More Saturday Male Beauty - Pt 2

 

The Dead End to Trump’s "Perfect" War

Before launching his war of choice against Iran, the Felon ignored the warnings of experienced intelligence and military personnel who predicted that Iran would seize control of the Strait of Hormuz and that an air war alone would be insufficient to force Iran into capitulation. Now, five months into the Felon's disastrous war from which there appears to be no exit without an admission of defeat it becomes clear why previous - and smarter - presidents never launched a war with Iran realizing that such a war would turn into a quagmire such as he one we are now witnessing. Should Iran's allies, the Houthis in Yemen, manage to block Saudi tankers from exiting the Red Sea, oil and gas prices could soar and make the high price at the pumps earlier this year look like a bargain - all as the mid-term elections inch closer.  The perverse side of me would love to see American gas prices hit record highs to further erode the Felon's and GOP's support within the MAGA base who foolishly believed the Felon's lies during the 2024 campaign, particularly that the Felon would lower prices and not drag America into more foreign wars.  A column in the New York Times looks at how the Felon's "perfect" war has spun into a disaster. Here are highlights:

“We won,” President Trump announced on March 11, less than two weeks into his Iran war. “In the first hour, it was over.”  On March 24, in the Oval Office, he reiterated, “This war has been won.” On April 6, he asserted, “They are militarily defeated.” On April 11, Trump posted on Truth Social, “The United States has completely destroyed Iran’s Military.” “The war in Iran is going along swimmingly,” Trump said on April 16. “It’s perfect.”

The perfection of Trump’s war has confused some of his supporters. “I don’t understand how it’s possible that Iran has the capabilities to fight this way and continue to try to lash out at Gulf countries and U.S. military bases,” Maria Bartiromo of Fox News said on air recently. “Because the U.S. has obliterated Iran’s military, and the president continues to reiterate that.”

Yet Trump’s perfect war seems to have a few wee flaws, including the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and, in the past few days, the partial closure of passage through the Red Sea as well. So Trump is escalating attacks in what looks like a doubling down on a failed strategy. But the problem now is not Trump’s terrible miscalculation in starting the war on Feb. 28 in ways that weakened America, depleted munition supplies, reduced our capacity to deter China in Asia and strengthened Iranian hard-liners. Rather, the issue at the moment is the way he is disastrously escalating the war.

Trump has lately been striking sites across Iran each day, and he warned that the United States would hit a power plant or bridge for each ship that Iran struck. Putting aside the question of war crimes, there’s also the problem that Iran responds in kind.

“Iran still retains multiple escalation options,” noted Danny Citrinowicz, a retired Israel Defense Intelligence expert on Iran. Citrinowicz noted that Iran could attack Persian Gulf states, cut undersea cables or harness the Houthis in Yemen to attack shipping in the Red Sea.

Both sides have already struck water and desalination plants, which could be disastrous for Gulf countries if this continues. Iran is not heavily dependent on desalination, but Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates rely on desalination for almost all of their drinking water. Cities could become pretty much uninhabitable if power plants and desalination plants are destroyed.

Likewise, if the United States attacks Iranian oil and gas sites, Iran is likely to do the same in Gulf countries, reducing oil flows for months or years. The Houthis have announced that they have joined the conflict, targeting Saudi maritime traffic in the Red Sea and thus diminishing global oil supplies even more. The Houthis had stayed out of the war until now, and I wonder if this means they see Iran as the effective victor.

Trump is threatening to strike the Houthis. But he should remember that he and Joe Biden before him spent some $7 billion bombing the Houthis for a bit more than two years and achieved nothing obvious.

“Any realistic strategy should begin with one core assumption: Iran is unlikely to capitulate,” Citrinowicz said.

In other words, increased airstrikes seem a fiery dead end. I hope Trump isn’t considering invading with ground troops, for that would be even more disastrous. Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired general, estimates that it would take a year and 600,000 American troops to subdue Iran, taking casualties along the way.

“Then what?” McCaffrey asked. “Stay?”

[T]here’s really no alternative but negotiation, recognizing that any negotiated outcome will be unpalatable — though not as unpalatable as escalating a war to nowhere. Perhaps the most important aim of negotiation should be keeping Iran from getting nuclear weapons, but Trump’s foolish new nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, if it goes forward, will make that even harder. If the Saudis are enriching nuclear fuel, the Iranians will insist on doing so as well, and the upshot may be a nuclear competition between them.

I’m increasingly fearful that the most dismal legacy of this catastrophic war may be that a decade or two from now both Saudi Arabia and Iran will have nuclear weapons. Two unstable, misogynist Middle Eastern autocracies with nuclear weapons — what could go wrong?

More Saturday Male Beauty

 

Poll Shows Trump Voters Losing Patience with Iran War

I often wondered what it would take to cause at least some among the Felon's MAGA base to put down their pitchers of Kool-Aid and reconnect, at least somewhat, with objective reality.  The Felon has been a master at spewing lies and disinformation that his base time and time again clink to as gospel.  Yet, a new poll suggests that the Iran war, higher gasoline prices - oil is back over $100/barrel - and an incompetent handling of the economy may be finally outweighing the appeal of the Felon's efforts to mainstream racism and white supremacy, cruelty to non-whites, and mainstream anti-LGBT bigotry (at last nights White House Correspondents dinner he spewed anti-gay and anti-trans insults) that have to date appealed to the MAGA base.  If the Felon's newly announced  tariffs push consumer prices even higher before the 2026 mid-term elections one can only hope that defections from the MAGA alternate universe may pick up and, with luck, see Republicans harshly punished for what they and the Felon have wrought. Meanwhile, the Felon - self absorbed as ever and busy grifting and further enriching himself - seems to care little about the grow opposition to the war, including among his typically mindless base.  A piece at Politico looks at this development:

Half of President Donald Trump’s MAGA base thought the Iran war was worth its economic costs in May. Now, just a little more than a third do.

That precipitous, 13-point drop in just two months, according to a new POLITICO Poll, reveals how the [Felon's] president’s most die-hard supporters are starting to agree with the majority of Americans who have long opposed the U.S.’ involvement in the war.

Additionally, 37 percent of self-identified MAGA Trump voters say the U.S. should continue its involvement only if it doesn’t increase costs, up from 29 percent who said the same in May, according to the survey, conducted by independent polling firm Public First. Nearly 1 in 5 MAGA voters believe that the U.S. should end its war in Iran, regardless of the costs.

That flagging support among the president’s most loyal supporters is the clearest sign that Americans’ patience is wearing thin as the economy continues to dominate as voters’ top concern heading into a critical midterm cycle.

But Trump on Monday gave little indication that he was looking for a quick end to the war. The U.S. military has pounded Iran for the last two weeks, and speaking to reporters on Tuesday the president claimed that Iranian officials “want to desperately meet” . . . .

The White House is “at a maximum level of frustration right now, and I was told by very senior people that the president is now fully aware that the only way to the victory that he wants is completely politically impossible. The American people just will not support the kind of escalation it would take at this point,” said one person close to the White House, granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. “We’ve got more dead Americans and a politically impossible situation.”

This souring of the president’s base comes amid renewed hostilities between the U.S. and Iran, which have been conducting tit-for-tat strikes after the president earlier this month declared a tentative peace agreement between the two countries “over.” Two U.S. servicemembers were killed in Jordan this weekend and gas prices have climbed above $4 per gallon, underscoring the war’s impact at home.

The mood among White House staff and their outside allies is grim as the president grapples with finding a path out of an unpopular and expensive war three months from a midterm election expected to turn on cost of living issues.

The president was expected to spend the year on a victory tour on affordability issues, touting his popular tax cuts, Trump accounts for newborns and lower drug prices. Instead, a domestic travel schedule has been pocked by visits to Dover Air Force Base to oversee the dignified transfer of the remains of more than a dozen dead soldiers, and he has during his campaign-style rallies been forced to time and again argue to the American people that the price of war — most salient to higher prices at the pump — was worth ending Iran’s nuclear program.

White House aides contend that price bumps are temporary and will quickly return to pre-war levels either when the war ends or when the U.S. has degraded Iran’s military capabilities to the point that it can no longer stem the flow of oil tankers through the Strait of Hormuz. . . . . “The President does not make national security decisions based on fluid opinion polls, but on the best interests of the American people.”

Still, the latest polling shows that non-MAGA Trump voters are even more down on the war, with only 21 percent believing it is worth higher costs, while 28 percent say that the U.S. shouldn’t continue the war regardless of costs.

And the results show the president’s voters are broadly comfortable blaming the war for higher prices. When asked why gas prices have increased since the president took office, the majority of respondents blamed the conflict, including 57 percent of MAGA voters and 63 percent of non-MAGA Trump voters.

Those who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, on the other hand, also blamed the president’s poor handling of the economy and his tariffs, at 55 percent and 52 percent, respectively, for the rise in costs.

Trump’s 2024 supporters also are split on whether gas prices would have gone up more, less or the same under a Democratic president compared with now — another indication that Americans are more willing to assign blame to Trump for the state of the economy.

Prominent Republicans, including strategists in key races, have spent the last several months warning about the impact of backlash to the Iran war on their chances of holding the House and the Senate, with frustrations around the war playing out in competitive races across the country.

“This shows that as unpopular as the first round of war was from February to early summer, this second round is even more ridiculous,” said Curt Mills, executive director of the American Conservative magazine. “The American people quite simply do not get it, do not understand why we are in this war, and, yes, President Trump is king of the Republican Party. Yes, the president can do a lot and has a lot of latitude with his own supporters, but kings are not invulnerable from political reality.” But Trump on Tuesday said he wasn’t concerned.

Saturday Morning Male Beauty

 

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Thursday Male Beauty

 

Americans Need the Truth About the Iran War

Oil prices are even higher today as the price per barrel of oil moves back towards $100.00 and Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen are claiming strikes overnight on two Saudi tankers in the Red Sea, something that if it continues will cause oil prices to soar even more. Meanwhile, neither the United States nor Iran are showing any letup in their fighting as most Americans continue to be told little about ongoing attacks on Iran, any hint of a thought out strategy or the total number of servicemembers wounded.  Indeed, the Felon, Pete Hegseth and Pentagon officials appear to actively suppressing information and continuing to deliberately lie about Iran's military capabilities being "obliterated" even as Iran's ongoing attacks show that the claim was and is a lie.  The reality is that Iran seems to realize that it has the Felon in a corner where he has no means of escaping the mess of his own creation.  Moreover, if Iran's Houthi allies succeed in cutting of oil flowing from the Red Sea, the last round of high American gas prices will look like nothing compared to the coming pain at the pump.  All as we move towards the mid-term elections. A column at The Atlantic looks at the Felon's ongoing lies:

For nearly five months, [the Felon] Donald Trump and his Cabinet have been misleading the American people about the war in Iran. When the president makes statements about the war, they are full of wishful thinking, hyperbole, and outright lies. He has devoted a full address to the topic only once—a rambling prime-time speech nearly four months ago that contained little substance. At this point, after more than 20 weeks of hostilities and at least 18 Americans dead and hundreds wounded, the people of the United States do not—cannot—entirely know what is happening, what progress U.S. forces are making, or what the president’s goals are.

This opacity seems to be by design: The [Felon] president and his lieutenants appear unwilling to admit that they started, and are now losing, a war with one of America’s most dedicated enemies, and obfuscating probably seems less damaging than admitting this painful truth. Of course, some of their statements are merely mistakes. Some are spin. Others are exaggerations. But many of them are flat lies that Trump and his appointees dump into the public square seemingly without hesitation.

[The Felon] has insisted for months that the Iranian military is finished and that it has nothing left, as he did in the first week of the war when he said: “We’ve decimated their whole evil empire.” (He made similar claims at least half a dozen times in the first month of the war alone.) He has said that Iranian nuclear materials must be handed over, then said that the same materials are worthless and can stay where they are, and now has gone back to arguing that ending the Iranian nuclear program is the most important goal of the war.

All of these claims are dominoes that were set up to fall, one after another, by the single most egregious mistake that Trump made when choosing to go to war: He bet on quick regime change in a terrorist dictatorship and had no other plan should his long shot fall short. Perhaps Trump, after talking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, believed the optimistic scenarios of a rapid regime collapse that Netanyahu and others floated. Trump’s own secretary of state reportedly warned the president that he was being sold “bullshit.”

But within days, it became apparent that regime change was not happening. Unable to face failure, Trump resorted to prevarication. The war was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks, perhaps a month or a little more. When that timeline fell apart, Trump and his advisers began to dial through various reasons for staying in the war, but regime change—so prominent a goal in the first hours of the conflict—was now no longer one of them. Trump eventually claimed, dishonestly, that he’d never had any such intentions.

He then piled up more falsehoods. The war was going great, the president and the self-appointed “secretary of war” told the world. “Total and complete ​victory. 100 percent,” Trump told the French AFP news service on April 8. “No question about ​it.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the same day, called Operation Epic Fury “a historic and overwhelming victory on the battlefield, a capital V military victory” and said that Iran had been rendered “combat ineffective for years to come.” These statements were obvious nonsense.

Such assertions are clearly false and were almost certainly knowably false from the start. Iran’s military capability has been degraded, not obliterated, which is why this wording has come back to haunt Trump. Over the past few days, a clip of the Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo has gone viral; in it, Bartiromo points out what any sensible person who has listened to Trump talk about the war might question: “I don’t understand how it’s possible that Iran has the capabilities to fight this way and continue to try to lash out,” she said. She was puzzled, she added, “because the U.S. has obliterated Iran’s military, and the president continues to reiterate that.”

Bartiromo’s observation has only three possible responses. One is that the president genuinely has no idea what he’s saying, which would be beyond alarming in any circumstances, but especially during a time of war. Another option is that Hegseth and other advisers are keeping the truth from him, which would be a civil-military crisis of unprecedented gravity. The third option is that Trump is lying.

Now that a poorly negotiated cease-fire has finally fallen apart, Trump has returned to one of his most cringe-inducing howlers: The Iranians, he has said repeatedly, really want a deal. . . . Tehran appears to enjoy outing Trump on this one; sometimes the Iranians seem to launch attacks in the region just to make the point that Trump is wrong.

Americans, after months of war, cannot even be sure how many men and women in uniform have been wounded or how severely. . . . As the CNN reporter Brian Stelter notes, “Hegseth hasn’t explained the military strategy behind the renewed air strikes. His department hasn’t revealed the circumstances that led to the recent deaths of US service members. It’s all indicative of a larger effort to control information, limit access and avoid difficult questions about the war.” This is more than a lack of transparency; the Pentagon is taking away the ability to query actual human beings, instead redirecting journalists to an online source that is itself an obstacle to getting timely and accurate facts.

Trump and Hegseth are putting on a brave face, warning Iran that it will pay for killing more Americans. . . . Leaving aside the issue of this threat to commit potential war crimes, the United States seems to be running out of munitions: On Monday, The Washington Post reported that a “U.S. official familiar with internal administration discussions,” speaking on the condition of anonymity, warned: “We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that.”

But others—including people in the Pentagon and the intelligence community—must know the truth, and if the White House wasn’t aware of these concerns yesterday, it is now. Trump, Hegseth, and others in the administration know many other truths as well. They should start sharing those truths with the American people.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

More Wednesday Male Beauty