It’s October, Halloween is coming, and it’s time to look at the graveyard of Trump’s administration.

Stephen Miller. Dead. I mean, you’ve looked at his face in photographs and interviews and even walking across the tarmac to get on whichever Air Force One Trump is using at the moment. There is no there there, as Gertrude Stein said not long after Miller’s great-great grandparents arrived from Belarus at Ellis Island.

Stephen Miller is dead inside. His dead eyes look out at the world from a hole of his own creation, with nothing in his immigrant background reflecting what we would think of as a combustible source of ill will. There is something missing inside Miller. If you are religious, you could call it a soul; romantics would refer to it as heart; others might consider that he lacks a center of being, an origin point for feeling.

Whatever is missing in Miller has caused him to turn to cruelty as gas for the engine that runs him. Feed the machine cruelty and more cruelty comes out. There is something inhuman about him. The only emotion that shows on his face is anger, and even then it’s just a flicker, as if the generation of displeasure and hostility takes too much effort, or perhaps for Miller, it would reveal too much.

There have been press reports that he is infamous for yelling at subordinates and sending screeching emails and texts when he finds something within his sphere of inhumanity wanting, such as an insufficient number of immigrant persons being caused the pain of dislocation and removal from their homes and businesses and schools. But those texts are out of our view. We are left with a person who was dead to the rest of humanity even before Trump knighted him as his cruelty czar.

Trump’s favorite decorative element, gold, is dead. The way Trump displays gold is repulsive, dead from repetition, dead from the lack of imagination reflected in its familiarity. If gold is the only thing you can think of to display your wealth or your taste, it’s dead already by overuse. Gold is dead by its commonness. It’s a cliché that was already dead before Trump came along and anointed it with his belief that gold says “class.”

Kristi Noem. When you feel the need to costume yourself to state who you are, to deck yourself out in western wear and be photographed on a horse, you’re already so dead that not even filing for divorce from a husband who turned himself into a walking cliché will bring you back to life. Dead inside. Dead outside. Dead.

Pete Hegseth. What the dead look like when they try to regain their youth. The phrase “dead man walking” comes to mind when you look at his skinny, too-short pants and his two-sizes too small jackets. His red, white, and blue pocket handkerchief is like makeup on a corpse. He was deadened by alcohol when he was on Fox. Real men don’t abuse women. Dead men do.

JD Vance. What a dead man looks like when he grows a beard. You can pin ivy league degrees on a corpse, but it’s still a dead body.

Todd Blanche. Dead the day he opened his first textbook on civil procedure in law school.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. A mummy who belongs in a crypt under a wood-frame church at the end of a dirt road in the piney woods where he was killed at birth by snake-handling charlatans ranting that God had come to take him to a “better place.”

Trump himself. When not even a breakfast of Adderall and a daily transfusion of the blood of infants through the veins of your hands can keep you awake, you are as dead as you look, coffin-ready makeup and all.

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Congress is formally out of session for the elections, but their bills remain alive – not their legislative bills for us but the bills we still need to pay for them to live in Washington.

In the very season where incumbents are pleading with voters to look beyond cuts in government health spending, higher prices from seemingly irrational tariff policies and unaddressed costs affected by law, it turns out that the one House bill rising all by itself is the members’ food and lodging costs in Washington.

The Washington Post looked at the program that sets no requirements for lawmakers to file for reimbursement for food and lodging – even receipts for expenses.  It turns out that taxpayers spent $6.7 million or 21 percent more last year on helping cover the costs of living over 2024.

The program launched three years ago, allows House members to supplement a $174,000 base salary that Congress has not raised in nearly two decades by expensing food and housing costs while in Washington on official business. Specifics of the spending are not disclosed, and lawmakers need not provide documentation, but simply certify that they have incurred the eligible expenses when seeking reimbursements. A similar Senate program does require receipts.

Party affiliation did not seem the relevant factor in individual claims, though the most of the top spenders were Republicans.  In this last year, 360 members of the House filed reimbursement claims, including 26 who reported more than $30,000 in expenses and an additional 140 who reported more than $20,000. Their collective spending was $1.2 million higher than in 2024, when 355 members sought reimbursement – about the same number.

The Top Spenders

Given that fraud is such a big topic in Washington, the existence of a receipt-free reimbursement program seems, well, not well attuned to voters’ ears. That the high cost of living, especially in two places, might be problematic, welcome legislators to voters’ world.

The Post reported chasing after the top filers, most of whom were reluctant to discuss their spending. Rep. Jim Baird, R-Indiana, put in for $39,789; Rep. Abraham Hamadeh, R-Ariz.,  came in second at 39,131. Rep. Jonathan Jackson, D-Ill. spent $37,078 last year, the third-most, including for the mortgage on a second home in Washington.

Most of the top ten spenders did not respond or declined to provide details. In case you wonder, the others included former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.,  and Republican Representatives Neal Dunn, Fla., Mike Haridopolos , Fla., Ryan Mackenzie, Pa., and Pete Sessions, Tex.

Kedric Payne, a former deputy chief counsel at the Office of Congressional Ethics, said it’s hard to know what drove the spending increases without more information.  Housing costs that are the subject of so much political anger could be hitting the very legislators who are putting in for more reimbursement.

The most frugal spender was Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md.), who lives in a suburb of Washington, who was reimbursed $62 for meals, usually chili from the cafeteria in the Longworth House Office Building for lunch.

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AI Funders Back Detectors To Catch Pathogens That AI Might Make

It’s a brilliant business model, isn’t it? Create a problem then make money selling the solution? It’s also a timeless business model. Snake oil salesmen have scared people for ages that their health is in danger without their elixir. Equifax credit rating service, that has data on seemingly everyone, didn’t secure your data well enough and lost even social security numbers to hackers in 2017. Then offered credit monitoring service. For free. But in a way that could automatically subscribe you to their paid service.

Now some of the funders of AI have a similar tack. Since AI might be used by terrorists to create new pathogens, they are investing in a company that sells pathogen detectors to the government. Rather than change AI to not create such problems, they’ll make money feebly trying to deal with the problem after the fact.

The company selling the devices is Pilgrim Labs. It has received funding from Peter Thiel for one. Thiel has long invested heavily in AI. Now two top people in Anthropic, the makers of Claude AI, are part of a big new investment in the company.

The company makes boxes that are mounted on poles and monitor the air to try to detect both known pathogens and possible unknown, new pathogens. The Centers for Disease Control has a contract with the company for these devices.

That’s all good and unfortunately necessary, but it’s also a feeble way to deal with the possibility of newly created pathogens. If one of these boxes detects a possible problem and notifies the CDC, then what? The CDC has to analyze it to see if it really is something new and problematic. Then analyze further to really understand it. Then come up with a plan to try to start isolating affected people. Start working on treatment or inoculation. Long after it has had plenty of time to spread.

I’m sure profits from this company will only be a small part of the income of these AI titans but it will be something. And the first time there is a scare about a possible new pathogen, even if it turns out to be a false alarm or easily thwarted, then every town and neighborhood is going to want one of these boxes for quick detection near to them.

Pilgrim is hardly the only incidence of this. Valthos company wants to “identify biological threats and design medical countermeasures” to AI created bio-problems and is backed by much the same investors. Red Queen Bio wants to, “design antibodies that can be manufactured to protect against…threat of an AI-designed virus”. It’s backed by OpenAI. Then there are other kinds of problems that can be addressed for profit. Adaptive Security, from their press release, “trains employees against emerging threats” from AI. It’s backed by AI investors. And World ID, a company started directly by Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, sells a way to prove your human so as to thwart bots. Overall this “sell the solution to the problem they made” seems to be a growing pattern. There is sure to be more coming.

It’s true that trying to detect new pathogens quickly is necessary in any case because new ones can develop naturally, or be created by terrorists using non-AI methods of hacking existing viruses. Plus it’s hard to imagine how AI could be prevented from ever being used to make new pathogens unless we got rid of AI altogether, which is, of course, impossible at this point. But there’s something ugly about this situation because it is the makers of the problem selling the attempt at a solution. Because it’s not the way we’ve encountered problems, or tried to deal with them, in the past.

We invented the nuclear bomb, but that was a government effort to end a terrible war. There were defense contractors who made money off everything that followed but it was different. The initial reason for doing it was different. The indirectness of the profit was different. With AI, which does have its benefits but could also become the new equivalent of nuclear war, this is entirely a matter of private companies racing for profit. Government is involved as a supporter, and as a client, and as a concerned entity, but private company profit is the direct driver.

There were people in the 1950s who made money setting up bomb shelters for worried families. This time it will be the AI investors themselves making money selling us feeble attempts at assuaging the fears of the fallout of what their products might create.

Welcome to the 1950s of the 2020s.

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The post AI Snake Oil: Create Pandemic, Sell Solution appeared first on DCReport.org.

This is going to be one of those “Things That Are Going To Happen” articles that no one will believe. I’m writing it anyway because when it does happen next year, or maybe a few years later (but I’m betting on it really getting started soon), I’m going to point to this article as proof I saw it coming a mile away. I will not be happy I was right. I’m rarely happy I am right about this crap.

Let’s get to it. I have been screaming, for YEARS, that the Republican Party is going to go full Nazi. That was ignored, too. But now, here we are, with the GOP infested with goosestepping Hitlerjugend and getting worse by the day. There is no stopping this cancer. Within a handful of elections, the GOP will be openly proud to be running under the banner of Nazism, and the legacy press will be working 24/7 to normalize this aberration.

What I am writing about today is the flip side of that coin. Sort of. Here’s my prediction that no one will believe:

But unlike the very real Nazi cancer on the right, the left’s “Communism Problem” will be fake. All of it.

Oh, there will be useful idiots on the ground who rush out to get sickles and hammers tattooed on their arms. There are already some of them now. But what we’re going to see, I promise you, will be a large, coordinated, and suspiciously well-funded group of “professional” communists. Talking heads with massive social media followings (definitely not bots gaming the algorithm!) that will spring up overnight. Established “far left” influencers who were all-in on socialism “suddenly” discovering that socialism is stupid. So played out and uncool and, I swear to god, “centrist!” Communism is actually the path forward!

The reason for this magical surge in love for communism is not that complicated. It all comes back to the necessity of the “both sides” lie.

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I’ve written about this before. The GOP going full Nazi (as well as pro-pedophilia) presents an insurmountable problem to the political discourse in America. The foundation of our politics is that we pretend both parties are the same. No matter what Republicans do, we pretend they are normal. No matter how extreme and violent and corrupt they get, it’s all washed away with “Democrats are just as bad.”

That dynamic cannot survive the GOP’s transition to a party of literal Nazis. It is understood by everyone that Nazis are genocidal monsters. There is no credible way to whitewash them. The New York fucking Times tried it back in 2017, and the public outrage reduced them to a fine mist. A Nazi GOP kills the both-sides lie.

But without the lie, the shield that has protected Republicans for decades disappears. The public would see them for who they really are: A party of ravening monsters. Liars. Grifters. Thieves. Fascists. Rapists. Pedophiles. Genocidal animals.

A true public accounting of the Republican Party would mean the END of the Republican Party. That cannot be allowed.

But what to do? There is no way to equate Democratic Socialism with Nazism. To call advocating for universal health care and school lunches and taxing the rich as extreme as advocating for the mass murder of all non-white, non-Christians in the United States is a non-starter. Even the most bug-eyed conspiracy nutjob can’t square that circle. I thought this would be the end of it. Nazism would finally kill the “both sides” lie and, with it, the Republican Party. It hadn’t occurred to me that there was a way out: Astroturf Communism.

Communism has a long and proven track record of killing tens of millions of people. Communism really is dangerous, not because the ideology itself is inherently genocidal, but because it has repeatedly led to genocidal outcomes. Like capitalism, communism is great on paper. In practice, it relies on implementation by people. This wouldn’t be a problem except people are greedy, stupid, arrogant, and corrupt. Without checks on their power, they, more often than not, run amok, and the results are millions of fatalities. We justify the piles of dead bodies under capitalism because a handful of people get extremely wealthy, but, really, neither system left unchecked works out very well in the long run for the average person living under it.1

So, in order to protect the “both sides” lie, the solution to the GOP’s Nazi problem is obviously to manufacture a “Communist Revolution” on the left.

Republicans have been trying to fabricate one for months. Years, really. Every whisper of socialism on the left is conflated with communism. They rely on the public’s general ignorance of the difference between the two. We’re a very stupid nation sometimes. Not for nothing, Medicare is socialism. Social Security is socialism. The word is right fucking there in the name. Municipal services like the police, the fire department, sanitation, public schools. These are all examples of socialism. We all pay for them. We all collectively benefit from them. No one person owns or operates or profits from them.

But while this screeching used to work, it doesn’t anymore. Republicans spent decades crying “socialism!” in order to terrorize their voters. And not at all coincidentally, there appeared a large, coordinated, and suspiciously well-funded group of “professional” socialists. The professional “far left” loved socialism and made lots of noise and got lots of attention. I’m sure this wasn’t a ratfucking operation at all. Totally organic and just happened to gain ground just when the Republican Party tilted over to extremism.

A funny thing happened, though: Socialism, specifically Democratic Socialism, became quite popular. Especially among younger voters. The same voters who are increasingly dominating elections.

Democratic Socialism turned out to have a pretty good track record. It is, after all, what most of Europe follows. Whoops. Maybe the ratfuckers should have picked something less functional. Too late now.

I know, tinfoil hat shit, right? Totally crazy! Except, you know, if you pay attention to the DSA, you’ll notice there are two types of members. The first group can explain Democratic Socialism. How it works, why it’s good, what we would fix, and who would benefit. They have specific, concrete policies they want to implement and plans to do it. These are serious people.

Then there’s the other group. They have…slogans. They’re not really sure what Democratic Socialism is, but they hate the system and both parties! Burn it all down! Policy is boring. Revolution is exciting! These are not serious people.

The first group is going to dominate the conversation going forward because people want solutions, not slogans and mindless anger. The second group?

They’re going to become “communists.” They will be the useful idiots led by the “professional” communists who, again, will have suspiciously large platforms and be suspiciously well-funded.

This “Communist Revolution” will not represent the Democratic Party. It will not represent the left at all. It will be a manufactured astroturf movement. But just like that, the legacy press will have the flipside to the GOP’s Nazi problem.

There will not be a single elected “communist” in the entire Democratic Party. There will not be a single mainstream “communist.” They will not represent the left in any significant way. They will be a fringe movement, but they will be given an astonishing amount of attention from the press.

Comrade Chris and Comrade Tina will make the rounds on all the major networks, explaining how they’re the “real” left wing of America. How they’re going to bring communism to the nation and overthrow the corrupt corporate something-something blablabla. Workers Unite! No private property! Down with capitalism!

Just like that, the GOP isn’t extreme anymore. Sure, they’re Nazis, but have you seen how crazy the left is?! Because when both sides are extreme and dangerous, no one is.

I know this all seems far-fetched. Who would ever fall for something this ludicrous? I dunno…the same people who listened to the ratfuckers in 2016 and then again in 2024? When they told us not to vote for Hillary because she murdered Vince Foster and she was a warmonger, while Donald Trump would never EVER abuse his power? That the Supreme Court wasn’t important? That Kamala was a cop and Trump was a “populist?” That Biden was too old, but Trump wasn’t?

The professional “far left” is out there right now trying to whitewash Tucker Carlson, a literal white nationalist, because that’s the current play. If they’re told to push communism by their paymasters, they’re going to start spouting Karl Marx and waxing on and on about the wonders of collectivism. They have no ideology beyond “whatever keeps Republicans in power.”

The legacy press, of course, will eat it up with a spoon, grateful that they won’t have to talk about the violent extremism of the right. They’ll know it’s all bullshit. It won’t matter. A fake communist revolution will give them the fig leaf to continue the “both sides” lie indefinitely.

For my part, I would love to be wrong. I would love nothing more than to wake up one year, two years, five years from now and see the “both sides” lie reduced to cinders. I would love to see Republican extremism finally reach a breaking point where it can no longer be hidden and ignored. But too many people have too much invested in protecting the GOP from itself. When they start seig heiling at their rallies, something will have to be done. That something will be to invent an equal and opposite threat from the left, and Zohran Mamdani filling potholes and planting trees isn’t going to fucking work. Democratic Socialism doesn’t pack the boogeyman punch they need. It’s too popular and, worse, too functional to be a counterweight to Nazism.2

My guess is that the Communist Revolution is coming. And it’s going to be 100% bullshit. Watch for it. Know who your enemies are and act accordingly.

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Let’s get this out of the way right now: General George S. Patton Jr. never gave a speech to his troops standing in front of a wall-sized American flag. That was Hollywood, all the way – brilliant as an attention-grabber in the first moments of the film about the World War II combat commander but conceived in an airless little office on a studio lot by none other than Francis Ford Coppola, who wrote the scene and the dialogue and knows a thing or two about creating legendary characters.

The photograph above was taken yesterday in Quantico, Virginia, at yet another of Hegseth’s chest-pounding lectures to his betters – this one aimed at several hundred mid-career officers and non-commissioned officers. Apparently Hegseth concluded from the stone-faced looks he got from the generals last year that another yell-fest might go over better with their juniors.

I really don’t know where to start with this blithering balloon-ego maniac. No one, not even Coppola himself, could have come up with Hegseth’s signature line in his lecture – “No fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals” – he clearly believes is a description of his ideal military.

But wait! There’s more! The Washington Post reported that Hegseth began his day working out in the parking lot of the Pentagon with the soldiers he would later lecture, all 600 of them, attired in black shorts and gray t-shirts with the phrase “THIS IS WAR” emblazoned on their chests. They did some push-ups, and then they jogged around the Pentagon. Afterwards, Hegseth grabbed a microphone and mounted a PT-stand and exhorted them, “Do unto your formation that which you would have done unto your son or daughter’s formation. Meaning no games, no gimmicks, no low standards, no excuses.”

I mean, huh?

Meanwhile, 7,000 miles to the east of the Pentagon parking lot looms the unfinished war on Iran where 50,000 soldiers and sailors and airmen and airwomen await the orders of that famous warrior, Donald Trump, who has spent the last several days saber rattling his intention to maybe-perhaps-we’ll-see “annihilate” Iran right after the midterm elections. To that end, today Trump dispatched a third aircraft carrier group to the Middle East, along with 10,000 more troops, and really, you have to wonder if they were given their “THIS IS WAR” t-shirts before setting sail.

The only explanation I could possibly have for such a display of adolescent crotch-grabbing self-glorification is that Hegseth is a dry drunk on Adderall, or maybe Ketamine, or both.

Hegseth’s speech to the junior officers and enlisted soldiers was full of bluster and unfunded plans to establish a new military base somewhere in the United States, after state governors engage in a kind of “Apprentice” style show of making applications to be picked for the honor. I suppose Hegseth has a special panel in the Pentagon scouring the records for the name of another loser Confederate general to put on the sign outside the new base.

He also announced a panel of “three of our best minds” to come up with the “futuristic” weapons our military will need on “any future battlefield, from under the Earth to beyond the Moon.” Whatever the fuck that means. I know you’re trembling with anticipation to learn who Hegseth picked. Naturally, one is Elon Musk. Another is Newt Gingrich. The last is someone called Palmer Luckey, whose biggest qualification seems to be that he is Don Jr.’s best friend and gave a million dollars to Trump’s superPAC, for which his defense firm, Anduril, has received nearly $25 billion in Pentagon contracts. And oh, almost forgot – Don Jr. is a stockholder in Anduril, don’t you know.

It’s hardly necessary to tell you that neither Gingrich, Musk, nor Luckey has served even a single day in uniform and wouldn’t know the barrel from the stock of a rifle. Here is Testosero-Pete’s military brain trust as they were introduced to his uniformed audience yesterday:

Hegseth came up with some other absurd shit in his address to the mid-career military men and women, but the one that should catch your eye, and the eye of Democrats elected to Congress next month, is his plan to form the “Office of Religious Affairs” in the Pentagon, because in past administrations, “Political correctness and secular humanism got a vote, chaplains did not.” Hegseth invoked his favorite general officer, God, to justify his new imposition of religion on our nation’s military, referring to Psalm 33:12, “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord.”

You will not be surprised to learn that Hegseth is a follower of a right-wing Christian nationalist pastor, Doug Wilson, who has a fundamentalist church in Idaho, because of course he does. Hegseth has invited Wilson to preach at one of the monthly religious services he holds at the Pentagon, which are voluntary to members of the armed services, who have spent the last year watching Hegseth fire generals and admirals and interfere in the military promotion system, removing those he apparently thinks are too “woke” to be promoted, most of them female and Black officers. Hegseth announced his approach to leading our nation’s military at the International Christian Media convention earlier this year in Nashville with this: “We train our troops, we no longer trans our troops. Gone is godless and divisive DEI. Gone is gender bending and divisive quotas. We are not in woke we trust, we are in God we trust.”

He received a standing ovation from the conservative religious broadcasters for that nugget of military wisdom.

Hegseth needs to be impeached by a Democratic Party-controlled Congress in the first week of January of 2027. By establishing his office of “religious affairs” in the Pentagon, he has violated the First Amendment to the Constitution, which states with its first words, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or the free exercise thereof.”

I predict that the next time Hegseth gets up in front of a bunch of officers and non-commissioned officers in that lecture hall at Quantico Marine Base, he’s going to announce that attending church is mandatory for members of the U.S. military. Mark my words. That’s where he’s headed.

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Especially when it comes to shit details, tasks or missions that have no purpose other than polishing the brass of the senior commanders and the egos of the politicians who give the orders. Iraq was such a shit detail, maybe the biggest in our nation’s history, certainly in competition with Afghanistan and before that, with Vietnam for that dubious honor. George W. Bush launched us into the war with Iraq in 2003 on a thin veneer of lies, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq had somehow had something or another to do with the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Almost as soon as the United States Army beat Saddam’s military and occupied Baghdad, it became clear to the soldiers on the ground that this was another shit detail. As looting and chaos in the streets of Iraq’s capital city surrounded them, soldiers were given nothing to do. They stood by and watched and set up defensive perimeters, the largest of which soon became known as the Green Zone, and were witness to the bewildered response of those senior to them, the chief culprit being Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Here he was, the guy in charge of the Pentagon and all the nation’s military services, and in charge of the war itself, and all Rumsfeld could come up with when confronted by the fact that there was no plan, none whatsoever, for our military to carry out once they had “taken” Iraq, was to utter this gem explaining why we had saved Iraq from Saddam: “Stuff happens. And it’s untidy. And freedom is untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things.” He would later compound his crimes against command with his remark, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time,” in answer to a question by the press about why soldiers were driving around in Humvees with canvas sides and tops and frequently no doors, when they were facing attacks daily from roadside bombs planted by insurgents that were killing dozens of soldiers.

Vehicles with better defenses would be developed and deployed later, but they didn’t make the bodies of dead soldiers from the days of Humvees with no armor earlier in the war any less dead. Altogether, by the time the last of our soldiers flew out of Iraq today, 4,400 would die and 32,000 would be wounded, many with debilitating wounds such as lost limbs and brain damage due to blast waves from nearby explosions.

More than 1.5 million soldiers served in the Iraq war during its initial phase from 2003 to 2011 when it was called “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” as if pasting an important-sounding title on the unfolding disaster of our presence there would turn the whole thing into the “victory” it never became. Soldiers knew we had no business being in Iraq right from the start. Even a general who turned into what passed for one of the war’s few heroes, General David Petraeus, was quoted by a reporter in the first days of the war saying, “Tell me how this ends,” a despairing remark that soon became famous as the war ground on and on and on.

Soldiers, including generals, were assigned to Iraq over and over. Petraeus earned a third star and then a fourth as he took over larger and larger chunks of the army’s shit detail in Iraq. Other officers went from being captains to colonels during the war. Sergeants earned stripe after stripe. And still the bodies piled up.

For what? In November of 2003, with the war only six months old, I asked a colonel who commanded a brigade under Petraeus in the 101^st Airborne Division in Mosul what the hell we were doing in Iraq. He took a deep breath and said, “Everybody knows the orders we get come from General Rove,” sarcastically referring to President Bush’s political majordomo who was known to be already positioning Bush for reelection in 2004.

That is what the war in Iraq became: an escalator nobody could get off. They couldn’t even come up with a way to prove that we were achieving a “victory.” They couldn’t use the enemy body-count, the figure that was supposed to reflect the victory in Vietnam that was always just one search and destroy mission or carpet bombing away.

So why were we in Iraq, anyway? Well, it morphed from stopping Saddam from “developing weapons of mass destruction” that never existed, to ending the “insurgency” they finally admitted existed, to fighting ISIS, which moved into northern Iraq and took over large swaths of land that the U.S. once thought it controlled. Then there was the threat of attacks from Syrian forces to the West and Iranian-controlled militias from the East. Most recently, Iran has had its proxies hitting U.S. base camps in Iraq with drones and missiles, so the Trump administration started closing our base camps and deploying the troops from Iraq to bases in Jordan, further away from Iran and its proxy militias so that no more American soldiers would die in Trump’s war on Iran that is turning into Bush II, or Iraq II, or a war for oil, or whatever the hell is going on over there.

And now, according to the Pentagon, the last of our military forces have left whatever mission they had in Iraq, marking “a transition from a wartime coalition mission to an Iraqi-led security effort,” according to Hegseth’s hand-puppet, Sean Parnell, the Pentagon spokesman Trump and Hegseth have put up for promotion to Secretary of the Army. Hegseth fired the last one, Daniel Driscoll, apparently because he wasn’t on board with Pete’s testosterone push and was more interested in modernizing the army to fight with drones the way every other military in the world is rushing to do right now.

It never stops. We go into a country like Vietnam, or more recently, Iraq, and we spend years fighting people who don’t want us there, so they are killing us, and we are killing them. And then somebody at the Pentagon comes up with “Vietnamization,” which was turning the fighting over to our Vietnamese “allies,” or a doofus like Parnell calls it a “transition” to mask the fact that one day we were there, with our base camps and the trillions of dollars spent on “security” and weapons and killing Iraqis, and the next day, we’re gone. Like, poof.

No explanation that even attempts to make sense of the last 23 years and the more than 4,000 of our troops who died. No statement that we “won,” because of course we didn’t, and if Hegseth and Parnell claimed that, you’d be able to hear the laughter over the roar of one of Musk’s Starships taking off on its next satellite run.

Soldiers always know. They’re the ones with the muddy boots and the exhausted faces and the sore bones from sleeping on the ground and riding in armored vehicles that never, ever, end up with enough armor to protect them from the roadside bombs and these days, drones and missiles, that wound and kill them.

I remember one day when I was in Iraq in 2003 on a base out near Tal Afar, an outlaw town near the border with Syria. I was sitting in the dining facility having breakfast with a bunch of soldiers who had just returned from another useless mission down in Sinjar, where they were supposed to suppress insurgents who were taking over the town. The soldiers were dirty and tired and hungry. They hadn’t eaten a hot meal in three weeks. Their M-16 rifles leaned against their chairs as they bent over their meal trays inhaling their third servings of eggs and bacon and cut-up fruit and pancakes.

On a flatscreen television that was mounted on the wall of the huge tent-like structure of the dining facility, a man was giving a speech in Washington D.C. to a group of people. The words at the bottom of the screen said the speech was at a conservative think tank called the American Enterprise Institute. The man was wearing a suit. Everyone in the auditorium was wearing suits. The man giving the speech was talking about Iraq and how we were “expanding our footprint” in the Middle East, and our victory over insurgents who opposed us was a sure thing because the United States of America had “the most powerful military in the world,” and “no one can beat us.”

One of the soldiers sitting next to me asked if I knew who the speaker was. I recognized him. It was Douglas Feith. The soldier asked, “who the hell is that?” I answered that he was one of the architects of the war in Iraq.

Suddenly every soldier at the table began throwing pieces of toast and empty half-pint milk containers and plastic forks and spoons at the screen, shouting “shut your mouth you stupid fuck” and similar epithets.

It occurred to me this afternoon as I read Sean Parnell’s remarks about the end of our military involvement in Iraq that men in suits are still telling the same lies to the same rooms full of people wearing suits in Washington D.C., as soldiers get on C-130 transports wearing dirty battle fatigues and dusty boots and fly to new base camps in other Middle East countries to do the same thing we’ve been doing for over twenty years.

The shit details just keep on coming. The presidents keep starting the wars. The generals keep getting promoted. It never ends.

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