In the second week of an inept narcissist's spiraling war - not even of choice but of whim - that's killed over 1,500 people and wreaked widespread havoc, almost as grotesque as the witless carnage itself is the "slopaganda" issuing almost daily from a White House evidently run by 14-year-old gamers who splice real combat footage with Call of Duty-esque video games to create tacky war porn celebrating "JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY." Millions of us wanna know: "What the fuck is wrong with you people?

"Under Trump we will have no more wars - I am peace," once intoned the hollow reality-show specter now spreading mindless death, terror and economic mayhem across 12 countries. To date, US and Israeli airstrikes have killed over 1,255 people in Iran, mostly civilians, including perhaps 300 children, the youngest an 8-month-old girl; at least 12,000 Iranians have been injured. Also dead are about 400 people in Lebanon, over 50 in surrounding countries, and 8 US service members. Bombs have struck at least four schools in Tehran; after strikes this week on oil refineries and storage facilities, Tehran residents woke to plumes of dark smoke and black rain falling in what many viewed as a genocidal attack on infrastructure that mirrors that of Gaza.

It's become clear from Trump's flailing rhetoric he didn't expect or plan for a war, just a fast, hard, "kill their leader and they fold" move like Venezuela, always a delusional goal, so they could pick a pliable new leader. Instead, after sloppily killing all their own choices for successors, they got the far more extremist, now angrier son Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, a hardliner with close ties to Iran's most ideologically rabid, repressive clerics - and, after Trump's blithe assertion he'll kill him too, with nothing to lose. The outcome, deemed "the blueprint for a generational blood war," also pissed off rich Gulf states who've been courting him with investment pledges. One Dubai oligarch "at the heart of a danger (we) did not choose": “Who gave you the authority to drag our region into a war?”

The slapdash incompetence of his "short-term little excursion" quickly exposed a wildly erratic take on what he actually called his "performance" not governance, more improv than coherent strategy. The rationale kept shifting - no nuclear weapons, people free, regime change - as did the language: A "47-year-conflict" became an "imminent threat." ("Words, what are they for?") The promise Iranians' "future is yours to take" became the demand for imaginary "UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!" He bounced ideas off journalists, was surprised neighboring states got drawn in, ignored likely consequences - what oil? - had no contingency plans and rudely rebuffed allies. To the UK's offer of an aircraft carrier: "We don’t need people that join Wars after we’ve already won!”

Not so fast, said Iran President Masoud Pezeshkian, who warned their enemies “must take their dream of the Iranian people’s unconditional surrender to their graves." Then he apologized to neighboring countries for strikes against their U.S. bases. In response, Trump crowed they were ready "to cry uncle" and declared it "the first time Iran has ever lost in thousands of years." MAGA voted for an isolationist America First leader; they got a raging, idiotic, ignorant warmonger who launched more military attacks on more countries in a year than any president, and who doesn't give a shit about Americans. Asked if we should be worried about retaliatory attacks from Iran, he shrugged, "I guess...When you go to war, some people will die.” Aka, whatever. But lookit these cool, macho videos celebrating Epic Fury!

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Within days, the White House, or the puerile gamesters running their social media account, moved on from simply glorifying the violence to transforming it into video games, “gamifying" it by seamlessly merging video footage of actual U.S. strikes and explosions with bellicose clips from Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat. They also interspersed real kill-footage with popular action flicks and TV shows - Braveheart, Gladiator, Top Gun, Iron Man, even Saul Goodman and Walter White: "I am the danger" - complete with relentless, churning techno music to get your jingoistic heart racing. The result, both cringey and chilling, is to render real-life pain, blood, death, grief, terror, destruction, displacement mere cartoon entertainment, stripped of humanity, unworthy of empathy.

In a rare move, the gaslighting profanity of the videos prompted a "call to conscience" from Cardinal Blase J. Cupich, Archbishop of Chicago, who decried the "profound moral failure" they represent. Seeing "real war with real death and real suffering treated like a video game" was "sickening," he wrote, war and its brutality become "a spectator sport" and a moral crisis. "Our government (is) thrilled by the destructive power of our military, addicted to the 'spectacle' of explosions," he wrote. "The American people are better than this." Maybe, some of them. But the malignant narcissist with the warped world view and his fanboy marveling at the capture of Maduro as "the most gangster thing I've seen in my life," are still hideously, obliviously "locked in" to the atrocities.

So are, of course, his loyal buffoonish minions, strutting and gloating over America's bloody, illegal "victories." "We're marching through the world," declared giddy, craven lickspittle Lindsay Graham to a laughing Maria Bartiromo on Fox. "We’re clearing out the bad guys." All praise to "Ronald Reagan plus," "the greatest commander in chief of all time." He doesn't want "a fair fight," just "a quick one," he said, joining the bully ranks, and to make lots of money. Committed to being the cringiest cheerleader on the vile team, he even brought props; he waves "Make Iran Great" and "Free Cuba" hats, and smirks, "Stay tuned." Oh puke. Who asked America to clear out the bad guys? Who thinks what we need is a hat-based foreign policy? Idiotic hubris, thy name is.

Meanwhile, insufferable Press Barbie Stepford, her little Christian cross front and center, has gone full, smug, North Korea agit-prop. What does Trump's imaginary “unconditional surrender" mean, she is asked. She yammers at length, dragging out the titles in an effort to bolster her gobbledygook: "It means that when President Trump, as commander-in-chief of the........

© Common Dreams