#unqualified

"It is shocking that Trump said no one informed him that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz. I find it unbelievable that one of the fundamental pillars of geopolitical strategy in the Middle East was ignored. That was the first thing we assumed Iran would do. It is their main tool of global leverage. We are now seeing the consequences of a foreign policy driven by impulse rather than strategy.

Vote for a racist idiot

A very critical point is that trump acts strictly on impulse. There is no strategy. There is no analysis. There is no plan. It’s all impulse all the time from someone who lacks critical thinking, is a recognized narcissist and a documented serial liar.

I'm disgusted with this blundering, blathering imbecile and his ship of fools. Let fleas and flies and bedbugs swarm every voter who put this uneducated dumb guy in charge of the country--because, not-so-bright themselves, it didn't occur to them that Just Maybe the person charged with one of the most difficult jobs on earth should be filled by someone

I blame it on the theory of white supremacy. We had a president who rescued our economy from Bush, no wars and global respect, but he was black and the white guys got mad so they had to reclaim the presidency as a white job.geable and SMART. I mean... Yeah. What a concept.

Up until the 80’s federal agents, especially the CIA/FBI/Secret Service had to be graduates of Ivy League colleges. The belief was that being from wealthy families meant they would be more likely to be dignified and professional and less likely to accept bribes.

Every federal agency, with the exception of Cyber Command, has its own armed and badged agents. They are required to have a college degree, preferably a law degree or some sort of business/economics degree that would help them with white collar crime cases. Those with pilots licenses were also in demand, especially with the DEA. Further every agent had to be physically fit and pass through a rigorous training program that blended legal studies, enforcement techniques, firearms training, and physical fitness with an emphasis on running. Meticulous background checks were performed on every potential hire and if you even had a relative with a criminal record you wouldn’t be accepted.

Trump and his hench-demon Stephen Miller want to rapidly expand ICE to meet their staggeringly unrealistic deportation goals. You’ve probably seen their incessant ICE recruiting ads on YouTube that are targeting local law enforcement officers. Because they’re looking for Trump cultists with a penchant for violence they’re not getting the best candidates. The candidates are not college educated, disproportionately obese (unable to run a mile in under 14 minutes-if you are a fast Walker you can do that), and a large number of them have criminal records.

The short answer to that question is, be Donald Trump. The longer answer is more complicated, but not by much.

Wars are not fought on battlefields alone. Let’s go back to the last war we won, World War II, and have a look at how that war was fought. The entire industrial might of the United States was turned, all at once, to deal with fighting the war against Germany and Japan. The U.S. built 300,000 military aircraft during the war, 200,000 of which were combat planes, including heavy, medium and light bombers and fighters. We built 86,000 tanks; 193,000 artillery pieces; and more than two million army trucks. We built more than 100 aircraft carriers, 377 destroyers, more than 400 destroyer escorts, and more than 200 submarines. Nearly 6,000 merchant ships were built, including 3,600 cargo ships, 700 tankers, and 2,700 “Liberty ships” used to transport troops and military equipment across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

Steel production was wholly dedicated to the war effort, as was the production of canvas for tents and cotton fabric for fatigues and leather for boots.

Magazines and newspapers ran cover stories on the war effort day after day, week after week. Hundreds of covers of LIFE magazine showed soldiers and sailors and airmen; the same was true for LOOK and Time magazines. Newsreels from the front lines were shown at theaters before cartoons and movies.

The population of Germany in 1941 was about 75 million, including Austria. The population of Japan was roughly 72 million. Both countries were heavily industrialized and devoted their industrial bases to their war efforts.

On February 28, Donald Trump took this country to war against a country with a population of 92 million that has a military of about 500,000. Iran has highly sophisticated industries that produce several different kinds of rockets and thousands and thousands of drones. Iran is a militarily impenetrable country of mountain ranges and deserts, with a 600-mile coastline on the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Sea of Oman. Let’s just put it this way: Iran is a considerable military foe.

Trump has treated his war like it’s a video game. He’s got a Secretary of Defense, who calls himself “Secretary of War” without authorization by the U.S. Congress which appropriates the money for such things as the military and the Pentagon and naming departments of the government. His name is Pete Hegseth, and he apparently thinks he is a preacher, because he presides over a monthly prayer service at the Pentagon, where this week he invoked Christianity in praying for victory against Iran, wishing for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”

I have three things to say about that: One, I don’t even know what “violence of action” is, unless it is a phrase from some religious text. Two, it is immoral and illegal under international law to make war on an enemy showing “no mercy.” The laws regarding prisoners of war alone demand that mercy be shown to soldiers in their defeat. Three, Hegseth invoking the name of “Jesus Christ” puts the emphasis of the entire Pentagon and U.S. military behind one religion, Christianity, when the military is comprised of people of many faiths. The First Amendment forbids the government from establishing religion or favoring one faith over another, so Hegseth’s so-called prayer is clearly illegal under the highest law of the land.

Trump is losing the war against Iran because Iran is setting the rules and dominating the battlefield by closing the Strait of Hormuz. It’s as if during World War II, we failed to control the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and allowed the enemy to deny us the ability to ship fuel, personnel, military equipment, and weapons across those oceans.

You’ve read the analysis: 20 percent of the world’s oil passes through the Strait of Hormuz, now closed to any ships and tankers not permitted to pass by Iran. Included in the shipments denied are those carrying the essential element, helium, necessary for the industry that currently runs the world – computers.

What planning went into the war on Iran? None that has been noticeable since it started. We had somewhere around 40,000 troops in the Middle East before the war started. No effort was made, and I mean no effort was made to protect the bases where they were stationed. I say “were” stationed, because they have largely been removed from their military bases to hotels or sent to Europe, where presumably they have been instructed to “work from home.”

But you can’t send airplanes in Saudi Arabia to hotels, and this weekend, a U.S. E-3 Sentry surveillance and command and control plane was destroyed by an Iranian missile on a runway on a U.S. airbase in Saudi Arabia. These planes are essential if what you’re doing is fighting an air war, because they can fly overhead and control the airspace dozens of U.S. and Israeli jets and bombers operate in. The AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) aircraft can distinguish between enemy and friendly aircraft, pick out targets on the ground and guide weapons to them, provide information to pilots that ensures they do not drop bombs or fire missiles at civilian targets – already a problem with 100 percent of our AWACS in the air, and now we have one less – which leaves only 16 of them in the Air Force arsenal, with only six – now five -- stationed in the Middle East.

The E-3 Sentry is so old, it uses a Boeing 707 airframe. Not all the 16 we have left are airworthy. Let’s put it simply: Having one of these aircraft destroyed on a runway is a huge loss to the U.S. military. Bloomberg reports that five KC-135 tankers, used to refuel fighters and bombers when aloft, have been damaged by Iranian missile and drone strikes. Three F-15 fighters were shot down by friendly fire in Kuwait.

Twenty service members were severely injured in the missile attack on the base in Saudi Arabia. Thirteen Americans have been killed by Iranian drone and missile strikes, six in an office on a military base in Kuwait. The Hill reported today that at least 300 American soldiers have been wounded.

If Trump and Hegseth are up to their usual tricks, we have not been given the real figures for any of this, with the sole exception of military dead. The figures for aircraft losses are probably higher. We don’t have any figures for the loss of military equipment on U.S. bases that have been abandoned in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, UAE, and Jordan, not to mention the U.S. bases that have been hit by Iranian militias in Iraq.

I have a question: what in the hell was a $300 million plane doing parked out in the open on a base in Saudi Arabia that is well within the range of Iran’s missiles? Why wasn’t it in a reinforced concrete bunker? Trump has been in office for 14 months. There has been plenty of time to build defensive measures for aircraft, people, and military equipment at bases in the Middle East. If anything militarily rational had been done over the past year to get ready for this war, we wouldn’t be abandoning bases in the Middle East and losing aircraft parked on the ground.

It has been reported that Russia provided satellite intelligence to Iran that located the AWACS plane on the base in Saudi Arabia. Trump has said nothing about this, and the possibility that he called up Putin and told him to knock off supporting Iran is zero, especially when he ordered that sanctions on Russian oil be lifted…

So he could lower gas prices in the United States by putting more oil on the market.

One word for that: pathetic. No, another word: traitorous.

The second war Trump is losing is the economic war. He and his lickspittles are so clueless, they made no preparation at all for the oil shock that was bound to result from the bombing of Iran. Now, Trump is threatening to bomb Iran’s oil infrastructure and water system. He has put off his threat once, telling reporters on Air Force One that we are in “very good” negotiations with – get this – the third regime in Iran because the first two were killed, or at least that is what he says.

I have another question: He has been saying the Iranians want to “make a deal” for at least two weeks now. What is the sense for anybody in Iran, even a cab driver, to “make a deal” with Donald Trump when he and Israel are actively seeking to kill the very people they say they want to deal with? And why would they believe even a syllable Trump says when he cancelled the deal we had with Iran on uranium enrichment, and then bombed their nuclear facilities last year…

And then bombed the fuck out of Iran for 30 days and now threatens that he might bomb Kharg Island “just for fun.”

The Iranians know this like it’s a verse from the Quran: Trump is not a serious person. Neither is Hegseth, neither are Trump’s son in law, Kushner, and real estate buddy, Witkoff, whom he sends around the world “negotiating” and “making deals,” none of which seem to have produced anything but more billions in payoffs to Donald Trump himself.

Trump is losing a third war as well, the war for public opinion, which given the gravity of the other wars he is losing seems almost an afterthought. But it wasn’t an afterthought during World War II, when public opinion was somewhere in the vicinity of 100 percent for the war, and kept there by constant updates and publicity. It’s a real issue for Trump this time, too, and he’s not helping himself with his lies and mumbling and golfing and yapping about his almighty ballroom, which he seems to care about more than his disastrous war. Pew Research, a dependable and middle of the road outfit, found last week that 61 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s war, while only 37 percent approve. Those are almost exactly Trump’s political approval numbers right now, so we can see that all he’s getting is the abjectly loyal support of his base, who will tell pollsters they approve of him even if he is caught selling discount gas on a street corner with one hand while his other hand is up the skirt of an underage girl.

Trump didn’t prepare the country for this war. Incredibly, he didn’t even prepare the military. Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana – located in the district of Speaker of the House Mike The Mouse Johnson – was shut down recently because multiple swarms of drones overflew the base for several days. Barksdale is one of two bases where B-52 bombers are located, the same B-52’s now being used to bomb the shit out of Iran.

So…no biggie. We have crucial bombers on a high-security base within the continental United States…

And we don’t have machine guns or other air defenses to shoot down drones inside our own country.

What fucking sense does that make? It was reported that the drones, in groups of 12 to 15, were able to fly over Barksdale because the controls used to fly them were so sophisticated that they couldn’t be electronically jammed.

So we don’t even have electronic counter-measures to defend our military installations within this country.

We still do not know who controlled the drones over Barksdale, or if it was done by a foreign country, or even an adversary. We couldn’t defend a $300 million surveillance and command aircraft on a military base in Saudi Arabia. We somehow allowed three 97 million dollar F-15’s to be shot down by trigger happy “allies” in Kuwait. We failed to build enough bunkers or other defensive measures to keep 300 of our soldiers from being wounded or killed in drone and missile attacks by Iran.

But Pete “I have a Nazi cross on my chest” Hegseth is praying for a victory over those godless heathens in Iran.

Donald Trump is the…I hesitate to use this word…man who once said, “We’re going to win so much that you’re going to be sick and tired. You’re going to say, ‘Please, please, Mr. President, we’re sick and tired of winning. Please let us have at least one loss.”

Well, we’re going to get a big one that he is not prepared for. When he figures that out, we’ll need more than Pete Hegseth praying for us.