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Here we go again.
What else can one say to the stream of misinformation and disinformation flowing out of the White House and Pentagon since the war with Iran broke out?
We have grown wearily familiar with President Trump's cavalier relationship with the facts. Combine that with his tendency to snatch words out of the air, appropriately or not, and you come up with a jumble of head-scratchers.
A leading example is his repeated oddball description of the Iran war as an "excursion," which caused brows to furrow and eyeballs to roll in newsrooms around the planet.
Excursion? Does the president know the true meaning of the word?
Last Monday, 10 days into the war, Trump summed up the situation this way to reporters: "We took a little excursion because we felt we had to do that to get rid of some evil. And I think you'll see it's going to be a short-term excursion. How good is our military, right? Amazing. How good? Short term. Short term."
Right. The war had already killed a half-dozen American troops and injured about 150.
Then there's the Tomahawk missile that flattened an Iranian elementary school, killing at least 175 civilians, most of them children.
This is some excursion.
Predictably, the war has shaken up the already unstable Middle East and driven oil prices skyward. Some industry experts are calling it the largest oil shock in history. But Trump dismissed that as something he'd already thought of.
"We figured oil prices would go up, which they will. They'll also come down," he said on March 7. "They'll come down very fast."
Brent crude traded above $100 a barrel in recent days, and some observers see it surging much higher if the war starts spiraling.
As I write this, the Iranian military isn't quite ready for the excursion to be over.
That's because they have effectively squelched tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, a chokepoint for 20% of the globe's liquid petroleum traffic. One has to wonder whether Trump and Secretary of State Pete Hegseth had taken this entirely predictable eventuality into consideration.
The growing war concerns caused me to flash back to an earlier era, when an excursion in Southeast Asia to help a friend with their colonial problems became the Vietnam War. I remember it vividly because I happened to be in college and of age for conscription. We used to say on campus, nothing concentrates the mind like the realization that you might be draft bait.
If you're too young to remember, take it from me. Furor over the draft became a leading reason why Americans have not had a draft since then. Other reminders of the Vietnam era are all the hazy spitball takes on just what the nature and duration of our commitment is.
Asked in early March how long this excursion might take, the president offered that it could take four to five weeks. Days later, he bragged that Iran had better watch out because the U.S. had "virtually unlimited supply" of munitions and that it could fight a war "forever." Later he put aside his initial four-to-five-week estimate and declared "whatever it takes."