Back to our regularly scheduled programming. No one in Washington knows what they’re doing. And conservatives are regressive.
The Atlantic, Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Isabel Ruehl: Six Days of War, 10 Rationales, subtitled “The administration has laid out a buffet of reasons for Operation Epic Fury—take your pick.”
On the third day of the war in Iran, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called Operation Epic Fury the “most-precise aerial operation in history.” A difficult claim to fact-check. More difficult still has been parsing statements from the White House and the Pentagon to figure out, with any exactitude, why we are at war in the first place. So far, the Trump administration has offered at least 10 separate rationales in just six days.
Imminent threat. To prevent their nukes. To halt the militias. Regime change. Election interference (they did it to us). World peace. For the grandkids. Preemptive hit. Fulfill God’s purpose (a useful go-to for anything). And, the Israelis made us do it.
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Oh, and it’s the Department of War now, but this thing in Iran is *not a war.* (Why? Because Congress didn’t approve it. Because Trump didn’t ask them to.)
JMG, from The Independent: Johnson Claims US Is “Not At War” With Iran
Even though they keep using that word.
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It’s all a video game to them.
JMG: WH Posts War-Glorifying Hollywood Mashup [VIDEO]
From Mediaite:
President Donald Trump’s White House used its official channel to post a bonkers war hype video mixing a dubious collection of Hollywood clips with actual war footage.
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JMG, from The Mirror: Trump To Rubio: “Your Next One Is Gonna Be Cuba”
As many have predicted.
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JMG: Hegseth Declares US As “Christian Nation Under God”
Excuse me, who is he to say? I object.
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JMG, from Yahoo News: Scamvangelicals “Lay Hands” On Trump In Oval Office
This is just as creepy as whatever the white evangelists accuse Muslims of doing. Also, Matthew 6:5-6.
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Some longer items.
John Pavlovitz, 5 Mar 2026: Umm, No, God Did Not Ordain a Vile, Traitorous Serial Predator. Alleged Christians Did.
If I hear one more Evangelical claim that God anointed Donald Trump, I swear I’m gonna rapture myself.
It’s sinful.
It’s blasphemous.
It’s lousy evangelism.
It’s terrible theology.
It’s also just plain asinine.The hypocrisy on display is historic: after spending years straining to find infinitesimal specks in Barack Obama’s eye that they could condemn as moral deal breakers, Conservative White Christians are now perfectly fine with Trump’s expansive, rotted, and reeking forest of immorality and lawlessness.
In fact, in the most dizzying display of theological spin doctoring, it is now precisely his ever-growing trail of personal toxic discharge that supposedly proves evidence of the Almighty’s hand in it all. After all, God uses flawed people.
Yet again, this kind of behavior, and rationale, discredits the entire evangelical movement from any kind of moral authority.
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Yet again, conservatives want to undo all the moral progress made over centuries. It’s them vs everyone else, who should just disappear.
The Atlantic, Ali Breland, 6 Mar 2026: ‘We Need to Do McCarthyism to the Tenth Power’, subtitled “Conservative influencers are pushing for a return to the dark days of 1950s inquisitions.”
For decades, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s name has been used as shorthand for the opposite of the aspirational ideal of civilized American politics. In the way that Kleenex has become interchangeable with tissue, McCarthyism, for many, is an eponym for the unjust, reprehensible use of political power. Indicating that anything resembled the tactics and smears of the late senator from Wisconsin has been enough to suggest that such behavior was out of bounds, with no rightful place in our modern politics. But now comes a small, influential group of hard-line right-wingers who believe that, in the words of one popular meme in such circles, McCarthy was right.
William F. Buckley. Ann Coulter, Laura Loomer, Jack Posobiec. Others. And they’re paranoid about communism. Which *failed* in the old Soviet Union; that’s why it broke apart. They’re also paranoid about globalists, which to them means a lack of nationalistic integrity, not about cooperation to create win-win, non-zero-sum games, to advantage everyone in the world. They’re tribalists.
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Underlying much of this is the conservative inability to understand how the world works.
Paul Krugman, 6 Mar 2026: Renewable Energy and National Security, subtitled “The wind and the sun don’t need to transit the Strait of Hormuz”
Donald Trump’s attack on Iran will have many unintended and unforeseen consequences. One consequence even I wasn’t thinking about, but which is already clear after less than a week, is that Trump has made a strong new case for renewable energy.
The usual argument for promoting solar and wind power is that relying on renewable energy avoids the environmental damage caused by burning fossil fuels. This environmental damage includes, but isn’t limited to, climate change. In addition, air pollution imposes shockingly large direct and immediate costs by harming our health and reducing our life expectancy.
But now we know that there is another reason for nations to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels: security. In a dangerous world, it’s infinitely safer to rely on the sun and the wind than to depend on fossil fuels that must be transported long distances, from nations that are untrustworthy, often exploitative and located in regions that frequently devolve into war zones.
Relying on fossil fuels, which conservatives are intent to do partly because they resist change and partly to maintain the current oligarchy, entails security challenges when a “war” like the current one breaks out. Cue those rising gas prices in the US.
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One more.
AlterNet, Thomas Kika, 5 Mar 2026: Trump gives an ‘obvious tell’ that he has no idea what he’s doing
The tell: everything is “two weeks” away.
