Opinion

Don’t give Joe Kent any kind of a pass just yet, because he’s still MAGA. And he’s about to become even more dangerous than he already was.

The DNI was under a microscope on Wednesday in the wake of the unexpected resignation letter bombshell released by the Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Joe Kent.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another just won the Oscar for Best Picture. It’s a multi-generational saga of political resistance. It’s a film about people fighting for something real, even when the odds are against them. It’s bloody, messy, and violent.

And then there’s the Trump administration’s version: One Lie After Another, a violent, bloody, and worse-than-messy narrative. No Oscars. No standing ovations. A zero percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics are panning it across the globe, and audiences are screaming back at the screen. And unlike Anderson’s film, this one is costing actual lives.

It’s reassuring to know that if you have brown skin and happen to be dead, it’s no longer OK to be a suspected pedophile.

I only wish the same were true for those who are white and living.

In one of my most elaborate undercover operations for BBC Newsnight, I got my hands on the secret plans for the invasion. Nope, not Trump’s attack on Iran. It was 2004 when I conned the Heritage Foundation and a James Baker operative into handing over the elaborate 323-page plan to keep the oil flowing from Iraq. The plan was secretly drafted BEFORE George W. Bush invaded.

In 2004, The State Department had told me that no plan existed for handling Iraq’s oil. I didn’t buy it. If we invaded California, we’d certainly have a plan for oranges and action films.

There may have been no more honest action in this administration than when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted the Pentagon was predicated on war, tossing aside former assumptions that it engaged only in "defense." And here we are.

Only one year into his term, President Donald Trump ordered troops into a war without an articulable argument as to an Iranian threat, never mind justification proven by fact. Appropriately, the result ensures Trump's eventual personal demise, but sadly, too, the destruction of the American public's hard-earned global goodwill. But struggle back anyway.

As a gay man, let me tell you what I didn’t do when I read the news that U.S. intelligence has reportedly briefed Donald Trump that Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, is probably gay.

I didn’t laugh.

There are several clear winners from Trump’s attack on Iran:

— Russia, who can again fund its violence against Ukraine with new oil revenue and now claims its unprovoked attack on that nation is consistent with this new Trump Doctrine;
— Saudi Arabia, which has long hated Iran and lobbied since at least 2008 for the US to attack that country;
— the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which has similarly pushed America to attack Iran since at least 2010;
— the American defense weapons industry, which is making additional billions;
— Don Jr. and Eric, who have taken a big position in a drone-manufacturing business, getting them in on the Pentagon gravy train;
— Donald Trump himself, who’s succeeded in largely pushing Epstein off the front page;
— and Benjamin Netanyahu, who’s called for American strikes against Iran since 1992 and will stay out of prison as long as the war continues.