Squandering

     I'm watching the Trump administration press conference about their special military operation, and the lies and distortions have come thick and fast.  So has the power-worship, military might praised for its own sake.

     Someone will do a full fact-check on it.  I'm just going to note that the United States has positioned itself as an unpredictable bully, a rogue state that has promised to act however it will, without regard to international law -- over a bog-standard South American autocrat.  If he'd been a right-winger doing much the same as he can be proven to have done, he'd still be doing it, and counted as a U.S. ally.

     We now live in a changed world, and not for the better aside from the removal of cheap dictator, to be replaced by an as-yet unknown government, of an unknown nature other than they're liable to comply with whatever our current government decides are our interests.

     These men are villains.  That they took out another villain, smaller in scope and more overtly villainous, does not excuse their own crimes, the stain they have put on our national honor, and the credence they have given to similar acts committed by other governments elsewhere on the globe.  And they are promising to do more of the same.

     They have turned Ronald Reagan's shining city on a hill into a pyre for civilization.