Page A9From§Eachthe sunrise edition — 31 August 2026
As it ran on the front
Same outlet, same week, two headlines that cancel each other out if you read them in order instead of separately. First one: 'America is out of money, out of forever wars, and done apologizing.' Second one, right behind it: Trump 'just speedran' Bush's biggest mistake, this time with Iran. You don't get to run both of those without one of them being wrong, and I'd bet the rent on which one.
The first piece is the sales pitch — the country's tired, the treasury's empty, the forever-war era is over, we're done writing checks for other people's fights. That's a good pitch. People want to believe it, because the last twenty years of pitches like it turned out to be lies with a flag pinned on them. The second piece, from the same masthead, days apart, describes the country doing the exact thing the first piece just said it was done doing — striking a country in the Middle East, opening a front nobody voted on, escalating a conflict that wasn't there a month ago.…
…(cont) I don't think that's an accident of scheduling. I think that's what happens when the case for restraint and the case for escalation come from the same building, aimed at the same readers, and nobody upstairs is checking whether the two pieces published this week are describing the same country. One says we're out of forever wars. The other says we just started acting exactly like we're in one again, and compares it, by name, to the last time this went badly.
Here's the part that should bother you more than the contradiction itself: neither piece is arguing the strikes shouldn't have happened. One's just embarrassed to admit they did. That's not a policy disagreement, that's two different moods about the same set of facts, published days apart, and the facts didn't move — the mood did. Somewhere there's a real decision, made by real people, about whether more of this happens next month, and it's getting covered like a personality clash between op-ed writers instead of a war.
“You can't be 'done with forever wars' and 'speedrunning Bush's biggest mistake' in the same publication in the same week — pick one, or admit the money and the bombs never actually stopped moving.”
“Striking targets tied to an active threat isn't the same as a forever war, that's a false equivalence the columnist made, not the administration — the administration's position is measured, targeted, and not a sequel. I understand the Bush comparison is going to happen regardless of what we call it.”
The receipts
The Pentagon has failed its audit eight years running - the only major federal agency never to pass one Military Times, 19 December 2025
America is out of money, out of forever wars, and done apologizingIn 1776, a congress of colonials declared they had had enough of kings and priests claiming divine right over their lives. Rights come from the Creator, governments exist by consent, and their purpose is to secure life, liberty, and the…
As we approach the 25th anniversary of 9/11, isn’t it time we learned the lessons of history? From Vietnam to 9/11, the War on Terror, and now Iran, America never seems to understand what ought to be obvious conclusions about its actions…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.