Local opinion: Iran, and a President's construct of reality based on lies

Lies play foundational roles is Donald’s construction of reality. He deploys them while performing obliviousness in the face of their debunking.

“Barack Obama was born in Africa.” So what if the records of his birth in Hawaii are publicly and irrefutably available, and that there is no evidence at all of his having been born in Kenya?

“Mexico sends us murderers and rapists.” So what if the evidence shows that immigrants from Mexico, as well as from every other country, commit crimes at a far, far lower rate than native-born Americans?

Weeks after being elected in 2016, Donald tweeted: “In addition to winning the electoral college in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” So what if there was never any evidence to support this nonsense?

By never acknowledging that such drivels are factually wrong, much less that they constitute lies, he allows them to linger, adding to the trove of thousands of bits of absurdity he daily expectorates. As for his minions, they do not challenge, and their silence lends acquiescence functioning as support for non-facts in the creation of an “alternative reality.”

But only in fiction, quantum theories, induced mental states, and the like, do alternative realities have some understandable claim on the mind. None of these constitutes a refusal to acknowledge the widely accepted meanings of words that make communication possible. None suggests that what or eyes and ears show us is false.

Besides lies, “conspiracy theories” are fundamental to Donald’s struggle to impose his version of reality. His claim regarding the existence of a “deep state” is another notion for which there is no evidence. In fact(!), such concoctions are not theories (conspiracy or otherwise) at all. A theory is a purported explanation of observed facts or phenomena that can be challenged and abandoned with new evidence.

Consider Donald’s treatment of the January 6, 2021, attack on our Capitol, which he encouraged and allowed. Attackers were tried and convicted of crimes. Donald pardoned them, calling them “patriots.” This particular lie by Donald, flying as it does in the face of what we all saw, must stand as among his most absurd. But let it also stand as evidence of Donald’s compulsion to construct a fantasy of him as winner.

And now Iran. Whatever impelled him — Israel’s Netanyahu, simple-minded Pete Hegseth, another chance to grift, etc., etc. — he has got himself in a pickle. Having eschewed all planning for probable/possible consequences, e.g., the closing of the Strait of Hormuz, attacks on American allies in the Mideast, attacks on American assets in the Mideast, Donald is stuck. He has tried threats, including the war crime of threatening extermination of the Iranian people. It hasn’t worked.

Remember, what matters above all for Donald is that he see himself as, and that he be able to convince himself that others see him as, a winner. Thus, maybe a mini-assault on a couple of Iranian islands in the Persian Gulf. The Navy bombards with guns, missiles, drones, and bombs, the Marines hit the beaches, the Army paratroopers land. There is combat; Iranians and Americans are killed and wounded. But the toll is far less than that of a ground assault on mainland Iran.

Donald can then babble the drivel that comes naturally to him: “a great victory for America, one of the greatest victories of all time, like no other president ever achieved. If our allies hadn’t abandoned us, we could have achieved even more. They must now live with the consequences of their own cowardice.”

The American military withdraws.