6/22/2025

 Sunday, June 22, 2025

D+207/139/1308

Sick day #9 but feeling better👃

1941 Operation Barbarossa: Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the Soviet Union during World War II, the largest military operation in history

1944 US President Franklin Roosevelt signed the"GI Bill of Rights"

1970 President Richard Nixon signed an extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required the voting age at 18 in all federal, state, and local elections

1977 Former US Attorney General John Mitchell started 19 months in federal prison for perjury regarding his involvement in the Watergate Scandal

1978 Neo-Nazis called off plans to march in Jewish community of Skokie, Illinois

2025 US joined the Israeli offensive against Iranian nuclear facilities, bombing three sites

In bed at 9:30 after watching DJT's my-dick-is-bigger-than-your-dick announcement of war with Iran, awake and up at 5:40.  75°, high of 90°, mostly sunny day ahead - meteorologically, that is.

Kevzara, day 12/14; Trulicity, day 3/7; morning meds at 8:55 a.m.; Blink pill at 8:55   a.m.; Eye wipes at 6 a.m. and  4:30 p.m.; Eye mask at 12 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.; Ketoconazole wash and cream at 11 a.m. and 7 p.m.  Eye ointment at bedtime.    

Hats.  The White House has released photos of the people in the White House Situation Room during the B-2 bombings in Iraq.  Trump is shown sitting at the head of the conference table wearing his business suit, a bright red tie, and a bright red MAGA hat.  Whazupwidat?  When he got off Air Force One in Canada for last week's G7 meeting, he was wearing a business suit befitting a head of state and a bright white MAGA hat.  Whazupwidat?  In photos of the guy who assassinated a Minnesota legislator and her husband, the guy is wearing a cowboy hat.  In Minnesota?  Whazupwidat?  Whenever political commentator Mark McKinnon is interviewed or is otherwise on television, he's wearing something like a wimpy cowboy hat.  Whazupwid these guys who think it's OK to wear an outdoor hat indoors?  Some of the cowboy hat bunch also wear cowboy boots, even though they are in a TV studio or at a political fundraiser rather than on a cattle range or on the lone prairie.  These guys remind me of "B.D." in Doonesbury, who was never seen without a helmet on.  The weirdest guys, I think, are the guys with the cowboy hats who insist on wearing them indoors and especially when they are on TV.  The hats suggest to me that these guys are like Daisy Buchanan's husband, Tom, in The Great Gatsby, he with the gruff, husky voice and crushing handshake. "Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are."  The cowboy hats seem to be intended as a sartorial signal that 'my whachamacallit is bigger than yours.'  I wonder whether Donald Trump thinks those MAGA hats send the same signal to the world.  If so, I think he's badly mistaken, but who knows?  I've never had a cowboy hat or a MAGA  hat.  

WAR.   I am not a member of our quixotic president's cultish fan club, but I have been struggling with what to think of his attack on the Iranian uranium enrichment sites.  Not on the constitutional issue, which I think is clear.  Absent an imminent threat, the decision to send an aerial armada to drop bombs on another country requires at least congressional consultation and concurrence, under Art. I, sec. 8 of the Constitution.  Scholars and politicians may argue about how much consultation and what kind of concurrence is sufficient, but what is beyond argument is that, absent an imminent threat (another subject for arguments), the president is not authorized by the Constitution to do unilaterally what Donald Trump has done unilaterally in Iran.  But this is a procedural issue: where within the divided structure of the federal government lies the ultimate and preclusive decision to wage war on another sovereign nation.  It is on the substantive question of whether there are good and sufficient grounds to destroy Iran's uranium enrichment facilities that I have doubts.  I'm inclined to answer that question affirmatively based on Iran's entire history since 1979.  Maybe our intelligence community knows just how close Iran is (or was) to having nuclear weapons, and maybe it doesn't.  Let's remember how the IC failed to foresee the collapse and dissolution of the Soviet Union and the attacks on 9/11 (and the financial disaster in 2008 for that matter).  How about the 1993 car bombing of the World Trade Center?  Or the 1993 truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon?  Have we forgotten CIA Director George Tenet's telling George W. Bush that the case for Saddam Hussein having weapons of mass destruction was  "a slam dunk"?  If the IC was wrong in its judgments about Iran's progress in producing nuclear weapons, and we found out too late that Iran already had such a weapon, the strategic situation in the Middle East and in the world would be irretrievably changed.  Trump wasn't willing to take that chance and I'm inclined to agree with him, though not without a good amount of dubeity.  My greater concern is with Trump's taking this action completely independently of Congress.  That is the action of a dictator.