In for A Penny, In for A Pound: The New Hostage Situations

You just have to shake your head. It's so reminiscent.

In 1998, at the very cusp of being impeached, Bill Clinton ordered an attempted missile assassination of Osama bin Laden, who apparently was in a meeting in Sudan. Bin Laden, if you recall, tried to blow up the World Trade Center the old fashioned way in 1993 and roughed it up a bit, killing a few people. The missile missed him by ten minutes, though, and he came back to finish the job he started. 9-11 was the result. It killed more than a few people.

Now we have 45, waiting for Nancy Pelosi to deliver the House managers and the actual impeachment charges, coming up any day now. He has made a stunning attack upon perhaps the number two political/military leader of Iran, Gen. Qasem Soleimani, and succeeded. In doing so, we have made a serious step toward becoming the number one purveyor of terrorism in the world.

Of course, 45 never informed anyone about anything, never told Congressional leaders of either party. He was probably paranoid that it might have been leaked to the press, though that's pretty rare (In fact, Scotty Reston of the New York Times knew that Kennedy was about to send a force to Cuba in 1961, the infamous Bay of Pigs Invasion, and JFK asked him to sit on it until it was done. Reston complied. After the disaster--which would lead to the Cuban Missile Crisis--Kennedy admitted that Reston should probably have gone ahead and printed it anyhow.). Never mind, though. Consequences be damned.

Soleimani was a bad guy, yes, but we will pay for this. Count on it. Escalation is guaranteed. There will be a kind of backdoor attack that will be delightfully vengeful in Iran (Remember the shooting down of the Iranian jetliner during the Reagan years? That was apparently done by mistake. No matter: A jetliner was sabotaged over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing a comparable number of Westerners. Measure for measure.). In the meantime, at least emotionally, 45 has made our whole country hostage to his act.

Iran is also getting out of its nuclear deal. Once gone, a new discussion will be impossible, as opposed to what 45 said he wanted. I personally don't believe that and never did; he lied about that as well as he's lying about not wanting a war but stopping one. 45 wants war with Iran to make himself look fantastic. He has a desperate need to put himself in a place in history where no one forgets him. He'll certainly get that.

How could the Democrats remove him now, when he seems so irreplaceable to his faithful? That question will reverberate through 45's favored, filtered media. How could they even consider it?

More to the point: How could any Republican even think about doing anything but whisking the process through a divided Senate in a token, even half-hearted effort to satisfy those who cluck their tongues about due process?

Even more to the point: How will Pelosi manage to keep the country's attention on the process of impeachment proceedings with the ultimate deflection, a rising military commitment to the Middle East (again!), well underway?

Rationality has now been taken hostage, too. It will return if and only if we manage to get 45 out of the White House and reduce Mitch McConnell's power to that of Just Another Senator. Both are necessary. Neither can happen until November, unless John Bolton (a) is allowed to testify and (b) he says something so completely outrageous that at least Republican Senators have no choice but to convict to save the integrity of the chamber--though I can't imagine what that might be at this point to risk getting a primary election shoved in their faces back home.

The other hostage situation is the extent to which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, an evangelical Christian, and 45 himself believe that God is working through them to expand the influence of Israel just before The Rapture. They are caught without rationality themselves. They will see a wider war as not only inevitable, but necessary. They will see casualties as collateral damage as long as they aren't part of them.

If all of this lures Iran to attack Israel, so much the better. Then the Ultimate Showdown will happen. It's why Pompeo, as opposed to the blustering, belching 45, never has to raise his voice. It's all happening according to The Plan. Watch him. He almost can't avoid grinning.

If you're wondering why 45 is so quickly running to shore up his evangelical base, it's to make the irrational seem rational. After all, not nearly as many of them live in large cities, where attacks are likely to take place (the exception being where the mega-churches stand). The longer all this continues, the closer we stand to such a possibility. They aren't in for a penny, as the British say: They're in for a pound, or in all the way. As actual war approaches, watch for the frenzy to peak. They're being held hostage, too--emotional hostage.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark