I had an eventful weekend. Friday night before bed, I loaded up the washing machine and turned it on so that when I woke I could shake the clothes out, put them in the dryer, and be done. As I was falling asleep, though, I noticed the smell of smoke, woke up, and noticed that there was a very serious smell of electrical smoke. Ran to the bathroom, and sure enough I had somehow managed to catch my WASHING MACHINE, a TUB OF WATER, on fire. I unplugged it and opened windows, waited until I was sure it was safe, and went to bed. Found a super cheap machine (I am a firm believe you should never spend a ton of money on washing machines), Gerald and boys took out the old one and put in the new, and done.
Always something. Interestingly enough, despite my attempts to burn down my house, I am but a piker when it comes to arson, as our man-child President has basically set the world on fire. Let’s be clear on one thing- Suleimani was an awful, horrible, evil, no good person, and it is hard to consider a calculus in which the world is not better off without him. Having said that, Trump has managed to do this in the most awful way possible, and we can only begin to estimate the damage that will be caused over the next decade because of this. Someone on twitter likened Trump killing Suleimani to a “drunk driver running over a child molester,” and that’s somewhat apt, but only if the drunk driver continued on and creamed who knows how many other people, because a lot of people are going to end up dead because of this.
Obviously it was an assassination, and obviously it was an act of war, and one can only imagine what would have happened had the Quds assassinated David Petraeus while he was visiting Israel. Cruise missiles would have already been launched. So of FUCKING COURSE Iran is going to respond, and as Adam has written in detail, how is the only question.
Today we are seeing a little bit of the fallout:
1.) The Iraqi Parliament has voted to expel US Troops. This of course needs the prime minister’s approval, so it is not final, but it’s not a good thing.
2.) Iran has said fuck it to the remaining aspects of the Nuclear Deal.
3.) Turkey is begging us to de-escalate, but that shit is out of the bag now. Iran is going to have to respond, and we’ll have to respond to that, and well, we know where it goes. Normally this is where you say “hopefully cooler heads will prevail,” but our President is on meth and everyone around him is an enabler.
4.) Speaking of enablers, these fucking assholes at the Pentagon:
In the chaotic days leading to the death of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Iran’s most powerful commander, top American military officials put the option of killing him — which they viewed as the most extreme response to recent Iranian-led violence in Iraq — on the menu they presented to President Trump.
They didn’t think he would take it. In the wars waged since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Pentagon officials have often offered improbable options to presidents to make other possibilities appear more palatable.
After initially rejecting the Suleimani option on Dec. 28 and authorizing airstrikes on an Iranian-backed Shiite militia group instead, a few days later Mr. Trump watched, fuming, as television reports showed Iranian-backed attacks on the American Embassy in Baghdad, according to Defense Department and administration officials.
By late Thursday, the president had gone for the extreme option. Top Pentagon officials were stunned.
Don’t give him any extreme options. The saying “POWERPOINT IS GOING TO BE THE DEATH OF US” was not supposed to be literal.
And so it goes.