Events

I saw a stat on social media that turned out to be true: at its worst, in early 1973, 29% of the US approved of the Vietnam War. But only 27% approve of what we're doing in Iran—or at least, they did on Sunday. Of course, an argument to popularity isn't a valid argument, so let's look at the evidence:

I've got a lot of plates spinning at the ends of sticks for the next couple of days, including figuring out who to vote for in the Illinois Primary Election two weeks from today. Since I won't be in Chicago on election day, I've got to do this by next Friday at the latest. The other spinning plates are a bit bigger.

Ah, you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is "never get involved in a land war in Asia."

Yes, there are other things going on in the world (ugh!). Let's just take a moment to reflect that we (in the northern hemisphere, anyway) got through another winter.

The US and Israel have launched "major military operations" in Iran, with no strategic clarity or stated rationale other than "regime change:"

I promised to include former White House speech writer James Fallows' reaction to Tuesday night's Klan rally State of the Union address. Suffice it to say, Fallows was not pleased:

First run

In his latest post, satirist Jeff Maurer argues that the Democrats in Congress walked into a trap "genitals first" when the OAFPOTUS "invited" Congress to stand in support of a fairly basic premise of national sovereignty. (My representative, Mike Quigley, skipped the speech.) The OAFPOTUS counted on the Democrats remaining seated, and he was right. As Maurer says,

I did promise reactions to the unrelenting stream of bullshit we all heard last night, so let's go:

I eagerly await James Fallows' take on last night's clown-car-hits-dumpster-fire, and I'm holding off my "SOTU reax roundup" post until I can include his. It turns out, the world didn't stop for two hours yesterday: