The Weekly WTF: Pentagon pleads for biggest budget ever in low-budget cartoon
Plus, pony up for Trump's ballroom, fistfight polls, and the best Met Gala diss
This stuff actually happened:
Iran war running hot and cold. Does anybody know if the Iran war is on or off? The Trump administration says it’s both.
US and Iranian forces are still shooting at each other. Gen. Dan Caine, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says Iran has attacked US forces more than 10 times since President Trump declared a ceasefire on April 7. Iran sporadically fires at tankers in the Gulf. US forces recently sank six Iranian vessels in the region, and they continue to disable Iranian cargo ships trying to run the US blockade. The Strait of Hormuz is still blocked to most oil shipments.
But everything is fine, seriously. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on May 5 that the war is over and the mission has been accomplished. What mission? Well, not deposing Iran’s authoritarian regime. It remains in place. The Iranian people have had no chance to take back their country, either, even though Trump promised they would when he launched the war on February 28. All of Iran’s nuclear weapons material is still in the country. Rubio says reopening the strait to oil shipments is now a humanitarian mission, as if it would be a nice gesture to the rest of the world, but not really that big a deal.
Here’s what is really going on. Trump is in a bind that’s the political equivalent of each of his six business bankruptcies. He completely failed to foresee the consequences of attacking Iran, like a hustler who takes on too much debt and then can’t pay it back. He’s desperate for a face-saving solution that doesn’t look like defeat. So he keeps telling his creditors that he’ll come up with the money, hoping for some kind of miraculous intervention, such as a bailout from his dad. But dad isn’t around to help on this one. So, a mess.
The Internet thinks this captures Trump’s Iran predicament:
Cartoon Pete. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted a two-and-a-half minute cartoon video featuring himself trying to explain why taxpayers should gladly raise the defense budget by half a trillion dollars, to $1.5 trillion. “We’re putting the American taxpayer first,” Hegseth lies in the video. There’s a cameo appearance by Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, in cartoon format, smoking a cigar at a big desk, like an old-timey tycoon who doesn’t care if smoking is banned. Then he orders “Deal Team Six” into action. They’re going to go out and whip the military-industrial complex into shape, you see.
Hegseth doesn’t mention the bill for the unnecessary Iran war, which is at least $25 billion so far, and could easily end up double or triple that. His idea of putting American taxpayers first is giving sweetheart defense contracts to Trump family members, who had zero experience in defense technology before their Dad became president. Defense contracts to the president’s family would be prohibited in any other administration. Where’s Hunter’s laptop?
Hegseth promises us there will be more videos like this, so you might want to wait for the whole series to drop before gathering the family in the home theater. Meanwhile, here are a few highlights from the pilot.
The people’s ballroom. The Justice Dept. will probably be prosecuting Trump for cost overruns at the new White House ballroom any day now. When Trump announced the ballroom project last year, he said donors and friends would pay the $200 million cost, and taxpayers would cover nothing. Then the cost doubled, to $400 million. And now, some Republican senators are trying to appropriate as much as $1 billion for the project, which means taxpayers would be footing the bill, after all.
Trump said on social media that the cost went up because the size of the project doubled and the quality improved, following “deep rooted studies.” Somehow, it is still “under budget,” Trump says. Now that’s some next-level developer talk.
The White House hasn’t explained why taxpayers should cover the bill, though.
Trump’s Justice Dept. launched a prosecution of the Federal Reserve and its chair, Jerome Powell, because a Fed renovation project is running about 30% over budget, due to unforeseen asbestos contamination at two 100-year-old buildings, and construction costs that spiked after the Covid pandemic. If taxpayers get stuck with the ballroom bill, then the entire project is a cost overrun, because the actual cost to taxpayers should be 0. If Congress funds the $1 billion ballroom, they should throw in several million more to make sure the prosecution is well-financed.
Put up your dukes, Trump. Polling firm YouGov ran a survey asking people if they thought they could beat Trump in a fistfight. I checked the date to make sure it wasn’t April 1. It wasn’t. I looked at the web site address to make sure it wasn’t a spoof. No, it was the actual YouGov.
They ran the poll because Trump held a May 5 White House event highlighting physical fitness, and asked one boy in attendance, “you think you could take me in a fight?” YouGov jumped on the bandwagon by asking more than 2,600 Americans three questions: Could an eight-year-old boy beat Trump in a fight? Could a typical American beat Trump in a fight? And could you personally beat Trump in a fight?
The survey results are below. The YouGov pollsters didn’t reach me on the question, but if they had, I would have said that Trump would run like a banshee from any fight where he didn’t have a bodyguard. The fight I’d most like to see is Trump against a transgender woman, because in addition to getting beat up, he’d probably pass out from cooties.
Anyway, here’s what Americans think about this timely topic:
Art diss. I’ve never been invited to the Met Gala and never will be, but I do enjoy checking out the world’s most elaborate Halloween costumes and wondering how you go to the bathroom inside one of those contraptions. This year’s event was controversial because billionaire Jeff Bezos and his arm-cleavage wife Lauren Sanchez-Bezos co-chaired it, and they represent everything that’s bad about conspicuous consumption, I guess. Of course, it’s a FUND-RAISER for the Met’s Costume Institute, so maybe you’d want RICH PEOPLE helping you raise all those funds?
Anyway, the whole thing is meant as spectacle and the Bezos involvement didn’t bother me, and if did, who would care?
But this was fun: The theme of the event was fashion as art, and what do celebrities know about art? Not much, is what real art mavens think. So the Whitney Museum, a few miles south of the Met, posted on its Instagram account after the gala, “I hereby order all celebrities to take an art history class.”
That’s what I’m talking about! A museum-on-museum diss track!
The Whitney followed up by pointing out they have free tours every day at 1 and 2 pm. Well worth a visit! I love the Whitney. And the Met, too.
I am out of words, man! SMH...