“Pentagon No. 3 frustrates senators in closed-door briefing on Iran war, Trump defense strategy”, 17 September 2026 (Photo via The Hill — the original report)
As it ran on the front
It was born last winter as a promise, the kind that comes free with any military briefing, and it is survived by the Republicans who repeated it on camera for months.
The notice runs long, so start where the file starts. Congress did not blink. A senator who had voted to confirm him called for his firing, then called for it again this month, twice being the going rate for a man Congress still funds. A Republican congressman filed actual impeachment paperwork. Congress did not blink at that either.…
…(cont) On September 9th, President Trump told his own party plainly: the war will not end before the midterms. That same week the Republican National Committee opened its first-ever midterm convention, in Dallas, built for one purpose the invitation did not hide — helping Republicans buck the President's own low approval numbers, not the war's. A North Carolina farmer named Matt Bell, who voted for this President, told CBS he is "in survival mode." Congress still did not blink.
Gas and diesel prices blinked first. The New York Times reports this week that as pump prices climb into November, the same Republicans who backed the war for months are changing their tune — not on the war crimes finding, not on the farmer, not on the man they confirmed and now can't fire fast enough to matter. On the price at the pump. That is the whole obituary: a war can be called devastating, priced past $40 billion, and found likely criminal by the UN without moving a single vote, but a gas station receipt will do it every time. That is not proportion. That is just the bill finally addressed to the right zip code.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks that anyone still holding a vote spend it on the war's price tag before they spend it on the war.
🍺
“You can drop actual bombs on a country, get called a war criminal by the UN, and Congress shrugs — but you raise the price of a gallon of diesel and suddenly it's an emergency session. That tells you exactly whose pain counts on Capitol Hill: not the farmer's, not the dead's, just the donor class's gas gauge. Forty billion dollars and a war crimes finding, and it takes a midterm and a fill-up to get anybody's attention.”
“Look, nobody's "changing their tune," they're responding to constituent concerns, that's called representative democracy — did I just defend a $40 billion war by calling it customer service? Anyway the war crimes finding is preliminary, the Hegseth thing is out of context, and frankly if gas prices are the issue that means the economy's the story, not the war, which is a totally different and much better story for us.”
Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike emerged Thursday from a closed-door briefing frustrated by what they said was a lack of clear answers from Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby on the Trump administration’s National Defense Strategy and the ongoing Iran war. The briefing with the Senate Armed Services Committee started off…
Matt Bell said he initially supported Trump's policies but now feels he and other farmers were "sold a bill of goods" that there was a plan to "put America's farmers and ranchers first."
A UN fact-finding mission has reported that two US airstrikes which killed at least 178 civilians in Iran constitute war crimes. Plus: Andy Burnham says he is “determined” to hit net zero by 2050, Sweden’s left-of-centre coalition wins the general election, Netanyahu is pushing to strip IDF critics of their citizenship, and the…
The fossil fuel industry is raking in big profits thanks to President Donald Trump's illegal war with Iran, and a new analysis finds that it's plugging a sizable chunk of these gains into propaganda. A report published by Clean Creatives on Wednesday reveals that fossil fuel firms across the world have "engaged 802 advertising and PR…
A recently published economic analysis estimates that President Donald Trump’s illegal war with Iran has cost US consumers an average of $1,760 per household—including a total of $121 billion in extra spending on energy alone—since the conflict began less than 8 months ago. The war, which Trump launched without congressional…
The Pentagon has failed its audit eight years running - the only major federal agency never to pass one Military Times, 19 December 2025
All of the Democrats in the Senate — excluding Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman — signed an open letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, pressing him to give Congress a cost breakdown of the war in Iran. The letter, although largely symbolic, reflects the frustration of many Democrats in Congress over what they perceive as a...
Matt Bell has been farming in North Carolina for more than half his life. He voted for President Trump but said farmers are "fighting for survival" as they combat rising prices.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who voted to confirm Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, is renewing his call for President Trump to fire the Pentagon chief after Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned. “He needs to go, whether it’s impeachment or the most expedient route — just the president to replace him — would be great,”
US House Speaker Mike Johnson said Wednesday that with seven weeks to go until Election Day, it was time for lawmakers to "go home to their districts and make the case to the American people"—a day earlier than scheduled. But with the US public overwhelmingly disapproving of President Donald Trump's war in Iran and demanding…
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) announced Thursday that four Republicans, including him, have signed the Epstein Files II discharge petition and expressed confidence it will pass the House. The news comes after House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sent lawmakers home for a seven-week recess ahead of the midterm elections.
U.N.-commissioned rights experts say there are "reasonable grounds" to believe the U.S. committed war crimes with strikes that killed scores of Iranian civilians.
President Donald Trump on Thursday said he is weighing whether or not to "annihilate" Iran in a renewed effort to end the illegal 201-day US-Israeli war of choice, musings that came on the heels of a report by United Nations experts who said the United States likely committed war crimes during earlier attacks on the Middle East nation.…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.
