Splash one!

That deep sigh you heard from newsrooms in New York and Washington D.C. earlier this week was relief being expressed by newspaper editors and television hosts that they had another U.S. “victory” to report. And it came with an exciting video of an exploding drug boat!

The real news of the week, in contrast, was dreary. The latest jobs report came out, showing only 22,000 jobs were added in August. The numbers for June were revised downward to show a net loss of 13,000 jobs for that month. Didn’t Trump just fire the Commissioner of Labor Statistics after bad numbers were reported for July? Why, yes, he did.

He couldn’t very well fire the acting commissioner this month for the same crime. He doubtlessly knew that dismal job numbers would be announced this morning, and he needed a win to obliterate the bad news, so what did he do? He ordered himself up one of those neatie-keenie videos he could release showing a boatful of drug smugglers – or somebody anyway – being shot out of the waters off Venezuela by a Reaper drone firing a Hellfire missile, or some fancy-dancy high-tech missile that probably cost more than your house.

Just listen to that! Reaper, as in grim reaper. Got it? Hellfire, as in, well, hell and fire! It sure sounds great, doesn’t it? And of course Trump got to show a video of the shootdown, like those we became so familiar with about 20 years ago during the invasion of Iraq, when our TV screens lit up with grayish images of cross-hairs following a tank, or a grouping of enemy soldiers, or even a single insurgent placing a roadside bomb somewhere in the wilds of Afghanistan or on a street in Mosul or Baghdad. And then BOOM, the target would disappear in an overexposed white cloud, and we would hear the voice of the pilot of a fighter jet or attack helicopter on a radio intoning splash one.

A voice announcing the vaporization of several human beings in the same calm tone a Southwest pilot would use over the intercom to apologize for turbulence was eerie but somehow thrilling. It was as if techno-death had become so commonplace that it came close to being yawned over by those wreaking havoc from the sky.

Trump has been hungering for that kind of “warrior lethality” to be brought back to life, so at the same time he bragged that a boatful of nasty “Tren de Aragua Narco terrorists” had been eliminated, he ordered that the Department of Defense was to be renamed as the Department of War.

Wow. A twofer. What a day for The Donald and his testosterone addled Pentagon chief, Pete “How Dry I Am” Hegseth.

A case could be made – in fact, I’ll make it – that one of the worst things to ever happen to modern warfare was turning it into a video game that presidents and Pentagon limp-dicks like Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz could play while seated before a flat-screen television monitor either in the White House war room or – of course the room where it happens is called this – “The Tank” in the Pentagon. All they’ve got to do is order a strike – there’s another wonderful macho term – and magically appearing on the screen before them will be the action in real time.

And the truly great thing is, they can release the video to the media to be played on the news showing how U.S. power can be projected – yet another pound of the proverbial chest – anytime the slavering president or Secretary of Defense…oh, sorry, I meant to say “War” – desires to flex his imaginary muscles.

Trump got to feature a bunch of grayed-out videos of cross-hairs and explosions when he ordered his big bombing and rocketing campaign against that perpetually-hated member of the Axis of Evil, Iran, back in June. Then he ordered several thousand armed soldiers into L.A. and several thousand more camo-clad Intimidators into Washington D.C. in August.

Hasn’t it been a busy summer for the man whose fake “bone spurs” got him no less than five deferments from the Vietnam draft?

The explosion of the four-engine alleged Venezuelan drug boat was especially satisfying for the Waddling One. “There’s more where that came from,” Trump bragged in a White House appearance before the press. The Pentagon then announced that the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group – three Navy warships, one of which carries 2,200 Marines from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit – had just arrived in the region. Why, goodness me, that sounds like the Chief Decorator of the Oval Office and Rose Garden Landscape Architect rattling his sabers, doesn’t it?

The great thing about firing Hellfire missiles at alleged enemies is that the target disappears, either blown to smithereens, or in the case of the alleged Venezuelan drug boat carrying eleven alleged terrorists, it’s sent to the bottom of the sea. No one will ever be able to get solid, irrefutable evidence of who they were, or what they were up to. Trump and his macho-minions can stand in the White House or Pentagon press room and show their thrilling videos, which the media is only too happy to put on the air because cool explosions, man. The preternaturally serene pilot voice announcing splash one becomes a literal splash on the video screen as the boat explodes in a giant mist of seawater and boat-bits and blood, none of which we can distinguish from each other because it’s a black-and-white video, and we can’t see it up close. In fact, according to the Daily Beast, the Venezuelan government has already claimed that the video of the so-called drug boat being shot out of the water was generated by AI, and the White House is lying.

So, there it is. While once we were just in the age of the video game war, now we appear to have entered an age when AI can be used to generate fake images of fake attacks on fake terrorist boats. Or not.

The point is, who knows? Was that really a drug boat? Were they really narco-terrorist evil gang members? Why did it take 11 men to run drugs? Were there really any drugs on board? Why would they use an open boat that would obviously take on a lot of water running hard and fast through the waves of the open sea?

So many unanswered questions. Experts have been all over the cable shows bellowing about how it’s illegal under international law to just arbitrarily shoot a boat out of the water. But in the Trump White House, and across the Potomac in the House That Lethality Built, who the hell cares? They fired all the inspector generals, remember? They just assigned practically the entire Judge Advocate General Corps of military lawyers to be temporary immigration judges, so there is nobody around to tell them what’s legal and what’s not. Who’s going to stop them?

Nobody, that’s who. In the meantime, there are those missile strike videos to put on the news to distract from nettlesome details like the worst job numbers since 2020 and the increasingly obvious possibility of a recession, not to mention the Epstein victims telling their painful stories and threatening to name names.

Look over there! Splash one!