Rogers spent two decades demanding war with Iran, now films a grocery-store ad calling for it to end

…(cont) I wouldn't bother you with a month-old page except for what he did Monday.

Monday afternoon he put out a video. Seventy-five seconds, and he's standing in a grocery store, and he says food prices need to come down. Then he says — I copied this part out, hold on, yeah — "the war with Iran needs to end." And in the meantime he'd like a temporary embargo on exports of diesel, because diesel has hit a record $6.51 a gallon. Then: Michigan families can't afford to wait.

His opponent, Mr. El-Sayed, put up two clips of him from earlier interviews with three words underneath: liar, coward, fraud. The Republican nominee in Iowa said the war should end that same day.

So which part of that video is the new part — the grocery store, or the ending?

Because the price he's pointing at has a paper trail. On the fourth of this month diesel set a record at $5.85, and an economist wrote "Trump did it!" On the eleventh it was $6.06 — fourteen percent over the month before, sixty-four percent over the year before. Monday, per AAA, it's over six dollars in forty-nine states, and in California it's $8.42. The wire noted that diesel moves the freight and the delivery networks, so higher diesel means higher transportation cost. What does it run now, then, to get the food onto the shelf he's standing at?

Also Monday, Reuters/Ipsos had the President at 32 percent, the lowest of his political life. Among Republicans it went from 82 to 73 in a single week. And for the first time, a majority of Republican voters — 51 percent — said they disapprove of his handling of the cost of living. When the candidate says families can't afford to wait, is he disagreeing with anybody in his own party?

Here's the part I keep not understanding. The war is 201 days old. Thursday the President was asked about it and said he has a big decision: "Do I want to go in and annihilate them, or do I not?" That was on the heels of U.N. experts saying the United States likely committed war crimes in the earlier attacks. On the fifteenth the Congressional Budget Office priced the thing at nearly $40 billion and called its own number conservative — conservative is their word, not mine. A senator who voted to confirm the defense secretary has asked twice this month that they be fired. A Republican congressman filed impeachment paperwork against them. Is there anybody in these receipts still defending the war itself?

Now. My car. The fan belt's shot, has been since spring, and I've got a fella at the garage who has told me — told me at the counter, told me on the phone, told me in the lot while I was looking for my keys — that the belt is a scam, dealer nonsense, take it off, drive it. Say I take it off. Say the engine cooks on the interstate in August. And say he comes out to the shoulder with a phone camera and films himself standing by the hood, saying somebody has got to put a belt on this car, and families can't afford to wait. Would I be out of line to ask him, right there on the shoulder, who exactly he's asking?

Oh — sorry, you've got your coat on. One thing and I'll let you go. Those two clips his opponent posted, the ones he says show the man supporting this war — in those, Mr. Rogers is asking for something too. How long, according to this page in my pocket, had he been asking for it? Two decades.