If your clergy offers excuses or dismisses Trump’s insane post, offering anything other than condemnation, then you need to (a) find a new congregation
or (b) stock up on asbestos underwear for eternity.
Like Marriages, Wars are Easier to Get Into Than Out Of
I think General McChrystal has presented the most thorough and insightful analysis of Trump's Iranian fiasco of any out there. It is well worth your time to read https://www.nytimes.com/2026/
Without doubt, Iran has been a bad actor, supporting Hezbollah and oppressing people with sharia law. Whether that warrants starting a war with no endgame is another question.
There are two reasons that Trump can't simply declare victory and go home: Iran and Israel. Iran is fighting an asymmetrical war; this is not WWI trenches or WWII tank battles. This can range from drone strikes to computer hacking to terrorist attacks and who knows what else. Israel will do what Israel wants to do. Period. Neither Iran nor Israel is on Trump's timetable.
There is a long history of distrust between the West and Iran, not just 1979 but 1953 and 1941. You might also listen the the four-part series from The Rest is History podcast about the fall of the Shah and the Iranian Revolution. https://therestishistory.com/episodes/fall-of-the-shah-part-1
Other thoughts ----Pete Hegseth talks about "silly rules of engagement". Throwing out rules is a two-edged sword and a very dangerous one in the Middle East.
Make no mistake, this "preventative" strike is a war; it became that with the sinking of the Iranian ship off the coast of Sri Lanka.
Trump's standard operating procedure of erratic behavior then moving on to the next reckless, ill-conceived project may be stuck in a real quagmire this time. Iran also is not Greenland. Sadly, the global economy is impacted, and that means people and nations with less resource than the US are going to truly suffer, not just be inconvenienced.
The jack-booted thugs in ICE costumes are shredding the Constitution daily and have no respect for human life. Granted they are hastily recruited, ill trained, and poorly led, but that is not really an excuse. They (and their counterparts in Border Patrol, Homeland Security, etc) follow the lead of their master whose power "is limited only by his own morality", the life-long cheat, bully, adulterer, whoremonger, and grifter who sells autographed Bibles to his brain-washed minions. Our nation is imploding because of the demented and dementia-ridden Beast in the White House, who is friend of our enemies and enemy to our friends on a global scale.
Heaven help us.
Looking to basic physics Newton’s Third Law of Motion states: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction force. It would appear that politics in America adheres to physics rather than philosophy or morality. Neither party want to make things right but pushing back to the center and some semblance or normalcy after the other party has been too far in one direction or other. This leads to increasing extremism. Beware the pendulum
Now the push is into sheer madness. At this point this should be visible now even to some of his supporters. There is no other word for the extremism of President 47. Do not say his name for he feeds on hearing it like fire feeds on oxygen. He thinks in terms of absolute power…but was already corrupt before he took office.
From the silliness to the Gulf of
America to the vile comments on Rob Reiner’s death to strafing survivors of a
boat struck by missile to ICE murdering a mother in her car. It gets worse every day. This is megalomania of the Nero/Caligula variety - boundless evil. There
will be a judgment, possibly of a Nuremburg type, definitely of an eternal nature.
February 6 is the birthday of the late David W. Cooley, president of the Memphis Chamber of Commerce from 1968-73 and then again from 1984-95. I went to work for him in 1987. I was 25 and reasonably sure that I was pretty fair PR hand. He assured me that I was not nearly as good as I thought I was, taught me a good deal, and recognized other talents in which he encouraged me (large scale event planning being one). No Gen X or Millennial could last a day with Mr. Cooley; they would simply wither, die, and melt down to a small pile of ash after one of his inspired chewings out. A Marine who rose to the rank of corporal, he was no nonsense. “Your turn in the barrel”, “the hog is in the ditch”, or “that don’t get it walkin’ or ridin” were frightening phrases but not nearly as much as a note on his special blue notepad.
He could also praise and mentor. He was an excellent communicator. I learned a lot about public speaking from him. I’m not talking about the sanitized TED Talk pablum that passes for speaking these days. I am talk about a stump speech. Cadence is a lost art. Most important of all, a speaker must watch the reaction of his or her audience. About 75 % of public speakers I hear are just tone deaf and canned. It’s a waste of everyone time really. Oh, I can tell you from experience that you have not lived until you encounter a skeptical or hostile audience. That’s a wake up call unlike any other.
Cooley was a lifelong chamber man. It was a career path and required an interesting skill set – part researcher, part preacher, part negotiator, coalition builder, and driven competitor. Civic pride on a scale befitting the town you worked in and for. He had a favorite short poem he would sometimes work into speeches, a little doggerel verse called “The Kind of a Town” or something like that; wish I could remember the words. If he had been preaching to a congregation, this would have been his benediction.
International Paper came to Memphis on his watch. There were other notable accomplishments in that era as well. It was a good time for Memphis and the Mid-South.
He was rough on my in my youth and
he wonderfully kind decades later when he would check in with me periodically to
see how Memphis was faring from his retirement in South Carolina. A chamber man
through and through. David W. Cooley
1929-2022.
