It's the stupidity, stupid

Political strategist James Carville famously coined "It's the economy, stupid" as the slogan for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign. For the current administration, it seems that slogan has nutated into "It's the stupidity, stupid".

Look, I don't mean to make Trump supporters mad, or even to make them feel sad. It's just that it's not possible to assess Trump's presidency, in either term, without picking up on instances of stupid behavior and stupid decision-making. And before you protest that every president does stupid things (which is true), it's the depth of the stupidity in Trump's case that is so troubling.

The latest and most egregiously stupid act on Trump's part was his commencement of war on Iran. How do I know this? Because to this day, nearly two weeks after the ordnance started flying, the administration still hasn't settled on one solid explanation for why we attacked. If you're a Trump supporter, tally up what you've heard.

Iran was a week away from a nuclear weapon! (I thought last year's Trump-ordered missile strikes eliminated their program, per Trump's own boasting.)

Iran was planning to attack us! (Haven't gotten any proof of that, and neither have the members of Congress who've been given classified briefings by administration officials.)

The ayatollah and his regime are terrible people who massacred thousands of their own people! (True enough, but oppressive leaders who massacre lots of their own people are, lamentably, not rare. Why now, and why Iran?)

Israel forced our hand! (Really? Really? You're tellig us that Benjamin Netanyahu can play the current administration like a cheap fiddle?)

Given all the above lame (indeed, quadriplegic) excuses for sending U.S. troops into harm's way, I really shouldn't be surprised that this same president and administration were left dumbstruck that Iran responded with, among other things, a blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. Per an Atlantic piece by Phillips Payson O’Brien:

Astonishingly, President Trump and his aides were caught unprepared when Iran, under air assault from the United States and Israel, retaliated by targeting shipping in the Persian Gulf region and specifically through the Strait of Hormuz. Military planners have pointed out for decades that the waterway—through which one-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas passes—is highly vulnerable to Iranian assault. But the Trump administration acknowledged in classified briefings, CNN reported last night, that it did not make provisions for a closure because officials assumed that such a move would hurt Iran more than the United States.

In its failure to anticipate Iran’s reaction, the administration ignored a dynamic that former Defense Secretary James Mattis, a first-term Trump appointee, was fond of pointing out: Once hostilities begin, “the enemy gets a vote.” U.S. leaders have drastically underestimated the Iranian regime’s ability to survive, adjust, and strike back. Just two weeks into a war that began at a time of the president’s choosing, the U.S. appears uncertain about what to do next.

This administration's M.O. has been on display since Day 1. It is transparently impatient with what it considers dithering, which includes the kind of careful, deliberative approach that most administrations took when contemplating big decisions and big actions, including — especially — those requiring military action.

Maybe crying, "Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead!" is exhilarating for Hegseth, and for Trump. Maybe it's exhilarating for you. But if you're so cavalier about the lives of our soldiers, you have no goddamned business being anywhere near the chain of command.

Not planning for a totally foreseeable bad outcome is unbelievably stupid. Yet that's exactly what this unbelievably arrogant administration did, led by its unbelievably arrogant president. What's worse is that this administration will neither recognize nor feel shame for its stupidity, because the president is without empathy or humility and he will not permit his toadies/accomplices to express either of those things: he considers them weaknesses.

The depth of this administration's grotesque stupidity in attacking Iran is beyond obvious. So here's the real question: if you deny that stupidity, how long can you keep your better judgment at bay? How long can you contort yourself into a pretzel to justify what cannot be justified, to excuse what cannot be excused?

The game hasn't changed

Gregory Bovino, the bullying CBP turd who led the grotesque assault on Minneapolis, has been sent packing. He'll now spend his remaining days trying to intimidate people at California's border with Mexico. (Sorry to the folks in southern CA.) Mango Mussolini's "border czar", Tom Homan, is taking Bovino's place.

Some have cheered this change, and on one level I can see why: Bovino has behaved like a villain in a C-grade movie, designed to piss off the audience enough that the otherwise uninteresting hero looks good by comparison.

The trouble — besides the fact that this isn't a movie — is that this change is purely cosmetic. The starting quarterback has been sent to the showers and the cheerleaders, like Kristi Noem, have been muzzled (for now), but the coach, Stephen Miller, and the owner, our domestic Dear Leader, haven't changed the game plan. They still want to rule with impunity and without being challenged, even rhetorically.

And Bovino might have been in charge of the occupying force, but he didn't personally and singlehandedly brutalize or kill people in Minneapolis, or anywhere else. No, he had thousands of federal goons to do the dirty work alongside him.

Those goons remain in Minneapolis. Other goons are in Maine, and Memphis, and in dozens or hundreds of other locations. Most of them are as poorly trained and badly supervised as those in Minneapolis.

Exactly one of the main players in this brutal campaign has departed. The rest stand ready to resume it as soon as the heat dies down. And by "heat", I mean the public uneasiness of Congressional Repubicans, who detest having to answer questions about blood shed by Trump's brownshirts.

So we need to keep the heat on those Republicans, by continuing to publicize the sickening, indefensible abuses by this lawless administration's shock troops. We need to awaken everyone who's sleeping through current events. We need to arouse the dormant consciences of Mango Mussolini's supporters, or at least those whose hearts haven't shriveled.

It's not over. It has barely begun.

The Reiners and Trump

Rob and Michele Reiner's murders are a tragedy, and worse, apparently a family tragedy. I feel awful for the couple's loved ones and send my sympathies as they grieve.

I won't rehash our domestic Dear Leader's remarks about Rob Reiner's murder because if you give a damn you've already heard about them or seen them for yourself. (If you don't give a damn, you can stop reading.)

Trump's remarks are totally in keeping with my estimation of his character. As such, they didn't surprise me, or not much, anyway. In the interest of doing my bit to reclaim our country's soul, however, I have to speak up about them.

Death, particularly violent death, shouldn't be fodder for politics.

Need I remind Trump supporters of how angry they were when Charlie Kirk was murdered? People who voiced their dislike of Kirk behaved insensitively in the moment; those who celebrated his death were grossly out of line. Trump supporters' outrage at such people might have stemmed in part from a sense that their side had lost an effective voice, but it also came out of a genuine sense of grief.

If you wanted people who disliked Kirk just to shut up in the immediate aftermath of his killing, remember that others feel the same way about the Reiners. And if you have the grace not to air whatever unsympathetic thoughts you have about them right now, thank you. But could you go one step further, and tell Trump that you would like him to do the same?

To tell Trump that he was out of line isn't a betrayal of him: it's an affirmation of your own soul.

To the scolding "Justices"

A lower-court judge apologized to the (self-described) conservative "Justices" Gorsuch and Kavanaugh after they "suggested that Judge Young subverted the court’s will by failing to apply an earlier emergency order".

Judge Young said on Tuesday that he had not realized he was expected to rely on a slim three-page order issued with minimal legal reasoning in April to his case dealing with a different agency.

If you'd been in Judge William G. Young's robes, you might have "erred" in the same way he did. Why? Because those rebuking "Justices" and their colleagues in the majority didn't explain themselves.

Since the beginning of President Trump’s second term, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has sided with [the] White House in nearly every case it has considered.

But it has done so relatively opaquely through more than a dozen emergency orders — unsigned opinions issued relatively quickly and without oral argument.

Unsigned orders without explanations are no damned help to lower courts when it comes time to puzzle through the Supremes' supposed intentions. Does what the Court's majority hastily "decided" about apples apply to oranges? How the hell should anybody outside the chambers know?

Neil, Brett — we need to speak plainly: may I call you by your first names? — fuck your high dudgeon.

You and your radical brethren (and your occasional sister-in-arms, Amy Coney Barrett) may be in a position to demand the obedience of your fellow robe-wearers, but you have forfeited any right to the respect of the millions of Americans who see through your pretense.

You posture as solons of the Constitution, but you have twisted its plain meaning, and that of many laws, to let an autocrat in the making steamroll over the legal safeguards the people established to prevent autocracy. You are nothing more, nor less, than dictator-enablers. You are fundamentally anti-democratic in your mindset, and as such, you have betrayed your oath to the Constitution you pretend to uphold.

What derailed you and your likeminded colleagues from what I assume was an initial commitment to justice, I don't know. What I do know is, you are on a course that millions of your fellow Americans will neither forgive nor forget.

If you have a shred of decency left, you will step out of your (echo) chambers and look at how the rest of the country sees you and your works.

If you have a heart, you will feel shame. That's okay; in fact, that's absolutely necessary. Only if you truly recognize the magnitude of your mistakes (and their consequences for others) will you find the resolve to fight until you've corrected them.

Is this what makes us great?

Stephen Marche in The Atlantic has disquieting thoughts about "Canada's Terrible New Freedom" [paywalled, sorry].

The United States is declining into authoritarianism and threatening Canada’s sovereignty. How can Canada ensure that its political, military, and economic institutions survive?

The threat is not abstract, and is already manifesting itself in more than words.

... Canada is increasing its defense spending and re-arming with Europe, not America. Trump didn’t give us much choice. In March, he announced the next generation of American fighter jets, which Canada has long purchased, by noting that he would sell an inferior version to other countries: “We like to tone them down about 10 percent, which probably makes sense because someday maybe they’re not our allies, right?” The idea that the American military would turn against Canada once seemed absurd. But the absurd has become almost predictable at this point. If the U.S. Marines are coming for American citizens, surely they could come for Canada too.

I always took a measure of pride in knowing that, whatever reservations our international friends might have about our pop culture, our customs, or our arrogance, they recognized that our hearts ultimately were in the right place.

I can no longer take such pride. The heart of the United States now is brutal, selfish, suspicious, and spiteful — which is to say, it's the spitting image of our domestic Dear Leader's.

If you're a citizen of the U.S., does our national change of heart fill you with pride? Do you think that change of heart has made our country great?

Then you have taken Trump's warped values into your own heart. I'm sorry for that because ultimately, they will leave you as embittered, as spiteful, as spiritually empty, and as unloved as he is. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. I wouldn't even wish it on Trump, but it's too late for him. I hope it's not too late for you.

Current U.S. foreign policy reflects and embodies our domestic Dear Leader's pathologies. (So does the country's domestic policy, for that matter.) I'm deeply ashamed of that. None of the United States' traditional allies deserves the chaos and malice aforethought emanating from Washington, D.C. these days. Certainly Canada, of all places, has merited and continues to merit our steadfast friendship.

I hope I live long enough to see that friendship, and many others, reestablished. Until then, great is one thing we won't be.

SCOTUS betrays us again

The right-wing so-called "Justices" of the U.S. Supreme Court has let Elon Musk's DOGE marauders access the highly sensitive personal information held by the Social Security Administration.

The order, which lifts a preliminary injunction wisely granted by a district court (an injunction upheld by a divided Fourth Circuit), was unsigned but noted that Justices Kagan, Jackson, and Sotomayor did not join the majority. Indeed, the bulk of the text of the order is devoted to their objections; the actual reasons for the majority's decision are entirely absent.

This is not a formal decision of the Court: no trial has even occurred. However, you'd think that a Court majority that gave a shit about its own legitimacy in the public's eyes would have explained why it was throwing caution to the wind and giving a bunch of arrogant, reckless, and totally unsupervised Elon Musk zealots unlimited access to our data.

Consider the Court's own summary of what goes into deciding whether to stay a preliminary injunciton. (So we're all on the same page, the "stay applicant" here is the Trump Administration.)

When considering whether to grant a stay, this Court looks to four factors: “(1) whether the stay applicant has made a strong showing that he is likely to succeed on the merits; (2) whether the applicant will be irreparably injured absent a stay; (3) whether issuance of the stay will substantially injure the other parties interested in the proceeding; and (4) where the public interest lies.” [citations omitted]

What makes the right-wing majority think the administration will succeed on the merits, in advance of a trial and in the absence of any evidence?

What irreparable injury will be inflicted if the DOGE pillagers have to wait a while? It's not like Social Security ion't working (setting aside, that is, the Trump Administration's own near-criminal mismanagement of it). Nor is the mission of DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, so urgent that it can't wait for a judge to review whether or not the administration's wrecking-ball approach to seeking "efficiency" actually passes legal and Constitutional muster.

Considering that "the other parties interested in the proceedings" include every damned citizen of the United States, not to mention lots of legal residents, staying the preliminary injunction — thus, again, permitting the lawless DOGE kids to access some of our most sensitive personal information — sure as hell will "substantially injure" the "other parties". The onus is on the SCOTUS right-wingers to say otherwise.

"Where the public interest lies" is in protecting our sensitive personal information from parties who have no damned business accessing it because they are in no legal jeopardy if they misuse their access. Again, the onus is on the SCOTUS right-wingers to explain why that's not the case.

But of course, those arrogant, dictator-friendly assholes in the right-wing majority on SCOTUS say nothing — literally not one word — to justify their aiding and abetting of Trump's autocratic power grab.

Why? Because they know no justification is possible — not if you believe in democracy and the rule of law, that is.

Which those arrogant, dictator-friendly assholes in the right-wing majority on SCOTUS emphatically do not.

To the regime's troops

Donald Trump, our domestic Dear Leader, is gutting the federal government without rhyme or reason. The one thing he can be counted on not to gut, though, are the security forces.

In the U.S. we're not accustomed to thinking in terms of "security forces". That term is reserved for other nations, covering the gamut of police, intelligence, and military personnel. In the U.S., when someone is arrested or federal property must be protected, we speak of the specific responsible agency: the FBI, the Park Service, ICE, etc.

However, those agencies and all the others operated by the federal government, like the CIA (which legally cannot operate domestically), the NSA, and the forces under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense, can be thought of as the "security forces" of the U.S. government — and right now, they all answer to our domestic Dear Leader. He can behave like the tinpot dictators he so adores because when literal push comes to literal shove, he can call on hundreds of thousands of members of the security forces to do the dirty work.

So I address myself to you members of those security forces, because you are in a difficult moral position.

I'm sure you tell yourselves that your job is to follow orders from your superiors. So long as you do that, you say to yourselves, you aren't morally or even legally responsible for your actions.

That only gets you so far, though.

Admittedly, you almost certainly don't have enough information to judge whether the person you're hustling into your SUV off a quiet street is actually a criminal, or even a threat. You assume your bosses — the whole chain of command, in fact — are acting in good faith.

However, you do have enough agency — that is, enough free will and moral responsibility — to judge how valid that assumption of your superiors' good faith is.

You don't live under a rock. Can you defend the deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, which even this administration admitted was an "administrative error"? Can you believe Trump's claim that his administration has no power to bring him back to the U.S., when this administration is paying El Salvador to hold prisoners there? Isn't it obvious that the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, would have Abrego Garcia back on a plane to the U.S. in a heartbeat if Trump asked?

Given that Trump lies so brazenly about his ability to get Abrego Garcia back to the U.S., how much confidence can you have that he acts in good faith about, well, anything? How confident can you be that Abrego Garcia is an isolated "error", that there aren't more innocent victims?

Remember, too, that Abrego Garcia has been ordered returned to the U.S. by the U.S. Supreme Court so he can be given due process, which neither he nor anyone else deported to that El Salvadoran prison has gotten. In leaving Abrego Garcia to rot in El Salvador, Trump is defying the Supreme Court.

If he doesn't consider himself bound by the orders of the Supreme Court, then what constrains him? "The law" doesn't constrain a ruler if he claims the right to say what the law is, which is what Trump has done.

How is he different from a dictator?

Your orders ultimately derive from Trump's wishes. How confident can you be that what you're doing is consistent with the actual law, much less with morality and true justice, when the man at the top no longer respects any of those things?

Trump has claimed power for himself that no man has ever claimed in this country's history, because claiming it would be unconstitutional.

You swore an oath to the Constitution, not to any one man. Whatever problems you hoped to alleviate by becoming a sworn peace officer or member of the military, can you in good conscience be part of a regime that no longer respects or abides by the Constitution?

A regime that tolerates no dissent and uses you to crush it?

A regime whose security forces, including you, abduct people off the street without identifying themselves?

A regime that uses you to deport legal residents without trial? (Those people wouldn't comply if they weren't being held at the point of your gun.)

Only you can decide whether this is a regime you can support.

Only you can decide whether you can do more good by resigning now, or by resisting from within for as long as the regime allows.

Only you can decide whether you will be able to look your children and grandchildren in the eye, and tell them that you fulfilled your Constitutional oath by following the orders of a man who betrayed his own, and know whether you're telling them the truth.

You cannot avoid making this decision every day you help to keep the regime in power.

If enough of you honor your oaths and your consciences, you can render a lawless, faithless president impotent to subvert the consitutional order further.

You are not solely responsible for restoring that constitutional order: we all have a part to play. But you will be singularly responsible if you help this lawless, faithless president to become a tyrant, ending our republic.