What is it about scum-sucking quagmires started by idiot presidents and $70-plus billion supplementals passed by supine Congresses? The House today passed $73 billion in additional money for Trump’s insane war on Iran that we’ve already won about four times, or is it seven? I guess we’ll have to wait until 3 or 4 a.m. tomorrow for Trump’s latest Truth Social spasm to see if we’ve won the war again, if Iran’s last missile battery has been knocked out, or they’ve sunk the final Iranian Zodiac tender that was scooting around the Strait of Hormuz with its 25-horsepower outboard motor.

On March 25, 2003, five days after the invasion of Iraq began, Bush asked Congress for a $74.8 billion Emergency Supplemental for the ongoing war in Iraq, postwar occupation, reconstruction and relief. They hadn’t even taken Baghdad and they wanted billions for shit they didn’t even know they needed, because with 23 years of hindsight, we remember that the amount of planning they had done for what happened after the fall of Baghdad was exactly zero. In April of 2003, the House and Senate passed a bill for $78.49 billion, $3.7 billion more than Bush had requested, because God only knows how many Congresspersons had tacked on extra goodies for stuff they needed back in their districts and states, so why not throw some extra meat in the pot as long as it’s sitting on the stove simmering, right?

The current gaggle of MAGA-make-overs on the Republican side of the aisle also threw in an extra $1.15 trillion – that’s trillion, not billion – for the defense policy bill that’s on the table for this year. The Pentagon is sitting on about $75 billion in unspent funds from last year’s defense reconciliation bill, but as Emily Litella, played by the brilliant Gilda Radner on Saturday Night Live used to say, never mind.

Where did all those tens of billions go in 2003 when we had about 140,000 troops on the ground in Iraq? I actually have some facts about that from personal experience. I was in Iraq as a journalist in November and December of 2003 when the supplemental funds were hitting government bank accounts. A West Point classmate of mine was then the head of USAID in Iraq. He was a bundle of nerves, because about $30 billion of the $78 billion was going to be handled by USAID, which meant him. I asked him how all those billions were going to be spent. I had read about the reconstruction projects that were planned for Iraq – sewers and water treatment facilities for Baghdad and Mosul and Basra, money to secure the antiquities in the national museum that had been raided right after U.S. troops entered Baghdad, and so forth. My classmate hummed and hawed a little, and then he said, nope, none of the $30 billion was going for such rebuilding and relief. It was going for Iraq oil infrastructure, every blooming dime of it.

That left $48 billion from the emergency supplemental, and even though there was no information back in 2003 how that would be spent, we know now where it went: straight down the rabbit hole of military adventurism that would play out for the next eight years. Up in Mosul, the 101^st Airborne Division would be sent back to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, and two Stryker brigades from the 2nd Infantry Division and the 25^th Infantry Division would be moved into Mosul to take up the fight against Iraqi insurgents that would turn into the Battle of Mosul in November of that year.

Elsewhere around Iraq, other units, artillery brigades and infantry divisions and brigades of Marines would be rotated back to the States and be replaced by other units. That took money. Billions and billions. In fact, between 2003 and 2011 when we pulled our combat units out of Iraq, $751 billion was spent on the Iraq war, according to the Congressional Research Service. When post-service costs such as medical care and retirement benefits for service members are included, nearly $3 trillion will be spent on the Iraq War, according to estimates from Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

How much is the current Forever War du Jour going to cost us? Well, Secretary High-T Hegseth told a congressional committee yesterday that we’ve already spent $37.5 billion, and he wouldn’t even answer a question from a Democrat if that amount included money to pay for the U.S. bases in Jordan and the Gulf that have been bombed by Iran. We know from past experience that the Pentagon just adds up active costs to come up with figures like Hegseth’s total of $37.5 billion, such as ammunition fired, aviation fuel consumed, food eaten by sailors on warships, logistics costs of movement of replacement ammo and personnel into the battlespace…that kind of shit. When you factor in the real costs, like troop salaries and every nickel spent to move ships and troops around, like aircraft carriers leaving Norfolk, Virginia for the Indian Ocean, I would estimate that you can double Hegseth’s $37.5 billion.

The key thing during the Iraq war and today with Trump’s Insanity on the Gulf is that not a dime of the money the Pentagon burns through will come from the U.S. Treasury. Not one tax dollar. The whole bill will be paid on-the-come with off-budget funny money borrowed from bond-buyers who are willing to supplement our Asshole Adventurism with investors’ money, because when all is said and done, they’ll profit from this profligacy. That’s right. We’re still paying the bill from Iraq and Afghanistan, because that money was borrowed, too.

And don’t forget what else Bush was doing in 2003 while he was fighting a war in the Middle East with borrowed money. He was passing tax cuts for rich people and corporations at top speed – specifically, the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 and the Jobs and Growth Reconciliation Act of 2003. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the Bush tax cuts added $1.5 trillion to the national debt. By 2010, the nonpartisan Pew Charitable Trusts estimated that making the Bush tax cuts permanent would increase the national debt by $5.5 trillion over the next ten years.

So, while the Bush war in Iraq was costing the U.S. about $3 trillion in borrowed money, the Bush tax cuts were adding a gigantic bill of borrowed money on top of that.

And I’ll bet you can’t guess what Republicans are doing right this very minute, as we fight a crazed war over control of the Strait of Hormuz – which was open to all trade for free on February 27, the day before Trump launched his war. Republicans want to make the 2017 tax cuts they passed in Trump’s first term permanent. Because that’s what Republicans always do: They start wars that they don’t want to pay for, and while the bombs are dropping and the bodies are coming home in flag-draped coffins, they pass tax cuts with a 10-year sundown date to get around rules about passing shit in Congress using budget reconciliation. Then later, they want to pass bills to make the tax cuts permanent. Making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent will add $4 trillion to the debt.

Am I fucking hallucinating? Are Republicans doing the same shit they did with Iraq over again with Iran? Borrowing money for a useless war as they turn it into a quagmire at the same time they pass tax cuts for the wealthy on the backs of the middle class and the poor?

You bet they are. We haven’t got money for Medicaid. We haven’t got money for school lunches and breakfasts. We haven’t got money for food stamps. The New York Times published a huge story yesterday about how 400,000 people in Arizona are losing their SNAP benefits because of work requirements and other barriers to aid passed by Republicans…and that’s just one state. There are 49 other states where food aid is harder and harder to get because Republicans want to pass tax cuts and fund insane fucking wars at the same time.

And the truly astounding thing is this: Donald Trump, who could barely walk across the medal podium after the soccer championship on Sunday is stumbling the United States into another quagmire of the kind he’s been yelping about for at least two decades. He promised no new wars. He started a new war. He promised no permanent wars. He’s got himself into a war that’s so permanent that he wants $37.5 billion for it on top of $1.5 trillion he is asking for next year’s defense budget, or war budget, or whateverthefuck Secretary High-T is calling it.

What is wrong with this country? What is it about the Middle East that makes one president after another want to spend billions and billions and billions of dollars bombing the shit out of people who have been over there since civilization began? And what the fuck is up with using funny money to pay for all of it? Why don’t they ever raise taxes to pay for this shit? When World War II was over, we had a 90 percent top tax bracket to make up for all the money we spent to save the world from the Nazis and the Japanese. If we wanted to run around the world shooting at stuff and dropping bombs and defending Europe and occupying Japan, we fucking paid for it.

Quagmire, quagmire, here we come! Right back where we started from! Please take out your wallet and have a glance at your bank balance, because it’s going to be thinner if Democrats don’t win the midterms and stop this lunatic before he bankrupts us just like he bankrupted his casinos and had to sell off his properties like the Plaza Hotel to pay off all the bankers he had stolen money from.

This time, he’s stealing from us, and we’re the only ones who can stop him.

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When I was growing up, I remember one of the weirder things I learned about the Nazis was how weirdly homoerotic they were. For an ideology that quite literally had the death penalty for homosexuality, Nazis spent an awwwwful lot of time obsessing over the male body. Lots of pictures of young men in tight shorts, covered in sweat. It was very fetish-coded, and this was before I really understood the concept. As I got older, good fucking god, it wasn’t just gay, it was SUPER gay.

History, as they say, doesn’t repeat, but it sure as hell rhymes, and right now, MAGAland is hitting all the high notes. If you know what I mean. Heeeeeeeeey, girlfriend!

From Tucker Carlson telling men to tan their balls:

To Donald Trump being obsessed with how sexy men are:

To one of the leading misogynists of the Manosphere, Andrew Tate, dressing like your divorced aunt on her way to brunch with the girls:

The “manly” fascists of the far right are gayer than almost every gay man I have ever met in my life, and I’ve met more than a few. Since the early 90s, I’ve been a walking safe zone for the LGBTQ community. So much so, I collected them like barnacles. To the point where my best “man” at my wedding was a lesbian. Of the remaining four in my party, two more were gay (one male, one female), one was bi (female), and only one was a heterosexual (male). It was made known to the assembled guests that comments on this would be most unwelcome.

And then there’s this nonsense:

The right has been screaming about “low-T” men for years. There’s an epidemic of low testosterone in American men! We’re being wussified! Feminism/chemicals in the water/empathy is making our men weak and soft! We need to return to the old days when men were MEN. When we were tough and manly and and and…you know…MEN!

But have you looked at MAGA men lately? Have you ever seen a group less manly than your average Republican voter?

Start with the stereotypes. Men are supposed to be strong, stoic, brave, and persevere in the face of adversity. What part of that even remotely describes the whining and weeping mass of MAGA manbabies who cling to their guns in terror?

Every day, MAGAland wakes up to a new panic. Are Muslims in your neighborhood? BE AFRAID! Is someone flying a pride flag on the next block? BE AFRAID! A Trans kid goes to your local school? BE AFRAID! And you don’t even have school-age kids!

The list is never-ending. Immigrants. Jews. Blacks. People who speak a second language. Educated people. Chemtrails. People with accents. Homeless people. Feminists. Liberals. The Deep State. China. The media. And on and on and on forever.

The victimhood of mediocre racist white people is eternal. Their fear is deeper than the Marianas Trench and wider than the Grand Canyon. They are consumed by fear. They do not persevere in the face of terror; they crumble and submit, begging for a strongman to save them, surrendering their liberty while groveling for a crumb of illusory security. Not that the Founding Fathers were paragons of virtue, but, holy shit, they would throw themselves into an active volcano if they saw the abject cowardice and self-subjugation of the people who claim to be their ideological successors.

Take another stereotype: Fatherhood. A real man is a good father. We’re going to skip over rates of child abuse among MAGA vs. non-MAGA. That gets complicated. Even staunch liberals can abuse their kids because “that’s how I was raised.” The cycle of abuse is hard to break.

But taking a step back, what does MAGA vote for? Do they vote for a better future for their children? No. They vote for cuts to education. They vote for cuts to healthcare. They vote for more pollution and tainted food and anti-vaxxerism. They vote to burn this country to the ground rather than let their white privilege slip away.

These are not good fathers (and grandfathers). These are men who see their children (and grandchildren) as entirely disposable. They do not care what happens to them. Children are little more than pawns to be used up and cast aside in their fight to “own the libs.” If little Timmy dies from the Measles, or is killed in a school shooting, or is maimed at age 13 in a factory job, or graduates and can’t read because his Bible-themed charter school never bothered to teach basic academic skills? That’s just fine because it makes libs cry, and isn’t that the most important thing? Sure, little Timmy’s life is ruined (or just ended), but admitting they were wrong is worse than death itself for MAGA. What’s the life and future of their children compared to that?!

MAGA are not good husbands, either. They do not view women as partners. Misogyny is a core feature of fascism, and there’s a reason the American right adores Donald Trump. His hatred of women appeals to them on a visceral level. The right has long seen feminism as a threat to the power of men. This is why they have worked tirelessly for the last 50 years to undo Roe. This is why they are trying to make contraception illegal again. This is why they want to make no-fault divorce illegal again.

This is why the American right is openly embracing pedophilia.

The Banter

The Right's Pedophile Problem Is Getting Worse

by Justin Rosario…

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4 years ago · 23 likes · 6 comments · The Opinionated Ogre

Women terrify MAGA men. You know, the big, strong, tough manly men. The men who are so masculine and powerful that there is a real conversation on the right about being attracted to women is actually kind of…gay.

Got that? Sex with women is only for making babies. Otherwise, you’re gay. Or maybe sex with women is just gay altogether. It should be noted that when a middle-aged woman knocked on then-25-year-old Nick Fuentes’ door, he panicked, pepper-sprayed her, and shoved her away before slamming the door and hiding.

Soooooo fucking manly.

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The right’s creepy homoerotic obsession with masculinity is not really all that complicated. They are full of self-loathing and hollowed out by decades of subsisting on a diet of nothing but fear and hate. They are incapable of anything but performative toxic masculinity because true masculinity requires a sense of self and security. You have to be comfortable with who you are as a man before you can be masculine.

But MAGA men live in a state of constant insecurity. They have to. It’s their organizing principle. Security would take away their fear, and without fear, they would not hate. Without hate, what are they? How would they identify with the GOP’s appeal to aggrieved, mediocre, racist white men?

The phrase “masculine MAGA” is an oxymoron. By definition, MAGA men cannot be masculine. They can only playact a caricature of masculinity. The real thing will be forever beyond their grasp because they do not understand it or themselves. They are selfish, empty things, devoid of love and the concept of putting others before themselves. They are built of weakness and an inability to see beyond that weakness or even admit to it.

This is why they despise those of us who put the lie to their cosplaying. We expose their failures just by existing. They spit their hate and rage while envying everything we have: The loving family. The happy home. Living comfortably in our own skin without self-loathing. Living without fear. They despise us and want nothing more than to drag us down to their level because that’s easier than escaping the pit they’ve dug for themselves.

And there’s the irony of it all. What could possibly be more low-T than that?

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists and their enablers in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider a one-time donation if you’re not up for a recurring subscription!. Thank you for everything!

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There are 104 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak.

Stay strong. You are never alone.

For those who can be fuzzy on global geography, like me, it’s perhaps useful to say that the Persian Gulf is a body of water bordered by eight countries: Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Oman. These countries include some of the world’s most prominent oil exporters, who have shipping ports for their oil on the Persian Gulf. However, oil tankers leaving the Persian Gulf (and headed for the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, and destinations around the world) need to travel through the Strait of Hormuz, a channel that is about 100 miles long, but with shipping lanes for big oil tankers that at the narrowest point are only about two miles wide in each direction. The chokepoint is bordered by Iran to north and UAE and Oman to the south.

Chokepoints can cause problems, and not just because of armed conflict. Some readers may remember that five years ago in 2021, a container ship called Ever Given ran aground and shut down traffic through the Suez Canal for six days. Now the Strait of Hormuz is giving the world a lesson about how supply shocks affect oil prices.

About 90% of international freight trade moves over the oceans. What are some other main chokepoints for global ocean shipping? Stephan Maurer, Luke Heath Milsom, and Ferdinand Rauch offer insights in “The fragility of the global trading system” (London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance, Discussion Paper 2186, May 2026). A readable short overview of the paper is available at the blog of the LSE Business Review. In the overview, Maurer, Milsom and Rauch write:

[W]e measured sea routes between 455 ports with a statistical trade model that lets us simulate what would happen if a major route closed, or if a new one opened. We simulate shutting three shipping lanes: the Panama Canal (which connects the Caribbean Sea with the Pacific Ocean), the Suez Canal (between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea) and the Strait of Malacca (between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea). We also looked at opening two new routes: a year-round Northwest Passage (connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through the Arctic north of Canada) and a proposed canal across Thailand’s Kra Isthmus. (This scheme would lower the distance for many shipment routes between China or Japan and Europe, although the Thai government is reported to be considering a land-bridge project instead of a canal.)

As geography suggests, the Panama Canal is most important for the US economy, because the alternative is that some shipping would instead need to travel around the southern tip of South American. The Suez Canal is important for European trade, because otherwise shipping would need to be re-routed around the southern tip of Africa. (Although Suez is most important of all to the economy of Egypt; the authors estimate that a closure of Suez would reduce the total GDP of Egypt by 8%.) The Strait of Malacca (between Malaysia and Indonesia, with Singapore at its southern end where a key channel is only about two miles wide) is most important for China’s international shipping trade. Otherwise, shipping between China and India, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe would need to be rerouted further to the east through an alternative passage like the Sunda Strait (between the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java, but also shallow and narrow for some large modern ships) or the Makassar Straight (between the Indonesian islands of Borneo and Sulawesi, a longer detour but also deeper water).

The authors also look at the possibilities from opening two new trade routes. If ships could pass freely though a Northwest Passage, it would be possible to move trade between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans without either going through the Panama Canal or around the southern tip of South America. A proposed canal in Thailand across the Kra Isthmus would potentially be quicker than the Strait of Malacca or its alternatives–but would also be a huge infrastructure project.

In a global economy with near-instantaneous communication and rapid air travel, it can sometimes feel as if the details of geography, like chokepoints for ocean shipping, don’t matter all that much. Which is true enough–until they do.

The post Chokepoints for Ocean Trade: Strait of Hormuz, and What Else? first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Poisonous air is currently blowing its way across Canada and the northern United States, creating an air quality crisis that has kept millions of people indoors and threatens the health and wellbeing of millions more. The source, this time, is Canadian wildfires. The unhealthy air those fires are spewing, and the hot weather that air is spewing it into, poses serious risks, up to and including death. Most people I know in the high-AQI cities are stressed and stunned by the reality that something we both need to survive and largely take for granted — clean air — can go bad overnight

As someone who lives in one of the world’s most polluted cities and lives in choking air most days of the year, I can empathize.

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Today it was announced that the remains of a third soldier have been found at the U.S. military base in Jordan that was struck by an Iranian missile on Friday. That brings the total of U.S. dead to sixteen.

The Pentagon immediately announced that U.S. forces would strike targets in Iran “in retaliation” for the three deaths in Jordan. That is where we are today. We’re not bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. We’re not attempting to knock out Iran’s ability to shut down the Strait of Hormuz. We’re “retaliating” because Iran killed three members of our armed forces.

You hit me, so I’m going to hit you back is not a war. Nations go to war to achieve objectives that cannot be reached by other means. Trump said in a video, or he mumbled on his way walking across the lawn to Marine One, or he posted on Truth Social – I can’t remember which, and it really doesn’t matter – that we were going to war so that Iran will never achieve possession of a nuclear weapon. That’s an objective, and a legitimate one, but then what happened?

Well, when we bombed Iran, they started firing missiles and drones at our bases along the Persian Gulf and elsewhere in the Middle East such as Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. Plus, Iran fired missiles and drones at our allies in the Gulf, hitting some of their oil production sites, their airports, and even some civilian targets such as hotels and apartment buildings.

Iran also decided to shut down shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, which they control because geography, not international law, has given them that control. Reopening the Strait of Hormuz became the object of our war.

Then the market spoke. Trump doesn’t listen to even one human being, but he hears the market. The market moves money, and he likes money. The market sent oil and gas prices up very quickly, and then the market sent the price of everything else up, because it’s all connected.

So, when the market had caused more pain that he could stand, Trump sent his son-in-law and one of his New York real estate buddies over to the Gulf to “make a deal” with Iran that would bring prices down. They produced an agreement called a “memo of understanding” that accomplished exactly zero of the goals Trump had said we were fighting a war for. The agreement did accomplish two of Iran’s goals, however. It acknowledged Iran’s control of the Strait of Hormuz, and it gave them a ceasefire, during which they could repair all the military stuff we had damaged with bombs and missiles, and it let them restart their production lines and rearm.

It has become startlingly apparent that no one running things in the White House or the Pentagon has had even a cursory look at Carl von Clausewitz’ elemental tome, “On War.” Right at the beginning of page one, Clausewitz warns that the idea you can defeat an enemy without the use of maximum force is a “fallacy.” On page two, Clausewitz says simply that “The aim of war is to disarm the enemy.” “If the enemy is to be coerced you must put him in a situation that is even more unpleasant than the sacrifice you call on him to make… Otherwise the enemy would not give in but would wait for things to improve.”

While Witkoff and Kushner dicked around in Geneva and Oman and wherever else their alleged “negotiations” took place, Iran just waited, and things improved for them in multiple ways. The world economy began to slide. The U.S. economy was badly stung. Trump’s poll numbers crashed. His political party panicked. Trump was driven to invoke the Defense Production Act to force defense manufacturers to build more weapons – very, very expensive weapons -- because we were running out of them.

On page three of “On War,” Clausewitz discusses “the maximum exertion of strength.” He says this is necessary if you want to damage the enemy’s means of making war and “the strength of his will.”

In fighting an air war against Iran, we have not employed anywhere near the maximum strength of our military, and we have not broken the will of Iran, which was sent sky-high on the first day of the war when U.S. and Israeli bombs killed Iran’s supreme leader and his immediate family and most of the country’s top military and political leadership.

The first three pages of one of the two most important books ever written about war, and the White House and Pentagon have fucked up everything Clausewitz taught about war and warned against if you’re going to wage one.

It is undeniably tragic every time one of our soldiers is killed in a war. But the death of soldiers is not a reason to fight a war. You don’t retaliate against the enemy because he killed our soldiers. You fight a war to bend the enemy to your will by killing his soldiers and defending the lives of our soldiers. If you kill more enemy soldiers than a country can afford to lose, and if you knock out enough of his weapons that the enemy becomes effectively disarmed, then you break the enemy’s will. If your enemy is Iran, and your break his will, he will do things like stop trying to build a nuclear weapon and go back to allowing unfettered shipping through the body of water that because of his geography he controls.

The Persian Gulf is not a playground, and war is not a spat. War is serious business. We do not have serious people in charge of the war we are waging against Iran. We have people presenting cage fights on the White House lawn, people who cannot fill a reflecting pool with water without turning it lime green. That is why we are nowhere close to achieving even one goal Trump claimed we had when we began bombing Iran.

We have lost only 16 soldiers in this war. We have lost only one fighter jet shot down by the enemy, and one AWACS aircraft destroyed on the ground. We have lost no Navy surface ships or submarines.

Iran, on the other hand, has achieved multiple goals in a war they did not choose but was forced upon them.

Trump is losing this war bigly.

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… to CT reader and commenter Dr Memory, who has cleaned up our database, eliminating many of the badly rendered quotation marks and similar problems. Those problems reflect the fact that the blog is now more than 20 years old, and has gone through multiple formatting systems.

An unexpected side benefit is that commenters can now use emojis, which weren’t even available in Unicode when CT started out.

I enjoy reading over our old posts and discussions, and will enjoy it more now that they are properly readable.

Thanks again, Dr M.