Rubio calls Iran's offer to reopen the strait outrageous; Trump calls the same war a good decision anyway.

…(cont) I'm sorry — I do this, I get stuck on a number and I come at it from every side until somebody tells me to close the notebook. But I keep going back to that eight. Look what happened in the weeks those eight pages sat wherever unused articles of impeachment sit. The President now says that the war played a role in costing his party the House, and he's agreed with his Vice President's reading of why. He called the whole thing, after all that, a good decision anyway. I have both of those written down, one from each man.

So here's the part I keep circling back to, the cost side of it this time, not the date. Seven weeks of calling the question a stunt, and the thing the question was about turns out to be the thing voters didn't care for so much in November. Which came first, the word "stunt," or the losing of the House? I have the dates. Sorry — I keep checking the same two like they're going to change on me.

On November 5th, Massie went back to Secretary Hegseth with the same offer: resign, or I reintroduce the articles. Not new ones, I checked. The same eight. Somebody has to carry those pages back onto the House floor, the exact ones that got walked out the door in September. I know, I'm back on this again — is that the same stack Speaker Johnson called a stunt, or a fresh one? It's the same stack.

I'm sorry, fourth time now, but I keep thinking about my own garage. There's a ticket in the glovebox I've been meaning to deal with since summer. Calling it a formality doesn't make it go away; it just waits for the day collections calls the house. This one waited fifty-four days, the 16th of September to today. I did the math twice at my own table, because I trust myself with fifty-four about as much as I trust myself with eight.

The man those eight pages are about has his own week to get through. Secretary of State Rubio told the Daily Caller that Iran's offer to reopen the Strait of Hormuz was "outrageous and ridiculous and really not realistic." The same Sunday, the Washington Examiner had the President calling a return to full-scale war "highly unlikely." CBS News, the same day, had him saying there was no reason to escalate. One Cabinet official closing a door; the President saying nobody's trying to open it. Is that two Cabinet voices describing the same war in the same week? I have both quotes. I'm not the one who has to reconcile them.

And this is the part where I was ready to close the notebook — I really was — when somebody reminded me Secretary Hegseth is giving a speech at the Naval War College this week. This week. The same week the House comes back. The same week those eight pages might finally get a vote, fifty-four days after a Speaker stood at a podium and called the whole thing, word for word, a publicity stunt.