superrific
Legend of ZZL
- Messages
- 8,656
1. Well, most of our conservative posters aspire to mere hopeless stupidity, so yeah it's a low bar. Didn't mean to offend.
2. I think that Trump does not get any information that is remotely accurate. He has made it super-clear that he's only willing to listen to what he wants to hear. So, no, I do not think that he was "assured" of the result in any rational meaning of that term.
3. Hegseth probably told him that it would work 100%. This is what happens, right? Hegseth's position was precarious because, as has been reported, he's been pissing a lot of people off with his incompetence, vanity and inexperience. So from Hegseth's view, the bombing was a way to save his job. The most important thing was getting it to happen. If it was a success, then he's a hero. If it isn't, if he overpromised, well he's out the door anyway.
This is, of course, a dynamic that any sports fan knows: the coach or GM on the hot seat makes risky moves to shoot for the moon, because failure doesn't matter given that they would lose their jobs anyway. Good managers know how to address these situations.
I doubt Trump even thinks about the motivations of his underlings at all, and certainly cannot take them into account when making assessments.
4. I really do not think this is a black eye on the military. It was Trump. And of course he didn't think about the strategic element at all. Before now, that big bomb was really scary and it was a stick in our arsenal. It's still scary, but it's a little less scary than it was. Which is why it should have been deployed only in an emergency situation, allowing the US to retain the strategic ambiguity as to our capabilities. Instead Trump blew it on Bibi's vanity project.
It's these small things that fully expose Trump for the idiot he is.
