There was a time when ships would keep live fish on board, in barrels, for easy protein. Hence the expression.
For me the conceptual difficulty has always been the shooting. Wouldn’t it blast holes in the barrel, thereby killing all the other fish? Just how hard was it for a seafaring cook to simply reach in and seize?
Donald Trump lacks most of skills we associate with his various predecessors: tact, wit, discretion, subtlety, coherence, deliberation, grammar. And experts often describe the difficulty older people face when learning new skills. But I think we can all agree he has recently excelled at one timeless presidential skill: killing.
With American bombs raining across the globe it’s easy to overlook, but the death toll in his war against alleged drug runners has now topped 200.
That number is only a fraction of the Iranian civilians, approaching 2,000, who have been killed. But significant, at least to their families.
How hard would it have been for U.S. warships to simply seize these small boats? The Coast Guard does it all the time, yielding perp walks and captured evidence. By contrast, the proof from Operation Southern Spear is literally irrefutable, because no one has seen it, at least in public.
Like Trump, I’m no good at geography, but some of the boats appear to have been travelling away from the United States, a fact which might prove underwhelming in a court of law. And so far, literally none of the boats have fought back, rendering the war a touch one-sided, despite the crowing of Pete Hegseth, the beefcake Aryan. As Trump himself once asked, in a different context, “Can’t you shoot them in the legs or something?”
Our president is so anti-drug he’s blasting people out of the water, yet he’s neck deep in crypto, which has been a godsend for cartels. Almost seems, well, inconsistent.
Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, Nigeria, Yemen, Somalia, Syria.
The list gives new meaning to the term government efficiency. Andrew Jackson, Trump’s murderous role model, could only dream of bombing seven countries in a single year.
Still, the idea of a guy who so desperately wants a peace prize bombing the planet would be bitterly laughable if not for the body parts washing ashore in the Caribbean, and now the Pacific.
Is there a Nobel Pieces Prize?
