In a better world, the gang rape of Jane Doe at Cornell would not have happened, and this column would not need to be written. Ours is not a better world.

To stand over a sleeping baby as a parent and observe the sweetness of an innocent face is heartbreaking, because you know what awaits outside that room, away from the ministrations of your control. You can protect your child right up until you can’t. A teenage daughter will be in her room getting ready for her first date and there will be a knock on the door, and she will leave in a car with a teenage boy, still arguing about what time she must be home. There will be a day when you help a son who is still a little boy into his football uniform for the first time, figuring out the shoulder pads and adjusting the belts and snapping the chin strap on his helmet, and he will go out onto a field and get hit by other boys.

It’s your job to get kids ready for the world outside the door. It is a very hard job, because there is no handbook. There is only the life you have lived and the way you have lived it.

A lot of the duty of being a parent can be summed up as stating the obvious. Don’t run out in the street. Brush your teeth. Wash between your toes. Listen in class. Do your homework.

It gets ever more complicated, not less, as they move further away from your supervision. The only thing you can do is prepare them for the time when you don’t know what they are doing in their lives. This is the time when hoping for the best is not enough.

You have to make up your mind how far to go when you warn them about what’s out there. I determined that a daughter needs to be told that men are not to be trusted, that their motives are nearly always suspect. A son must be told that women are to be cherished and under no circumstances are they to be abused physically or mentally.

The dos and don’ts do not end at the margins of the genders. There are larger matters which govern. Try to be understanding of differences. Do not be swayed by prejudice of any sort. Do not be hurtful. Be kind.

I passed along these rules of how to live your life almost exactly as they had been passed down to me by my parents. I had no way of knowing how lucky I had been until I got out in the world and was introduced to those who had not been so lucky. I remember in the Army that one of my assignments was to teach a class to the entire company called “personal hygiene.” It seemed like stating the obvious until I learned that there were guys who had grown up in homes without hot water, for whom bathing was as unusual as woolen blankets, who had never been given or used a toothbrush.

It shouldn’t take a story about a fraternity gang rape of an unconscious young woman for us to realize that there are not a few men who need to be taught a course in moral hygiene. They grew up in homes where behavioral lines were not drawn, even fuzzy ones. Laws are inadequate as restraint, especially when alcohol and drugs are involved. By the time the courts and the police are involved, it is always too late. Damage has been done, and when it comes to sexual damage, it is nearly always girls and women who suffer.

I am probably no different from many, many others who have asked themselves how such as thing as the crimes at Cornell happened at all after all the years of being educated by feminism, witnessing the me-too movement, and just living in this imperfect world where sexual crimes are as common, even more common, than murder and mass shootings. Every time a sex crime becomes public, you hope that the shame and consequences attached to it will make the same thing less likely in the future. But the same kind of hope is dashed again and again as they are by school killings that keep recurring despite the recitation of the horrors of the last one.

We live now in a country where the role model in chief is a rapist. Moniker-makers have come up with “manosphere” to describe online male misbehavior that has become its own political movement. I despair when I see words like “manosphere” because I have learned that it stands in for the worst instincts and crimes of men such as sexual assault and rape. The young men who serve in our military have a leader who paid $50,000 to shut up a woman he sexually assaulted at a conference in a hotel where he was a featured speaker. One sexual abuser was elected president. The other was confirmed by the Senate. Yet these men and their crimes cannot serve as excuses for the crimes of other men.

There is so much that should not need to be said, and yet here we are all over again. Male sexual assault is not a hormonal explosion or participation in the groupthink of a club or a fraternity. It is a choice. Everyone knows this or should know it by now.

The president of Cornell announced today that he is banning parties at fraternities and said he will address the “culture” of alcohol and drug abuse that he has found on the campus. I would say that he should have gone all the way and outlawed fraternities and sororities, but that is paper over the problem. He may as well ban alcohol and drug use by students, which is already the case under New York State law and in other states where the drinking age is 21 and drugs are illegal.

It is obvious that students in fraternities have for decades been left alone to behave any way they want when they are gathered together. Misbehavior at fraternities is celebrated everywhere they exist. The phrase “party school” is a compliment, not a condemnation.

There is no solution, easy or otherwise, for the crimes committed most recently at Cornell. The prisons are filled with rapists and even more of them walk free among us. Yet we cannot sit back and hope that another school shooting doesn’t happen or that another young woman is not sexually assaulted or raped on or off a college campus.

How were these young men at Cornell brought up as children that they would come to think gang-raping an unconscious woman was an acceptable thing to do? Bad behavior isn’t born, it’s raised. We must believe that correction can happen and not just from application of felony laws. That means leadership by example that did not occur at Cornell and is not happening enough in our politics and culture. It’s a big problem, but it is not insurmountable. To believe otherwise is to give up on our children and our future. We cannot. We will not. We are human beings, not animals, and we should act that way.

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One of my favorite genres of articles these days is the “MAGA relatives and friends are very sad about the consequences of being absolute human filth. Why is this happening to them?!” My favorite sub-genre is “They’re sad; they don’t deserve this cruel, cruel treatment, and we should all just get along.” To which my instant and natural response is a lot of laughing and a loud “FUUUUUCCCKKK YOOOOOOOUUUU!”

just wrote about another delightful entry in this favored genre from the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ just doesn’t understand; it’s so confusing! Why are so many adults telling their parents to take a fucking walk, lose their number, and to never darken their doorstep again?

“Why Are So Many Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?” the headline asks.

The broad causes the WSJ lists are “the rise of social-media algorithms, changing therapeutic approaches and a broadening definition of trauma.” You can see where this is going, and it’s as far away from personal responsibility as humanly possible.

He’s not kidding. You can, in fact, tell the WSJ is going to twist itself into a caricature of wide-eyed innocence and “just asking questions!” from the very beginning of the article:

Like Brill—whose 28-year-old son cut off contact three years ago—these parents were seeking one thing: answers.

“We want to know what makes all these kids want to do this,” says Brill, a 60-year-old retired event planner from Atlanta. “Because whatever the individual case may be, they are all saying the same thing: ‘My mom is a narcissist.’ ‘My dad is self-absorbed.’ ‘It’s your fault something is wrong.’ ”

Let’s be honest. Not one of these parents is looking for answers. They’re looking for absolution. They’re looking for someone to tell them that they’re not to blame for their kid finally tiring of their abusive bullshit and kicking them to the curb. They need someone, ANYONE else to blame.

It has to be social media! It has to be therapists! Texting! Identity politics! Their children are self-centered, not them! They’re good people, goddammit!

Pfft! As if. But allow me to take a brief detour from the article to ask you, very nicely, to support this newsletter with a subscription. Substack has been throttling my traffic for almost two years now, and every sub helps. You can keep this newsletter going for just $5/month or $50/year $25/year during the October 50% Off Spooky Season Sale!

If subscriptions aren’t your thing, you can leave a one-time PayPal or Venmo tip instead! Thanks for your support and for reading all of this! Now, back to the article!

Of course, while diagnosing the problem, WSJ conveniently elides the very obvious issue at hand: Who these parents actually are and how spectacularly shitty they have been to their children. The word “politics” is mentioned exactly once. Same with gender, race, and sexuality. None of that is a problem. Or rather, it is. But only because of those darn kids and their identity politics!

Surprise! Identity is targeted as the source of all the drama. Naturally:

“There’s this idea that if you don’t endorse or embrace my identity, you are no longer an ally,” Coleman says. “And from that perspective, cutting you off becomes a virtuous act of self-care and protecting my mental health.”

Did you catch the attempt at psychological and societal jujutsu? When your parents reject the very core of who you are, it’s YOUR fault if you don’t accept that rejection! You and your fucking identity bullshit and mental health. Don’t you know your parents need acceptance, too?! They need you to accept their hate and spite and cruelty and sadism and blind rage.

We’re not talking about parents and kids butting heads over a career choice or what kind of music they listen to. If I get into an argument because I think my son dresses like an idiot or my daughter wears too much makeup, that’s not me criticizing them on a core level. That’s all superficial bullshit. Becoming a professional mime probably isn’t going to work out. Jobs come and go. Music tastes change over time. No one dresses the same at 30 like they did at 19.1

That is not the same as telling your kid they’re disgusting for dating a (insert ethnic or religious minority of your choice here). An abomination for being Trans. Throwing them out of the house for being gay. Telling them over and over that America is for whites only when half of their friends are not white. That hurting The Other makes you happy, and if they don’t agree, then there’s something wrong with them. They must have toxic empathy or some kind of woke mind virus.

Now, you are hitting something deeper, something central to who they are as a person. Something they cannot alter, and you, as a parent, should not want them to. You’re not “challenging their identity,” as the WSJ so blandly puts it. You are attacking their fundamental self. You are telling them that they are unacceptable unless they change the most elemental parts of who they understand themselves to be. This, according to the Wall Street Journal, is fine. Walking away from parents who demand it? That’s just fucking awful.

In other words, parents are allowed to condition their love and affection on their child changing immutable aspects of themselves. Children, on the other hand, are not allowed, under ANY circumstances, to condition their love and affection on their parents accepting them for who they are. They’re also not allowed to condition their love and affection on their parents being less intolerant and hateful of others. Let’s be clear about this: Not every kid walks away from their MAGA parents because their hate is directed at them, specifically.

There are plenty of people who cannot tolerate the nonstop torrent of bile their relatives spew at other people. You don’t have to be Trans or Jewish or Black or have any Trans, Jewish, or Black friends to get sick and tired of listening to your Fox News-addled mother’s nonstop complaining about how they’re ruining America. A bigot is a bigot is a bigot, and in the year 2026, that shit is worn the fuck out. We also all know that if whoever they currently hate isn’t someone in our lives, it will be someone new tomorrow. Sooner or later, it WILL be someone we know and care about personally. It always is. It always will be. This is why I stopped speaking to my in-laws in 2016 when they bragged about voting for Trump. I’ve mentioned this many MANY times, but I told my wife that even though the 2016 election was about hate for Latino immigrants and Muslims, they would get around to the Jews. Seven months later, Nazis were marching in Charlottesville. Ten years later, the Republican Party is infested with…Nazis.

Now, according to the WSJ, the fact that so many people are no longer swallowing the poison of their parents at the expense of their own well-being is truly an epidemic. Not the poison, of course. That’s OK. We must accept the ocean of bile spewed by parents who wear MAGA hats and cheer for concentration camps and openly pine for literal genocide. Any desire to remove that kind of objective evil from our lives is, of course, just wrong and hurtful. How can we be so callous?! What the actual fuck is wrong with us? Don’t we love our parents?! The ones who laughed when Americans were murdered on the street?

The Wall Street Journal can go fuck itself right off a cliff. Like I’ve been saying since 2016: We do not owe these fucking people anything. Not our time. Not our forgiveness. Not our love and affection. They are owed nothing but scorn and derision because they have chosen to follow a monster and attack everything that is good and decent in this world and in themselves. That’s their fucking problem. I see no reason to make it mine. But please, keep writing these articles, WSJ (and the rest of the legacy press). I do so dearly enjoy the genre. It’s absolutely delightful.

There are two things, specifically, I love about this genre and why I enjoy writing about it so much.

The first is that it shows, for the very first fucking time in American history, that there are systemic and ongoing consequences for the American right. They are not being rewarded for their hate. They are not being absolved of their hate. They are being ostracized for it. There is now a price for being hateful. A very VERY steep one. They are being cut off from their family and treated like a pariah. After Trump is gone and they burn their MAGA hat, some of them will be forgiven.

Most of them will not.

I will never again speak to my in-laws, my cousin, my half-brother. They went MAGA, and they are dead to me. I will be far from the only person with this opinion. There will be (tens of) millions just like me. Millions of Americans who will get a phone call from their MAGA friends and relatives looking to reconnect after the regime falls. They’ve changed, you see! They were never REALLY MAGA! They’re an Independent now! Or a Constitutional Conservative! Or, really, they’re just not into politics; can't we just move past all that silliness?

No. No, we cannot, and lose my fucking number, you Nazi fuck. This will spawn another thousand articles after the fall: Why won’t intolerant liberals forgive their parents?!

Because they do not deserve it and they have not earned it and because fuck them, that’s why. I look forward to reading that new sub-genre and writing about it.

This brings me to the other thing I love about all of this. These articles and me writing about them2 do something very important. Something the WSJ definitely does not want but is doing anyway: They create a permission structure. This structure allows people who were either on the fence about walking away from abusive parents or didn’t even realize that was an option.

The Wall Street Journal, and every other outlet writing in outrage over this “epidemic,” is unintentionally showing us that there is another way. We do not HAVE to suffer through another Thanksgiving listening to our parents tell us that the only way to save America is to get rid of the dirty immigrants and men playing in women’s sports. That vaccines kill babies, and you can’t trust doctors. That “inner cities” are all on fire because of riots and crime. That women who get abortions are whores, and maybe they should bleed to death in hospital parking lots.

None of us have to allow so much hate and cruelty and evil in our lives. There’s no reason for it. There’s no justification. By talking about it, both in terms of it happening and laughing at the so-called “despair” of those who have been cut off from their victims,3 we make space for others to take that leap to freeing themselves from the tyranny of hate.

The fact that I deeply enjoy writing about the suffering of estranged MAGA doesn’t make it any less of a public service to tell you that you do not have to put up with their bullshit. An Ogre can love his work, can’t he? 😉It’s your life. It’s your children’s lives (if you have any). If you do not want soulless monsters tainting it with a constant barrage of sadistic malice towards everyone that doesn’t look, sound, and act like them, walk away. Protect yourself (and your kids).

Maybe someday you’ll end up the subject of a legacy press article lamenting how mean you are for abandoning the poor, unloved MAGA in your life. God, I’ll be so jealous!

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It takes a particular kind of person to relish in human suffering, and an even more particular one to assume that others share the same sadistic tendencies. But that’s the foundational story of Donald Trump and those who work for him and support him. And few moments have made their barbarism and sadism as clear as the announcement that the execution of former Army Major Nidal Hasan, who killed 13 people in a Fort Hood terrorist attack, will be by firing squad, and live streamed to the public.

That announcement came shortly after the botched execution of Christa Pike, a Texas woman on death row for the torture and murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. That phrase — “botched execution” — is itself a horror. That the United States government executes people, and that we sometimes “botch” that process, should make us feel ill and ashamed.

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Hasan and Pike did awful, evil things. There are not questions about their factual innocence. You don’t have to pity them or empathize with them to conclude that the state should not use its power to kill them.

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I’ll bet you thought I’m going to write about his last-ditch zoom-zoom Air Force One roundelay of rallies trying to prop up Republican losers running for House and Senate, didn’t you? His nearly nightly frenzied shriek of pain and political malpractice speaks for itself as the calendar pages turn until doom day in November.

No, what I’m referring to is Trump’s seventh, or is it eighth abandonment of Ukraine as he tries to help his payoff-pal Vladimir Putin get himself out of the death-hole he has dug with his four-year-plus war on his much smaller, much less powerful, much less wealthy neighbor that he declared isn’t a real nation but rather a vassal-state that needs him more than he needs it.

Putin and Trump are the most incompetent bullies in modern history. Can you imagine being one of these assholes for even one day? When Donald Trump took office a second time last year, all he had to do to not fuck things up for his party, and oh, by the way, for the nation, was forget his whole tariff obsession and not start any wars. And his pal, Putin? He knew his military was broken, his economy was a joke, the standing of Russia in the world was an even bigger joke, and all he had to do back in 2022 was not invade Ukraine.

Putin bogged himself down in Ukraine, and Trump fumbled his way into his tariff nightmare so stupidly, even his own Supreme Court wouldn’t endorse his bullshit. Eight days after the Court shot down his tariffs in a way that would have enabled him to use that decision to bail himself out of the inflationary mess he’d created, Trump started bombing Iran and threw the entire world into an energy and inflationary spiral we still can’t see the end of.

Last summer, Trump invited Putin to a U.S. military base in Alaska and gave him a red-carpet welcome. Who knows what he expected from the Russian assassin? The meeting lasted a great big three hours. Putin apparently told Trump there would be no peace deal unless he got all the land his military had failed to take in the Donbas, which was code for, there will never be peace until I’ve got all of Ukraine. It wasn’t a deal. It wasn’t a threat. Even dullard Donnie could understand that.

So, what did Trump do, between planning sessions for his ballroom and trips to pick out marble at some two-bit excess showroom in Miami? He kept calling Putin on the phone, like a teenager pursuing one of the “popular” girls he knows is never going to date him.

Meanwhile, Putin is sitting over there in a bunker under Moscow somewhere laughing his ass off as Trump fucked up the one thing he should have excelled at -- putting on a big show for the 250^th American anniversary in Washington D.C. If he had just done it right than follow his base instincts and terrible taste, the world would have congratulated him. Instead, he had MME fighters bloodying each other on the White House lawn and a mock state fair on the mall that sold water to heat-stroking tourists for $5 a bottle. The whole thing was an embarrassing mess.

All the while, Putin was bombing Kyiv and other cities in Ukraine, bombing their power plants, bombing the train from Poland to Kyiv, sending swarms of drones and missiles anywhere they could hit a stray Ukrainian civilian.

While Putin was bombing civilian targets in Ukraine, Zelenskyy had built up Ukrainian drone and missile stocks and was hitting targets all over Russia – refineries, power plants, airports, department stores, and finally data centers. Putin is such a paranoid asshat, he centralized almost the entire Russian internet and data networking structure around a few facilities. Ukraine has by now knocked out half of them.

All spring, all summer, right up until this month, Ukraine has been killing and wounding more than 50,000 Russian soldiers a month on the front lines, causing almost every single casualty with drones and short-range missiles that Ukraine was now building for itself in underground factories.

The U.S., with the largest and most powerful military in the world, was shown the door in the Middle East by the much smaller and less wealthy country of Iran. Russia, which said it had a powerful and invincible military, is getting the shit beat out of it by Ukraine, the country Putin thought he would take over a long weekend back when he started the war. They must have several crews in Russia these days dedicated to cleaning up the bloody mess left by the bodies of Russian generals that have mysteriously gone out high-rise windows.

If you were a half-way competent military expert, what would your assessment be at this point? Trump blathered and fumbled his way over the weekend into breaking a federal law by relaxing Russian oil sanctions so Putin could promise to “send” 300,000 tons of diesel fuel to the U.S., which Trump promised would bring down prices. Paul Krugman crunched the numbers last night and figured out that 300,000 tons of diesel is just about enough to fill up the tanks of trucks and diesel-burning buses in this country for 12 hours. There’s another 500,000 barrels coming from Russia, too, Trump claims. Whoop-de-doo! That’s almost a day’s worth!

Elon Musk woke up and told the world on Saturday that – I’m going to quote from his post on X – “Zelensky has gone too far.” That’s right Elon. Ukraine is causing our high gas and diesel prices because they’re hitting refineries in Russia that we buy exactly zero barrels of fuel from. Oh, that bothersome mess in the Strait of Hormuz? Look over there! I just saw a man in a dress doing into a women’s restroom!

Every time you think you’ve seen it all, or heard it all, these gibbering idiots somehow manage to outdo themselves.

Trump is supporting a murderous monster in Russia who started the first war in Europe since World War II and is bombing women and children every single night in Ukraine.

That alone is grounds for impeachment, not to mention voting against every Republican whiner who has enabled his insane bullshit for nearly two years.

Trump got us into a war in Iran that has caused us to lose every military base we had from the Persian Gulf to Jordan. We’ve moved bombers out of Great Britain because we’re afraid Iran has terrorists who will set off bombs and destroy them. We don’t have enough missiles and smart bombs left to defend our own troops and military installations, much less defend our allies in Europe and Asia.

Another article of impeachment, maybe two.

There is a strong likelihood that Trump will get up in front of one of his rallies sometime soon, and such a stream of pure, unadulterated madness is going to come out of his mouth that even the New York Times and CBS News and the other mainstream media outlets are going to be left searching the dictionary for words to describe what has happened in this country. Our president, to use a phrase the Times is free to steal, is as mad as a hatter. Even if we win the House and the Senate next month, we will be lucky to survive him.

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Donald Trump’s sudden deal for purchase of Russian diesel oil is a shocking rejection of U.S. law extending sanctions against those doing business with Iran, a handshake with those providing targeting information harming Americans, and a diplomatic slap against Ukraine and its allies in the continuing war against Russia.

The “deal” with Russia’s Vladimir Putin is a cynical, desperate attempt to trumpet a would-be reduction in soaring diesel before the November election. The deal proposes delivery of 300,000 tons of diesel “immediately,” to be followed by 500,000 tons in a month, and a million tons sometime thereafter.

But even a cursory look at the numbers involved show that even at best, the move, however diplomatically dangerous, will not work as intended. Gas prices globally have surged as the war in Iran has upended the energy sector. The national average for a gallon of diesel in the U.S. remains above $6.

In his announcement, Trump simply asserted that more Russian oil supply would lower costs to farmers, truckers and ranchers three weeks before the U.S. elections. Trump did not acknowledge that he was overturning the sanctions that his own administration had just imposed on Russia and any other country doing oil business with Iran.

But in the war with Iran, it is the very same Russia that is providing Iran with information to pinpoint locations of U.S. troops in the Middle East.

Trump’s Russian Diesel Deal Raises Sanctions and National Security Concerns

It is another Trump transaction that seems to benefit his ever-present warmth for the autocratic Putin. Trump lurches from deal to deal with no apparent strategy or long-term international goal.

In this case, Trump is ignoring his own pronounced need to clamp down on world trade with Iran, since Russia is a close ally with Iran and does plenty of oil and other business with that nation. Any Trump strategy to move from military strikes with unclear goals in hopes of forcing Iran to abandon its nuclear weapons aspirations or to fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz to free international trade seems doomed by a gratuitous move to win back short-term votes for Republicans in November.

The deal drew immediate condemnation from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and from Democrats who have criticized Trump’s handling of gas prices and foreign policy. Reaction was more muted among Republicans.

Zelenskyy sees the deal as boosting Russian economic ability to sustain its four-year invasion of Ukraine. No matter to Trump, who simply called over the weekend for Zelenskyy to resign as president of Ukraine, as if that were either appropriate or practical. On Sunday, Trump asserted there was a negotiated ceasefire over energy targets between Ukraine and Russia, though the fact that Ukraine did not even know about it suggested that Trump invented it out of whole cloth.

As it happens, Ukrainian drone attacks on Russian refineries have been increasingly successful at disrupting the country’s fuel supplies in recent months and have emerged as among its most effective pressure tactics against the Kremlin. Russia has not been exporting diesel to conserve it for its war effort, as lines at fuel stations stretch for blocks in many Russian cities. Diesel output is reported down about 30 percent.

It is not even clear that Russia can live up to the amounts specified in the deal.

But it is beyond understanding how Trump would shake hands for diesel deliveries from the same Russians who are providing missile targeting information to the Iranians. How a diesel deal will contribute to bringing Iran to its economic knees, as Team Trump has been preaching, is totally beyond understanding.

Will Russian Diesel Imports Actually Lower U.S. Fuel Prices?

As The Washington Post and other outlets note, the volumes involved are a small slice of daily U.S. diesel production and consumption. The actual immediate price impact was likely to be muted, analysts say.

Clayton Seigle, an energy strategist and expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Associated Press that the price impact for the U.S. will be minimal.

The U.S. uses about 3.6 million to 4.1 million barrels of diesel a day. Transportation alone accounts for 2.9 million barrels a day. The U.S. exports roughly 1.5 million barrels of diesel per day while producing around 5.3 million barrels of distillate fuel per day.

Do the math. The 300,000 tons will cover about 1.5 days of U.S. usage. Analysts estimate the initial tranches could represent a modest 5% to 6% temporary bump in supply.

Russia already is selling its diesel to someone. Even if the designated amounts are  redirected to the U.S., it means global prices will remain high – which translate into U.S. consumer prices that are passed on through tariffs and trade.

We should recognize Trump’s deal as the inconsequential, pandering election scheme that it really is, and ask the more important question about why Trump would help the same Russia who helps target our troops in the Middle East.

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One of the first rules of election year politics has to be, you don’t want an October surprise. That usually means starting early in the year, you get your political handlers and thinkers and organizers and major domos to game out the year ahead to prevent one from happening.

Sooooo…let’s say the year is 2026, and it’s the year the midterm elections will be held in November. You’re the president, and your party controls the House and the Senate, and you don’t want to lose control of either one of them. The thinking should have started back in January with one essential question: what kind of disaster could befall us between now and the election – most especially, in October just before the election?

I’ve got a great idea! says the Big Thinker in Chief. Let’s start a war in the Middle East! Those always work out well for us! We’ll start a little one against Iran, no ground troops, just some bombing and missiles, they’re weak, we should have everything wrapped up within a few weeks! That’s the ticket!

Well, here’s the thing about wars. You’d better have a hell of a good reason to start one, because consequences will follow. Consequence number one is, the country you go to war against will shoot back. Consequence number two is, they will do stuff you didn’t plan for. Consequence number three is, the war will inevitably spread. Consequence number four is, the war will cost more than you think it will in all kinds of ways you didn’t plan for.

All of which happened to Donald Trump beginning on February 28 of his midterm election year. Let’s take a look at how things are going for our resident Military Genius in Chief as we open yet another door in the October Surprise advent calendar.

Iran fought back starting on the first night of the war, killing six Americans at a base in Kuwait and doing major damage to that base and other bases in the region. Iran shut down the Strait of Hormuz. That wasn’t an unintended consequence. It was part of Iran’s strategic planning should they come under attack by the Great Satan.

You already know what happened next. Oil prices headed straight up, gas and diesel prices along with them. The 28^th of February has this annoying habit of being followed immediately by the month of March, when planting begins on farms in the warmer climes of the U.S.A., and March is followed by April, when more planting takes place. This means lots of plowing, no-till planting, fertilizing…

Ooops! Farmers! Aren’t they Republicans? Why, yes, that’s what they tend to be out there in the Midwest and the South, and they have lots and lots of tractors, which these days are enormous things with quad wheels on the back and the front, they weigh tons and tons, and they consume lots and lots of diesel fuel. And of course, farmers need fertilizer, which contains compounds like urea and phosphorus. Urea is made from natural gas, which is produced in great quantities in, you guessed it, countries in the Persian Gulf, and phosphorus is produced by Saudi Arabia, yet another Persian Gulf country.

All of which was known on February 28 in the White House.

Or maybe not. Maybe the fools in the White House, or Trump and his minions sitting around that absurd makeshift “situation room” walled off by curtains in a Mar a Lago ballroom, did not know this. Maybe Secretary Pushups over there in the Pentagon was too busy firing generals and meddling in promotion boards to look up urea and phosphorus and what would happen to world oil prices if 25 percent of the world’s supply was suddenly cut off by a very pissed-off Iran, that had about eleventy-thousand missiles aimed at the Strait of Hormuz.

All that happened. Every last teeny-tiny bit of it, and Iran was just getting started. Iran’s proxies in Iraq started misbehaving and flying drones and bombing the shit out of American bases in the north of the country. So much damage was done to U.S. bases in Persian Gulf countries that Hegseth and his geniuses just threw up their hands and withdrew American military forces from every Middle Eastern country but Jordan. This week, the Pentagon’s Liar in Chief, Sean Parnell, had to admit that they had undercounted the number of American soldiers who have been killed since the war began, increasing the figure from 18 to 21. Don’t ask how you can not know that three soldiers were killed. They knew. They just lied until yesterday. The Pentagon’s top liar also had to adjust the count of the wounded to 865, an increase of 95 since August. And this blithering idiot Parnell? He’s been doing such a good job staying on top of the casualty figures and whatever lie they’re telling this week about their stocks of missiles and bombs that Hegseth wants to promote him to be the new Secretary of the Army because he’s done such a good job of lying.

All this time, these last seven-plus months, Trump has been declaring that the war is over, we won, Iran is destroyed, they demanded a ceasefire, we’re negotiating with them, we’re not negotiating with them, he controls the Strait of Hormuz, he’s renaming it the Strait of Trump…

The gibberish hasn’t stopped for even one second.

Nor has Iran stopped. In July, Iran got its allies the Houthi rebels in Yemen to declare a blockade of shipping by Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea, because the Saudis had been prevented from sending their tankers out of the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz, so they started moving their oil through a pipeline to their port on the Red Sea and shipping it from there.

Then the Houthis hit the Saudi pipeline. They hit the Saudi port on the Red Sea. And now they’ve got their proxies in Iraq – yeah, even the Houthis have proxies now – to attack Saudi oil facilities in the north of the country. On October 3, the Houthis hit a large Aramco oil facility just south of the Saudi capital of Riyadh. On Tuesday, the Houthis destroyed Saudi oil facilities in the south of the country, wounding more than 70 people.

And yesterday, the Houthis launched a multi-pronged attack on the King Khalid international airport in Riyadh, killing 12 people and wounding 300 in precision strikes on two passenger terminals. It was the second attack on that airport. There have been three other attacks on airports in the south of Saudi Arabia closer to Yemen. The Houthis used Iranian weapons to carry out the attack on the Riyadh airport, including propeller-driven drones, jet-powered cruise missiles, and liquid-fueled ballistic missiles. The attack lasted 45 minutes. Saudi air defenses were apparently helpless against the hybrid Houthi attack, which kind of reminds you of something, doesn’t it? Like, maybe, how helpless U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain and other Gulf countries were against similar hybrid drone and missile attacks in the early days and nights of Trump’s war.

So, let’s take toll. Trump starts a war on Iran, a country on the Persian Gulf he describes as “weak,” a war he says will be over in “a few weeks.” The war spreads to every other country in the region – I won’t list them, I’ve done it before. Zillions of our weapons were expended. Many, many radar and anti-aircraft and anti-missile installations were destroyed, so many we had to just abandon them and the bases they were allegedly protecting.

Now Trump has the Saudis and the Yemenis yelling for assistance in fighting the Houthis, because they are shooting up the capital of Saudi Arabia, for crying out loud.

All these new explosions, with accompanying increases in oil prices, have Trump so panicked, he called up his pal Putin and begged him for some diesel fuel, which of course Putin agreed to if Trump would lift sanctions on Russian oil, which Trump did, and trust me, he lifted some other sanctions, too, that they’re not telling us about. Even Republican Tom Tillis, Senator from North Carolina, is yapping today that Trump’s unilateral deal to lift sanctions on Russian oil violates the law passed by the Congress.

But what’s a little law-breaking to Donald Trump? He’s too busy lining up side deals for Donny Junior and Eric so they can pocket a few million on the diesel deal, and we already know that Kushner and Witkoff have been to Moscow talking with Putin and some of his hand-picked oligarchs about real estate deals that they can do when the Ukraine war is over.

If you were an Iranian leader who lost family members or friends and allies in that attack on the Iranian leadership on the first night of the war, what do you think you’d be doing with three weeks left until November 3? Do you think you might have a few other surprises for Donald Trump? Maybe some attacks on Gulf airports in Dubai? Knock a few more tankers out of the water in the Red Sea? Shoot up some shipping in the Strait of Hormuz? How about aiming some ballistic missiles on the U.S. bases that are still open and occupied in Jordan?

Twenty-three nightmarish days to go, Donny my boy. Get your ass out there and tell some more lies to your adoring rally fans. Maybe throw in some Kid Rock. You could rename the Atlantic Ocean while you’re at it. Drive your ten-ton armored “Beast” past the reflecting pool and see if you can get that thing leaking again.

How about starting another high-T war? You can trot out Hegseth in a muscle shirt to whip off a few pushups. The rallies will love it.

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