Yes, the lion lay down with the lamb in Singapore, with the meeting of El Donaldo and Kim Jong-un. The only problem was, no one could tell which caudillo was which.
Okay, I’m being unkind to El Presidente, as is more or less my wont. He rips children from the arms of their parents, but he has yet to murder his own relatives, though Donald does seem to have a disturbing tolerance for nerve gas when used as a removal agent.1 And one has to wonder if old Tom Bolton, aka “Regime Change Tom”, isn’t muttering “this isn’t what I signed up for” like a New York cop being summoned to arrest Godzilla—although, in this case, of course, he’s being summoned to hawk beachfront property on the West Sea.
The folks on the neocon right are brandishing absolutely the worst insult in their armory at Trump—that his policies are just like Obama’s—proof that, basically, they just can’t stop lying.2 If they can’t lie, they can’t speak. But yesterday’s primaries only emphasized their helplessness: Trump owns the Republican Party, lock, stock, and two coolin’ barrels.
This doesn’t mean that Trump will be cooling things in the Middle East. He hates those damn Iranians, all right, and the Saudis are Donnie’s kind of ally: they’ve got money! They pay their way! But I confess I like the way Donnie talks about bringing the troops home, something that he keeps coming back to. All those war games! They’re so expensive, you know what I’m saying? And they bother my buddy Kim, you know that? So let’s call the whole thing off, you know what I’m saying? Sounds like a no brainer to me!
Afterwords
Like a lot of things in Donnie land, it’s “funny” that Trump would bitch about the cost of war games just after giving a massive boost to our already bloated beyond all reason defense budget, but, hey, that’s Donnie. What he’d probably like to do is build the largest battleship ever built and name it after himself. Of course, they don’t build battleships any more, but Donnie, he’s always been a sucker for the big guns.
Afterwords II
Lost amid all the shuffle, really, is the question of what’s going to happen to North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missiles. It kind of sounds like “nothing”.
- Kim Jong-un had his half-brother Kim Jong-nam murdered with nerve gas in Kuala Lumpur last year. Russian agents attacked Sergei V. Skripal and his daughter with nerve gas in Britain earlier this year. Trump has, of course, recommended the readmission of Russia to the G-7. Because, come on, they didn’t even kill the guy. It was like a warning. ↩︎
- If Obama talked about Kim Jong-un the way Trump does, the National Review wouldn’t be calling for his impeachment, they’d be screaming for it. ↩︎
