Trump's Surrender

 

I supported our war with Iran. I knew it was risky to go to war with an unfit and unreliable commander in chief, but I believed the goals of freeing the people of Iran from tyranny, fully eliminating Iran’s capability to resume working on building nuclear weapons, destroying its stockpiles of and production facilities for making ballistic missiles, and having Israeli forces finish the job with Hezbollah were good ones that justified taking a chance. I was right about the goals. I was wrong about taking the chance.

I have read the memorandum of understanding between Trump and the rulers of Iran. It is a strange document. It is common for people to surrender and accept an enemy’s terms after being defeated in a war. This is the only instance I can think of of a commander in chief surrendered after his armed forces won.

There are several possibilities as to which of Trump’s flaws led to this disaster. The simplest explanation is insanity, that if his behavior seems like madness, it is. Besides, there is plenty of evidence for the idea of him having some level of serious mental incapacity in his rants, unhinged Truth Social posts, and general erratic and unstable behavior. Apart from the present disaster, there is enough for officials to consider invoking the 25^th Amendment.

Another possibility is cowardice. For the man is surely a coward - a comic, stereotypical example of the blustering bully who likes to act tough, but is not convincing with it, and cannot back it up. The TACO (Trump always chickens out) criticism has been shown to be accurate over and over well before the present war. Now we are getting another and a disastrous example of it.

A third possibility is that Trump did it because he had decided that it would be the best result for Donald Trump – not Israel, not the people of Iran, not world civilization, not the United States of America, just Trump. He may have worried that if the Iranians shot down planes, captured their crews, and used them as hostages, it would make him look like Jimmy Carter. He might have been convinced by someone (maybe Vance and his faction) that if gas prices did not come down, Republicans would lose the midterms, and he would be tormented by congressional investigations for the next two years. He may have been offered personal incentives by the rulers of some of the oil states in the Middle East. He may have just wanted to feel like a master deal maker again. Or he could have had some other imagined gain in mind.

The explanations are not mutually exclusive. My guess is that it was some of all three that led us here.

Bombing Iran

 

I do not think Donald Trump is qualified to be president by either knowledge, character, demeanor, judgment, or temperament. I wish the Republicans had nominated someone else in the last three presidential elections. I think the only valid reason for voting for him last November was a decision that Harris and Walz likely would be worse. Regardless of that, I am proud of President Trump for ordering the attack on Iran’s atomic weapons production sites. It was the right thing to do and, together with the actions of Israel’s armed forces, has made the world safer and the geopolitical situation better for liberal civilization. He deserves credit and respect for doing it.

On the other hand, many leftist Democrat politicians and many of their public relations people in the traditional media deserve contempt and ridicule for their behavior. From silly claims that all would have been well if Obama’s agreement effectively allowing Iran to develop atomic weapons but maybe a little more slowly had still been in place, to fairly obviously hoping the attack had been a failure, to in some cases directly siding with the Iranians, their behavior has been despicable. There is a joke going around that Democrats are angry about the attack because it destroyed the only Obama/Biden infrastructure project that actually got built. That is unfair, but some of the Dems and their friends deserve the mockery. So do Tucker Carlson and the rest of the anti-Israel, isolationist, and at least somewhat antisemitic gang on the right.

Trump was right on this one, and it does not hurt those of us who do not like him to see it and say so.

Five Days of Helicopter Jokes

 

Iran’s president, the butcher of Tehran, Raisi has died in a helicopter crash. Iran’s dictator has decreed five days of mourning in his honor. At the suggestion of the artist formerly known as Iowahawk, Americans are celebrating with five days of helicopter jokes. I have seen several good ones at various places, but my favorite so far is the following:

“As Allah as my witness, I thought Iranian presidents could fly.”

In the spirit of the thing and after reading the administration’s disgusting statement of condolence to Iran, I will quote the following more appropriate reaction from an anonymous, highly placed pentagon source, straight from the war room beside the big board:

“If I may speak freely, the raghead talks big, but frankly, we think he’s short of know how. I mean, you just can’t expect a bunch of ignorant goat humpers to understand a machine like some of our boys.”

Jokes aside, there should have been no condolences, and certainly no prayer about the murdering scum in the senate. People should be glad he is dead and and willing to say so.

Israel and Hamas

 

First one has to state the obvious. People are not the same everywhere. Those in Hamas committing atrocities are inhuman savages, and so is anyone cheering them on in their savagery. Then one can make the point that that does not apply to all Muslims or even to all Palestinians in Gaza. The ideal solution for dealing with Hamas’s terrorists would be (to paraphrase Jacob McCandles) to hunt them down and kill them, every mother’s son of them. A good practical solution is to come close enough to that ideal that they and their organization no longer have a capability to do harm. Hamas is known for using civilians as human shields, even to operating out of schools, mosques, and hospitals, causing enemies to hold back for fear of harming innocent civilians. This time the priority should not be to harm Hamas some, while avoiding civilian casualties, but rather to destroy Hamas, while inflicting as few civilian casualties as are consistent with that objective. The blame for civilian casualties in Gaza is Hamas’s, just as the blame for civilian casualties in the American bomber offensive over Germany was Hitler’s. Americans should support Israel in its war, and the American government should be ready to take direct action to free Americans held as hostages and to punish those who harm Americans. Beyond that the government should find a way to make the rulers of Iran suffer painfully, since Iran is behind the attack.