"Beannachtaí na Féile Pádraig dhuit!" (St Patrick's Day blessings to you!)

Also, many thanks for the kind wishes about (Z)'s health. A rough dental procedure was followed by a raging kidney infection; two events that may or may not have been related. But, thanks to a large supply of the correct medicine (Hiprex—and it took many rounds of this to figure that out), and a couple days' recovery, all appears to be well now.

A Tale, Told by an Idiot, Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing, Part I: Iran

At this point, we must have written at least a thousand times that Donald Trump does not play 3-D chess, or even 2-D checkers. The man seems to be fundamentally incapable of anticipating the consequences of his actions, particularly two or three or four steps down the line. In domestic politics, he's made that work for him, thanks to a fawning base that eats up whatever he says, and a whole bunch of pliant Republicans in Congress. But it's not an approach that works in foreign affairs, as the mess in Iran is demonstrating.

At this point, Trump has figured out that he's got a burgeoning oil/gas price problem and, more specifically, a Strait of Hormuz problem. The petroleum markets have already been thrown off kilter in a manner that will take months or more to resolve. And the longer there's a bottleneck in the Strait, the longer it will take for the markets to settle down. Trump has already tried a bunch of things to try to address the problem, from trying to arrange escorts for tankers to trying to serve as insurer. No dice. So, over the weekend, he took yet another tack, namely demanding that the United States' allies and/or China help clear the Strait.

These would be the same allies that Trump has spent the last year pissing on, and the same China that would love to see the U.S. economy take a giant hit. Further, when it comes to the allies, Trump seems to have no awareness that they have polities that they answer to, too, and that helping Trump would be one nail in the coffin of a Keir Starmer or a Friedrich Merz, while getting involved in a forever war they were not consulted about would be a second nail. So, they all (predictably) told Trump to pound sand.

Trump responded to this with one of the few diplomatic "tools" he has left, namely bluster. He decreed that really, the United States is fighting this war FOR those other nations, and that it actually has plenty of oil without needing the supplies that pass through the Strait of Hormuz. So, he concluded, if other countries aren't willing to help out, "Maybe we shouldn't even be there."

Forgive our judgmental language, but we are (almost literally) banging our heads against the wall here: Is he really that colossally stupid? First, if you're trying to build an international coalition like this, threats and di**-waving are never going to get you anywhere. Second, does he not realize that America's single-largest foreign source of oil is... Canada? About 55% of all U.S. petroleum imports come from there. And if the U.K. or France or Italy or Spain are running low, and offer a higher price than the U.S. is paying (or, for that matter, the same price as the U.S. is paying), do you think Canada might jump at that? (Note: See allies, pissing on.)

But wait, it gets worse. Because Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz, and because they know where they placed mines, their ships are moving through those waters without difficulty. In fact, as remarkable as this sounds, The Wall Street Journal reports that Iran is actually shipping more oil right now than it was before the war, because it doesn't have to share shipping lanes with anybody. Sure, the U.S. or Israel could fire on one or more of those ships, but then they would get massive blame for the resulting ecological disaster.

But wait, it gets even worse than that. Iran is reportedly considering re-opening the Strait to non-Iranian ships, but only for trades conducted in Chinese yuan. That would be fine and dandy for oh, say... China. And, of course, while the U.S. is unlikely to fire on an Iranian oil tanker, it would never fire on a Chinese tanker. Talk about World War III—that would probably do it.

In short, despite having declared victory on Day 1 (raising the obvious question: Why is there still fighting going on?), the Trump administration has utterly botched this thing, and at the same time is being completely outmaneuvered by the Iranian government. Undoubtedly, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon are rolling in their graves.

And it is abundantly clear that Trump knows he's dug himself a hole, and that he's starting to feel the heat. The best way to take the President's temperature, of course, is to take a look at his shoot-first-ask-questions-never social media platform. And if you happened to take a look on Sunday night, you saw that he fired off an absolutely unhinged rant about Jerome Powell, and tariffs, and Joe Biden and a whole bunch of other things that ran to nearly 1,000 words. You simply cannot read it and say it's the work of a healthy mind. It's like reading Ulysses or Infinite Jest, except that once you do the hard work of parsing it, there's actually nothing there.

On Monday, Trump turned to another trick he loves to use to try to prop himself up and to deflect responsibility, namely the old "someone told me..." bit. The problem is that when you start a foreign war that appears to have no end in sight, some Joe Palooka off the street isn't going to move the needle. After all, who cares if Joe thought it was a good idea to bomb Iran? And so, for this particular usage of this item from the bag of tricks, Trump went big and said that he spoke to "one of the former presidents who I actually like" and that president allegedly said he liked the decision to bomb Iran and that "I wish I did it."

There are, of course, only four living presidents. Trump strongly implied it was a Democrat, and said outright it wasn't George W. Bush. That leaves us with Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Trump hates all of them, and none of them are particularly likely to speak to him on the phone, much less speak to him to tell him, "Yeah! Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb bomb Iran!" And if this logic is not enough, well, spokespeople for all four former presidents denied that Trump spoke to them about Iran.

One wonders what happened here. Did he just make it up, not thinking that his story would be verified, and his lie would be caught? Or was he engaging in some wordplay? Did he talk to himself in the mirror, and say "#45, what do you think about all of this?" Or did he maybe stop by the White House portrait of, say, Ronald Reagan, and have a chat with St. Ronnie? Did he talk to A president (say, the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, or maybe the president of Oracle, Larry Ellison) and just imply it was a U.S. president? Did he hallucinate? Did he have a dream? We'd kind of like to know.

Anyhow, the upshot is that he's showing his usual signs of desperation. The problem here is that Trump has dug himself into a bigger and more dangerous hole than any other he's faced. We stand by our view that the correct political AND human move here is to declare victory, get the hell out of Iran, and try to minimize the fallout. But that does not seem to be the current plan and if, in particular, the world's oil economy begins to transition to the yuan, that could mean very bad things for the U.S. economy, long-term. (Z)

A Tale, Told by an Idiot, Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing, Part II: Cuba

It is hard to think of a president that, faced with the train wreck that is Iran, would not learn a little humility. The best historical example is Lyndon B. Johnson, who had as big an ego as any man ever to occupy the White House. Even he was taken down several pegs by the mess he created in Vietnam.

But Donald Trump is not like any of his 44 predecessors. And so, even while the Iran debacle unfolds before our very eyes, he's still behaving very cocksure about the United States' prospects when it comes to Cuba. That nation's energy infrastructure failed yesterday, in substantial part because of an ongoing U.S. oil blockade. Shortly thereafter, Trump predicted that the end of the current regime is near, and bragged to Fox entertainer Peter Doocy that " I do believe I'll be having the honor of taking Cuba" and that "I think I can do anything I want with it."

Trump is mucking around in so many countries these days, and with so little explanation, that we have absolutely no idea what his thinking on Cuba is. We suspect that he doesn't know much better than we do. He talked yesterday about how "They have no money, no oil, no nothing, they have nice land, nice landscape, it's a beautiful island." That sounds an awful lot like his verbiage about Gaza, and the luxury resorts that he and Jared Kushner would like to build. Maybe to grasp his vision, all you have to do is watch the first 90 minutes of The Godfather, Part II.

We also imagine that, because the current leadership is pretty poor, Trump thinks that the U.S. will be greeted by the Cubans with open arms. This is probably a miscalculation, because while many Cubans don't like the regime of Miguel Díaz-Canel, they don't much like the U.S., either. After all, the U.S. is the country that has helped create the current humanitarian crisis by starving Cuba of food, fuel, medicine, etc.

Actually, as long as we're speculating, we'll also add that we think Trump is probably making a very similar kind of error in Cuba as in Iran, namely paying WAY too much attention to the views of Cuban Americans and Iranian Americans. The problem here is that the Cuban/Iranian Americans are about as far from a random, representative sample as you can get. In fact, the Cuban-American diaspora and the Iranian-American diaspora were made up almost entirely of people who fled the regimes in those nations. Of course THEY hate the current government. That doesn't mean they speak for all (or even most of) the people of Cuba or Iran.

In the end, the most important question is really this: Why is the U.S. still embroiled in this weird cold war with Cuba? Yeah, it made sense back in the 1960s, when Cuba was a client state of the Soviet Union, and the Soviets were using Cuba as a potential base for missile silos. But today? Cuba isn't exactly a client state of Russia anymore and, more importantly, the Trump administration does not care about hemming Vladimir Putin in. So, that excuse for involvement in Cuba just doesn't pass the smell test.

The only real motivator we can see is that high-profile Cuban Americans in the administration, most obviously Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and latter-day Cold Warriors, most obviously Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), just have a bug up their a**es when it comes to that nation, and they will not be satisfied until the U.S. takes a sledgehammer to it.

Given the oh-so-long list of U.S. successes in Latin American nation-building, this figures to go oh-so-well. Meanwhile, people who voted for Trump because he promised to keep the U.S. out of wars are on the cusp of getting their third disappointment on that front in just this year (for reference, Venezuela was invaded on January 3). At this rate, the U.S. will be at war with half the United Nations by Arbor Day 2027. (Z)

Trump Allies in the Senate Will Try to Save SAVE Act

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) will use a little parliamentary sleight-of-hand to bring the SAVE Act to the floor of his chamber sometime later this week. Then, the secret-but-not-that-secret plan is to keep debate open for some extremely long period of time, so as to force the Democrats to defend their (ostensibly minority) position, over and over, providing soundbites for the fall election season. Some seemingly punch-drunk Republican members, like Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), are eyeing the debate that preceded the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a target. That one lasted 60 days.

It is hard to know what the Republicans' goal is here. Officially, it is to draw attention to one of the few GOP planks that seems to be broadly popular. A recent Harvard/CAPS poll reports that 85% of respondents think that only citizens should be allowed to vote in federal election, while 71% support the SAVE America Act. There aren't too many other GOP positions that poll that well, or anywhere near that well.

The other possibility is that the Republicans are primarily putting on a show for an audience of one, the fellow who sits at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, and who has said he's not signing any more bills into law until the SAVE Act hits his desk. There is no chance the Democrats will allow the bill to pass, and there appears to be no chance that 50 Republican senators will vote to kill the filibuster. So, if the Senate tries for a week, or a month, or however long, maybe Thune is thinking he can go to Trump and say, "I tried very hard, sir, but it's just not doable." Maybe that would be enough to get the President to end this particular crusade for now.

If the goal is indeed to mollify Trump, well, then we guess Republicans on the Hill gotta do what they gotta do. However, if they are expecting to derive political benefit from this (or they are ALSO expecting to derive political benefit from this, in addition to pleasing the Dear Leader), we're not sold that is going to work. To start, while it's true that the polling is pretty clear, there also isn't that much of it, and those polls that have been taken are almost exclusively from strongly right-leaning pollsters (Harvard/CAPS, Rasmussen, etc.). This is an issue where a little bit of poll design magic could push the results in a desired direction. For example, there are surely some people in that 85% who don't realize that non-citizens are already forbidden from voting in federal elections, and so think the SAVE Act will "solve" a problem that doesn't actually exist. If you ask that question BEFORE you ask about the Act itself, you're going to goose the numbers for the actual legislation.

Beyond that, right-wing politicians and media propagandists have been beating this voter fraud drum for years and years. The Democrats have not responded too much, because they don't want to be accused of trying to give the vote to "illegals." But if push comes to shove, they could mount a PR campaign that highlights two very salient points: (1) there is virtually no voter fraud, and (2) voter ID laws have the effect, and are MEANT to have the effect, of preventing citizens from voting.

We are also somewhat skeptical that voters care a whole lot about parliamentary shenanigans in the Senate, especially when they took place many months before the actual election. That said, if they do, Democrats have some pretty easy counter-arguments to make. For example, "While a war was waging in Iran, John Thune and his colleagues thought the best use of the Senate's time was a pointless debate about voter ID." Or, "While DHS was shut down, and TSA employees were going without paychecks, John Thune and his colleagues thought the best use of the Senate's time was a pointless debate about voter ID."

And finally, besides all of this, there's the fact that even if some sort of new voter ID law is implemented, it's no longer clear that will work to the benefit of the GOP. As we have noted many times, the type of voters who have no problem coming up with whatever paperwork is needed have migrated to the Democrats in recent years. Affluent college-educated suburbanites typically have passports or can easily get them. Meanwhile, those Democrats who do not have the correct paperwork (mostly immigrants and minorities) tend to live in cities, where it will be much easier for the blue team to organize "get your paperwork" drives.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said that he and his caucus have been strategizing, and are ready for whatever the Republicans might throw at them. We'll see what that means; with him, it could be that he's planning to write a strongly worded op-ed for The New York Times. Maybe one for USA Today, as well. But even if whatever the Democrats do in the Senate is kind of flaccid, we still think the Party has a fair bit of maneuvering room here, once this colossal waste of time comes to a close. (Z)

Political Bytes: Going Dark

Let's run down some recent political news:

Bye for Now, Bye Forever: The Board of the Kennedy Center officially voted to shutter the venue for 2 years for "renovations." It will close after some Independence Day events, and will theoretically reopen in July of 2028. Given the follow-through that is characteristic of this administration (see East Wing, White House), not to mention the embarrassment of approximately 100% of potential Christmas performers saying "No, thanks!", there's an above average chance the venue does not re-open during Trump's presidency.

Meanwhile, shortly before the vote, Trump cashiered now-former CEO and Executive Director Ric Grenell, as Grenell did not satisfactorily manage the negative PR caused by all of Trump's monkeying around with the venue.

Our Take: It is remarkable how quickly Trump managed to run the Kennedy Center into the ground, even by his rather lofty standards of rapid failure. Meanwhile, the primary PR problem was that Trump allowed his name to be added to the venue. That was something that even Edward Bernays could not have smoothed over.

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So That's What Did It: Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), who got the ignominious distinction of being the first member of the House to be successfully primaried this cycle, has figured out what went wrong. He says that, these days, there are many Republican voters willing to believe false information about a candidate.

Our Take: You don't say? That's obviously the sort of keen insight that only a member of Congress can offer.

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Public Housing: And here you thought that government-funded housing was only for poor people. Not in the Age of Trump it's not. "Attorney General" Pam Bondi has become the latest member of the Cabinet to move into housing provided by the U.S. government, joining Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and, until recently, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in doing so. The stated reason for all of these moves is "security concerns."

Our Take: We see two possibilities here. The first is that this is a grift, and that "security concerns" are just a way to allow high-ranking members of the Cabinet to fatten themselves a bit more at the teat of Uncle Sam. The second is that there really are "security concerns." If so, then it raises the question: "What is this administration doing differently from every other administration, since no other president has had to move a bunch of Cabinet officials into secure housing?"

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What Took So Long?: This week, we saw the first instances of a story that you ALWAYS see coming from the minority party in the midterm year. To wit: "Some members are not so sure they are willing to keep Minority Leader [X] after the elections." Naturally, the calls for change come from the fringes of the party—so, progressives for the Democrats, Freedom Caucusers for the Republicans.

Our Take: We will believe it when we see it. As far as we can tell, Jeffries has played his hand fairly well. And besides, you can't really know until a person becomes Speaker and has real power. In any event, it's very difficult to get rid of a party leader who does not go willingly, in the same way that it's difficult to get rid of a president who does not go willingly. And that is for the same reason: Anyone who turns apostate risks getting burned if the rebellion fails. Hard to find the necessary number of people willing to take that risk.

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Maybe AI Reporting Is NOT the Wave of the Future: The Washington Post, which was already in financial trouble before it laid a bunch of people off, lost 60,000 more subscribers immediately thereafter. It turns out that if you want people to pay for a product, you have to offer them, you know, a product. Now, Jeff Bezos himself is trying to get some of the laid-off staffers to come back to work for the paper.

Our Take: Many of our readers are Star Trek fans, and are aware that when NBC dropped the original series, network executives neglected to talk to ad sales department. If they had, they would have learned that while the ratings were not great, the demographic that the show was delivering (young people, especially young men) was golden, and had no real parallel among other TV shows of that era. So, Trek was actually wildly profitable. Similarly, killing the Post's sports section was a stupid choice, because those folks not only sell newspapers, they also sell advertising. Do you really think Budweiser or Ford or Hanes wants to advertise in the Arts section? All of this said, if we were former Post reporters, we'd only return if there was no better option available. You just can't trust Bezos or the other leadership at the paper. For a really smart guy, Bezos is kind of stupid. His best course now is simply sell the paper to some other company in the newspaper business, for example, Gannett or McClatchy.

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John Roberts Disrobed: NBC has been polling Americans' confidence in the Supreme Court for close to 30 years. And in their latest, SCOTUS drew the worst numbers it's gotten in that time. Only 22% of respondents have "great confidence" in the Court, 40% have "some confidence" and 38% have "little or no confidence."

Our Take: Since SCOTUS has no enforcement powers of its own, it is reliant on public confidence in its rulings much more than the other two branches. After all, if people and institutions think a ruling is B.S., they will ignore it, or at least try to subvert it. Responsibility for this low point for the court falls on many people—Clarence Thomas and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) certainly leap to mind. But it falls most heavily upon Chief Justice John Roberts.

True, it may be true that there are some things the Chief Justice could not have controlled, like the shenanigans surrounding Brett Kavanaugh. But Roberts had a milquetoast response to Thomas' blatant acceptance of bribes and to the leaking of the Dobbs opinion, both of which hit the Court's reputation hard. He's also been in the majority in some very problematic decisions, such as the ones chopping away at the Voting Rights Act, and the one granting Donald Trump king-like status. And the Chief has stood by while the shadow docket was abused beyond all reason. These things were all within his power, and he dropped the ball. He will justly go down as one of the two worst chief justices in American history (it's between him and Roger Taney and, these days, we give the edge to Roberts).

That's the news. Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow. (Z)

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