Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Bandits are making out like bandits

The fabulist residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. “made 13 posts in an hour” Friday celebrating his greatness. (That’s His Greatness.) Ron Filipkowski compiled the lot:

• “Iran has agreed to never close the Strait of Hormuz again. It will no longer be used as a weapon against the World!
• “A GREAT AND BRILLIANT DAY FOR THE WORLD! DJT”
• “Now that the Hormuz Strait situation is over, I received a call from NATO asking if we would need some help. I TOLD THEM TO STAY AWAY, UNLESS THEY JUST WANT TO LOAD UP THEIR SHIPS WITH OIL. They were useless when needed, a Paper Tiger!
• “Again! This deal is not tied, in any way, to Lebanon, but we will, MAKE LEBANON GREAT AGAIN!”
• “Iran, with the help of the U.S.A., has removed, or is removing, all sea mines! Thank you!”
• “Thank you to Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar for your great bravery and help!”
• “The U.S.A. will get all Nuclear “Dust,” created by our great B2 Bombers – No money will exchange hands in any way, shape, or form. This deal is in no way subject to Lebanon, either, but the USA will, separately, work with Lebanon, and deal with the Hezboolah situation in an appropriate manner. Israel will not be bombing Lebanon any longer. They are PROHIBITED from doing so by the U.S.A. Enough is enough!!!”
• “The Failing New York Times, FAKE NEWS CNN, and others, just don’t know what to do. They are desperately looking for a reason to criticize President Donald J. Trump on the Iran situation, but just can’t find it. Why don’t they just say, at the right time, JOB WELL DONE, MR. PRESIDENT, and start to gain back their credibility???”

Speaking of credibility, the Strait of Hormuz is an open and shut case that His Greatness has none.

From The Washington Post this morning, Breaking: Iran says it’s closing Strait of Hormuz again, citing U.S. blockade:

Iran’s military announced it has closed the Strait of Hormuz just a day after the country declared the waterway open, claiming the U.S. had breached Tehran’s trust by maintaining its blockade in the region.

The Strait of Hormuz had “returned to its previous state” and “is under the strict management and control of the Armed Forces,” Iran’s military command said Saturday, according to a statement published by Iranian state-backed media.

“Trump keeps claiming victory in Iran,” a headline at Politico reads. “Our new poll shows voters aren’t buying it.”

Neither are the Iranians:

Iranian officials did not confirm most of Mr. Trump’s claims and disputed several of them. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Iran’s top negotiator and the speaker of its Parliament, said on social media Friday evening that Mr. Trump made several false claims.

“The president of the United States made seven claims in one hour, all of which are false,” said Gen. Ghalibaf, a military and political influential figure in Iran leading negotiations. “They did not win the war with these lies, they will certainly not get any where in negotiations either.”

Who is buying Trump’s total victory BS? The stock market. The Washington Post reports that investors most distant from the oil production and processing business seem less concerned about the realities of what’s been damaged and how long “it will take for things to return to normal — if they ever do,” said Gerry Morton, oil and gas co-chair at the law firm Baker Botts. Underlying problems signal “a reckoning in the not too distant future,” the Post reports.

Until then, “US stocks rally and return to where they were before the US-Iran war.” For illustration, here’s what the one-year tracker on my retirement nest egg looks like since Trump launched his unsanctioned war on Feb. 28:

Thirty years ago, then-Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan Greenspan, described that kind of investor behavior as “irrational exuberance.” Under a Trump administration, one might call it market manipulation. Somewhere close to Trump’s inner circle (and to the buffet line at Mar-a-Lago), bandits are making out like bandits.

Update: Container ship reportedly hit by ‘unknown projectile’ in second incident in Strait of Hormuz

Baby Meerkat time!

Baby meerkats..🐾😊 pic.twitter.com/EPKh9cwxxm

— 𝕐o̴g̴ (@Yoda4ever) April 13, 2026

I’m still traumatized by the “Shakespeare” heartbreak on Meerkat Manor, so I’ve been reluctant to follow the meerkat world. But this pulls me back in. They are incredibly cute.

“This is what Trump does. He lights our national house on fire. He lets it burn for 15 minutes before he shows up with a fire hose. And then he demands a prize for putting out the blaze while the rest of us stand here in the smoldering ruins.”

Yep.

He’s now saying that he “solved” the Iran war. Which he started,

Trump is destroying America’s relationships across the globe

Politico reports:

The Iran war is risking America’s global security ties and damaging its reputation, especially among the world’s Muslims, according to a set of State Department cables obtained by POLITICO.

The cables, dated Wednesday, described the fallout of the war for America’s standing in three countries in different parts of the world: Bahrain, Azerbaijan and Indonesia.

[…]

U.S. diplomats at embassies in the countries’ capitals painted damning portraits of an America under siege in multiple media spheres by pro-Iranian actors that are exceptionally agile in the digital space.

In Azerbaijan, what had been a significantly improving relationship has hit a plateau at best, and appears to be faltering. Bahrain’s government is facing questions about whether the U.S. abandoned it to fend for itself against Iranian drones and missiles. And Indonesia’s leader could face growing calls to reduce security ties with the U.S.

Some of the cables describe anti-U.S. sentiment that is having an immediate impact, while others raise concerns that relationships could be in danger if the war continues much longer. Taken together, the cables paint a picture of countries where the U.S. is losing the population’s trust, and potentially that of their governments.

I’m quite sure they aren’t the only ones. For instance:

The abrupt change in direction of US policy is a massive shock for both Korea and Japan. While much of his attention has been focused on Europe and the Americas, Trump’s recent comments on Japan and Korea have not been encouraging. Early this month he said he “loves” Japan, but complained that Japan had made a “fortune” out of the US. While the alliance ensured the US protected Japan, Japan had no obligation to protect the US.  Korea in turn was “unfair to the US – militarily and in other ways”.  

Officials in both countries are reacting with anxiety and alarm.  

The US and South Korea have a long shared military history. Image: Wikimedia Commons

Both support the continuation of the rules-based order, even as they worry it may barely exist any more. For the moment the approach of both countries can be summed up as hide, plan and wait:  avoid being an immediate target of US action; nevertheless plan that they will be; and wait to determine when to execute their response plan.

Trump’s shock treatment seems to be working already – to the extent of forcing Japan and Korea to upgrade their own self-reliance. Ishiba has committed to “dramatically bolster our defense capabilities…with the fundamental goal of deterring an invasion of Japan by possessing the capabilities needed to prevent or repel an invasion of Japan on our own.”  Achieving this would amount to a major reversal of Japan’s post-war dependence on US deterrence. 

The whole world is recoiling in horror at what this idiot is doing. First there were the inane tariffs, now he’s blowing up boats in the high seas and starting wars. How could they possibly trust this country?

The implications of this are profound, as we know. I don’t think we can accurately predict where it’s going but the dissolution of the world order as we’ve known it for the past 80 years is happening very rapidly. If we weren’t in the nuclear age I think we might be able to just sit back and watch it unfold without panicking. The U.S. will still be very powerful, regardless, and very wealthy. As individuals we would likely be more or less ok.

But the reason we had the post WWII order in the first place was to keep a lid on the nuclear threat which, despite many problematic aspects, did work. That’s gone now and we don’t know what, if anything, can replace it. That’s something to keep you up at night.

Well, well, well:

In recent weeks, as criticism of President Donald Trump from his own supporters has reached a fever pitch, a new conspiracy theory has taken hold: Some of the president’s biggest supporters are now claiming, without evidence, that Trump staged the assassination attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania in 2024 and is covering it up.

Many of the true believers think that his survival meant he was the chosen one. But this was probably inevitable:

“I think that maybe it was staged,” Tim Dillon said on his show last weekend about the assassination attempt. Dillon, who was previously a staunch Trump supporter, went on to share that Trump should now come out and say, “Some people are going to be upset by this, but we staged the assassination attempt in Butler to show people how important it was to vote for me and how far I was willing to go for them.”

Some of these claims began months ago. In November, former Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson promoted the idea that the FBI was somehow involved in covering up the shooting, writing on X that the “FBI lied” about the shooter’s online footprint.

A day later, conservative pundit Emerald Robinson went further, posting on X that the FBI “did it.” (In the same post, Robinson claimed that the agency was responsible for everything from the January 6 attack on the Capitol to “Jeffrey Epstein’s blackmail tapes” and the “Gov. Whitmer fake kidnap plot.”)

But the claims that Trump had staged the entire thing really picked up steam when former US National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent appeared on Carlson’s podcast last month, one day after he resigned from his position over the Iran war. During the interview, Carlson and Kent discussed the failure of the Trump administration to provide more details about the Pennsylvania shooter. Kent claimed, without providing any evidence, that investigations into the shooting had been shut down before they finished.

I guess that explains why Trump went crazy on Kent the other day. The problem is that until this month he was the director of the National Counterterrorism Center in the Trump administration, a top post with unfettered access to classified information. He’s always been a kooky conspiracy theorist but Trump put him in a job that handed him the credibility he needs to push this counter-narrative with the weirdo base.

A lot of people are skeptical of that event. I’m not one of them. Trump is the luckiest SOB in the history of the world so it doesn’t surprise me that he survived that attempt that killed one of his ardent followers instead. That’s the story of his life. But I have to say that I am enjoying the fact that his own conspiracy mongers are turning on him. That assassination attempt is one of the fundamental tenets of his cult, proving that he is divinely ordained and he’s massively invested in that, as we can see by his displays of the “iconic” picture above, even putting it on the commemorative coin. He’s not going to like this, not one bit.

There’s nothing he won’t do for his Dear Leader:

Fox News host Sean Hannity dedicated a portion of his Thursday show to deliver a message to Pope Leo XIV, suggesting he and others at the Vatican had “totally lost sight of the true meaning of the bible and its teachings.”

… Hannity first discussed his own background with Catholicism, explaining the factors that led to his break with the church, before later turning on the pope himself.

“While I am a Christian, I left the Catholic Church in large part because of institutionalized corruption, and it was at the parish level, to the bishop level, cardinals, all the way to Rome,” he said.

He continued:

The very top scandals, terrible behavior, frankly, went not only unchecked, but they never fully corrected it or dealt with it, and others at the Vatican have totally lost sight of the true meaning of the bible and its teachings. I don’t know why. For the first 1200 years of the church, the priests were allowed to marry. They changed that law. But right on cue, Pope Leo XIV is seemingly more interested in spreading left wing politics than the actual teachings of Jesus Christ. As the AP put it, quote, “Pope Leo amplified his condemnation of America’s conflict with Iran, saying that God does not bless any conflict and certainly doesn’t side with those who drop bombs.”

Well, first, that is simply not biblically accurate. The bible contains over 400 references to war, for equally depicting God as authorizing, commanding, intervening in battles like one that we all know, the battle between David and Goliath. Why is the pope twisting religion to specifically attack only President Trump and the U.S.? Why did he recently meet with top [Barack] Obama advisor David Axelrod and far left governor of Illinois J.B. Pritzker? It’s because he’s a run of the mill Trump hating Democrat that lacks radical clarity about radical Islam?

Hannity then pivoted to Trump’s words

“I want him to preach the gospel, I’m all about the gospel,” he said. “But I also know you cannot let a certain country, which is a very mean-spirited country, have a nuclear weapon. If they did, they would use it, and I think they’d use it quickly, and they would kill many millions of people. So, the pope can disagree, but certainly we are allowed to have that.”

Hannity responded to the president’s words with a blunt assessment. “The president is correct, the pope is wrong on so many levels,” he said. “Perhaps his judgment is clouded.”

He’s clearly just a Trump cultist at this point worshiping at the feet of his Dear Leader and doing his job as an apologist for anything he says. But it seems to me that as a conservative talk show host he’s taking a big risk of offending quite a few of his own audience members, most of whom love Trump but aren’t used to seeing the Pope and the church disparaged in this way.

I think these guys are playing with fire. This could have been papered over but they’re obviously spoiling for a fight with the Pope and when you combine it with the creepy crusader talk from the likes of Hegseth you have to wonder if we aren’t seeing a real religious schism in the right wing.

If Trump really was doing a good job, I’d think this would blow over. But I have a sneaking suspicion that there are quite a few people who know that he’s a failure but don’t want to admit it. Some of them are probably looking for another reason to back away from the cult. This is a way out.

The rumor is that Trump has agreed to release $20 billion in frozen funds to Iran in exchange for agreement that they will “suspend” their nuclear program indefinitely. (He’s denying it but nothing he says can be taken at face value, obviously.)Too bad nobody ever thought of that before.

Oh wait, they did:

Trump spent years in a jealous rage, relentlessly slamming Barack Obama for unfreezing $1.7 billion of Iran’s own money to Iran, calling it pathetic ransom money and proof of a disastrous, weak-kneed surrender.

Driven by petty obsession, Trump spitefully ripped up the Iran nuclear deal in 2018, shredding every restraint on Tehran, and smugly promised the world a “better deal.” Instead, his childish vendetta supercharged Iran’s nuclear program, pushing it dangerously close to the bomb. Now, in a breathtaking display of hypocrisy and failure, Trump is negotiating to hand Iran access to $20 billion in frozen funds — more than ten times what he once condemned — in exchange for the regime surrendering its near-weapons-grade uranium stockpile.

This is Trump at his most embarrassingly stupid: destroying a deal that had capped Iran’s enrichment and kept it under watch, only to crawl back offering vastly more cash after his own incompetence made the threat far worse. The man who mocked Obama for “giving” Iran money is now dangling a fortune in frozen assets while pretending it’s a brilliant victory.

It’s not leadership — it’s ego-driven incompetence and rank hypocrisy, a petty grudge that backfired spectacularly and left America facing a more expensive, more dangerous mess. Trump’s jealous tantrum didn’t make America safer; it just made the cleanup bill ten times bigger.

You really can’t make this stuff up.

It’s good news if the war is coming to an end, at least for now. (There’s no guarantee, of course.) But Trump and Netanyahu precipitated it in the first place and now Iran knows that it can close the Strait at will, they have a new younger,more hardline Ayatollah who will no doubt crack down even harder on the population and spend the money they will get from the U.S. to rebuild the regime even stronger.

But yeah, it’s a real victory. Trump is already saying that he’s ended another war. He’s discovered that he can start wars and then end them, claiming he’s the second coming in the process. It probably won’t be the last.

Just when you thought Hegseth couldn’t get more ridiculous

SECDEF/WAR! Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s God Warrior, quoted a garbled Bible quote from Pulp Fiction (1994) in one of his Pentagon “sermons” this week.

The New Republic:

“They call it CSAR 25:17, which I think is meant to reflect Ezekiel 25:17,” Hegseth erroneously said, saying the lead planner of the Combat Search And Rescue operation in Iran shared it with him.

So the prayer is CSAR 25:17 and it reads … “the path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of camaraderie and duty, shepherd the lost through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper, and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to capture and destroy my brother. And you will know my call sign is Sandy One when I lay my vengeance upon thee.”

Almost every single line from Hegseth’s prayer is ripped from Jackson’s iconic recitation of Ezekiel 25:17 in Tarantino’s film, not the prophet Ezekiel as ordained by God.

Here’s what the original verse in the Bible actually reads:

I will execute great vengeance on them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I lay My vengeance upon them.

That’s it. The flowery language, the allusions to destruction of evil—all come from Tarantino.

On Wednesday, the flowery language came from former Fox Weekend co-host/alcoholic, Hegseth, in front of a Pentagon audience. One assumes Hegseth’s attitude regarding “stupid rules of engagement” now applies to rules for quoting the Holy Bible by which he sets such store.

A man of maturity (and cultural literacy) would think better about quoting that “prayer.” He would anticipate how it would make him, his office, his troops, and his boss look to the press and to the world.

Hegseth is an idiot. But you knew that.

@abcnews

A clip of Secretary Pete Hegseth reading a version of Samuel L. Jackson’s famous monologue from “Pulp Fiction” — that partly quotes actual scripture — is circulating online. ABC News’ Ian Pannell reports.

♬ original sound – ABC News – ABC News

“The Pentagon did not respond”

All that performative, right-wing bluster about loving “our troops” is about to blow up like a girls’ school in Iran (USA Today):

Dan F. was alarmed when his daughter, a Marine aboard the USS Tripoli, a warship deployed to fight the Iran war, sent him a photo of a meal served on the ship. A lunch tray, two-thirds empty, carried one small scoop of shredded meat and a single folded tortilla.

A picture of a mid-April dinner on the USS Abraham Lincoln, shared by a service member with his family, was similarly unappetizing – a small handful of boiled carrots, a dry meat patty and a gray slab of processed meat.

Dan and other military family members worried that their loved ones deployed to the Middle East are going hungry are filling boxes with items they hope could help service members ride out prolonged deployments in the Middle East – homemade fudge, Jolly Ranchers, crossword puzzle books, playing cards, toothpaste, Girl Scout cookies and fresh socks. But mail delivery to military ZIP codes across the Middle East has been indefinitely suspended as of April, and packages in transit now hang in limbo.

Service members Donald Trump deployed to the Persian Gulf for his unsanctioned Iran war are going hungry. One Texas mother has sent over $2,000 worth of packages to her sailor son. None have reached him. She asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation against her son.

These meals are short one or two items from U.S. agriculture secretary, Brooke Rollins’s a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, a corn tortilla and “one other thing.”

Karen Erskine-Valentine, pastor of a church in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, said she was alarmed to hear from a community member whose son is in the Middle East aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln about the poor quality of food on the ship. The Abraham Lincoln is one of two aircraft carriers sent to the region, along with the USS Gerald Ford. A third, the USS George H.W. Bush, is on the way.

“The food is tasteless and there’s not nearly enough and they’re hungry all the time,” Erskine-Valentine said. “That kind of breaks your heart.”

The Pentagon has not responded to a request for comment. I half expect them to brush off the USA Today story as Iranian (but surely not Russian) propaganda. No other major news outlets have confirmed it as I write.

Images of food being served to sailors on the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Tripoli, published by USA Today.

Supplies "are going to get really low" and "morale is going to be at an all-time low," one sailor messaged his mother: https://t.co/di0KUEohvI pic.twitter.com/ZcuBNw1k8i

— Evan Hill (@evanhill) April 16, 2026

A spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service tells USA Today that no parcels are being returned to sender. They are held up until the military lifts delivery restrictions imposed, according to an Army spokesman, “due to airspace closures and other logistical impacts from the ongoing conflict.”

This story will blow up all across the globe. MAGAs already “sick” of Trump will increase their numbers. Soon there won’t just be spray tan on Trump’s face, but a lot of unserved egg substitute. And on SECDEF/WAR! Pete Hegseth’s face in his makeup studio.

Do us a favor and spread this report everywhere you can think of over the weekend.

(h/t SFT)

He’s on another tear.

A GREAT moment for Hezbollah.

He’s posting these loony posts one right after another.

Dementia.

Update —

Here he is talking about his new bunker:

Trump: What’s a corner store? I’ve never heard that term. Who the hell wrote this? pic.twitter.com/9eDExMQYkQ

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 17, 2026

WTF?