Speaking of Political Malpractice………

Trump's disastrous and incompetent Iran adventure is deeply unpopular, and it's getting less popular by the day, but the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) refuses to come out against the war.

To quote (not) Tallyrand, "This is worse than a crime, this is a mistake." 

There’s definitely something uncanny about this: We’re five months and 10 days into Donald Trump’s war of choice with Iran, and it’s been about five months and five days since he lost it. Trump won’t end the war because he can’t accept terms that make clear how badly he fucked this up, and we’re all captive to his narcissism. The result is that U.S. credibility is in tatters. Everyone’s mad at us for creating a global energy crisis, and rightly so. Nobody trusts Trump to honor his word, because he’s a liar. Nobody trusts him to make good on his threats, because he makes them endlessly but never follows through. He’s depleted U.S. munitions stockpiles badly enough to leave service members, and allies that rely on our preparedness, vulnerable to adversaries.

It’s a cockup of world historic proportions. And yet… it’s often not among Trump’s biggest day-to-day political liabilities. The war is slow-bleeding support from the GOP. But there are no sustained calls for Trump to resign in disgrace, or face impeachment, or any consequences that match the scale of the failure. And yet we know, because we weren’t born yesterday, that presidents and cabinet officials have been mired in damaging controversy for much smaller military blunders. Remember Barack Obama’s redline in Syria? Or Benghazi?

………

What do you think would happen to Democratic Party approval ratings if Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries wrote up an agenda like the one I proposed here, including a promise that if Democrats win the election, they’ll defund Trump’s war against Iran? Would they go up or down?

What if they were able to communicate, unabashedly, that Trump had humiliated America. That through his own foolishness, megalomania, and dishonesty, he had made the United States seem weak and feckless to the world. That this is, for the pendency of his regime, a disaster for U.S. strategic power—but also that it’s fundamentally aberrant. Something Democrats will set right once Trump is gone.

What if Democrats told the electorate, but also the world, that American renewal could begin early, but only if voters gave Democrats enough power to dog walk Trump to the end of his term. No more threats to invade or occupy enemies or allies on a lark. No more denial about the failure of his foreign policy. He might serve his last two years in full—Republicans could still ensure his acquittal on impeachment—but he’d be muzzled and on a tight leash?

People are disinclined to vote for careerist coward hypocrites.