What a scorcher. I’m referring to the heat—101 degrees as I write—and not the Israel/Iran/USA hostilities, which at this point is more of a war in this country between the isolationists and neocons, who are acting like it’s an NFL playoff game, with “hooray for my side” substituting for hours-long waits for “news” from the Mideast. No intent here to minimize the yet-to-materialize long-lasting consequences, and for the very little it’s worth, I wish the ever-prevaricating Trump kept his nose out of the region and just let Israel Be Israel. Although who could resist chuckling at Trump’s angry pronouncement Tuesday morning that Israel and Iran “don’t know what the fuck they’re doing.” I like a president who’s honest and not afraid to show it.
As noted here on several occasions, I’m almost always on the side of 90-degree days and agree with the climate-change naysayers that what a lot of the country is experiencing right now is called “summer.” I do back away from a skein of triple-digit heat waves, though, primarily because it causes my born-and-raised-in-Los Angeles wife to become grumpy, and our dog Billy to pant on morning walks, just as eager to get home as he was to go out. But this is what really worries me: a repeat of last year’s summer in Baltimore. Then, we had a month of hard rain and thunderstorms, followed by four weeks of unrelenting heat. All over the city, gardens were “scorched” and the produce output was nearly nil, leaving makeshift watermelon and tomato stands on the roads of Baltimore County in the lurch. My wife spends a lot of time fussing over the tomato plants, flowers, cucumbers and herbs and was cheesed off when it was all over by July, kind of like a rain-shortened baseball game when your team is losing by one run after five innings.
Is this frivolous? You could argue so—what with the hysteria over World War III creating its own hurricane Bibi and oil prices flip-flopping depending on unreliable “news” reports, and Zohran!—and that’s legitimate, but that won’t singe the crocodile on my well-worn forest green Lacoste polo shirt. Let’s raise a glass of no-microplastics H2O to the First Amendment, which hasn’t yet been suspended, despite the I’ve-got-nothing-better-to-do protestations from the kooks insisting Trump’s a dictator/Nazi/Idi Amin-impersonator that’s just part of the noise, a more grating situation (“We’ve got a situation” in TV procedural jargon) than elevator Muzak that’s exclusively The Archies, Lemon Pipers, Donny Osmond, the Bay City Rollers and The Traveling Wilburys.
Okay! On the with the show—this is it—and shazam, shazam, shazam and Heavens to Murgatroyd as I ponder, while our garden not-so-gently wilts, the mostly upside-down world of political commentary. I usually like the writing of The American Conservative’s Executive Director Curt Mills, the Millennial who lampoons Boomers (and 94-year-old Rupert Murdoch) for sport, not at all unfair, but his petulance over a week of Bad Fur days, is getting tiresome. Mills is a smart fellow, but his isolationism has grown so severe that he’s grasping at any ban-the-bombs online comments from Bad Guys like Steve Bannon. Once again, because caveats of good intent are so vital, I don’t mean to be entirely facetious, but Mills is acting (perhaps he’s purposely sleep-deprived) as if his sure thing wager in a March Madness pool is getting flushed down the rickety toilet in a woodsy latrine—and as a long-ago Boy Scout, who had cleaning duties, I can assure you those flimsy structures get rank after just four sit-downs.
On the other side, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, usually a Trump critic (although not as vituperative as the Atlantic lunatics), applauded the Iran attacks. He writes: “For decades, a succession of American presidents pledged that they were willing to use force to prevent Iran from acquiring weapons. But it was President Trump who… was willing to demonstrated that those pledges were not hollow… That’s a courageous and correct decision that deserves respect, no matter how one feels about this president and the rest of his policies… And adversaries everywhere, including in Moscow and Beijing, must now know that they are not dealing with a paper tiger in the White House. The world is safer for it.”
That’s the endorsement Stephens denied Trump last November.
The Atlantic’s Robert Kagan, once a rabid interventionist promoting the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but now a Democrat because he found Trump gauche, isn’t as generous as Stephens, because even a temporary win for the President is a loss for him.
Kagan writes, unaware that his words wouldn’t be out of place in a 1970 issue of The National Lampoon: “Today, the United States is at risk of being turned into a military dictatorship. Its liberal-democratic institutions have all but crumbled. The Founders’ experiment may be coming to an end. War with Iran is likely to hasten its demise. Not that it matters, but count me out.”
It’s not at all cynical to surmise that what’s bad for United States is a boon to Kagan’s bank account. I haven’t the stomach to read this loon’s Trump-related warnings since 2015, but I wonder how many times he’s invoked “the Founders’ experiment” nonsense? At least 40 instances would be my “back of the envelope” educated guess.
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023