We didn't for Bibi.
It won't be over this time next year, but Americans, by that time, will be fighting and dying on the ground.
Oh well, Cuba will be easier, right?
Cont:
Pete Hegseth took to social media today to post "Bomb them back to the stone age".
Pete is a Princeton graduate, so this is yet another example of my totally losing any sense of respect for Ivy League schools. Do they not teach history at Princeton?
That phrase arose with Curtis B. LeMay and is what he proposed to do to North Vietnam. LeMay fist used the phrase in 1965, and by the end of the war, we were using B-52s on targets in North Vietnam.
We lost the war.
At this point, I feel that somebody should see if Classic Comics has published a series on the Vietnam War. If they did, we ought to send a case of them to the Department of Defense.
April 3, 2026
A forty nation video conference was held on opening the Straits of Hormuz following the end of King Donny's War. The U.S. did not attend.
It's really clear at this point that there are major cracks in the U.S. defense establishment and a large number of officers are on the verge of an open break with Secretary of Defense Hegseth. We might be edging up on a Curragh Mutiny.
A look at some interesting connections.
cont:
A U.S. F-15E was shot down. The fate of the crew is unknown, but gunfire has been heard in the area where the two man crew may have gone down.
And so it begins. As the air campaign continues, more and more of this will happen.
Trump sycophant Pam Bondi is out, her reputation solidified as a toady, and her legal career wrecked. Sycophant Todd Blanche is now in, at least temporarily.
Former Fox News Commentator, current Secretary of Defense, right wing Evangelical Protestant radical Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of the Army Daniel P. Driscoll. I have no reason to believe that Driscoll is a shining beacon of light in the Trump Administration, but it's getting increasingly clear he doesn't get along with Hegseth and its becoming additionally clear the Army thinks the war against Iran is a mistake.
But that's not what we refer to.
Gen. Randy George, who is 61 years of age and highly decorated. 62 is the current Army retirement age, up from 60 when I was a Guardsman, and it's 64 for general officers.
Yesterday, the full-scale war between the Secretary of the Army Daniel P. Driscoll and the Secretary of Defense burst into the open with Hegseth firing Secretary of the Army loyalist and remaining solid generals including Army chief of staff, Gen. Randy George. Chief of chaplains, Maj. Gen. William Green, and the commanding general of Army Transformation and Training Command, David Hodne were also fired.
Gen. Hodne, age 56. Like George, he has the Combat Infantryman's Badge and an Air Assault Badge, as well as a master jump badge.
The reason for Hegseth's discontent is not openly known, although he's been at war with Driscoll for some time, but senior officers have been reportedly upset with Hegseth due to his monkeying with the promotion list. Recently two black and two female officers were reported removed from the list and there were comments that Trump would not wish to stand next to a black female officer.
Maj. Gen. William Green. It's harder to learn information about Green, but he served originally as an enlisted artilleryman and based on what data there is, he would be about 60.
If that is the reason, it's worse than the other potential reason, which is disagreement over the direction of the war. Notably, Maj. Gen. Green is also black, and so far I've seen no reason why he was removed. In light of Hegseth's membership in an Evangelical church that holds views that the overwhelming majority of Christians do not, there could certainly be other reaons.
Hegseth, as is well known, has consistently been a sort of reactionary force in the military, but since the war started he's been a zealot for a sort of Evangelical Protestant crusade. There's some evidence he may have helped talk Trump into the war, which he may see in that light.
He's also had consistent disputes with some of the military brass, while also taking on interesting social issue matters. For example, he just determined to prohibit chaplains from wearing their insignia of rank.
Rumor has it that Driscoll is targeted for firing. My guess is that Driscoll and Hegseth are both targets, with it being the case that one of them or the other will get the boot. Trump can't be happy with Hegseth, who likely promised a quick and easy victory which isn't happening and isn't going to.
But it doesn't end there. It's also being reliably reported that the increasingly desperate Trump may be considering firing Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Intelligence Chief Tulsi Gabbard and FBI Director Kash Patel. I don't know anything about Chavez-DeRemer, but all the rest of these people should be fired.
Of course, Trump should be fried as he's bat shit crazy. With all of these people in the crosshairs, maybe they have some incentive to invoke the 25th Amendment.
If any of these firings are going to happen, they'll happen quickly.
U.S. Marines land at Da Nang, March 8, 1965. It was just a few. . and then some airmen. . . and then the perimeter had to be protected. . . and soon, 50,000 U.S. troops were dead.
March 31, 2026
King Donny can't figure out how to get out of his war. The Iranians can't and won't surrender. The Iranians won't leave the Straits of Hormuz alone. The NATO countries, several of which have been threatened by King Donny with the use of military force, have replied to his request for naval assistance with variants of "fuck you and the horse you rode in on" and are perfectly happy to watch the US, which they don't like under Trump, and Israel, which they generally don't like, stew in the fat of Donald's juices.
Faced with this, the more rah rah, let's engage in a Protestant Crusade against Islam crowed, and the more sober military minds who have read history, are causing Marines to be deployed. Chances are, they aren't equally enthusiastic about deploying them, as the results of that will be a full scale and even more illegal war than the one we're currently in.
The economy, meanwhile, is turning to a steaming pile of shit, like everything else Donald touches. The stock market is supposedly the only thing the legacy seeking King Donny pays attention to, which probably means that his oligarchic connections are being hurt and calling him up on his cell phone telling him to get out before the wreckage matches that of the East Wing. King Donny, meanwhile, probably doesn't want to be remembered as the idiot who got 20,000 ground troops or more killed. So, as of yesterday, he's thinking of surrendering by simply pulling out.
Overnight, the Iranians targeted Diego Garcia with missiles but not reached their targets for one reason or another, including their being intercepted. Diego Garcia was not previously thought to be within range of Iranian missiles, and it still might not be, given that they didn't hit. Or it may be, or it may be that Iran has improved the capabilities of their missiles over the last couple of weeks.
Iran is busy destroying Middle Eastern oil infrastructure. The economic impacts will last for years.
March 21, 2026, cont:
Iran and the US/Israel exchanged attack nuclear facilities today.
March 22, 2026
Trump announced that if Iran does not open the Straits of Hormuz within 48 hours the US will commit a war crime and start to destroy power plants.
This would be flat out an illegal at, it serves no military purpose whatsoever.
March 23, 2026
King Donny claimed this morning that the US and Iran were in productive talks, so he was suspending offensive operations for several day.
Iran called BS on the claim.
Nobody really knows what's going on, but my guess, and it would guess, is that King Donny is going to claim there was a secret deal to end the war and call it over. My additional guess is that somebody got to him. Maybe the military, maybe the top (lap) dogs in the GOP, or maybe another oligarch, but somebody.
Listening to the weekend shows makes it plaint how much trouble Trump is really in. None of the people you'd expect to be present on all three were present on the two I listened to. Scott Bessant was on Meet the Press sounding like a complete fool. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy drew the short stick for This Week and sounded like he regretted it.
Bessant was downright insulting to the host, even if he sounded like a buffoon doing it.
What's increasingly clear is that sometime yesterday somebody or something got to Trump. The war isn't going the way he believed it would, and now he want out. He's just looking for a cover story to get out. The problem he faces is that none of the cover stories for getting into it will square with that, so he's in a bind. The strategy being tested is the claim that he made a deal, even if the Iranians are denying that they're close to making a deal.
Believing that lie won't be too much to ask diehard Trump fans to do. They'll believe anything. But it is too much for independents and some not wholly convinced Republicans to do. The next part of the problem will be that petroleum prices will take months or even years to go down. That showed up on Meet the Press in which a Trump voter called Trump "a worthless piece of shit".
cont:
Pete, I think you were the first one to speak up. You said, 'Let's do it.'
Trump.
Pete is now the designated fall guy. He better start looking for a new job.
March 24, 2026
In spite of King Donny's declaration that the United States was in talks with Iran, which Iran denies, as Donny is an outrageous liar, the war continued on yesterday, unabated.
Cont:
According to the NYT, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia is pushing Trump to continue the war.
We seem to just be regional suckers to the Middle East.
March 25, 2026
In addition to the Marines already deployed to the Middle East, 1,000 troops of the 82nd Airborne are being deployed to the region, all for a war that King Donny claims was won several days ago.
Pakistan, which it self as been at war recently with Afghanistan, volunteered to host talks between the U.S. and Iran. The U.S. has agreed to attend, Iran, has not.
Trump claimed yesterday that Iran gave the United States a very big oil related present, but he wasn't going to say what it is.
Um. . . .
March 27, 2026
King Donny extended his deadline in which for the US to commit an additional war crime by destroying electrical power sites. He claims negotiations are going well.
Some negotiations probably really are occurring, but it's not clear at all what they are. As they won't result in an end to an Iranian nuclear program, effectively what the US is doing is looking for a way out a la Paris Peace Accords.
On the other hand, Tehran increased its grip on the Straits of Hormuz yesterday, so the entire story of Iran negotiating may just be another Trump lie.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a real president, visited the Middle East yesterday as his country is helping several Middle Eastern countries counter Iranian drones.
March 28, 2026
The Houthis entered the war by firing ballistic missiles at Israel.
Donald Trump is now babbling on this topic nearly every day, and not making a lick of sense any time he does so. As if that's not enough, his cabinet lavishes praise on him in a way that will quite frankly be used against their reputations, and that of the country that they purport to serve, forever.
March 30, 2026
The illegitimate administration sent Iran the same list of 15 demands in the form of demands to be accepted to end the war. Iran told the U.S. to stuff it, and presented its own demands, also pointing out that it doesn't trust the US enough to enter negotiations.
Listening to the weekend shows and other soundings out there, it's increasingly clear that Republicans feel uneasy about the situation developing with King Donny. A common theme now is, "well, we should have done this years ago, um, and are now, um, and well, we have to see it through".
None of those things are anywhere near true and they know it.
We are getting increasingly close to the commitment of ground troops. Even some of the stalwarts that apologize for Trump's dementia on a nearly daily basis re now saying that requires Congressional approval. Well, Trump isn't going to ask for approval. He's just going to do it, if he does, and he probably is going to.
This is an election season, and those in Congress in the GOP should be made to answer for this illegal delegation of force to a demented octogenarian.
cont:
Reports hold that Russia shared satellite images of Prince Sultan US base in Saudi Arabia with Iran right before their attack that injured our troops. Ukrainian intelligence has confirmed it.
And Trump. . . well he's letting a ship of Russian oil offload in Cuba, which is otherwise being embargoed (blockaded?) by the U.S.
Odd, eh?
March 31, 2026
Iran hit a fully laden Kuwait oil tanker in port in Dubai.
Trump yesterday indicated that he might just abandon the Persian Gulf with the Straits of Hormuz closed.
Republicans desperate to excuse a war that's not going to end soon, and which right now looks as if it'll either require a decades long American ground presence in an illegal war, or an inglorious American retreat, either of which feature a major recession, if not depression, in the near term, are parading a series of bs excuses for what demented Don did.
The reality of it is quite simple. Bibi wanted to take Iran out while the US could be duped into going along with it. Only Bibi and Vlad seem to have any pull over King Donny, although for different unknown reasons. Anyhow, this is a war for Israel, that's what it's for.
The current line is that we've been fighting Iran for 47 years. No, we haven't been. Iran has been a bad actor for 47 years, but we haven't been fighting them for nearly five decades. Moreover, most of Iran's anger with us, as illegitimate and wrong as it is, is vicarious anger over US support for Israel.
I'm not saying that US support for Israel is wholly wrong, but it has frankly been often beyond what it likely should have been, and that's been the case since Israel became a country. It has a right to exist, but it doesn't have a right to unqualified US support, and support that has not involved American Allies that are in the region, to the the extent which it has. Anyhow, Iran's hatred of the US is largely due to US support of Israel, which is 100% what this war is about. Netanyahu saw a chance to take out, he thought, a decades long enemy, and took it. Unfortunately for him, he forgot about what an unreliable ally the US really is and that Trump's thoughts tend to be farts in windstorms.
The other major claim is that Iran was going to turn into a nuclear power and we needed to stop it. If that's the case, that was clearly going to involve a ground invasion. You can't bomb nuclear material into non existence. Trump may stupidly have thought he could cause the Iranian regime to fall in this fashion, which if so was flat out dumb, but he's not a very advanced thinker and his experience is in real estate, not realpolitik. He didn't cause an Iranian uprising and he didn't even get the Kurds to move on the government.
So here we are.
Concluding this war successfully will require a Vietnam War level of military participation and two decades to complete. At some point Congress will have to get involved. As Americans have no stomach for such an enterprise, what's much more likely to happen is a largescale conventional invasion of the country after a series of aerial war crimes, followed by substantial US troop deaths, followed by an inglorious withdrawal and retreat.
In other words, we're likely to lose the war.
Not before it expands into the US however.
We have every reason to believe that Iran has sleeper cells in the US. What hasn't happened that much yet, however, are proxy attacks here. That's coming, and it'll come in more than one form. We aren't ready for it, and we're not going to get ready for it. Further, both China and Russia will assist Iran on this where they can get away with it.
Along with that, we're going to see inflation and a recession within the next few months at a level we have no experienced since the 1970s. We'll be lucky, quite frankly, if we don't experience a depression.
So, welcome to King Donald's Forever War.
cont:
The maximum level of outright stupidity that is constantly demonstrated by this illegitimate administration is really on display today with Pete Hegseth. For example:
The president was clear this morning in his Truth that there are countries around the world who ought to be prepared to step up on this critical waterway as well. Last time I checked there was supposed to be a big bad Royal Navy that could be prepared to do things like that.
This is an illegal war on the part of the US, dumbass, and you don't get to declare war for other countries.
As far as President Trump and boots on the ground, I don't understand why the base wouldn't have faith in his ability to execute on this. Look at his track record.
Seriously? Where to begin. Cutting spending. . . nope, didn't happen. Avoid wars. . . nope, didn't happen. Make America Great Again. . . more like sending it into the dumpster.
What he's shown himself to be really good at is not getting the Epstein files released, although even there, there are enough cracks to raise the question if he was one of the rich men raping teenagers. It's not proven, but there's enough there to wonder.
cont:
I have a suggestion for you: Number 1, buy from the US, we have plenty, and Number 2, build up some delayed courage, go to the Strait, and just TAKE IT,'
'You'll have to start learning how to fight for yourself, the USA won't be there to help you anymore, just like you weren't there for us.'
And so, the TACO signals he's retreating.
Iran, apparently, will be the victor. People died for nothing whatsoever. Those serving in the military were made suckers.
As we all were. Everything is more expensive, people are dead.
To put it bluntly, we are really up shit creek without a paddle. At no point since the end of the Cold War have we been in this dire of situation, and it's all due to one demented billionaire.
Donald J. Trump, who fancies himself a Wile E. Coyote level genius, is a graduate of the Wharton School of Business.
It certainly doesn't show, or Wharton isn't all it has been cracked up to be.
Having gotten the United States into an illegal war as Bibi Netanyahu talked him into it, Donny appears to have been taken off guard that Iran could and would close the Straits of Hormuz, hit tankers, and hit oil and gas facilities throughout the Middle East.
Why wouldn't they?
Perhaps if Melania lets Barron go see his father over Spring Break, assuming they're not perusing travel brochures entitled "where we can go to live after Don dies where people won't know we're Trumps", and assuming that Barron isn't doing the right thing and enlisting in the United States Marine Corps, they can break out some hex and counter games and play Naval based Superpower v. Land based regional power" and see how that works out.
Anyhow, Donny Trump (did we mention that he fancies himself a Wile E. Coyote level genius?) has lifted sanctions on already loaded oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, which means that Iran now has a source of cash it didn't before the war started.
So, we didn't wipe out their nuclear capabilities in the Twelve Day War, their government hasn't fallen in this one, people have not risen up to toss out the Iranian government, the Straits of Hormuz are closed, we didn't stockpile oil before the war, the price of oil has skyrocketed, and now the Iranians can legally transport some oil
Assuming that Trump isn't secretly trying to destroy the American economy and benefit Iran (and Russia), it's hard to see the smarts in any of that.
Petroleum is back up over $100/bbl, basically because King Donny is a liar.
March 26, 2026
And the war inflation hits packages:
U.S. Postal Service Announces Transportation-Related, Time-Limited Price Change
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Postal Service filed notice today with the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC) regarding a time-limited price change to better align its costs of transportation with the market. This temporary price adjustment will provide needed flexibility for the Postal Service by helping to ensure that the actual costs of doing business are covered, as required by Congress.
While this price increase is a time-limited adjustment, it will provide a necessary bridge to a permanent mechanism to reflect market conditions in prices for competitive products that can support the Postal Service’s ability to achieve the universal service obligation in a more financially sustainable manner going forward.
The planned price change, which was approved by the Governors of the Postal Service on March 24, is an 8 percent increase that would affect base postage prices on the following retail and commercial domestic competitive products: Priority Mail Express, Priority Mail, USPS Ground Advantage, and Parcel Select. No other products or services would be affected, including First-Class Stamps. Pending favorable review by the PRC, the price change would go into effect at midnight Central Time on April 26 and would remain in place until midnight Central Time on Jan. 17, 2027. At that time, the Postal Service can determine if a different long-term approach is needed.
Transportation costs have been increasing, and our competitors have reacted with a number of surcharges. We have steadfastly avoided surcharges and this charge is less than one-third of what our competitors charge for fuel alone, so even with this change, the Postal Service continues to offer great value in shipping with some of the lowest rates in the industrialized world.
The time-limited price change is consistent with industry practices and will support the Postal Service’s ability to continue achieving its public service mission — providing a nationwide, integrated network for the delivery of mail and packages at least six days a week — in a cost-effective and financially sustainable manner over the long term, just as the U.S. Congress has intended.
The PRC will review the proposed price change before it is scheduled to take effect on April 26. Complete USPS price filings, with prices for all products, can be found on the PRC website’s Daily Listings section at prc.arkcase.com/portal/filings. Price tables are also available on the Postal Explorer website at pe.usps.com/PriceChange/Index.
# # #
March 27, 2026
More than 90% of new renewable power projects worldwide in 2024 were cheaper than fossil-fuel alternatives, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency.
Guess they aren't as woke as Chuck and demented Don would claim.
And this two years ago before the tin pot dictator decided to destroy the world's oil importation system.
March 30, 2026
West Texas is at $100/bbl this morning. Brent is at $115/bbl.
With the Houthis now in the war, there's a fairly good chance the Red Sea will be effectively closed, massively widening the war, and propelling the world into a King Donny causes severe recession.
March 31, 2026
Brent is at $114.88. West Texas at $104.
The price of almost everything is rising.
This is your economy at war. An undeclared war by a demented octogenarian.
Gun camera footage from a P-51 strafing Japanese civilian fishermen during World War Two, a gravely immoral act. We've conveniently forgotten how much of this sort of thing happened during World War Two, but a lot did. Allied fighters routinely strafed German farmers during the war, and I have heard of one account of an Italian farmer being killed by being strafed. This isn't warfare, it's flat out murder.*
III. SAFEGUARDING PEACE
Avoiding war
2309 The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:
the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
there must be serious prospects of success;
the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modem means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the "just war" doctrine.
The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.
Section 2309, Catechism of the Catholic Church.
Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the United States Constitution:
[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water; . . .
The American war against Iran is not a just war. It's not a legal one, either.
Iran is a world sponsor of terrorism that has sponsored terroristic acts for decades. Most of those acts of terror were against other sovereign states, not the US, but some can logically be argued to be directed at the us. That's almost certainly not what the war is about.
Much more likely, Trump is a pathetic doddering senile fool who has spent a life of utter pointlessness. His wealth is inherited and founded originally on a grandfather who engaged in providing prostitutes to Alaska miners, a gravely evil act. His father did nothing like that, but the family wealth was used to build more wealth, and Trump in his adult years, after not serving his country (a family tradition to some extent) went on to make and lose fortunes doing that.
Real estate development is, from an agrarian and distributism prospective like that I maintain, a fairly dubious occupation in and of itself. Not clearly immoral, but frankly I have real trouble with some of it. Be that as it may, I particularly have trouble with the sort of behavior that Trump exhibited in that questionable occupation. I wouldn't admire the Wharton graduate for that reason alone. But the way he has spent his wealth is abominable. He's a serial polygamist and its getting very difficult to say "there's no evidence" that he didn't sexually fish in the shallow end of the pond.
There's more credible evidence that he's a kiddy diddler, which I'm not affirmatively saying there is, than that he's a Christian. There's not one single outwardly Christian act that I can think of that he's committed. What he is, is a shallow opportunist, and he's used desperate Christians to advance his career.
Knowing that the grave is looming up on him, and with his mind slipping away from him at a rapid rate, Trump has spent much of his second, illegitimate, occupation of the White House trying to build monuments to himself. He wants a ball room as he's a rich product of the 60s and 70s when things like that mattered to somebody. They don't anymore, and it'll either never be built, or ripped down. He wants a triumphal arch, which is simply absurd.
And he wants to be remembered as a great hero, adding to the US landmass, or at least defeating a supposed major enemy.
Benjamin Netanyahu, who is a scary man in his own right, but not a demented fool, saw that he could play the demented fool in the White House. Netanyahu, like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, sees the Trump dotage as a time to "address all family business". Seeing a dolt he could play, like Putin has, he's coaxed Trump into a war for Israel's own purposes. This is, the way Netanyahu sees it, Israel's last best hope to destroy the radical Islamist regime in Tehran. Israel can't do it on its own, and no future US administration will support doing it. Israel is not held in that high of regard in much of the world for a variety of reasons, and never has been. Nobody else is going to play the willing muscled fool for Netanyahu. If Netanyahu is Corleone, Trump is Luca Brasi, a brutish dolt who is willing to act as an enforcer.
Trump entered this war thinking it would be a two or three day exercise. He'd bomb Iran and the Iranian people would give up. Or, maybe, Iranians theocrats would act like American property owners and cut him a deal. Well, say what you like about Shiite theocrats, but they're a lot less shallow than American businessmen. They hold to an existential, and unlike Trump it's not all about money and women.
Oh oh.
So they didn't give up and they aren't going to give up. They've fought back by striking economic targets and U.S. military installations around the Middle East (and now as far away as Diego Garcia). And they've closed the Straits of Hormuz.
By closing the Straits, they've also demonstrated that the US is, in fact, not as powerful as it pretends it is. We can't open them and we've been begging for help. Nobody else is willing to get into an endless war for Israel, and therefore that help isn't coming. In order to open them we will have to engage in a ground invasion.
Trump is trying desperately to avoid that, for a variety of reasons. One thing is that he's probably been told it will be a bloody mess. Body bags will be coming home to "Red" cities all around the country. People already don't support the war and they definitely will not when Johnny or Mary come home to be buried in Riverton Wyoming, or Billings Montana, having died for Bibi Netanyahu.
And then there's this:
There's not going to be a draft, but the satiric suggestions that he serve are not wholly ingenuine. Right now, the US is getting into one war after another. Franklin Roosevelt's children served, so did TR's. Why not Trump's?
Because Trumps don't serve the country, they take from it. That's why.
In his desperation to end the war, Trump is now threatening to bomb Iranian power facilities if they do not open the Straits of Hormuz. He broadcast this on social media, which is idiotic It also won't work. The Allied bombing campaigns against Germany did not work in World War Two. They didn't work, save for the Atomic bomb, against Japan, either. Nor did they work against North Vietnam. They won't work here. Instead, civilians will be killed and whatever support for a new regime replacing this one in Iran exists, will evaporate.
What Trump is doing is criminal. The US is killing people for. . . what?
The whole war is criminal from the first place, from a US prospective. We're using military force to kill people with no declaration of war. And now we propose to engage in a tit for tat campaign of economic retribution against them as we can't beat them. We haven't been able to articulate a single reason for the war, other than Iran cannot be allowed to have the same thing that Israel, the United States, France, Russia, North Korea, the United Kingdom, Indian, Pakistan, and South Africa have. . . an atomic bomb.
There is some logic to that, of course. An Iran with an atomic bomb would be scary, just like North Korea with an atomic bomb is scary. But given our ill thought out military adventure here, we are actually making this situation worse. North Korea, it might be noted, is improving missile capabilities, and why wouldn't they. If North Korea has not determined an absolute need to be able to hit the continental United States due to Donald Trump, it'd be amazing. And if Iran, which has its nuclear material yet, has not concluded that it has an absolute need to complete a nuclear project, that would be amazing.
But it's clear that Trump never thought this out. He went, we're told, with his gut, which is nearly always wrong.
So, here we are in this long winded thread.
And here's to the point. Supporting immorality, is immoral. Everyone engages in "remote cooperation with evil", which you can not do much about. Using illegal drugs is illegal, but paying the pizza guy when you know he's going to use some of that cash for illegal drugs isn't.
Here, we now have an interesting situation.
We are in an illegal war and doing immoral acts. The Republicans in Washington are mostly sitting around on their ass doing nothing about it. They're afraid. They're not paid nor elected to be afriad.
And all over the country the MAGA element of the GOP just lies down like the 13 year old girls at Epstein Island and gives into whatever Trump wants.
It's immoral.
For years and years Christians, particularly those of my faith, voted for Republicans in spite of reluctance because we opposed abortion and the Democratic Party supported it. Even as late as the last election I heard Catholics with severe doubts about Trump say they were voting for him for that reason.
Abortion is a grave moral evil. Engaging in an illegal war and targeting civilian targets is a grave moral evil.
I'm not saying vote for the Democrats without thinking, but I am saying that supporting this Administration and the Republican Party at this point is supporting moral evil. When John Barrasso and Harriet Hageman come around backing the war, they're backing a moral evil. When Chuck Gray declares his undying love for Trump and promises to be the most loyal of his political concubines, he's expressing a love of a moral evil.
Most Germans during the Nazi era did nothing. Most Republicans aren't going to either. In future years, they'll be looked at with utter disgust.
Christians believe that they'll have to account for their sins in the next world. I very much doubt that bothers Donald Trump as he's stupid and ignorant, which is sort of a defense, and I very much question if he has any belief in God at all. For that matter, while I have only the incidents to raise the question, I doubt the beliefs of many in Congress who claim they have one. For those of us who do believe, and frankly a person who doesn't has simply blinded themselves to reality, it's all too easy to believe that our self interest must be moral. Protestant churches have, for instance, by and large completely given up on being concerned about sexual morality for the most part.
God will not be mocked. Christians who declare Trump to be a "Godly Man" are willfully blinding themselves or outright lying. None of us are around here all that long. The "why did you support the murder of my children" question is coming up, and the "well, I supported Trump", or "well, the Iranians were baddies", or "well, the Iranians were Muslims" line is not likely to be a sufficient excuse for being complicit in murder.
Footnotes
*This may seem like a strange point to start in this thread, but wars routinely devolve, even when they fit the just war criteria, into flat out murder and the US has not been exempt from this. Arguably the cleanest war the US ever fought was World War One, with the Korean War being relatively clean. World War Two may be recalled as a uniformly just war, but the bombing campaigns against urban Japan and the use of nuclear weapons was outright not. And the tolerance of what is depicted above, which was very widespread, was not.
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