Every time Dear Toddler manages to not fuck something up, he still finds a way to fuck it up, and then lie about it and try to paper it over. That is all part of the playbook of the clinical narcissist, I guess. It's nothing if not entertaining to watch.
The world is a better place without Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, no doubt about that. But as it goes with people like that, the world also produces an endless supply of them. And clearly not only do we have no strategy in that region anymore, we have ceded our role to the Russians. Forget being the "world's policeman," we're just the Saudis' mall cop now.
Or maybe the Russians killed him, or perhaps al-Baghdadi killed himself. It's not like you can trust anything -- not even so much as a weather forecast, to say nothing of a secret combat operation -- that comes from anyone in this rotting fish of an administration, certainly not the head. What we do know for sure is that when the op took place he was, believe it or not, on a fucking golf course. So they had to stage the tough-guy situation-room photo later.
Jesus. Look, I'm not going to compare him to Obama or Bush or Reagan or whoever. But you really have to wonder about the sort of person who sees guys like Trump and Pence and thinks they're tough or masculine. Trump is, and always has been, the schoolyard bully who uses his doughy bulk and loud mouth to intimidate smaller, weaker targets, until one of them finally fights back and knocks him flat with the first swing. Pence is the pussy sidekick, the "hype man" who turns tail at the first sign of actual pushback.
Instead of simply reading a brief statement about the terrorist's demise, and leaving it at that, Trump decided to take questions and extemporize -- which, you may have noticed, is not his strong suit. So he ends up using it as yet another opportunity to take a shit on his predecessors (and really, maybe it's high time one or more of them speak up for the country, if not their respective legacies); invent yet another narrative where he was the only one with the genius foresight to know that Osama bin Laden was a troublemaker; thanked Russia and Turkey for their help with the operation before remembering to throw in, you know, American service personnel; leaked enough detail to let the world know that if you say the phrase "opsec" to him, he'll have no clue what the fuck you're talking about.
This endless symbiosis of unbridled arrogance and utter stupidity, this vainglorious, preposterous grifter whose main concerns are getting the American taxpayer to subsidize his rat-infested properties and receiving thick envelopes from his petrocrat patrons, once again manages with ease to take something that just about everyone across the political spectrum can readily endorse -- the violent demise of a brutal thug -- and turn it into a seedy spectacle, a pathetic, needy old man making the world watch him jerk off all over himself yet again.
And the whole thing about the oil fields American combat troops are supposedly "protecting"? For one, Syria produces very little oil; for another, Assad signed the oil rights over to Russia. The only reason Americans are still there is to prevent all the newly escaped ISIS fighters from taking them over and funding a resurgence. Anything else is industrial-grade bullshit.
Trump speaks as if he thinks that "us" "protecting" the oil fields means that "we" get to "take" the product, as spoils of war or something. Well, that's a war crime, not to mention the fact that "we" don't have any of the logistical equipment to extract and transport through the desert to the nearest seaport (which would be Basra, which is in Iraq, which has made clear they don't want any American troops within their borders anymore, so how do you get this oil which is deep underground right now out and into trucks to drive all the way from Erbil to maybe Kuwait City, and how much would all that cost?).
Our policy in the Middle East is and always has been a devil's bargain, deeply flawed and frequently counter-productive. We should have started pushing renewable sources thirty years ago, and cut those fuckers loose first chance and let things sort themselves out (within reason). But the fact is that it took some extremely intelligent (not to mention greedy) and educated people generations to achieve the fragile equilibrium that exists in the region.
And it took Genius Q. Dealmaker there just three years to burn it all to the ground. If you look through all the financial and strategic partnerships and alliances that exist between and among Russia, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, you'll see pretty quickly how ugly this can get. Throw in the stateless Kurds, betrayed by their American partners to be slaughtered by Turkish-backed death squads, and all it takes is one Gavrilo Princip to go after the "right" figure (for example, Erdogan or Assad), with a vest full of Semtex and ball bearings and nails, to set the whole thing off.
And there are currently fifty US nuclear weapons stationed in Turkey, which despite its aggression is still a NATO ally that we are contractually obligated to defend. And you can bet the Iranian nuclear program went into overdrive the second they realized Trump was going to screw them over on the JCPOA. The only countries that have any incentive to work with us at all, or even pretend to be on "our" side, is our rented allies in Saudi Arabia and Israel.
This is why, after all the snark about this water-brained dullard and his fifth-grade vocabulary, competence matters. Intelligence and temperament and character all matter. This shit is complicated. This is why it takes an adult to do the fucking job, someone who knows what areas they don't know much about, and so they listen to people who do know about those things. This is not a fucking pro wrassling match with the strutting and the kayfabe and the trash talk. People are losing their lives already, and a lot more will -- maybe even people you care about -- before it's over.
Fuck your feelings, indeed. How's that working out? Hope it was worth it for them.
The world is a better place without Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, no doubt about that. But as it goes with people like that, the world also produces an endless supply of them. And clearly not only do we have no strategy in that region anymore, we have ceded our role to the Russians. Forget being the "world's policeman," we're just the Saudis' mall cop now.
Or maybe the Russians killed him, or perhaps al-Baghdadi killed himself. It's not like you can trust anything -- not even so much as a weather forecast, to say nothing of a secret combat operation -- that comes from anyone in this rotting fish of an administration, certainly not the head. What we do know for sure is that when the op took place he was, believe it or not, on a fucking golf course. So they had to stage the tough-guy situation-room photo later.
Jesus. Look, I'm not going to compare him to Obama or Bush or Reagan or whoever. But you really have to wonder about the sort of person who sees guys like Trump and Pence and thinks they're tough or masculine. Trump is, and always has been, the schoolyard bully who uses his doughy bulk and loud mouth to intimidate smaller, weaker targets, until one of them finally fights back and knocks him flat with the first swing. Pence is the pussy sidekick, the "hype man" who turns tail at the first sign of actual pushback.
Instead of simply reading a brief statement about the terrorist's demise, and leaving it at that, Trump decided to take questions and extemporize -- which, you may have noticed, is not his strong suit. So he ends up using it as yet another opportunity to take a shit on his predecessors (and really, maybe it's high time one or more of them speak up for the country, if not their respective legacies); invent yet another narrative where he was the only one with the genius foresight to know that Osama bin Laden was a troublemaker; thanked Russia and Turkey for their help with the operation before remembering to throw in, you know, American service personnel; leaked enough detail to let the world know that if you say the phrase "opsec" to him, he'll have no clue what the fuck you're talking about.
This endless symbiosis of unbridled arrogance and utter stupidity, this vainglorious, preposterous grifter whose main concerns are getting the American taxpayer to subsidize his rat-infested properties and receiving thick envelopes from his petrocrat patrons, once again manages with ease to take something that just about everyone across the political spectrum can readily endorse -- the violent demise of a brutal thug -- and turn it into a seedy spectacle, a pathetic, needy old man making the world watch him jerk off all over himself yet again.
And the whole thing about the oil fields American combat troops are supposedly "protecting"? For one, Syria produces very little oil; for another, Assad signed the oil rights over to Russia. The only reason Americans are still there is to prevent all the newly escaped ISIS fighters from taking them over and funding a resurgence. Anything else is industrial-grade bullshit.
Trump speaks as if he thinks that "us" "protecting" the oil fields means that "we" get to "take" the product, as spoils of war or something. Well, that's a war crime, not to mention the fact that "we" don't have any of the logistical equipment to extract and transport through the desert to the nearest seaport (which would be Basra, which is in Iraq, which has made clear they don't want any American troops within their borders anymore, so how do you get this oil which is deep underground right now out and into trucks to drive all the way from Erbil to maybe Kuwait City, and how much would all that cost?).
Our policy in the Middle East is and always has been a devil's bargain, deeply flawed and frequently counter-productive. We should have started pushing renewable sources thirty years ago, and cut those fuckers loose first chance and let things sort themselves out (within reason). But the fact is that it took some extremely intelligent (not to mention greedy) and educated people generations to achieve the fragile equilibrium that exists in the region.
And it took Genius Q. Dealmaker there just three years to burn it all to the ground. If you look through all the financial and strategic partnerships and alliances that exist between and among Russia, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, you'll see pretty quickly how ugly this can get. Throw in the stateless Kurds, betrayed by their American partners to be slaughtered by Turkish-backed death squads, and all it takes is one Gavrilo Princip to go after the "right" figure (for example, Erdogan or Assad), with a vest full of Semtex and ball bearings and nails, to set the whole thing off.
And there are currently fifty US nuclear weapons stationed in Turkey, which despite its aggression is still a NATO ally that we are contractually obligated to defend. And you can bet the Iranian nuclear program went into overdrive the second they realized Trump was going to screw them over on the JCPOA. The only countries that have any incentive to work with us at all, or even pretend to be on "our" side, is our rented allies in Saudi Arabia and Israel.
This is why, after all the snark about this water-brained dullard and his fifth-grade vocabulary, competence matters. Intelligence and temperament and character all matter. This shit is complicated. This is why it takes an adult to do the fucking job, someone who knows what areas they don't know much about, and so they listen to people who do know about those things. This is not a fucking pro wrassling match with the strutting and the kayfabe and the trash talk. People are losing their lives already, and a lot more will -- maybe even people you care about -- before it's over.
Fuck your feelings, indeed. How's that working out? Hope it was worth it for them.
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