(New National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien)

So, apparently there was not enough going on here in The Swamp and we had to step it up again. At some point, perhaps sanity will return, but I am not expecting anything much until a year for November. And goodness knows what is going to happen after that.

Dizzying. Democrat front-runner Joe Biden has had a distressing run of “gaffes,” the political term for whoppers that are forgiven immediately, regardless of their distance from the truth. I am a little conflicted. I have always thought Mr. Biden was a personable fellow, but the distance between his wonderful stories and actual fact- (wait- or is the truth?) has become quite remarkable. I wish them all well, all the candidates- and have no idea why a rational person would want to run for any public office at the price of personal destruction.

The House- and New York Times- have re-declared war on Brett Kavanaugh, which is actually a bit of a Hail Mary to remove him from the bench, but of course that has to be viewed in the context of the impending replacement of Justice Ruth Baden Ginsberg. That is going to be ugly bit. Based on the state of play now, Amy Coney Barrett is a good bet, but that will provoke a firestorm over whether being a devout Roman Catholic is compatible with polite society.

So, naturally the salacious and uncorroborated stories about respected jurists is much more entertaining than actual reality. It is too bad this still has to drag on for more than a year, and if anything, Congress will probably get even more uncivil as we get closer. Could be fun, if we don’t get distracted by new Middle East wars. Somehow, week by week, the water seems to get a little muddier and a little deeper here by the banks of the Potomac.

Oh, the President just Tweeted that it was his intension to replace the departed John Bolton with Robert O’Brien as National Security Advisor. He would be the fourth NSA in the Trump Administration- and it comes at an interesting time. Unlike everything else here in The Swamp, the NSA position does not require Senate confirmation, so he can breeze right in to the office. He will face a broad number of foreign policy challenges continue to mount for Trump, most recently the purported Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil facilities.

Trump also announced Wednesday that he directed Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to escalate sanctions on Tehran. I really thought the previous round had the mullahs on the ropes- and hence the timing of the proxy rocket attacks by Yemeni Rebels.

For you old-timers, what we know as “Yemen” today used to be composed of two states, a southern one that once included the great British port of Aden, on the Pacific & Orient Lines route to Imperial India. It was an interesting place, not far from where USS Cole (DDG-67) was attacked. If you had told me in 1979 before DESERT CLAW that I would still be worrying about the Iranians forty years later I would have hooted in disbelief.

I will be interested in how this works out. I assume it will, right? The water could not still be rising here, could it?

Copyright 2019 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com