I’ve been just a little heartened, in the hours since I posted my pained reaction to Trump’s horrendous decision to shaft the Kurds, by the chorus of voices, including Republican voices, being raised in vehement, almost disbelieving opposition to this bizarre betrayal of a faithful ally. Lindsay Graham, who’s usually too busy polishing Trump’s ballsack to speak up about anything untoward, is out there having kittens. Even McConnell has said it’s the wrong move, and nobody but that libertarian nuthatch Rand Paul has said a thing to defend it.
I mean, even the panel on Fox and Friends was divided over the issue. That’s on a par with Pravda criticizing Stalin’s latest Five Year Plan.
Trump needs his GOP stooges in the Senate to carry on serving as his human shields. That’s his get out if jail free card if, as seems increasingly likely, he winds up being impeached by the House. This sudden break in the ranks might just shock him into another classic Trump 180. It’s what he does when he meets even slight resistance, and he did it before on Syria, about a year ago, when he said he’d decided to pull out. Mattis resigned, the polling was bad, and it didn’t happen.
I mustn’t allow myself get too hopeful here. The news already indicates that the American withdrawal from their positions in Northern Syria has begun, and Erdogan seems likely to move fast to seize his opportunity; they say he wants to kill two birds with one jagged rock and transplant several million nettlesome Syrian refugees to where the Kurds are now, getting them out of his country, giving him every incentive to get on with it as quickly as possible. Yet Donald, as if taken aback by the ferocity of the storm he’s stirred up, tweeted just a little while ago that of course he wouldn’t permit Turkey to run amok, never, albeit in a frankly unhinged Tweet that ought to make a lot more people think a lot more seriously about invoking the 25th Amendment:
Just last night Erdogan was bitch-slapping Donald up and down the West Wing hallways in his jammies, bending him to his will, but tonight Trump’s threatening to destroy the Turkish economy – you know, if, in his “great and unmatched wisdom”, the Turks do anything he considers “off limits”. Is this the precursor to the next great flip-flop? It seems surpassing strange to draw encouragement from a deranged utterance like this one, ravings which many have likened to a cross between Pol Pot and the Wizard of Oz, but maybe it means that by morning, US forces will have been sent back to their posts, and none of this happened anyway, so what’s everybody talking about. FAKE NEWS!
On the other hand, there’s something about the syntax of this cuckoo little Tweet, the absence of misspellings, the use of subordinate clauses, and the lack of full caps or exclamation marks, that makes me suspicious that we aren’t listening to Donald, and it’s actually Stephen Miller, having borrowed Orange Idi’s phone to try to take some heat off. In that case it amounts to nothing. But it’s dark out there, and the nights are getting cold, while the days grow shorter. I need just a crumb of hope to tide me through to the dawn, even if I only half believe it.
Even in Trumpspace, some things are too awful to happen, right?
He said, quietly, while a little voice in his head whispered babies in cages.
Postscript: So much for that. As morning dawns…
the needlefish 