Rogers's ad asking for an end to the Iran war he spent 20 years demanding runs 75 seconds

…(cont) Sensible. A man by the registers, worried about the registers. Except there's this other page I've been carrying since the twenty-seventh of August, soft at the folds now from the raincoat, and the headline on it reads: Mike Rogers pushed for war with Iran for two decades. Underneath, it says his career-long advocacy is now wreaking economic havoc on Michigan. Michigan is the state he's running in. That's my whole trouble, and I'm sorry it isn't more complicated than that. The page says twenty years of asking for the war. The video says end the war.

His opponent went and got the tape. Abdul El-Sayed put up a pair of clips from the Republican's own previous interviews and wrote: "You've spent your entire campaign supporting the war in Iran. Liar, coward, fraud." The Senate Majority PAC also called him out. Nothing there was manufactured — those clips are interviews the man sat down and gave.

The price of the thing, from the numbers I was handed: the Congressional Budget Office puts it over $40 billion. The president's approval is at a record low of 32 percent, and the write-up lays that largely to the war and the economic fallout. Diesel at a record. I don't have a figure for what it cost the people who were under it.

Now. I want to show you something, and then I'll get out of your way.

Eleven years I wanted the silver maple out of my yard. I'm not exaggerating, eleven — I told the man at the corner store, I told the fellow who does the gutters, I told the tree service twice a year every year: that maple has to come down. Well, it came down. Took the power line with it and two of the porch steps, and now the dog won't walk past the stump. So here's what I did. I stood in my own driveway with the phone held out and I said tree removal in this neighborhood has to stop, and in the meantime the township ought to temporarily stop anybody hauling firewood out of the county, on account of firewood being at a record price.

My wife watched the entire performance from what's left of the porch and asked me one question, which was who had wanted the tree down. I didn't have a good answer standing in the driveway and I don't have one now. It was my yard. My tree. My eleven years of asking.

Oh — excuse me, one more thing before you get away, and then I'm done. The wire prints the inventory of that video: food prices, the war needs to end, the diesel embargo. That's what's in it, all of it, that's the list.

So how much of the twenty years fits in the seventy-five seconds?