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?

TACO War

 

Photo from the wonderful collection "Paradise Lost" by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez (@adriana.loureiro on Instagram), an ongoing project documenting the collapse of Venezuela over the last 10 years, from the crash of basic services and the national economy to widespread violence and hunger, leading to a massive exodus.

Has anybody seen that war with Venezuela? I'm sure it was around here just a few days ago, and now I can't seem to find it anywhere. 

That is, I guess the USS Gerald R. Ford is still wandering around the Caribbean with its 90 aircraft and 4,600 sailors (BBC saw it parked in the US Virgin Islands on Thursday, 600 miles from the Venezuelan coast, and it seems to be spending most of its time with its six-ship strike group entourage right in that northeast Caribbean neighborhood, just south of Puerto Rico), and there have been planes getting closer and presumably gathering intelligence as recently as November 21. Trump "Truthed" a violent-sounding announcement on the 29th of November that the airspace around and over Venezuela should be considered "closed in its entirety"

but a couple of days later the US government was asking Venezuela's permission to send a plane there itself, repatriating a bunch of Venezuelan migrants presumably gathered for deportation by ICE, and Venezuela cheerfully approved the flight, as it has been doing for months now, in spite of the rumors of war. Flights crossing Venezuelan airspace are down around 50%, according to Reuters, but that's hardly "in its entirety". 

Wokey-dokey

I had to be reminded or in part informed (by Heather Cox Richardson) of a number of the cultural references in this "Truth" post: Trump's costume is that of Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore in Francis Coppola's 1979 film Apocalypse Now, played by Robert Duvall, the character who says, "I love the smell of napalm in the morning," and who leads a helicopter raid over the Vietnamese countryside to the sound of the prelude to Act III of Richard Wagner's Die Walküre (representing the flight through the skies of Wotan's warrior daughters, dashing over battlefields on their airborne horses, to gather the bodies of dead heroes for the afterlife in the Hall of Battles, Wallhall), evoked in the picture by the helicopters over the Chicago skyline; while the three helicopter emojis in the message are apparently used by a certain type of rightwinger to register approval of the Chilean dictatorship  of General Augusto Pinochet and its habit of dealing with dissidents by tossing them, from flying helicopters, into the sea. I don't know why it seems to have been shot somewhere miles away on Lake Michigan, from a boat that's violently on fire, leaving Trump-Kilgore in the position of the cartoon dog saying, "This is fine" when it clearly isn't.  

Dr. Google tells me that "Chipocalypse Now" is the title of an episode from the Disney animated series "Big City Greens", named not for Chicago but for the show's villain, Chip Whistler, a wicked capitalist who hopes to demolish the protagonists' apartment building and replace it with a giant supermarket, but I believe that's just a coincidence.

I'm reasonably confident I understand Trump's motive for changing the name of the department from Defense to War, as from a trope he might have inherited from his cranky rightwing father about the general decadence of the armed forces after they "lost" China, and subsequently North Korea and South Vietnam, to the Communists. Trump referred to it pretty explicitly (if confusingly, in his slippery "weave" style) when he was signing the executive order:

Belated Memorial Day

Philipse Manor War Memorial, Yonkers, New York, via.

David Brooks writes about the thing that made him angriest last week, something he says William F. Buckley, Jr. advised him to do when he first entered into punditry, but doesn't often get the chance, because it's so rare that anything makes him angry at all, but apparently he did this time ("The Trump World Idea That's Pushed Me Over the Edge"):

Last Monday afternoon, I was communing with my phone when I came across a Memorial Day essay that the Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen wrote back in 2009. In that essay, Deneen argued that soldiers aren’t motivated to risk their lives in combat by their ideals. He wrote, “They die not for abstractions — ideas, ideals, natural right, the American way of life, rights, or even their fellow citizens — so much as they are willing to brave all for the men and women of their unit.”

This may seem like a strange thing to get angry about. After all, fighting for your buddies is a noble thing to do. But Deneen is the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism, the popularizer of the closest thing the Trump administration has to a guiding philosophy. He’s a central figure in the national conservatism movement, the place where a lot of Trump acolytes cut their teeth.

I think we can assume "communing with my phone" means "googling desperately, having forgotten for the past three days that Memorial Day existed, for something I could hang a belated Memorial Day column on". I'm not sure what "the Lawrence Welk of postliberalism" is (postliberalism with accordions and a bubble machine metonymically representing Champagne?), but "postliberalism" is Brooks's current term for the bothsides thing that gets him sort of quietly irritated just now, not angry of course, the thing that JD Vance and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez do where they object to "neoliberalism", which seems in his view to be when they are pushing "populism", which seems to me (a non-bothsiderist) to refer to two quite different responses to income and wealth inequality, depending on whether you have ideas for doing something about that (as Ocasio-Cortez does) or not (like Vance) and thus different sides, but maybe that's just me.

Graveyard Scene

Screen capture from Trump's Tik Tok campaign video shot illegally in Arlington National Cemetery, via. Just for the record, I know you probably know this already, there were 45 combat deaths of US troops during Trump's presidential term, 18 "non-hostile" deaths, and no 18-month period during which there were no deaths at all. I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere, but there actually were about 18 months with no US deaths in Afghanistan after Trump signed the deal with the Taliban in February 2020, but Biden was the president for eight of those months. (This is a key reason why Biden honored the deal, because he knew if he didn't the Taliban would go back to attacking and killing Americans.)

On that story about the shoving match last week at Arlington National Cemetery, where a ceremony meant to honor the last Americans to die in the Afghan War, with presidential candidate Donald Trump as a guest, was marred by the behavior of members of Trump's gang entourage, who insisted on violating the rules (and the law) by filming the event, for what turned out to be a Trump campaign Tik Tok commercial, to the point of using violence against the official who tried to get them to stop (it's not clear exactly how, whether they pushed her to the ground or just punched her—the Trump team apparently has some video, but they don't seem at all eager to let it out)—there's an angle that hasn't been covered directly, which has to do with the mourners, family members of the American dead.

There were 13 Americans, 11 Marines and one man each from the Army and Navy,  killed on August 27 2021, among 180-some deaths altogether in a suicide bombing at the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, where desperate crowds were trying to get flights out of the country as the US forces packed up and left under the disorderly arrangements negotiated by the Trump administration the previous February, and the Taliban assumed control. The Americans were there, at least some of them, to help Afghan evacuees process their papers to get out. The attacker detonating the suicide belt was affiliated with the Taliban's enemies from Isis-K (the Islamic State in Khorasan), but it's not ruled out that panicked American troops killed some of the victims as well. It was a terrible mess.

What Did You Do in the War, Dad?

I won the war against Russian fascism last night, going to my first concert since 2019: brother-in-law's brother-in-law had tickets to the Vienna Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall and couldn't go, so he passed them to me, and I was feeling kind of funny about going, because the conductor was Valery Gergiev, longtime artistic director of the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, where he became friends with the then deputy mayor, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, in 1992, which has been pretty good for his career (he's been the third wealthiest Russian on the Forbes list of celebrities), but it hasn't been so good for his reputation internationally when he's appeared in Putin's campaign ads, denounced the members of the Pussy Riot group, or failed to address the Russian "gay propaganda" law of 2013 making it a crime to distribute "propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships", which has led to protests when he appears in New York, one of which I witnessed a while back (I felt like I was crossing a picket line), as well as dark questions about the relationship between art and power, as Alex Ross (whose account I am shamelessly stealing from here) told New Yorker readers in reference to a 2013 Gergiev performance of Dmitry Shostakovich's 8th symphony:

We have read many accounts of Shostakovich’s life under Stalin, his terror-stricken accommodations with the Soviet state. How should we react when this composer’s music is led by a conductor who has entered his own pact with authority, who has even spoken approvingly of the politics of fear? There is no clear answer to that question. We have all made our compromises with power; everywhere, the noblest artistic strivings are circumscribed by social conditions that make them look hypocritical and hollow. But the historical ironies surrounding Valery Gergiev are becoming uncomfortably intense.

Anyway, in the end, I got to go to the concert and Gergiev didn't get to conduct it. I should have known—it was reported in The Times on Thursday: Gergiev is canceled. 

Vienna dumped him for the orchestra's current US tour, he's losing gigs in Milan and perhaps Munich and Rotterdam, and last night he was replaced by the genial Canadian Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director of the Metropolitan Opera, while the very young Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho stepped in for the Russian Denis Matsuev (who has expressed support for the annexation of Crimea). It was a kind of schlocky program but one that goes beautifully with the famous warmth and richness of the Vienna band and the Carnegie acoustics, of the two most warhorsy of Rachmaninov's warhorses, the second piano concerto and second symphony, and it worked really really well.

It also started really late, I guess because we had to enter in single file in a line stretching almost around the block as everybody's vaccination status was verified, and it wasn't surprising at the end when Nézet-Séguin turned to the audience and said, "You want an encore? Come back tomorrow night!" It was a giddy, funny moment, and it honestly did feel like a feeling of victory for Ukraine, leaving us tired and a little punch-drunk but happy, as if we actually had been at a well-fought battle, against the grim forces trying to overwhelm us in this dark time.

Joe Did What? The Second Time Around

 

Imagery of a war scare.

Yesterday on NPR, when I was half asleep during an interview with the career diplomat John Herbst, who was ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006 and now runs the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center, I heard a reference to something like "the last time Russian troops surrounded Ukraine and an invasion seemed imminent, in April 2021,"  and I was kind of wait, what?

Because that's less than a year ago, and I don't remember anything about it, and almost nobody else does either, as far as I can tell, and I really don't think it was widely reported in the US. When I finally got around to looking it up, Dr. Google sent me, not to The New York Times or Washington Post, but the Natsional'nyy Instytut Strategichnykh Doslidzhen' (National Institute of Strategic Studies, and I'm not sure I'm transliterating it right) in Kiyiv, which has an excellent report on "The Russian and Ukrainian Spring 2021 War Scare", in English, that tells me more or less what I needed to know: In March 2021 Ukrainian intelligence were alarmed by an unusual concentration of Russian troops and hardware forming along the Russian-Ukrainian border, and at the end of the month the US European Command raised its alertness leve from "possible crisis" to "potential imminent crisis". 

War News

 

Pine forest near Klavdievo, Borodianka Raion, Kyiv Oblast, Ukraine. Photo by Aymayna Khikari via Wikimedia Commons.

Practically the same thing, in other words. US should have learned from Russia not to invade Afghanistan, no doubt. Russia should learn from US failures in Vietnam and Iraq not to invade Ukraine. It won't end well for them.

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 12, 2022

Literary Corner: Unpleasant

Ryan and Bill Owens, via NBC News.

The Endless Wars, So Bad

By Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America

These were the endless wars, so bad, so bad. I’d visit soldiers
at Walter Reed Hospital, where the doctors are truly fantastic
what they can do, but I’d see these young people that were just
blown to pieces, and it’s so sad. I’d be at Dover where these
magnificent machines would come in, the big cargo planes,
and that door would open up and there’d be a coffin in the back.
And the military, the soldiers, would take that coffin and walk it
off the plane. And I’d be with the parents an hour before and we’d
be talking, and I’d say to the general in-charge, “General,
the parents seemed to be okay,” and he’d say, “No, they’re not, sir.
They’re not okay.” I said, “General, I’m having a great conversation.”
And the mothers oftentimes would say, “Oh, my son was such a great
football player. Sir, he had an arm that was so powerful. He was
so strong and he could throw a ball so far. He was such a good player,”
or other things. They’d tell me these stories. They just were so in love
with telling the stories about their son or their daughter, in some cases,
their daughter. And then, I’d look at the general. I’d say, “Well,
it’s amazing the way they can handle it.” And then, the plane
would come in and the general would say, “Sir, it’s not going to
be good.” And that door would open up, that big back door, right,
would open up from this incredible, powerful machine that can lift up
Army tanks like it’s nothing. And it would open up, and there’d be one
or two or three or four coffins, and I’d see the same people that were
talking to me so jubilant about their child, how great the child was,
would start screaming, screaming. Screams like I’ve never heard before.

It was the most terrible thing to watch. And the general in charge would say,
“Sir, you’re going to see things that you maybe will not have seen.”
“Like what, General?” He said, “Mothers and wives, and even fathers sometimes,
breaking through the military ranks and jumping on top of the coffin.” And
I got to see that one time where a mother, she was devastated. She jumped
on, and these incredible, extremely fit soldiers are taking that coffin, 
and would jump onto the coffin, and they wouldn’t do a thing, they would
just keep walking. And the mother was on the coffin, and this is
for Afghanistan and for Iraq, and for these other places, where so
many mistakes were made, where we shouldn’t be, and we can’t do that.

Mustache of Radical Love

When Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, gets depressed (I think of it as getting back on his meds) he can get insightful: today, on the subject of the bizarre war between the Department of Homeland Security and the municipal government of Portland, Oregon ("Trump's Wag-the-Dog War"), though he's still pretty crazy:

Some presidents, when they get into trouble before an election, try to “wag the dog” by starting a war abroad. Donald Trump seems ready to wag the dog by starting a war at home. Be afraid — he just might get his wish.

Trump's told us all about how he hates endless foreign wars, but he's not opposed to domestic ones.

Listen to how Trump put it: “I’m going to do something — that, I can tell you. Because we’re not going to let New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Detroit and Baltimore and all of these — Oakland is a mess. We’re not going to let this happen in our country.”

These cities, Trump stressed, are “all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left. If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”

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).

Whaddaya know, I'm with Chomsky

Rebel-held Douma, May 2017, photo by ABD DOUMANY/AFP/Getty Images, via TheOdysseyOnline.

"Let's declare victory and go home." There was a lot of logic to that position in the Vietnam case, as had become clear to everybody by the time the Ford administration got around to it, about seven years too late for the victory-declaration part.

But what was really needed in that case was for the United States to lose the war, as did duly happen, and for somebody to win, namely the Communist Party of Vietnam and its armed wing, the People's Army, which was fully prepared to take power, though its rule would be harsh for the first decades, and a lot of people wouldn't be able to live with it—there was also a broad willingness in the US to take on refugees from Vietnam, which did a lot to alleviate that. It would have been much better if the US had lost a bit more definitively, and begun paying reparations as well, for the terrible environmental and economic damage it had brought about, but that did not happen. (Although the trade embargo ended under the Clinton presidency and economic cooperation became very lively under Obama.)

What I want to say is, when you make a violent assault on a country and recognize that it was the wrong thing to do, it's not enough to dust off your hands and walk away, "Oops, my bad." You need to do something about the horror you've created and to take some punishment. You need to give something back, preferably in a peaceful currency. If World War II was really "the good war", it was less on account of the wickedness of the enemies (nobody prevented the Rape of Nanjing or the Holocaust or gave Jewish refugees a home in North America) as much as the Marshall Plan in Europe and the Japan reconstruction initiatives, which truly did something to atone for the atrocities committed in turn by the Allies.

It would also have been a lot better if the US had definitively lost the war in Iraq, only in this case there wasn't anybody available to lose to—that is, I thought there was somebody (as I started saying four years ago), in the form of the populist-nationalist Shi'ite leader Moqtada al-Sadr, who was almost equally hostile to the US and Iran, and eager for collaboration with Sunni and actual-leftist factions, but I was alone in that view until lo these many years later, after his Sairun party won enough seats in the May elections to become an essential element in any ruling coalition, and some of the wise men started noticing him, like Michael D. Sullivan in Foreign Policy (a post slightly marred by Sullivan's insistent belief that he was just as right when he was anti-Sadr as he is now that he's pro):

Coup who?

Giraffe, Air Mountain, Niger via African Rock Art.

Masha Gessen's New Yorker article noting the resemblances between General John Kelly's speech style and the language of the military coup:

Before walking off the stage, Kelly told Americans who haven’t served in the military that he pities them. “We don’t look down upon those of you who haven’t served,” he said. “In fact, in a way we are a little bit sorry because you’ll have never have experienced the wonderful joy you get in your heart when you do the kinds of things our servicemen and women do—not for any other reason than that they love this country.”

You know who in particular that applies to, right? The guy with the heel spurs, from which he may still suffer, judging from the style in which he exercises, riding his little golf cart from fairway to hole to fairway, getting on foot only those 36 times to make his brief gestures with the clubs and then climbing back in. I'll never forget that golf cart ride he took in Taormina last spring while the rest of the G-7 leaders were walking uphill 700 yards to the town piazza (The Hill notes that he did join them on the way back down).

Why would General Kelly be publicly humiliating the president that way?

What was the point of that pantomime of limiting questions to reporters from "Gold Star families" or their friends—

Called on the carpet: The sociopathy of innocence

Flying Carpet, ceiling sculpture by Cai Guo-Qiang, Herford, Germany, 2005.

What is it about that concept of  "carpet bombing", actually? I mean I know, of course, it's a phrase that gives the GOP voter a boner, with its suggestion of total, all-covering, all-burying power, potency from above the supine victim, not to get all Freud about it, but why aren't they afraid of getting laughed at by the military folks? Quoting from the debate text:

CRUZ: What it means is using overwhelming air power to utterly and completely destroy ISIS. To put things in perspective, in the first Persian Gulf War, we launched roughly 1,100 air attacks a day. We carpet bombed them for 36 days, saturation bombing, after which our troops went in and in a day and a half mopped up what was left of the Iraqi army.

They did not, for one thing:

The Obama Doctrine

While all the emoprogs out there are running around howling about Obama the mass murderer, a story by NPR's Ari Shapiro suggests he thinks he's earning that Nobel Prize by a "shift in the way the U.S. wages war." This is what's signaled by the three big national security nominations of Kerry to State, Hagel to Defense, and Brennan to the CIA—two Vietnam vets and a crypto-Jesuit. In the less than happy phrasing of Karen Greenberg, director of the National Security Program at the Fordham University Law School,

"Remember, President Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize by saying war is necessary... He's somebody who understands, to his mind, what he sees as the need of war to create peace."

(I would say most people are people who understand, to their minds, what they see themselves as understanding, whether they indeed understand it or not, and whether the reader understands it or not too.)

Via Chitramala.

In any case, it's about the Drone Wars, and other such "targeted and surgical" operations, and the general End of Big War as We Know It. Obama really means it, as I have been speculating, as a way of making war less grievous and less cruel, and above all smaller:

The White House emphasizes that both Kerry and Hagel understand the full cost of war — in money and in lives. Obama says he believes that makes them the right men for this moment, as the administration shifts its approach following a decade of big, expensive, bloody wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As Tommy Vietor, a White House spokesman, puts it: "I don't think we can necessarily say without a doubt that there will never be a large war again. However, certainly we've moved conceptually toward a more targeted, surgical approach that focuses on al-Qaida."

The argument as I imagine it—certainly not the way Father Brennan would make it—is like this:

1. There's no such thing as a just war. No matter how unavoidable it may, after a certain point, have become, no matter how much in the right one side may be, it's always the result of a failure.

No, I don't know what could have been done short of war to stop Hitler and the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, or for that matter what the Pandavas could have done to avoid slaughtering the Kauravas, as Arjuna wished he might do when he paused, before the ultimate battle, for a conversation with his charioteer, who happened to be a god and could thus explain a good deal. All I claim to know is that it follows directly from the existence of a state of war that people are going to be doing things they know to be morally wrong, taking those Tough Decisions, committing unjustifiable homicide.

Soldiers (including sailors, marines, etc.; I do not use the phony-glorifying terms "warrior" and "warfighter") know this. Marine captain Timothy Kudo has recently written eloquently about it:

While I don’t know why individual veterans resort to suicide, I can say that the ethical damage of war may be worse than the physical injuries we sustain. To properly wage war, you have to recalibrate your moral compass. Once you return from the battlefield, it is difficult or impossible to repair it. 

VA has started calling this problem “moral injury,” but that’s as deceptive a euphemism as “collateral damage.” This isn’t the kind of injury you recover from with rest, physical therapy and pain medication. War makes us killers. We must confront this horror directly if we’re to be honest about the true costs of war.

2. Nothing can mitigate this—not grace and gallantry, not the wickedness of the enemy—except reducing it: seeing that fewer people get killed, in particular fewer of those that are not directly trying to kill you, or "civilians". And that's not good enough either, but it's all you can do. And it can take distinctly ungraceful and ungallant forms.

3. Drone warfare is very ungallant. In terms of traditional military gallantry it is downright cowardly, probably more so than any form of fighting previously invented. (That's only true for the shooter: I would imagine the confederates on the ground calling in the strike may need to be very brave indeed.) It is also very efficient, especially in contrast to such methods as carpet bombing and poison gas: potentially, it allows you to kill only those persons who are trying to kill you. According to NPR,

There is wide uncertainty about how many civilians have been killed in U.S. drone strikes. One estimate from the New America Foundation says around 300 civilians were killed in Pakistan from 2004 to the beginning of this year.

There is at least one case where U.S. officials, including Panetta, knew that a woman was present at a possible strike site, and the attack was ordered anyway. A U.S. official told NPR a strike with non-combatants in the area would only happen in "exceptional circumstances against very high-level terrorists."

Incidentally, Father Brennan walked back the lie, or incredibly naive assertion, that there had been no civilian deaths for 12 months up to June 2011; now he says,

there had been a period of time where the U.S. "had no information about a single civilian being killed." But, he added, "unfortunately in war there are casualties, including among the civilian population." He said "sometimes you have to take life to save lives."

And you know what "the U.S. had no information" means: it means the information had no official status as it floated up and down the hierarchy.

It's amazing how freely they've suddenly begun talking about it:

As head of the CIA, Panetta oversaw the U.S. drone campaign against al-Qaida. When the intelligence identified the location of a particular target, Panetta often had to decide whether to fire.

"As a Catholic, suddenly realizing I had the responsibility of saying, 'We're going to go after somebody,' it was something I did not take lightly," he says. "It's a lot of responsibility."

Panetta justifies the use of drones as a necessary tool to "keep the country safe," which he says was his mission both as head of the CIA and as defense secretary.

"I felt they were legitimate if we followed the law, and did what we had to do under our law, to make sure that we were being true to the American people with regard to our responsibility," he says.

Is Panetta sure that's not going to get him jailed? And why not?

In any event it's really ugly and being carried out by people who are not entirely to be trusted, and I may add that I don't think it's winning any hearts and minds, but no, Obama is not a mass murderer. As yet. Just a second-rate theologian, which makes him an order of magnitude better than most of the theologians on the case.