You fucked up — you trusted us!

Who knew he’d lie?

See, here’s what I meant last week when I say they don’t believe in anything:

What does that even mean? CNN:

Vance called himself “frankly kind of a conspiracy theorist on the Epstein stuff,” saying that he wanted the government to provide “full transparency” relating to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

OK, what does that even mean? He’s the Vice President of a guy who’s clearly all over the Epstein files — a guy who has been the opposite of transparent about them; indeed, whose DOJ factota have been manipulating the incompletely-released files themselves as part of the chaos storm/distortion field that keeps people from focusing on any of his multiple crimes not to mention the sex with children.

Yet CNN put up that teaser, not with any suggestion that Vance is as full of shit as he clearly is, but to promote the news value of his “confession.” HA! Whoopi Goldberg got him to admit he’s hot to get to the bottom of the Epstein Files. Just like we are!

Of course, we can’t expect him to do anything about it, however high up in the administration he technically is. We all know what Trump is like. Every so often we see him trot out his whole cabinet to wash his balls on TV. No way he’s going to let any of them push a few of the hot parts of the Epstein Files out the door. Hell, the one Republican who actually tried to air them out got run out of office.

So we all obviously just have to live with that. And when you’re living with something like that, sure, Vance can be a Release the Epstein Files guy, why not? I mean a few months ago Politico was telling us he was an Iran War “skeptic,” and now he’s out here shoveling the shit with the rest of them.

Speaking of Iran shit: You may have noticed that, with the Iran “deal” clearly favoring the Persians, some among our Prestige Press appear to be hedging their bets just the tiniest bit. We’re not seeing as much of the judgement-free credulity for whatever Tubby told them was happening in the war — all of Iran’s armed forces at the bottom of the ocean, the mullahs begging for a deal, etc. Now their headlines say “Trump says” more often, and “questions remain” — and even occasionally “Trump claims,” which by the standards of our time is practically Dan-Rather-on-Richard-Nixon levels of disrespect.

The people who are most cynical and enraged about this seem to be neocons — you know, those old-timers who cheered the Iraq debacle, enjoy every murdered child or bombed hospital in Gaza, and have been panting to nuke Iran for decades. Some of those guys became Never Trumpers and drifted over to the “resistance” side, you may recall, and while I will never fully trust any of them I have to admit a few, like the odious Max Boot, were at least querulous about Trump’s “excursion” from the start. It doesn’t make him less of a moral disaster, but give him credit for paying attention and seeing Trump for what he is.

But others of that breed — the Just the Tip Trumpers who’ve supported Tubby since he got in, albeit with some grumbling to save what’s left of their dignity, because they figured he’d punish all the people they hate — have taken this defeat very badly, which is to say hilariously.

Erick Erickson, after letting us know which high White House sources he’s trying to waft the stink away from — “Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth both raised concerns about the deal in internal discussions, while Vice President Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner pushed it through,” haha — eventually gets around to the most damning thing he can say about the agreement: it is a “failure that unites Obama and Trump.” You can’t make any deal with Iranians because they’re heathens, see, “men for whom the destruction of Israel is not policy but prerequisite, a barrier to be removed so the Twelfth Imam may return.” This summons a delightful image of Ham-Face in a Crusader outfit, vainly trying to lift a sword.

Just as eager to see the Musselmen crushed is Abe Greenwald of Commentary (no link, newsletter only). And he is unusually forthright about what drew pure ideologues like him into the arms of the con-man Trump:

Donald Trump’s absurd sideshows can land in different ways depending on what else he’s doing. When Trump is racking up policy wins, especially popular ones, it’s easy enough to laugh off the vulgar displays.

At the start of his second term, for example, Trump immediately moved to secure the border and crackdown on radicalism at the institutional level. Against those achievements, his decking out the Oval Office in gold leaf, while tacky and unfortunate, didn’t rise to the level of a dire offense. And so long as the war in Iran was going well, I couldn’t get that worked up over his towering arch project. Such things seem petty by comparison.

But when Trump is foundering on vital fronts, his indecorous sideshows become something much different—for example, when he throws a UFC birthday bash on the White House lawn while negotiating an American defeat at the hands of the Iranian regime. Here, the contrast between Trump’s aversion to tackling serious matters and his enthusiasm for ridiculous ones becomes deeply unsettling.

In other words, when Trump’s smacking around darkskins and bluehairs, his grotesqueries are pleasing japes; when he said he’d blow Iran off the map, it was an irresistible wet dream. But when Trump (predictably if, again, you’ve been paying attention) boots it, suddenly his gross behavior offends. It’s almost as if Greenwald thought this lifelong heedless bully and cheat would stick to his part of the bargain that he imagined they had with one another.

There are plenty like him around, and we close with Rod Dreher, who for once in his life doesn’t take thousands of words to get to the heart of the matter:

I feel in a sense personally humiliated, because I wanted Trump to be president again, despite his many flaws, because I trusted him more than any other senior American politician to keep us out of these useless damn wars. Now look.

The press is hopeless, the (happily declining) MAGA voters base is worse, and Trump is a generational disaster, but these guys really prove out the old truism that no one can be as stupid as an intellectual.