He is Rizz

Seeing a lot of headshaking over the President's Easter message,  which gives up the traditional "Happy Easter, even to the haters and lunatics" in favor of what I suppose he considers the true Churchillian leader-at-war tone and doesn't mention the holiest day of the Christian year at all:

It does look like decompensation in the personality disorder, like a complete loss of self-control, or at least an acceleration. I don't think he's introduced "fuck" into his written public communications before (though he's certainly been uttering it in rallies as far back as 2022, not to mention performing a mime blow job at a rally days before the 2024 election, which did not wreck his chances of winning), and Laura Loomer is going to wonder what he means by offering praise to Allah, and the 25th Amendment talk is certainly getting louder out here where you and I hang out, but I'd note that Vice President Vance and Speaker Johnson, the central figures in an invocation of the 25th, aren't listening to us, or as far as I can tell to Trump either (you can be sure if Johnson is asked what he thinks of this particular Truth, he'll say he hasn't had time to look at it, presumably because he's so busy preventing government from functioning).

But there are a couple of signs that the performance is more calculated than crazy.

One is the TACO maneuver hidden inside it: that 48-hour deadline is a 24-hour step back from the 48-hour deadline he issued on Saturday, if I'm reading that Truth right

“Remember when I gave Iran ten days to MAKE A DEAL or OPEN UP THE HORMUZ STRAIT. Time is running out - 48 hours before all Hell will reign down on them. Glory be to GOD!,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform. (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty)

(And Hell shall reign forever and ever! Hallelujah! How Eastery was that?!) 

Though it's impossible to figure where exactly that 10 days would have started, and the tell-tale "two to three weeks" surely meant, as usual, that he had no idea himself:

Trump on March 21 originally gave Tehran a 48-hour deadline, but then extended it, saying he wanted to give talks a chance to succeed.

Iran has rejected a 15-point US plan presented to it through Pakistani mediators but on April 4 left open the possibility of further negotiations.

In an April 1 televised address, Trump also suggested peace talks -- either directly or indirectly -- were still possible, but he also threatened to bomb Iran "back to the stone ages" and "hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks."

Then, though he certainly sounds a bit linguistically wilder than yesterday, with the Hormuz Strait becoming the "Fuckin' Strait" and the crusader's Glory to GOD turning into I don't know whose praise to Allah (our own M. de Norpois, NYT's David Sanger, says the language is "unusually vivid"), he may be using a technique he's used since Roy Cohn days, reacting to a public setback by not retreating but doubling down; here, I think, confronting the anger his war has caused among the Known Nothing Buchananites of his base, like Marjorie Taylor Greene with an appeal to the more important part, the nihilist bros who love him because he's a comedian, the podcast audience, the Beavises and Butt-Heads who really pulled him across the finish line in the battleground states in 2016 and 2024, though not in the plague year 2020. Those dudes are going to love "Fuckin' Strait".

I don't know that it will make the difference, though—I kind of think it won't, all things considered, between the gas prices and the advent of what looks like a real war, on its way to becoming either a quagmire or an ignominious US defeat as the Fuckin' Strait remains closed or a toll road where everybody ponies up the toll, from Japan to the Gulf states (whose natural gas US needs right now desperately for fertilizing the spring planting, though our own natural gas is sufficient most of the year), plus the stink of corruption everyone is starting to become aware with associated with the abusive management in DHS and DOJ. Trump can fire all the clowns in the cabinet from Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard to Kash Patel, but he can't stop the rot until he fires himself and the multibillion-dollar presidenting business in which his major clients, Saudi Arabia and UAE, call the shots alongside Putin and Netanyahu. We'll see what happens, as the man says, in two or three weeks, but I think he's lost the chance, as he did in 2020, to win his base back with rhetoric alone..

The Opposite of Iraq

That was pretty interesting, rhetorically speaking, from Secretary of War (as you know, the title is his idea, not mine) Hegseth in yesterday morning's presser, the first official comment on the war they started on Saturday:  

To the media outlets and political left screaming, "Endless wars." Stop. This is not Iraq. This is not endless. I was there for both. Our generation knows better, and so does this president. He called the last 20 years of nation building wars dumb, and he's right. This is the opposite. This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission. Destroy the missile threat, destroy the Navy, no nukes.

One of the interesting things is that, two months ago, he said basically the same thing about the war on Venezuela, that it was the "exact opposite" of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I take that to mean that it's not a nation-building exercise but a nation-destroying exercise, and not "endless" because the intention was to walk away as soon as it was destroyed enough, except for the oil. Kind of like a Trump casino, where the Emperor always takes some money away from the catastrophe for himself. 

That's what happened in Venezuela, and it looks like what they're hoping for in Iran as well. Certainly Trump was planning to name a new Supreme Leader after the old one was assassinated, somebody from the existing Islamic Republic hierarchy, just as he named Venezuela's new president from the Bolivarian Socialist Party instead of looking to the opposition there, but Israeli bombs killed all the candidates, so that will be harder to do:

 Seems weird to be the one to name the replacement dictator (they were hoping to pick one from the more "pragmatic" faction of the IRGC) at the same time as you're urging the population to revolt against the dictatorship, like he's expecting to be on both sides of the civil war he's trying to start, but perhaps Binyamin Netanyahu, if that's really who's giving Trump his orders, along with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (in private calls with Trump, though he's publicly against the war), doesn't think Trump or his writers need to know how civil wars work. 

Government of Carelessness

 

So we may be on the brink of fighting our second war with Iran in eight months. Or maybe not, who can say? "We'll see what happens," as the commander-in-chief always says. I think he generally means he'll see it on TV and he won't be sure until then, and find out what his decision was at the same time as the rest of us do.

I mean this more or less literally: that his more gnomic utterances, especially the social media posts when he writes them himself, should be understood as oracular, like the words of a Sibyl, possibly drug-induced, but in need of interpretation. They represent Trump's hopes, the thing he wants done, but in a way that can't be understood directly, and that indeed he can't understand himself. His lieutenants have to divine it for him, and put it into action, and then he'll know.

In a way that's not even particularly weird. It's really nothing more than the familiar figure of the psychopath CEO, like Dilbert's boss in the old comic strip when it was good (may its memory be a blessing!). It's not so hard to interpret what he's saying if you just remember that (a) it has a context, and (b) he's a psychopath. 

There was a delicious example in yesterday's news, with the melodramatic AI image of the US hospital ship being sent posthaste to rescue all the suffering Greenlanders from their ailments (Greenland runs its extremely good single-payer healthcare on Danish lines with Danish assistance, of course). WTH was that about?

I Know Everything

 

Drawing by Patrick Chappatte/Globecartoon.com, Switzerland/CagleCartoons.com 2018, via Washington Post.

David Rothkopf may be the most respectable person coming out to say this, and he says it well:

as much as we may condemn the actions of the regime in the Islamic Republic and feel its government is a threat to the stability of the region, Israel started this war. Furthermore, Israel started it not for the reason it gave—the imminent threat posed by the Iranian nuclear program. That threat has existed for many years and U.S. intelligence did not feel Iran had made any notable new strides recently. Rather, Netanyahu decided to strike for three reasons. 1.) He remains in political jeopardy and war has proven an effective means of helping him to stay in power. 2.) Rather than fearing an Iranian breakthrough on nukes, he feared one on a potential nuclear deal. He opposed the one negotiated under Obama. He goaded Trump into abandoning it. And he was deeply troubled that Trump was now advocating re-entering just such an agreement. 3.) He has made the conflict between Israel and Iran a centerpiece of his politics throughout his career. He is Ahab. It is his Great White Whale.

Of which point (1) is the most obvious to me, as you might expect, and the most offensive to the respectable, because of the moral implications that that is the kind of person the Israeli prime minister is, OK with killing a substantial number of human beings (something like 600 in Iran as of yesterday, including at least 239 civilians, and 24 in Israel, under Iran's retaliatory strikes, which seem to have been more effective than usual), as the price of office, and escaping prison in his corruption cases. That's exactly how I've seen him, though, for the last 18 months of slaughtering Gazan civilians (something like 50,000 at this point) and abandoning the kidnap victims from Israel still held in Gaza, so I'm not especially shocked.

Point (2), on the possibility of a US deal reviving the 2015 JCPOA or something like it, in which Iran would stop enriching uranium in return for some sanctions relief, hasn't been taken very seriously by the punditry at large, though newspapers loyally reported the five rounds of talks between the two countries in April and May, of which the last, held May 23 in Rome, was described by the Americans as "constructive—we made further progress" and by the Iranians as "one of the most professional rounds of negotiation," though they held out little hope of an agreement any time soon. 

Three Things They're Not Talking About

It's horrible, of course, horrible for everybody, for the families of the murdered young people at the Negev rave, itself so close to Gaza, and the hostages taken into Gaza and their families, and the Israeli soldiers in the besieged army posts (which I guess are by now liberated, but some of the soldiers are themselves in Gaza, kidnapped), and the civilians of Gaza whose lives are already so terrible and who are now formally under siege, deprived of fuel and water, and about to be massively invaded by one of the most powerful armies in the world—not especially them, except to the extent that they might be ignored or blamed in a way that people in Israel are not, but you know what I mean.

The former Palestine Tower in Gaza City, targeted by Israeli warplanes yesterday. Photo by  IEFE/EPA/Mohammed Saber. 

There's a vital point in the New Yorker interview by Isaac Chotiner of Nathan Thrall, former director of the International Crisis Group's Arab-Israeli Project, that I don't think I've seen elsewhere: that the shocking Hamas Organization attacks on Israel over the past two days are suicidal;

It is an attack of unprecedented scope, and Israel will retaliate to a greater degree than it has before, potentially leading to outcomes we haven’t seen before: not just a simple razing of Gaza by airplanes but also a ground incursion and potential reoccupation of parts of Gaza. So the decision to wittingly, knowingly, undertake this comes from a sense that there are no other options and that there’s nothing left to lose. And part of the reason that Hamas, and Palestinians in general, feel that they’re in such a desperate situation is that they have been entirely abandoned by those who should be their allies: the Arab states.

I was thinking about that too. as the first reports came out, of the Hamas fighters scaling the Wall (the one Trump has often celebrated as an inspiration for his own imaginary wall), breaking out on bicycles and hang gliders and motor scooters and trying to occupy IDF installations on the other side of the fence—these guys were begging to be killed!—until we all got distracted by the extraordinary failure of the Israeli intelligence, which was even more shocking, at least for the moment.

Flooding the Zone

 

Via ZDNet.

I'm going to be really skeptical in all directions about the report on Iranian interference in the election from our notoriously unqualified Director of National Intelligence, ex-Congressman John Ratcliffe, who got Trump's attention in 2017-18 alongside Devin Nunes as the two of them worked to turn the House Intelligence Committee into an adjunct of the Trump campaign, was criticized for not coming close to meeting the statutory requirements for the job

50 US Code § 3023, “Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.”

and lying about it in the most ridiculous way

Douthat and the only-two-countries-in-the-world model of Grand Strategy

Mahjong tiles revealing that China has words for "north", "east", "south", and "west".

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, takes his Grand Strategy chops out for a spin ("The Chinese Decade"):

richer-but-not-freer China proved that it was possible for an authoritarian power to tame the internet, to make its citizens hardworking capitalists without granting them substantial political freedoms, to buy allies across the developing world, and to establish beachheads of influence — in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, American academia, the NBA, Washington, D.C. — in the power centers of its superpower rival....

So China has won twice over: First rising with the active collaboration of naïve American centrists, and then consolidating its gains with the de facto collaboration of a feckless American populist. Four months into the coronavirus era, Xi Jinping’s government is throttling Hong Kong, taking tiny bites out of India, saber-rattling with its other neighbors, and perpetrating a near-genocide in its Muslim West. Meanwhile America is rudderless and leaderless, consumed by protests and elite psychodrama and a moral crusade whose zeal seems turned entirely inward, with no time to spare for a rival power’s crimes.

Furthermore, Trump’s likely successor is a figure whose record and instincts and family connections all belong to the recent period of American illusions about China. 

One of those naïve American centrists, he means, Joe Biden, and of course sneaking in the reference to the familiar smear for the cognoscenti, because that's how Ross rolls—Biden's "family connections" meaning the bogus story from Peter Schweitzer's fabrication factory according to which Hunter Biden took some kind of illicit profit from associations with the Chinese government (I dealt with it briefly here in the form of a Radio Yerevan joke).

The Persian Wars

Screen capture from The Persian Wars, via Ancient History Lover/YouTube.

OK so that was a pretty exciting war that had us glued to the TV last night, but it clearly didn't change the basic outcome, that Iran had already won on 3 January, with the US killing of two Iranians, Qassem Soleimani and one other whose name I'm not finding, and five members of Iraq's Popular Mobilization Forces including deputy commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis and his son-in-law Mohammed Reza al-Jaberi, the group's public relations officer: with that, the casualty list included

• Iran: 1 American dead and no Iraqis (per latest report)
• US: 2 Iranians dead, 27 Iraqis

Also

Iran informed Iraqi leadership about an attack on their country. The US did not inform them or Congress but several guess at Mar-a-lago were informed about it https://t.co/ONok5TkoZu

— President “I Caught the Swamp, I Caught Them All” (@realworldrj) January 8, 2020

It's attention to these details that makes Iran the winner.

Hey la hey la my Friedman's back

Opinion

Trump Offs Iran’s Most Pathetic  Statesman- Terrorist

Suleimani thought he was an empire builder, but turned out to be a grave digger instead, and it was his own grave, har har.

By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

• Jan. 3, 2020

“Suck on this,” said Abubakr, passing me a Wadi al Taym nightshade reefer in the cold hills outside Beirut, but I had a deadline to meet, maybe the deadline I'd been waiting a lifetime for, to comment on, to illuminate, to swoon over the process that will lead one day to the renaming of Azadi Square in Tehran as Donald Square, as God is my witness.

West of Eden: The War is Over, You Read It Here First

Baghdad, Saturday, funeral procession for the Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, killed in the same bombing as the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, Photo by Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images via Axios.

Starting to feel a lot calmer about the prospects of a US-Iran was to be fought on Iraqi soil, or anyplace else, not least thanks to Donald's belligerent tweets on the subject, offering some new light on what he might think of the distinction between "warning" and "threat" but otherwise displaying pure impotence:

....hundreds of Iranian protesters. He was already attacking our Embassy, and preparing for additional hits in other locations. Iran has been nothing but problems for many years. Let this serve as a WARNING that if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets, we have.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2020

....targeted 52 Iranian sites (representing the 52 American hostages taken by Iran many years ago), some at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD. The USA wants no more threats!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 4, 2020

Sure, Jan. Who exactly has targeted how many sites over the New Year holiday, and how did they come up with that interestingly symbolic number?

For the Record: Soleimani

Tomb of the great 14th-century poet Hafez in the city of Shiraz, famous until the Islamic Revolution for its wine. Photo by Ondřej Žváček, via Wikipedia.

It may not look as if my plan for Trump not to start a war with Iran is working out so far. I'm not so sure what I want to say about it, but there are a bunch of kind of short-breathed ideas I can pass on.

The first thing I thought of that other people didn't seem to be thinking about was the market movement that followed the killing of Qassem Soleimani:

Bet somebody who knows somebody did a big short today https://t.co/TYFsc53ZAD

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 3, 2020

More plausibly a group. Profits on some of these lurches (usually Trump talking the market up) can mount up toward $2 billion https://t.co/rLdmODxA75

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 3, 2020

So what did they tell their brokers? whoever went long on oil futures made a nice little bundle. https://t.co/IL1h1qHce5

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 4, 2020

And then I was answering questions:

Literary Corner: Threats

Q: How can you tell whether Trump is at a church service or partying with Jeffrey Epstein? A: He doesn't bite his lower lip in church.

New Year Greeting

by Donald J. Trump

The U.S. Embassy in Iraq is,
& has been for hours, SAFE!
Many of our great Warfighters,
together with the most lethal
military equipment in the world,
was immediately rushed to the site.
Thank you to the President &
Prime Minister of Iraq for their
rapid response upon request....

....Iran will be held fully responsible
for lives lost, or damage incurred,
at any of our facilities. They will pay
a very BIG PRICE! This is not a Warning,
it is a Threat. Happy New Year!

Isn't that great, not a Warning but a Threat? I wonder if Trump knows how the words are used in English.

Your close friend Jong-un is still laughing over how you threatened him with "fire and fury the likes of which the world has never seen" and ended up giving him everything he wanted with nothing in return for the US.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) January 1, 2020

He sure as hell misjudged Lindsey-Woolsey

Funeral Monday for five Syrian Democratic Forces fighters killed in battles against Turkish-led forces. Photo by Delil Souleiman/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, via The New York Times.

When I was trolling the trolls yesterday with my apocalyptic prediction

It's too late. It's going to take a lot more than that to stop a raging war and house 130,000 refugees (so far). What will happen presumably is Kurds make an accommodation with Assad regime-Iran-Russia now they know US cannot be trusted, Turkey will ally with Qaeda-ISIS.

— YASTAROTH DUKE OF HELL (@Yastreblyansky) October 13, 2019

I wasn't expected it to be fulfilled before nightfall (I mean nightfall in New York, not Syria), but that's what happened, more or less.

If you think you're getting away with this, Buster, you're making a big—

—error such as we all make from time to time, don't we, I mean after all who among us doesn't have to deal with a loose and stupid general? Or national security adviser with a mustache that looks like a goddamned exotic vacuum cleaner attachment, amirite?

Or, Donald Trump Became President Today, sometime between TV time at 7:15 in the morning

and noon or so, when he was on his way to lunch with Prime Minister Trudeau for the hour-and-a-half of his work day that wasn't devoted to executive time:

Second Time as Farce department

The Emperor is Displeased. From Warhammer 40,00, by Games Workshop, via.

Jordan asks, in comments:

Hey, anyone remember the days when the United States couldn't go to war without a congressional declaration?

My reply:

As far as I can tell they aren't exactly any more over than they were in 1964, and this should have been made a lot clearer in the news coverage. The issuing of "plans" doesn't mean anybody is expecting to do anything; just that the military is prepared to do this stupid thing should the "need" arise. The aircraft carrier was going there anyway.

What Bolton-Pompeo would really like is to ratchet up tension to the point where Iran forces will make some kind of actual attack on US interests which would allow US to start up some kind of "emergency" operation, and Congress would find it very hard to deny permission to the ongoing action. This won't in fact happen, I think, because Iran understands the danger very well and will continue to resist temptation. Except for the danger of an accident of some kind, which is certainly real (or of a fake attack, which would be a crazy risk for the fakers).

West of Eden: Listing Terrorists

Brian Hook, a State Department Iran policy adviser,  on NPR to propagandize for Trump's (or Prime Minister Netanyahu's, or Crown Prince Mohammad's, depending who you ask) decision to list the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a foreign terrorist organization, offered a list of terrorist things they're said to have been responsible for, including the 1983 bombing of the US Marine Barracks in Beirut, which killed 305 people including 241 US military,  the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 including four Israeli employees and 25 Argentines, the 1994 bombing of the Associación Mutual Israelita Argentina building in Buenos Aires, a local Jewish community center, killing 85, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 US Air Force personnel and a Saudi national, and detaining US citizens—

Wait, what? Not that I approve of these cruel and unlawful imprisonments, which include four or five people still jailed at the time of writing, but is it the IRGC that did it, as opposed to other organs of the Iranian government, and is it correctly described as terrorism?

T]he term 'terrorism' means premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents. (US Code, via Wikipedia)

“Calling for atheist thought in any form, or calling into question the fundamentals of the Islamic religion on which this country is based” and anyone who questions the King or the government or supports any group, party, organization other than that of the ruling elite inside or outside the Kingdom is a terrorist (Saudi Arabia, same source) 

Also, Trump's best friend Kim Jong-un runs a government that's holding US citizen Kim Dong-chul on bogus charges with a 10-year prison sentence, and Vladimir Putin's Russia has held Paul Whelan since December.

But if you leave it out, it looks like 22 years since the IRGC was involved in any terrorist acts, by the US State Department's count, which makes listing it as a terrorist organization now seem like some peculiar timing. Especially since it's election day in Israel, whose embattled prime minister (under threat of indictment for bribe-taking) jumped in to make sure voters understood it as an example of his pull in Washington, Trump's personal favor to him:

“Thank you, my dear friend, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, for having decided to designate Iran's Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization,” he wrote in Hebrew on Twitter on Monday. “Thank you for responding to another of my important requests, which serves the interests of our countries and countries of the region.”

Jameh Mosque, Isfahan, via.

Specific Chemical Materials

Is David Sanger of the New York Times playing a Michael Gordon/Judith Miller role in building up a case for hostility to Iran? Massive story in which Sanger shares a byline with the Yedioth Ahronoth analyst Ronen Bergman, reporting Israel's raid last January of an Iranian storage facility stealing documents from 2003, which Prime Minister Netanyahu himself reported last April as part of his personal effort to push Emperor Trump into abandoning the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran's nuclear activities, which paid off a few days later when Trump indeed left. The documents reveal that the Iran nuclear weapons program was more advanced in 2003 than somebody or other thought it was, though it's also clear that Iran totally dismantled it that year, as they claimed.

Why is The Times reporting it now, six months after the raid and three months after the news? Because the Israeli government invited them over for a junket, pumped up with thrilling detail about the bravura of Mossad in the break-in:

TEL AVIV — The Mossad agents moving in on a warehouse in a drab commercial district of Tehran knew exactly how much time they had to disable the alarms, break through two doors, cut through dozens of giant safes and get out of the city with a half-ton of secret materials: six hours and 29 minutes.

The morning shift of Iranian guards would arrive around 7 a.m., a year of surveillance of the warehouse by the Israeli spy agency had revealed, and the agents were under orders to leave before 5 a.m. to have enough time to escape. Once the Iranian custodians arrived, it would be instantly clear that someone had stolen much of the country’s clandestine nuclear archive, documenting years of work on atomic weapons, warhead designs and production plans.

The agents arrived that night, Jan. 31, with torches that burned at least 3,600 degrees, hot enough, as they knew from intelligence collected during the planning of the operation, to cut through the 32 Iranian-made safes. But they left many untouched, going first for the ones containing the black binders, which contained the most critical designs.

Would you like spies with that?

Kilauea eruption, 1983, via Hawaii Volcano Expeditions (When I write about Greenwald, as I haven't done in a while. I like to illustrate it with volcano pix in tribute to the special qualities of his prose).

An odd thing in relation to the scandal du jour over the weekend, and the revelation that the FBI had asked an academic in England to try to worm some information out of both George Papadopoulos and Carter Pageon their knowledge of the conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian state (and, as it later turned out, Michael Flynn as well, though that was possibly just in 2014, and Papadopoulos's and Page's boss in the campaign, Sam Clovis, who talked to him about relations with China), or as Donald Trump put it, sounding more and more hysterical every day, put it,

Reports are there was indeed at least one FBI representative implanted, for political purposes, into my campaign for president. It took place very early on, and long before the phony Russia Hoax became a “hot” Fake News story. If true - all time biggest political scandal!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 18, 2018

Yipes! Though I didn't see any reason why they shouldn't have had an embedded informant in the heart of this criminal conspiracy, as they might inside a mafia family, there was no reason to supposed that they did in fact have one. As we soon learned (apparently The Daily Caller was the first to report it), what they had was Stefan Halper, a veteran of Republican administrations who has been for some time a Fellow of Magdalen College and was director of Cambridge's American Studies program, who enticed Papadopoulos to talk by commissioning a bona fide research paper from him and engaged him over dinner and drinks and apparently failed to get him to talk about the tens of thousands of incriminating Hillary emails; and had what Page described as "benign interactions" with that person.

Republicans, of course, decided to go with the Deep State Infiltrates Spy Into Trump Campaign line, where they were joined by our old friend Glenn Greenwald, as I learned from LGM, has been at work reinforcing that in The Intercept, demonstrating how especially sinister Stefan Halper is, with the allegation that he

It takes a thief

Green-headed tree agama, via San Diego Zoo.

David F. Brooks finally starting to give in to his inner sycophant, as he contemplates Donald Trump's and Michael Cohen's histories with organized crime. Maybe it's a feature-not-a bug! At least from the foreign policy perspective ("Donald Trump's Lizard Wisdom"):

I can’t help but wonder if that kind of background has provided a decent education for dealing with the sort of hopped-up mobsters running parts of the world today. There is growing reason to believe that Donald Trump understands the thug mind a whole lot better than the people who attended our prestigious Foreign Service academies.

"Hopped-up" (1920s slang for "maniacal in a drug-induced kind of way") makes it art.

The Brooks hypothesis is that just as it takes a thief to catch a thief, so it takes somebody who's practiced on Fat Tony Salerno to equip a chap to deal with Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Trumpian triumphs of recent weeks demonstrate that. Not that Brooks is advocating the Trump doctrine!

Please don’t take this as an endorsement of the Trump foreign policy. I’d feel a lot better if Trump showed some awareness of the complexity of the systems he’s disrupting, and the possibly cataclysmic unintended consequences. But there is some lizard wisdom here.

It's just the Douthat electric slide: "I'm not saying, I'm just saying."

I think there may be a couple of flaws in this argument, one being that none of these eggs are actually chickens at present, as in the North Korea case:

West of Eden: Deal Away

Chahar Bagh School, or School of Sultan Hossein's Mother, Isfahan, 19th-century drawing by Pascal Coste, via Wikipedia.

Money quote, for my money, from the press questions after Trump's announcement:

REPORTER: Mr. President, how does this make America safer? How does this make America safer?

TRUMP: Thank you very much. This will make America much safer. Thank you very much.

Oh, that's how. In a much kind of way. Not somewhat or a bit. It's the muchness, stupid.

I didn't listen to the speech, but the way folks were describing his delivery (somebody on Twitter said he was "reading it phonetically") made it sound clear that he'd spent even less time reading it ahead of time than he normally does, which means around zero, and had no idea what it said. Though you can see a dim understanding floating by in a couple of Trumpy interpolations, like

In other words, at the point when the United States had maximum leverage, this disastrous deal gave this regime — and it’s a regime of great terror — many billions of dollars, some of it in actual cash — a great embarrassment to me as a citizen and to all citizens of the United States.

the reference to $1.7 billion as "many billions" and "actual cash" as if there were something particular sinister about that (cash was important to them as it would take some time for international banks to lift the sanctions), or his cute attempt to put himself in Ayatollah Khamenei's place—