We all know that John Bolton hates everyone and everything Iranian.  He desperately tried to get GWB to bomb Tehran back to the stone age, but still licking his wounds from his folly in Iraq, even HE wasn’t stupid enough to fall for Bolton’s bullshit on Iran.

Well, Bolton’s got a president now who is remarkably more stupid that GWB, so it’s Deja Vu all over again, and this time Trump IS stupid enough to go along with him.  Even while he denies he’s planning on sending in 120,000 troops into the Middle East, the defense department is planning on…sending 120,000 troops to the Middle East.  As we talked about yesterday, he’s already moved a carrier battle group into the region, and B-52 bombers are being staged into the area.

Now the State Department has ordered the consulates in Iraq be evacuated.  US central command in the Middle East has troops on high alert citing threats from Syria and Iran.  The problem, though, is that no one outside of the US government sees ANY increased threat from Iran.  In fact, the senior British officer in the coalition anti-terrorism operation in the Middle East confirms there is no increased threat; Trump responded to his comments as “fake news”.

In 2002, I was highly skeptical of all the bullshit that Bush/Cheney was peddling to whip up a war with Saddam Hussein.  Nothing they said made any sense, and there was NO evidence that Iraq had anything whatsoever to do with the 9/11 attacks.  This drumbeat to war feels the same to me.  No one with the government has given ANY evidence that Iran or Syria are doing anything that is more threatening that their normal hostility.  Because of these circumstances, I’m going to continue calling bullshit on Trump and call this what it is – Wagging the Dog to win the next election.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Today, Christopher Wray, Trump’s own appointee as FBI Director, warned that the Russians were continuing their efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, even announcing that he’s transferred other agents from their normal duties to counter intelligence to stop the effort to meddle.  Wray said in a statement,

“We recognize that our adversaries are going to keep adapting and upping their game. So we are very much viewing 2018 as just kind of a dress rehearsal for the big show in 2020.”

Trump has stubbornly and continuously ignored the problem, fearing that acknowledging it would make it obvious that his election in 2016 was illegitimate.  He’s even cut budgets to stop the Russians from interfering.  If anyone has any doubts about Trump’s allegiance to the Russians, one only need listen to and read his words.  He’s not going to do a damn thing to stop the Russians, because he knows that their interference is the only way he has a prayer of winning again in 2020.

It’s hard for me to believe that I’m even typing these words that the Fucking President of the United States is conspiring with a hostile foreign power to cement his own victory to maintain power.  The damage that he has done to our nation (especially our judiciary) will take decades to repair, if we even can.  In the meantime, I have a bottle of champagne set aside that we’re going to crack open when we see this treasonous son of a bitch walked out of the White House, hopefully in handcuffs.

Here we go.  I have to say that just watching this video gives me hope.

Run, Joe, Run!

Welp, I don’t like it, but Beto’s campaign probably ended today before it even started.  Reuters has published a story that he was involved as a teenager with a computer hacking group, Cult of the Dead Cow, which was selling tools to hack into Microsoft Windows machines.  Members of the group kept his involvement secret during his Senate run, but have now spilled the beans.  Beto acknowledged the truth of the story today, admitting that his involvement “…was not anything that I’m proud of today.” Dems will instantly throw him overboard by Monday.

I know, I know, he was a teenager, blah, blah, but I can see the RNC commercials now, and all I can hear right now is Ol’ Dandy Don:

Know-nothing conservatives have brought their ignorant, hateful, anti-science, anti-common sense, and racist rotten core to the center of American politics, culminating in the shocking election of the worst president in US history, Donald Trump in 2016.  To cling to power, they have sold out their fellow Americans and aided enemies like Russia and North Korea to do his bidding.  They’ve amplified Trump’s lies and horrible, hateful rhetoric, and Christians who support him oddly cite the religion they’ve betrayed to justify their corruption.

If anything good comes from this long national nightmare, it’s that good, patriot Americans who hold actual American values are stepping up.  2018 was a great example, with Dems retaking the House and hundreds of women taking leadership roles all over the country.  Normal people are saying that enough is enough, and today, another normal person, who is also a hero, has done the same.  Astronaut Mark Kelly has announced his run for the US Senate from Arizona.  This is a person of high integrity, honesty, and bravery who stepped into the breach after his wife, Gabby Giffords, had her political career cut short by senseless, easily preventable gun violence.  Here’s a guy we can get behind.

Keep a box of tissues handy.

Yesterday, there was another defection of a major conservative from the Republican Party. In a speech before the Federalist Society on Friday, George Will announced that he left the Republican Party and that he was urging other conservatives to defeat Trump and to  “grit their teeth” for the four years after 2020.  You know it’s bad when George Will jumps ship.