“I like people who weren’t captured,” he said about his dislike for war-scarred former POW John McCain.
Well, look at who’s imprisoned now.
The most famous draft dodger of all time, that’s who.
It’s been half a calendar sweep since he went to war against Iran. He implied its subjugation would be over in a hiccup. That was February.
By March: “I think we won.”
Come April: “A whole civilization will die tonight.” (Fortunately for civilization, TACO was cheap.)
In June: “There may come a point when we are no longer able to be reasonable.”
Now he sits in his rhetorical cell – tapping messages on the wall to Pete Hegseth, whose TV good looks fade as the months drift on. And you thought the sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln had it bad.
The last time Iran held hostages, it didn’t relent until it had facilitated a regime change in the White House.
Nothing at all indicates that it will not do the very same thing with these captives – they who thought so highly of shiny munitions that throwing them in bunches would transform the Middle East.
It turns out that nothing short of boots on the ground would achieve what these plotters, cowed by war whisperer Bibi Netanyahu, thought they could accomplish. That was and is not going to happen.
Now, powerless, he dreams up ways to endure his incarceration. Trade war with Canada! For what? To make life even less affordable for Americans? Yes indeed.
Remember him running on the lie that tariffs are paid by trade partners, not by consumers? He’s still telling it.
Remember when toilet paper was at a premium? Good old days. Economists project that the new tariffs could cause TP prices to jump 11 percent.
Housing costs? Canadian lumber represents nearly a third of that used for American home construction. He said he didn’t care about the bipartisan housing bill Congress made law without his signature. What did he care about?
Putting his name and face on things. That’s what.
A war that you’ve botched is a great opportunity to authorize a $250 bill with your face on it. Listen and hear Americans at their gas pumps clamoring for it.
Apparently his stellar military record, valor on the squash courts of Fordham U., qualifies this president to have his name on the aircraft carrier that was going to be named for seaman Doris Miller, the black messmate who leaped onto a burning deck to fire at Pearl Harbor’s attackers.
Back at home, should we take it seriously that the board appointed by the president will demolish the Kennedy Center if it can’t bear his name? Yes, we should.
But he’s done so much for it. So much that it probably won’t host a performance for two years. So much that it has a $23 million deficit, what The Washington Post calls a “catastrophic drop in revenue.”
Then there’s that ballroom mission. Damn the court orders. Full speed ahead.
Did someone say we were in a war? Um, how many wars? Where is that peace prize?
We are reminded at this point of the last time he called himself “wartime president.” It was when the nation suddenly realized, despite his glossing, that a global pandemic was killing Americans in bunches.
He never took that seriously, either.
So here we are, half a year into “Operation Epic Fury,” running out of bombs to throw, financing the futility on credit, and experiencing the worst case of buyers’ remorse since the other war he avoided.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
