The Trump's Been Played.

                                                      Well ... that didn't take long.

The babies ... the poor babies!! Oh ... they're American? Nevermind.

The Emperor, heavy of face, with all his features sagging, his lines thickening, a theatrically mean countenance, a mind drowned with things that don't matter, the lassitude of a hippopotamus with intermittent flashes of understanding: a man deaf to new ideas, with aural hallucinations which make him listen over his shoulders when someone speaks to him face to face, grunted in annoyance and, coming to life like a ruminant emerging from its digestion, shrugged himself out of his chair, as though standing would clear his phlegmatic brain and crystallize what he should do.

The babies ... the poor babies!!

But not the America First! babies his Lack of Healthcare plan would end up killing, not the America First! babies his destruction of the EPA will choke to an early grave; nor does his heart go out to any of the more than 100 America First! children already killed by gun violence since he's taken the oath of office (their lives don't matter nearly as much as the support of the NRA does), not the America First! children left to starve because, won't it be a Blast! to spend the taxpayer money Meals on Wheels could use to feed hundreds of hungry children and ailing elderly to go spend a weekend in Mar-a-Lago? Roly-poly, he lounges Royally amidst his 20 valuable acres with manicured fingernails and vibrant orange coif: here there's no dearth of red meat, tables groaning with food, banquets for the chronically overfed wafting their aromas like a steaming locomotive chugging its way though the sweeping sea-to-lake vista, while the walruses surrounding him waddle their overstuffed-chair physiques to overfill their plates and continue mulling over the new methods he and his Congressional cohorts are devising to further erode the lives of millions of his fallow (sic) Americans in order to funnel even more billions into the coffers of the Corporations that already are bursting with wealth they refuse to invest in the American economy from which they've extracted it.

It's  hard to believe it was but a year ago when Newt Gingrich proclaimed,

"Keeping America safe is the first job of the American President." 

But as then-candidate Trump pointed out, it was his opponent Jeb's brother who was in office when the Twin Towers were reduced to a pile of rubble as a result of their Father's bright idea of attacking Iraq. We can argue all you want about whether we should have done so or not, but the carnage that ensued from that truncated attack lies strewn across decades and continents.

Now President Trump plays tit-for-tat, in more way than most realize (Just as the Russian interference in our elections was accomplished via a construct of our own War Department, the internet, the attack on the Syrian airfield was accomplished via rocket technology that is a direct descendant of the Soviet-developed katyusha rockets used so successfully in WW2. With the usual sensitivity of armed men, our version is called the Tomahawk (and is prohibitively expensive at $1.59 million each), named after the handheld weapon of the people we mowed down with superior Western technology).

Delivering Lucky Strikes

Our President decided to use the Madeleine Albright twisted pair concept formulated in the nineties that has driven US policy since:

              1)       "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

                                                                       and

"Do you think the death of half a million children, more than were incinerated in the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, that have died since the imposition of Iraqi sanctions is worth it?"

              2)     "The price, we think is high, but yes, I think it is worth it."

  "It's all right with Albright 'cause all whites, not Alawites, are always right ."

The Allwhites Regime.

But just as the first Bush failed to translate a military success into a domestic one, sporting epaulets instead of the ubiquitous flag lapel, the inside-traders symbol that most easily marks the scalawag of today, this action will have Homeland repercussions that no border ban, or Wall, nor barrage of Tweets will keep out.  Because, perhaps sooner rather than later, the truth behind the gas attack will be revealed.  The murky atmosphere surrounding this episode has the ring of the "Kuwaiti babies being ripped from their incubators by Iraqi soldiers" story that so easily manipulated Americans into being led by the nose into a conflict that their grandchildren are still paying for and dying in today. The strategy has been pulled out of mothballs, dusted off, and used yet again to justify rash knee-jerk reactions that we will later regret (well, actually, we won't, as we'll never make the connection).

Our Trump's been played, he just doesn't know it yet. And when it is known, the hasty action of the temperamental leader of the country that has snuffed out the lives of countless babies, with that never having been a consideration before (500 thousand? "We think it's worth it" ... Translation? "We think they're worthless"), will be exposed as being the price the US pays for putting into the Oval Office a pampered child that can be so easily manipulated into temper tantrums and displays of cowardly machismo. And it will redound onto us. The people he has sworn to protect but for whom the job of doing so is just, Oh so boring. The Bankrupt now has the lives, not just the tax dollars, of his fellow countrymen in his hands, and he's already proving to be just as reckless with them. Quelle Surprise.