Last one out, hit the lights

Groundhog Day (take 4)

Remember Groundhog Day? My famous articles of course - with all of 10 views… Not the movie obviously...

Groundhog Day

Groundhog day (take 2)

Groundhog day (take 3)

Well… Wake up, wake up… Same war, same headline, same denial, same crash, same recovery, rinse, repeat. Trump threatens Iran, TACOs by lunch, calms the tape, and goes back to threatening Iran the moment the bond market stops cooperating.

We’ve been stuck in this loop since forever.

But this morning the loop did something new. It went quiet.

Not the war mind you. That’s still simmering hot.

The room.

Let’s start with the wedding, shall we?

Because this is the one that No1 can spin. What’d you do if your eldest son - or any kid for that matter? - is getting married? Of course you’re going to stay home to work some more, right? Yup.

That’s what happened. The president excused himself this weekend.

Sorry son, I’ve got to bomb Tel Aviv Iran…

And you know it’s bad when… (drumroll) he cancelled his golf!!

I mean… the guy golfs through hurricanes. He golfed through indictments. He ate a bullet and was back on the course before the bandage came off.

Well that guy is sitting at home this weekend.
Because he has a thing called Iran.

Yesterday night CBS filled in the rest. The administration is preparing fresh strikes on Iran. No final decision, they say, which is government-speak for “waiting for the paperwork”. Axios put him in a Friday war-room huddle, “increasingly frustrated”, ready to swing unless someone hands him a breakthrough nobody expects. Military and intelligence staff cancelled their Memorial Day plans.

So the principal’s staying late.

Tulsi Gabbard resigned Friday afternoon as Director of National Intelligence. The stated reason is her husband’s cancer, and that’s where it stays - it’s real, it’s awful, and it isn’t mine to poke at.

But the chair is. The DNI exists to do one thing, and one thing only: sit across from the president and tell him what the eighteen agencies actually know, instead of what he’d like to hear.

She’s vacating it on a Friday, mid-war, deal text leaking, talks going nowhere, keys handed to an acting deputy nobody can name.

Of course people get sick and the calendar doesn’t ask if it’s convenient. Granted.

But she’s not the first to leave, one is a pity - as I think she’s an incredible woman - but once you start lining up the people that left? It’s a pattern screaming to anyone left: GET THE FUCK OUT.

Last August they removed the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Kruse, shortly after his shop assessed that the strikes had set Iran’s program back by months rather than destroying it. The president had said totally destroyed. The honest number went bye-bye, and so did the man who signed it.

April, the Army’s top officer, General Randy George, told to retire effective immediately.

Three weeks later the Navy Secretary, John Phelan, gone the same way, no reason given, while his Navy ran the blockade.

Before any of them, at the opening bell, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs C.Q. Brown, the Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti, the Air Force’s number two James Slife. The most experienced people in the room, leaving in roughly the order of how much they’d seen.

Call it a purge if you like. You can just as easily read it as a slow procession of people who’d seen the cable traffic and wanted their signature nowhere near what comes next.

Either way… the chairs are empty.

Remember, remember the first of August (doesn’t have quite the ring to it):

When reality outpaces satire

“approximately 25% of America’s entire THAAD missile interceptor inventory - 150 missiles worth $800 million - was expended in 12 days defending Israel.”

Well… three months into Operation Epic Failure and the US has gone through roughly half its Patriot interceptors, what was left of the THAAD stock, and more than 850 Tomahawks - years of production in one campaign, with a one-to-four-year rebuild, assuming nobody starts another war in the meantime.

Meanwhile the Navy is quietly pausing weapons shipments to Taiwan to free up ordnance for Iran, while insisting from the same lectern that there’s plenty of ordnance for Iran. So… Because we’re winning, Taiwan can’t get its weapons? Got it.

When you go through the CBS report, they mention that defense and intelligence officials have started to update the recall rosters for US bases overseas, thinning the American footprint, “amid concern about possible Iranian retaliation”.

This recall roster is the who-do-we-pull-out list. You’re not going to dust it off if you expect to have a “clean” strike.

So they’re loading the punch and stepping their own people back from the swing at the same time. Over a holiday weekend.

Congress walked out too, and this one’s almost too on the nose. The House had a War Powers vote last week - the one that could have forced Trump to wind the war down.

Republicans pulled it.

Not because it would lose.

Because the sponsor had the votes and it would win.

So they cancelled the vote and rebooked it for June 2, after the recess. The single mechanism that could legally stop the strikes has been scheduled to come back into session safely afterwards. After the strikes landed.

And Thomas Massie? The Republican who kept breaking ranks to vote against the war, missed it anyway - he’d just lost his primary to a Trump-backed challenger supported heavily by the pro-Israel lobby. Funny how Washington works…

Now through the looking glass into never-ever-land, because the tea has gone cold and the Hatter is in charge.

The people who’ll actually catch the return fire are on the phone, begging him not to throw the punch. The UAE - the most hawkish of the lot, the one that took the worst of the last round, the one reported to have quietly helped hit Iran in the first place - has now joined Saudi Arabia and Qatar pleading with him to leave it alone.

The state that helped USrael to throw the opening punches is now calling Washington to ask - to beg, please please pretty please, for the love of God, to stop punching.

They told him in separate calls that the military option won’t get him what he wants, and that their own economies go straight into the blender the moment Iran hits back.

They would know.

They were THERE you know?

And the bill for this miscalculation is getting higher by the day. Rapidan Energy warned this week that a Hormuz closure dragging into August risks a downturn rivalling 2008 - Brent near $130, a six-million-barrel-a-day deficit by the third quarter.

Let me tell you, they’re an optimistic lot… But one thing is clear: they’re shifting the Overton Window.

…

Gas is already over $4.50…

Asked the obvious follow-up - what does the West do if Iran just keeps the strait shut - Rubio didn’t have one. There’s no frickin’ plan B!!

The official contingency, near as anyone can tell, is that the world will have to think of something.

Getting back to the chairs… Where’s Netanyahu? Not dead, before anyone runs with it - he did 60 Minutes a couple weeks back, there’s an April photo at a memorial. But the loudest thing his office has put out lately is a claim that he made a secret visit to the UAE that produced a “historic breakthrough”, which the UAE flatly denied ever happened.

The man who lit the match has gone quiet. It’s like this architect that got scarce right about the time the building started making noises.

The only room still full is Wall Street. The S&P closed at a record this week, gold around $4,509, silver around $75, the tape pricing the war at roughly nothing - because the tape’s been trained for three months that every dark headline comes with a Monday walk-back. The one crowd not heading for the exits is the crowd that never has to catch what’s falling.

The cancelled wedding, the empty intelligence chair, the recessed Congress, the Gulf leaders on the phone, the vanished prime minister - none of it has reached the room with the champagne in it.

But it will. The moon sets around half past two each morning right now, so the pre-dawn runs dark - nothing on the water, nothing to film. And this isn’t the usual two-night window. It’s Memorial Day. Three days, markets shut Monday, four nights where the tape can’t react and a session where it can’t even open. A long dark weekend with the legislature out of the building.

And underneath all of it, where the analysts stop looking, are the people who don’t get a vote, a phone call, or an exit.

The Gulf populations sitting in the blast radius of a stubbornness that was never theirs.

The crews on the seized tankers.

The Iranians under a blockade built less to topple anyone than to keep the wound open and bleeding into the oil price.

The thirteen American service members already - officially - dead in this war, and the families who got the official numbers. They don’t get a soothing Monday headline. They get counted, quietly, eventually, in a figure nobody at the podium reads aloud.

The people whose job was to tell the president the truth have left the building, most experienced first.

Right before the long weekend.

Yep… Everything’s going to be fine.

Let’s hope.