Trump take oil, retirement
By 
All of the winning has to be getting tiresome at this point:
Oil prices touched $100 a barrel and U.S. stocks skidded amid worries of a protracted disruption to oil markets.
Brent crude futures jumped 9.2% after President Trump said stopping the Iranian regime from getting nuclear weapons was a higher priority than oil prices. It was the largest one-day jump for Brent since May 2020 and the first time it has closed above $100.
The Dow industrials slid 739 points, or 1.6%, with the S&P 500 dropping 1.5% and the Nasdaq composite falling 1.8%.
Hopes of quickly restoring the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz are dimming, with Iran’s new leader vowing to keep the key oil route closed and seven ships struck over the past day. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said the U.S. Navy wasn’t yet ready to escort tankers through the waterway, but that he expected this to happen by the end of March.
Also adding to concerns: A report from Iran’s semi-official Fars News Agency that Iran-backed groups could shut a crossing that controls traffic for vessels accessing the Suez Canal via the Red Sea.
Earlier Thursday, the International Energy Agency slashed its forecast for oil-supply growth this year, and said the war in the Middle East was fueling the biggest disruption of global energy markets ever.
Well, all of these financial sacrifices and the blown up schools an such are surely worth it because…uh, why are we doing this again?
As Garrett Graff observes, it’s hard for there to be a Plan B when there wasn’t even really a Plan A:
The hardest thing for the media to wrap its hands around over the last year is that Donald Trump has no plan — for anything, ever. Time and again, national pundits and the White House press corps invent a logical Donald Trump who sets, announces, and later “changes” real “policies” or “plans,” failing to convey what is clear to anyone who is actually following events closely: In each public appearance and social media post, the Mad King Donald Trump spouts a string of words, devoid of meaning or purpose, that may or may not represent anything at all.
Every single thing he says may, at any given time, be taken as an official hard-line policy of the US government, the opening gambit to a long flexible negotiation, or a random pronouncement that will never be mentioned again. It’s impossible to know in real-time which is which — especially so if you’re actually in the US government and in charge of translating his words into actions and plans.
It was barely two weeks ago, remember, that Donald Trump announced out of the blue that he was sending a US Navy hospital ship to Greenland to provide medical care for “sick” islanders. The Danish and Greenland governments were baffled by what he meant; the US government never even bothered to try to explain the presidential announcement; and, at the time, both US hospital ships were in dry dock undergoing repairs. Let’s check back on that, shall we? Today, there’s only one hospital ship at sea — and it recently transited the Panama Canal and is now off the west coast of Mexico, apparently heading toward a long-term repair and overhaul in Portland, Oregon. There’s been no further mention of Trump’s tweet. The entire episode just came and went, as baffling as ever.
I mention the hospital ship because the US is now two weeks into running a major regional and global conflict with the same level of haphazard statements, strategy, and planning — and the US media continues to cover Trump as if he actually has some semblance of a plan or strategy for what to do in Iran, a country he’s clearly already bored with invading but now has created such an international crisis that he can’t quite just walk away as he’s become used to doing. This is TACO Trump at his most dangerous.
The administration never had any real justification for its war with Iran — and, indeed, it has offered something like 10 “ex post facto” justifications. But leaving aside why we went to war, it’s even less clear what victory looks like. Every day this week — and sometimes multiple times a day — Donald Trump has offered shifting statements, declaring the war somewhere between “very complete” and “not enough.” Each utterance has generated headlines as if they shed any light on the overall trajectory of the war, which might last anywhere from a few more hours to “four to five weeks” to, say, sometime in September, if you believe the timeframe that US Central Command is recruiting additional intelligence support.
The problem that Trump now has is that sanewashing only goes to far when people are getting the material consequences good and hard.