Be fair, any powerful war criminal would make the same demand

For starters, a bully always looks to provoke others, weaker than him, to fight back. This gives the bully the righteous excuse to rightfully retaliate. Trump sought, by unleashing masked, untrained goons, in full riot gear, to rough people up, break car windows and deploy tear gas on peaceful protesters, to provoke a violent response that would enable him to dominate the streets with the military. His attack on Iran, as illegal an act of unprovoked war as Cheney’s war on Iraq, likely has the same larger aim. Get Iran to retaliate with terrorism in the US, then, bingo, September 11, a new Patriot Act (probably already waiting at the Heritage Foundation) and soaring, intoxicating new emergency powers for Trump. Toward that end, he seeks preemptive immunity from the International Criminal Court for war crimes he’s busily committing now.

The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize recipient (he got the winner to give him her prize), Donald J. Trump, is threatening the International Criminal Court to back the fuck off and stop trying to accuse righteous Christian Americans of committing war crimes in various completely necessary excursions to ensure world peace. If the ICC had existed in their time, both Hitler and Stalin would have done the same, rest assured. Trump is just the first US president with the massive balls to do this, (hence the need for the 2,000,000 square foot Trump-Epstein ballroom where the East Wing used to be — finally a place where he can feel comfortable spreading his legs with those unfeasibly gigantic balls).

After the atrocities and massive death toll of World War Two (estimated at 70-85 million– including 40-50 million civilians), and widespread war crimes committed during that war of mass murder, idealists around the world pressed for and created the International Criminal Court. Those who massacred civilians would now be held accountable for crimes against humanity, under international law. Mass murderers of civilians selected by ethnic group would be prosecuted for the newly coined crime of genocide.

Not long ago (when I was in law school, during the last years of the twentieth century) many international law experts were optimistic about the rule of law prevailing among the nations of the world. They believed this even though Reagan had already rejected the ICC’s jurisdiction over Americans and Israel and a few other countries had done the same. Modern day Nazis had other ideas about this so-called rule of international so-called law. Look what our boy Trump has to say about this stupid court:

War criminal Pete Hegseth [1], Secretary of Indiscriminate and Absolute Lethality (not pansy-ish “legality”) keeps bellowing about the right to execute enemy combatants, or suspected drug smugglers, or anyone else deemed a danger, or a potential danger, even if they’re wounded, disarmed, incapacitated or surrendering. (See, nobody has prosecuted the agents who executed Alex Pretti while he was restrained face down on the ground… so, what are YOU going to do about it, bitches?) Hegseth said the US will not be bound by “stupid rules of engagement” and will “give no quarter to our enemies” (it’s also a war crime to kill people who are surrendering) so murdering like it’s a video game is cool again. The Department of Lethality posts video game-inspired little movies about the glorious war in Iran, with mad respect to the American service members who may, theoretically, be dying as a result — “as often happens in war” as POTUS sagely notes.

And while we’re talking about complete immunity, total impunity, pre-emptive exoneration, here’s POTUS:

Last night, Trump posted on social media: “We are totally destroying the terrorist regime of Iran, militarily, economically, and otherwise, yet, if you read the Failing New York Times, you would incorrectly think that we are not winning. Iran’s Navy is gone, their Air Force is no longer, missiles, drones and everything else are being decimated, and their leaders have been wiped from the face of the earth. We have unparalleled firepower, unlimited ammunition, and plenty of time—Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today. They’ve been killing innocent people all over the world for 47 years, and now I, as the 47th President of the United States of America, am killing them. What a great honor it is to do so! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP” source

“Watch what happens to these deranged scumbags today.”

[1] See, for example, his order for a “double tap” strike to kill South Americans clinging to the wreckage of their sinking boat after a drone strike destroyed it, killing everyone else aboard (and sending any evidence of the crime they were never charged with to the bottom of the ocean). See also his recent U-boat torpedo sinking of an Iranian vessel returning from the Indian Ocean, and then letting the survivors drown. The Tomahawk missile that made a direct hit on an Iranian middle school, killing 170 girls the same age as Epstein’s victims? Not his problem. He’s not going to be restrained by no stupid rules of engagement! He’s maximally lethal, yo. No quarter for the godless enemies of Christ! Like it says on his arm: Deus Vult.

Nazi enough for you?

While the NY Times frames things, often using the word “suggest”, to suggest everything is more or less normal, the abnormality of our criminal regime continues unabated.  

Secretary of Maximum Lethality, Pete “War is Hell” Hegseth, spent over $93,000,000,000 in use it or lose it funds in September 2025, with no blowback. Hey, if he didn’t spend it all … it would have been waste, (not to mention abuse and fraud).  On the other hand, Representative Nancy Mace, by signing a petition that allowed for the possibility of humiliation for Trump, simply for the fact that he loves beautiful women as much as Jeffrey Epstein did, and often they were on the younger side, (it is said) opened herself to a House Ethics Committee investigation of a $9,500 alleged overpayment to herself for her housing in Washington DC.   Fair is fair.  Nazis will be Nazis.   Here’s Heather:

That argument [that Congress has the sole power to declare war and allocate funds for war] is potent again almost 250 years later. Democrats are calling out that Trump is spending $1 billion a day in his attacks on Iran but that he slashed through government programs that help Americans, claiming the need to address the country’s ballooning national debt. Just yesterday, Berkeley Lovelace Jr. of NBC News reported that Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administration official overseeing the Affordable Care Act, says that many of those enrolled in healthcare under the law should not be there. About 23 million people signed up for ACA coverage this year, down by more than 1.2 million from last year. Oz anticipates cutting another 4 million off the rolls as he targets “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

And yet, as Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling of The New Republic noted last night, according to a report from government watchdog Open the Books, the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blew through $93.4 billion in September 2025 alone, with more than $50 billion going out in the last five days of the month alone.

To spend the entirety of the defense budget, rather than lose it, Pentagon officials bought “a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. (Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth’s Pentagon—the department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October.) In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for ribeye steak (again, just in September), $124,000 for ice cream machines, and $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts.”

In October, Houghtaling noted, the administration said it could not fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, because the government had shut down. Millions of Americans lost food benefits. source

Waste, fraud and abuse for thee, well-deserved perks for me!

That $1 billion a day figure for Trump’s war in Iran might be a little bit low, maybe by 100% or so. The New York Times reports:

The most transparent administration in US history, it was revealed, has more good news for the citizens:

There are major societal implications for that war. It is already costing at least $1 billion a day, and administration officials have suggested they are going to ask Congress for more money for it. That request will come on top of the news of March 10 that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. has borrowed $1 trillion over the past five months—that’s $50 billion a week on average—as Trump’s tax cuts slash revenue.   source

Admittedly, some Iranian children (and others) are being killed, a DOD “preliminary” investigation shows that the missile that hit the girls’ school on Day One was an American one; the most unstable region on Earth has been radically destabilized, apparently at the behest of the rightwing expansionist Prime Minister of Israel, who stayed with the Kushners in New Jersey and remained buddies with now-Ambassador Charles Kushner; there is a widespread effort across the government to cover up crimes in many departments of the federal government, as well as ethical violations, (which are a thing of the past, if done by good people); the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law by President Trump, is being actively thwarted by Trump’s former criminal and impeachment attorneys who now run the Department of Justice; and Trump is quietly borrowing 50 billion a week to fund all this, BUT — there’s really nothing to see here.

The US Department of Obstruction of Justice, in conjunction with the Department of Maximum Lethality, the Department of Destruction of Public Education and “History” Erasure, and the president’s taskforce on Why Are Blacks and Dead People Still Allowed to Vote, have issued a joint statement. It reads, in full, “Sir YES, sir!”

Recent polling suggests that everything is still completely normal here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

A radical notion for a party that has gone full Nazi

This afternoon, Representative Kevin Kiley of California announced he was leaving the Republican Party to become an Independent. When California redistricted the state to counter Texas’s redistricting, Kiley’s district became much more competitive. Kiley says that going forward, he will “have to consider” every bill “on its own merits.” source

Imagine the burden that would place on lawmakers — having to consider every bill on its merits rather than taking direct orders from an infallible, vindictive leader. How would they have time to fundraise?

A perfectly normal president, doing extraordinary things

Heather Cox Richardson concludes last night’s letter

The fantasy of those who embraced cowboy individualism was that if only they could have full sway, they would solve the world’s problems and keep Americans safe. But the conduct of the war is starting to illustrate that any claims of a moral code disappear when a leader exercises military might on a whim. According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. will not be bound by any “stupid rules of engagement” and will rain down “[d]eath and destruction from the sky all day long. This was never meant to be a fair fight,” he said, “and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them when they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”

On Wednesday, March 4, a U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship in international waters. The vessel was not participating in hostilities; it was off Sri Lanka returning from a naval exercise organized by India in the Bay of Bengal. In the past, the U.S. has participated in those exercises.

Andrew Roth, Cate Brown, and Hannah Ellis-Peterson of The Guardian noted that submarine attacks since World War II have been incredibly rare, as are attacks on vessels not taking part in hostilities. The ship was believed to have 180 people on board; Sri Lankan officials said they rescued 32 and recovered 87 bodies from the water. Hegseth boasted: “An American submarine sank an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters.”

On Thursday, Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali of Reuters reported that the U.S. appears to bear responsibility for the February 28 strike on a girls’ school in Minab, in southern Iran, in the early waves of the Israeli-U.S. attack. The strike appears to have killed 168 people or more, many of them children. Since the Reuters report, others have noted that the U.S. was operating in the area and Israel was not. The strike remains under investigation.

After Saturday’s dignified transfer, Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “I hate to do it, but it’s a part of war,” he said. “It’s a sad part of war.”

“It’s the bad part of war.”

read the whole, very much on point, letter here

So true, sad, and also, bad

War crimes are not war crimes, if done in the name of justice, truth, freedom, decency and Jesus, according to people like unindicted war criminal Secretary of Virile Maximum Lethality, Pete Kegsbreath. Genocide is not genocide, if God tells you to do it, according to indicted war criminal Bibi Netanyahu, whose radical religious allies, and a multifront all-out war of mass destruction, are keeping him from standing trial for corruption. Every mass murder in history has been committed with God on the side of the murderers. Thoughts and prayers, y’all, and a dignified transfer to each of us.

A few facts (and opinions) about the war/not war in Iran

The president, Caroline Leavitt told the press, launched the attack on Iran “based on a feeling based on fact.” You can take that shit to the bank, better than “concepts of a plan” even. Perfect.

The devastating attack was launched, by Israel and the United States, in the middle of Ramadan, the holiest month of the year for Muslims.

Iranian negotiators working with Jared Fucking Kushner (who elected him?) and Putin’s own Steve Witkoff (WTF?) felt they were making progress in their talks in Geneva.  Israel and the U.S. were making their attack plans as Witkoff and Kushner cosplayed as diplomatic negotiators. The bombing commenced as planned.  Such are negotiations when the major diplomats across the table are psychopaths who are themselves serving psychopaths.

The nation that could not afford health care premium subsidies for lower wage working people, or SNAP benefits for poor children and the disabled, or millions to continue preventing preventable deaths in poor countries (USAID) has spent over three billion dollars on the first four days of Operation I’m NOT INSANE and I’ll Fucking Kill All of You Fucking Fucks!!!  (officially called Operation Epic Fury — Epic Tantrum works too)  [1].

With the people we have in charge, the best of the best, what could go wrong by committing acts of war against Iran? Nothing the Board of Peace can’t handle.

Heather Cox Richardson adds:

In Need to Know, David Rothkopf today called out the madness of the fact world trade and global security is being shattered by a single man. “Not since Adolf Hitler blew his brains out in a bunker beneath the garden of the German Reich Chancellery on April 30, 1945, have the lives of so many people around the world been so buffeted by the psychosis of a single man.”

Why has Trump launched a war against Iran on a whim, attacked other countries, and upended world trade, Rothkopf asked. “Because he’s insane. Because he’s venal. Because he’s a malignant narcissist. Because he’s a sociopath. Because he has a fragile ego. Because those around him exacerbate and play to those traits to advance their own interests. Because CEOs and investors do likewise to fill their coffers. Because to some people, whether he is insane or malevolent or repugnant or not matters less than whether his actions will feather their nests, increase their power.

“Because they, the billionaires…play their games and the consequences for the little people down below, the consequences for us, hardly matter a whit.” [2]

On Thursday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) called attention to another factor in play. In a speech to the Senate, Whitehouse noted that throughout his second term, Trump has advanced policies that help Russia, pausing weapons shipments to Ukraine, easing sanctions on Russia, and pushing a peace deal favorable to Russia. Last summer, he welcomed Putin to American soil, and administration officials have parroted Russian propaganda. Russian state media gloated when Trump “installed Russia apologist Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence,” and Attorney General Pam Bondi upon taking office stopped the anti-kleptocracy work that had targeted Russian oligarchs.

Trump’s new national security policy threw traditional U.S. allies overboard and favored policies that Russian government officials praised as “largely consistent” with their own.

“If Trump were purposefully doing Russia’s bidding,” Whitehouse said, “it is hard to see what he would be doing differently. The United States is the most powerful nation in the world. Russia is a weak, corrupt regime. My old friend Senator John McCain used to say that Russia is a gas station, run by gangsters, with an army. It doesn’t make sense that the President of the United States, who insists—insists—on being dominant in essentially every relationship, is so submissive to one person and that one person is Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin.” source

Here is Sheldon Whitehouse’s entire speech. I highly recommend it.

Last we heard, Putin was giving strategic information to the Iranians, to help them target the U.S. military. I wonder which side Elon Musk and Starlink is taking in that transaction.

[1] The war is costing about $891.4 million per day, according to a think tank based in Washington, DC, that analyzed the information the Pentagon has shared about targets it struck and the assets involved in the operation.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies predicts that the cost will decrease as the US shifts to “less expensive munitions” and as the drones and missiles launched by Iran declines.

“However, future costs will depend mostly on the intensity of operations and the effectiveness of Iranian retaliation,” CSIS added in its report. source

[2] Billionaires are happy when their insane puppet crashes the world economy helping them make even more profit. Crisis for us equals opportunity for them.

What critical thinking looks like

Sadly, critical thinking has become fleetingly rare in American “public discourse” which is based, largely, on advertising and its moral twin, political propaganda.  Ads and propaganda, both designed to make money for the wealthiest, are aimed at our irrational impulses and they shape the angry black and white exchanges over who is right and who is wrong.  We all want to buy the very best product, after all, and defend our choice in buying our particular brand. 

Timothy Snyder demonstrates how critical thinking is done, and its usefulness (when applied widely) in debunking mindless propaganda, in this selection from his Substack Thinking About…

And so who does benefit [from war/not war in Iran]? Again, it has to be emphasized that we do not have the kind of sources that future historians would like. But there are nevertheless a few candidate who petition for our attention. Israel is the American co-combatant in this war, and its government has a clearly expressed interest in destroying Iranian power.

Saudi Arabia has been engaged in a regional struggle for power with Iran for 47 years. Interestingly, American war propaganda (picked up by regime-friendly commentators) now maintains that the United States has been at war with Iran for 47 years. (Orwell has gotten a lot of attention recently, but his “we have always been at war with Eurasia” in 1984 is very much a propos.) This obviously untrue claim implies that the United States has been a Saudi client state working against Iran for the better part of half a century.

This propaganda line is historically ridiculous — remember when we trafficked missiles to Iran in 1981-1985? or when Saudis flew airplanes into the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001? But it is telling. source

Of course, we also sold missiles and poison gas to a modern day Hitler, Saddam Hussein, lynched by an avenging George Dubya Bush in the middle of the night. Saddam used these American weapons to fight Iran and to gas ethnic minorities in Iraq. It doesn’t matter so much what we say or who we support in a given war, or what rationales we use, or nowadays don’t even bother to use, as long as the machinery of war, in its endlessly lucrative glory, continues to pump out obscene profits for the weapons industry and its savvy corporate shareholders. It matters not that we mass murder girls in a school on day one of a war that is not a war, as long as we perform maximum lethality against the rest of the worst of the worst and keep blowing up those million dollar missiles we make defending freedom.

A perfectly coherent answer from a very stable genius

People criticize the president for not giving straightforward answers to difficult questions. We can now put that criticism to bed once and for all, critical, carping, condescending cucks. Heather Cox Richardson writes:

Trump told reporters today that “we’re doing very well on the war front, to put it mildly,” rating it 15 on a scale of 1 to 10. But Americans stranded in Middle Eastern countries are desperate to get out, and the government has not been able to help them. When asked today why not, Trump answered:

“Well, because it happened all very quickly, we thought, and I thought maybe more so than most, I could ask Marco, but I thought we were going to have a situation where we were going to be attacked. They were getting ready to attack Israel. They were getting ready to attack others. You’re seeing that right now. And a lot of those missiles that are hitting in those are stationary. Those were aimed there for a long period of time at these other countries. So I think I was right about that. We attacked first, and if we didn’t, it could have been, you know, look, we’re really decimating them. They’re being decimated. And if we didn’t. If we didn’t, and by the way, we have massive amounts of ammunition. We have the high end. A lot of it was given away stupidly by Biden, very stupidly, for free. And I’m all for Ukraine, but they gave away a lot. As you know, when I give away ammunition, everybody pays for it. The European Union is paying for it, then they can do what they want with it, but they are giving it, let’s say, to Ukraine, and it’s okay, but we gave away a lot of high end but we have plenty. But we have unlimited middle and upper ammunition, which is really what we’re using in this war. And we have an, really an unlimited supply. We also have a lot of the very high end stored in different countries throughout the world. With this, we’re literally storing it there, which is actually something that I insisted on in my first term. I rebuilt the military. In my first term, the military is great. A lot of, not unbelievable, amount of of ammunition, or munitions, as they say, were given away to you know, the Wall Street Journal incorrectly covered the story when they said that it was given away to the Middle East, not to the Middle East was given away to Ukraine. Very little was given to the Middle East. Middle East would buy a lot. And some of the nations, because they’re rich, they have a lot, but it was given away to Ukraine and it just should have been done. Look, it’s a war that should have never happened. If I were president, that war would have never happened. But we have a tremendous amount of munitions, ammunition at the upper upper level, middle and upper level, all of which is really powerful stuff.” source

So you see, my fellow Americans, there’s nothing whatsoever to worry about. A perfect answer, perfect. 15 on a scale of 1 to 10!

Compare the president’s excellent, forceful, bulletproof answer to the wimpy word salad served up by a pinhead in the Senate (also from Heather’s letter)

Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), who is facing a difficult election in the fall, said: “Passing this resolution now would send the wrong message to Iran and to our troops. At this juncture, providing unequivocal support to our service members is critically important, as is ongoing consultation by the Administration with Congress.”

Supporting our troops unequivocally means sending them into a meat grinder, for no articulable reason, no questions asked, and having as many prove their valor by dying as is necessary to complete the mission, whatever that mission may or may not be? Come on, Collins! Take a lesson from your boss, the way he learned his lesson, as you predicted, after his first or second impeachment.

Now we know how Melania got to chair the UN Security Council, as her husband wages an illegal war of aggression against Iran

Heather Cox Richardson:

Whatever their immediate trigger, the strikes [on Iran] fall in line with the ideology of cowboy individualism that began to take over the Republican Party in the 1980s and which, under Trump, has turned into brutal displays of dominance. The old idea of a cowboy from rural America who cuts through the government bureaucracy that threatens his livelihood by coddling racial minorities and women has curdled into the notion that a leader can do whatever it takes, including violence, to force opponents to submit to his will.

In foreign affairs, that means smashing the international alliances built after World War II. One of the crowning achievements of that international order is the United Nations, constructed to maintain international peace and security by creating organizations that could provide a forum for diplomacy and stop countries from attacking each other. The U.S. currently owes the U.N. nearly $4 billion in unpaid dues as Trump seeks to replace the organization with his own “Board of Peace” that he alone controls. This month, the U.S. holds the presidency of the U.N. Security Council, enabling it to set the agenda. Today, Trump sent First Lady Melania Trump to chair the meeting, the first time a presidential spouse has done so. source

So apparently this genius, the son of a Trump-pardoned felonious billionaire who is now serving as the U.S. ambassador to France under the totally uncorrupt regime of Donald Trump, was unable to make peace in his talks with Iran, even with the able assistance of the brilliant Steve Witkoff.

Accordingly, Jared’s father-in-law, lifetime head of the powerful Board of Peace and proud owner of someone else’s 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, had to order massive air strikes and the mass killing of civilians in Iran, as well as the assassination of its leader.

I had to look this one up just to make sure that this guy is as fucking stupid as I remember he is. Listen to his imbecilic comment about Federal stockpiles of PPE when he was the czar of the inept and deadly U.S. Covid response.  Just watch the first few seconds where he speaks, incoherently, and publicly, for the first time. His powers as a natural diplomat can be observed in this great interview with Christiane Amanpour , the chyrons alone are worth the watch.

“Who’s laughing now, bitches?”

The incoherence is the point

And Donald Trump, a man of fundamental incoherence, is the perfect point man to effortlessly make that point over and over again.  Below Lawrence O’Donnell lays it out with characteristic intelligence and thoroughness.

Trump: “We may have casualties, that often happens in war.” Often, yes, so true, and shrewdly observed, war kills and maims, very, very often.

And this recent tour de force of presidential incoherence, which truly never gets old:

Legal arguments not yet articulated or vetted, but irrefutable. No need for Congress, or hostile voters with TDS, I alone will ensure that I remain irrefutable. And be honest, those drapes I picked out are to die for, as is often necessary in a room done up like one of Saddam’s castles.

Good night, boys and girls, don’t let the Nazis bite.

We all love gold, don’t we!