Ten minutes in the Oval Office, and a staff writer at The Atlantic wants the country frightened by it. I had the clip up four times before six in the morning. Then I called a shop in Norfolk.
Tom Nichols published a piece Tuesday arguing that the President has sealed himself off from reality, and somewhere in the back half he asks whether the man would take in basic information if it cut against his omniscient gut. He wrote that. A magazine that has spent this entire war telling me the war was a mistake put the word omniscient next to the President of the United States, in print, on purpose.
His evidence is the Reflecting Pool. Pirro moved to drop the case after deciding a botched installation did the damage, and the President went in front of cameras and said it was vandalism anyway. He also said she choked. Every anchor in the country played that as a man losing his grip over a swimming pool. I watched a commander in chief hold a position against his own U.S. Attorney, a friend of thirty years, with the paperwork stacked against him and nothing in it for him either way.
What the Omniscient Gut Did in Iran
Nichols gets to Iran and lays out the sequence himself, which I appreciate, because most of these people skip the sequence and go straight to the scoreboard. Advisers told the President that deposing the regime was unlikely. He went anyway. Then Nichols calls the result a strategic defeat and moves along as though the word settles it. Eleven years I have been reading this literature, and defeat is what these people call any operation that runs past its first month.
Nichols Puts the Omniscient Gut In With Stalin and Saddam
Then comes the comparisons. There is Stalin, so certain he had outmaneuvered the Nazis that he spent days in denial after the Germans came across. Saddam, refusing the news that American armor was already rolling toward Baghdad. Ceausescu, shouting orders at the firing squad that executed him. Nichols runs that list as a caution.
I ran it as company. A head of state kept issuing instructions to his own firing squad, and you do not train that into somebody. Doug next door was out getting his paper in a bathrobe, so I read him the passage. He asked what ended up happening to the Romanian. I told him to listen to the bearing.
Before Anybody Starts On the Contract
Somebody will take the pool and walk it over to the President’s ledgers, so I want it on the record that I raised it first and dropped it. The installation went out without competitive bidding. Nobody has alleged a thing. Raising a man’s finances while Americans are still deployed sits close enough to sedition that I would like to watch somebody try it in front of a judge. Our law enforcement desk read the whole filing and came back with nothing on anybody’s money.
Four Dollars and Eighty Cents Apiece
The shop in Norfolk does unit coins. Four eighty a coin if I take 250 of them, antique brass, eagle on the face, and the reverse is mine to fill however I want it filled. OMNISCIENT GUT, and under that the date of the remarks. I paid the deposit Wednesday morning before my walk, which is when Doug asked me who the coins were for. I told him a coin like that is a record.
Nichols builds his whole case on a commander who cannot be walked back by his lawyers, his advisers, or a box of evidence somebody wheels into the Oval Office, and then files that under danger to the republic. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?
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