Fear and loathing at home and abroad

Commentary by Jeff Kamen

I want to share with you something that I wrote down a month before 165 Iranian school girls and their teachers were blown to bits by an American smart missile striking its designated target in Iran. OK. A month ago…

I woke up in the middle of the night checked the news and offered up another prayer of gratitude to God because Trump hadn’t committed mass murder somewhere in the world in a fit of rage, stoked by his increasing frustration over his inability to fully control events and people the way he imagined that he would be, this time.  

After all, this time he didn’t make the mistakes the first time he was president terrible mistakes hiring responsible, seasoned truly patriotic men to run the pentagon, homeland security, and the White House itself. Those men —all retired generals —got in his way, told him that there were things that they would not do and that he should not do because they violated the Constitution, powerfully stabilizing norms-or their own sense of decency. 

But this time around, he put in positions of power people of desperately weak character, whose  loyalty to him gives them access to power that makes them so drunk so wildly intoxicated so breathtaking full of themselves then under no circumstances, would they do anything but exactly what their boss orders — no matter the consequences to the people of the United States of America as the nation stumbles toward the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. 

In Washington today, the outlines of a new American authoritarianism are no longer theoretical. They are visible in court dockets, grand jury rooms, agency build‑outs and a climate policy that treats the future as expendable.  

Trump is enraged by his slavish justice department’s humiliating failure to get a Washington DC grand jury to indict six Democratic lawmakers for making and distributing a video,reminding military and intelligence officers of their duty to refuse unlawful orders. It was a prosecution decision that would have been rejected by the dumbest law school student and should never have been brought into a grand jury room to start with.  But the president who wants to be king insisted on it. Humiliation followed. At the hands of those ordinary citizens who made up the grand jury. 

Their refusal to indict  is a flicker of institutional resilience—but the attempt itself is the tell: a president trying to turn the machinery of federal criminal law against elected opponents for the “crime” of insisting that soldiers obey lawful authority, not him personally. 

Trump is reading the public opinion polls and they all suck for him. He is prepared to do anything to block a free and fair election in November because it’s looking more and more like if he doesn’t block it, the Democrats will roar into the House of Representatives and the Senate, which means impeachment and the likely overturning of everything that he has done so far to create the nation and the world that he always wanted. 

Before I go, some additional thoughts about the mass murder by American ordinance of 165 school girls and their teachers in Iran:

I believe that we will never know if that school was targeted specifically because our glorious secretary of war thought that slaughtering those children would be such a shock to the Iranian leadership or was the intelligence that was fed into the U.S.  targeting system completely wrong. A mistake.

Did the US military service members who programmed the missile for attack believe that they were targeting children? Absolutely fucking not. They were handed coordinates and they programmed them in. They locked them in. They fired the weapon on command. 

If the missile team members were advised the next day of what that weapon destroyed, and who, they probably became incapable of firing the next round. 

Because secretary of war Pete Hegseth is a living, cartoon character of mindless machismo, it is unlikely that there were psychologists on the scene to help the missile crew sort out the shock to their system.

As of this moment, Trump‘s war with Israel against Iran has left more than 1000 dead in Iran, and turned into a regional conflict with Iran targeting 14 countries in the Middle East with missiles and drones. Trump imagined that it was going to be so easy because of America’s vast power. The plan was to kill the brutal mass murderer, who ran Iran for 37 years and then somehow magically turn the country of 93 million  into an American colony with Mr. Trump, approving or naming the next, “supreme leader.“

OK. Thanks for hanging in here with me. I’ve got to return to writing the book. Please take best possible care of yourself.