A monopoly on competence

We are being governed by unserious people.

The OAFPOTUS's demented adventure in Iran has exposed for people, including those who otherwise wouldn't care, that the Republican Party has given up any pretense of competent governance. They acted out a pantomime of competence for about 30 years, starting when Newt Gingrich shoved the party hard to the loony right in 1994, and even managed to cover it up with a sheet of tracing paper during the OAFPOTUS's first term. Alas, in the last 14 months it has broken free like the chest-bursting end to Kane at breakfast. Just as many of us predicted.

Michael Tomasky enumerates "how we're all paying the price for the myth of Trump's competence:"

We’ve seen numerous examples in these last 13 months of Trump’s mendacity and malevolence. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans will never see him that way. There are those who adore him unconditionally, but beyond these dead-enders, there are others who know he’s not a good person but aren’t all that bothered by it.

That’s hard for millions of us to accept. But I hope to God that these people are finally starting to move themselves toward the conclusion that, even if they aren’t that troubled by the mendacity and malevolence, the man is just wildly incompetent. A mountain range of mythmaking has gone into creating the Trump persona over the years; by him, by a pliant business press in his real estate days, and, since he entered politics, by a right-wing media that would make the old Soviet press agencies blush and a party of cowardly sycophants, most of whom know very well that he shouldn’t be in charge of a high-volume McDonald’s, let alone the executive branch of the federal government, but would rather let the country collapse than say so.

James Fallows, who worked in the Carter Administration during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and who has written books about Iran and the defense of the US, smacks the OAFPOTUS for "the arrogance of ignorance:"

This has seemed in a way worse than the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Or of the multiple horrific assassinations of the 1960s. Those previous tragedies were things done to America. Now the people at the controls have taken every hard-earned lesson about war and peace and set it ablaze.

The strongest leaders in our history have projected strength through control and calm. Think of John F. Kennedy, during the world’s closest brush with nuclear annihilation, the Cuban Missile Crisis, in 1962. Think of Martin Luther King Jr’s bearing, as his influence expanded and the mortal threats to him increased.

Then think of the clowns and posturers who now have the controls. They don’t know what they don’t know. They have no idea what they are unleashing. It took years for the United States to get into its quagmire in Vietnam. It took many months to prepare the groundwork for the disaster in Iraq.

These people have changed the world, for the worse, in just nine days. And none of us knows how it will end.

Historian Francis Fukuyama reminds us that "expecting Iran to unconditionally surrender is a fool's errand:"

When Trump launched the attack with Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, he was obviously hoping for a quick victory, something like the outcome he achieved when he snatched Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in January. But the war expanded across the Middle East, with Iran shooting missiles and drones at American allies and bases all over the Persian Gulf. It was clear that what remained of the Iranian leadership was not about to capitulate, and that the conflict could drag on—as Trump himself admitted—for weeks.

Normally, a smart leader in such a situation would try to lower expectations and declare an achievable objective in the war, such as degrading the better part of Iran’s ability to strike targets with ballistic missiles and drones. This would offer an opportunity for Trump to declare victory and disengage. Instead, Trump did the opposite.

Iran ... is a very big country, and has a lot of places for the surviving regime to hide. It will not be possible to eliminate every missile and drone under their control, so we can expect continuing attacks on U.S.-aligned Gulf states and American facilities into the foreseeable future. The threat of a random drone striking the big airline hubs in the Gulf will be economically very damaging.

[D]emanding unconditional surrender was a very foolish thing for the president to do. I’m tempted to believe that Trump just liked the sound of the words, without thinking through the ways in which they could come back to haunt him. But this was only one poor decision among many. The most serious was the decision to go to war in the first place without a clear rationale for doing so.

Iraq War veteran and former Republican US Representative Adam Kinzinger, saddened by his party's implosion into a sad cult, takes umbrage with the meme-ification of the war:

There’s something deeply unsettling about watching the official social media accounts of the White House turn war into entertainment.

Leadership—especially civilian leadership—has a completely different responsibility. Their job is not to hype the fight. Their job is to weigh the consequences of it.

They are supposed to be thinking about diplomacy. Alliances. Long-term strategy. Civilian casualties. Escalation risks. The stability of the region. The lives of American service members who may be asked to execute the orders they give. And they are supposed to communicate the gravity of those decisions to the American people.

Instead, what we’re getting looks like a social media account run by someone trying to win the internet for the day.

If the United States is going to commit military power against a country like Iran, the American people deserve more than memes and shifting talking points. They deserve seriousness. They deserve honesty. And above all, they deserve a president who understands that war isn’t content.

It’s responsibility.

Glenn Kessler weighs the cost of never admitting error:

Video evidence examined by Bellingcat, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, and other news outlets leaves little doubt that a Tomahawk cruise missile — used only by the United States in the conflict — struck an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps base next to an elementary school that was hit at about the same moment, killing mostly children, according to Iranian media reports.

On Monday, Trump again suggested that Iran — or some other country — was responsible.

As U.S. and Israeli missiles continue to rain on Iran’s cities, it’s imperative that any further tragic accidents are thoroughly investigated and the facts made public. Trump often denies reality, but a little humility goes a long way in the court of world opinion.

Getting back to my main point: the OAFPOTUS and his droogs have taken these wildly incompetent actions because the OAFPOTUS and his droogs are wildly incompetent. The apotheosis of this abjectly stupid presidency is a world in which the Democratic Party monopolizes competence at the Federal level. The MAGA cult continues to drive the Party's remaining competence out of state governments, showing that the Party's elites have also lost their minds.

But here we are: in a brand-new land war in Asia, with no rationale for being there and no plausible way to exit gracefully, because the majority party in Congress who also control the presidency and the Supreme Court have an average IQ below the mean and an average maturity level of 7th grade.

It's time to take back the government of the US and put these clowns in a time-out at least until they can demonstrate enough competence and seriousness to run a lemonade stand. I give them about 40 years. Or better yet: throw the Republican Party into the landfill of history, along with the Know-Nothings and other stupid parties whence they came. Let Kinzinger and others like him form a competent center-right party (like Germany's Christian Democrats or Australia's Labour), and let's return to a back-and-forth of ideas about how to govern this country instead of robbing it.