I Will Most Assuredly Get Fooled Again
By 
Donald Trump, Principled Non-Interventionist (TM):
Trump’s words, both in public and private, describe a view that wars should be brutal and swift, waged with overwhelming firepower and, in some cases, with little regard for civilian casualties. Victory over America’s enemies for the president is often a matter of bombing “the s— out of them,” as he said on the campaign trail.
[…]
Trump urged the CIA to start arming its drones in Syria. “If you can do it in 10 days, get it done,” he said, according to two former officials familiar with the meeting.
Later, when the agency’s head of drone operations explained that the CIA had developed special munitions to limit civilian casualties, the president seemed unimpressed. Watching a previously recorded strike in which the agency held off on firing until the target had wandered away from a house with his family inside, Trump asked, “Why did you wait?” one participant in the meeting recalled.
Speaking of MoDo, in a column where the parts where she’s not trying to be funny will surely stand as some of the finest comedy writing of the year, she 1)explains how she engaged in some cherry picking and wishful thinking to convince herself the man who made Dick Cheney his vice presidential nominee was a dove, 2)admits she was completely wrong, and 3)explains how she made exactly the same mistake with even less basis with respect to Donald Trump. And don’t worry, when the next Republican runs for president, he’ll definitely be a dove ex ante too (and the Democrat he’s opposing will be a man if she’s a woman and a woman if she’s a man.) The nice thing about having more secure tenure than an Article III judge is that you never have to learn anything.
But, ok, so Dowd doesn’t know anything about policy, and even her theater criticism consists of one witless joke about Democrats and desperately imagining the Moderate Republican Daddy she craves, but you have to admit that her pop culture references are always apposite and right on top of the Zeitgeist:
In the bitter contest between the Rumsfeld Defense Department and the Colin Powell State Department, John Bolton was a Rummy person who was a fifth column at State, along with Liz Cheney. Like a walrus version of Wile E. Coyote, he lived to dynamite treaties, alliances and anything with “global” or “multilateral” in the title.
[…]
His mistreatment of underlings was so legendary — one claimed that he had thrown objects — that I once dubbed him the Naomi Campbell of the Bush administration.
For those of you under 40, Naomi Campbell is a supermodel who was in the media a lot in the 90s. Apparently she was abusive to her subordinates? Anyway, one thing to add about the inevitable “Cotton the Centrist, Gillibrand the Gillette Man” column in 2024 is that it will have lots of Hamilton references that don’t mean anything. [HT to wjts.]