I watched yesterday's press conference featuring Pompeo and Mnuchin. If she'd lived till now, Diane Arbus would want to photograph these guys, and she could force on you their resemblance to gargoyles. But she wouldn't have to persuade me.
There was some verbal sparring about the meaning of "imminent," a reporter indicating in her question that such a characterization was false, since the Administration could identify neither a time nor a place for the "imminent" attack. She was right about that but also wasting her time: Pompeo simply denied that there was a contradiction, even though anyone can see there is a contradiction.
Another contradiction, perhaps harder to swat away, concerns how the concept of imminence is incompatible with the Administration's story about why Soleimani was killed. The planning was done. The attack was imminent. And it was forestalled by killing one guy. This does not compute. Please explain more about how the imminent attack was foiled by this one targeted assassination. It seems the fully assembled plan is now disassembled—we're safe—but it's impossible to understand how the killing of Soleimani achieved the disassembling.
On another topical topic, I think I've relieved myself of my opinion concerning that cliché of political talk, "words cannot express," but I find myself reaching for it anyway when chatter turns to Meghan and her Prince. Words probably can convey my endless indifference, but I cannot myself do better than "endless indifference"—maybe Shakespeare or Jonathan Swift or Marshall Mathers III, but not me, Eric. To get my attention the Prince, instead of marrying a hot young American girl, would have to convert to Roman Catholicism, take Holy Orders, and enter a Trappist monastery in Indonesia, something like that.
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