Issue #998 The Choice, Saturday, February 28, 2026
I am old enough to remember the Korean War (barely) and the Vietnam War, which was the first war to be televised on the evening news.
Of course, I also remember the unnecessary wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although he used lies and made up emergencies after 9/11, at least George W. Bush got Congressional approval for those wars, as mandated by the U.S. Constitution.
Donald J. Trump, who, along with people in his administration, has continuously ignored the Constitution, in the early hours of February 28, 2026, started an unnecessary war with Iran, partnering with his fellow international war crimes buddy, Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. Trump lied about why he started this war and did not seek Congressional approval for this action.
In 2012, Trump claimed that President Barack Obama would soon start a war with Iran because he was weak and needed something to “cover up” his terrible administration policies.
Actually, it was Barack Obama who secured an agreement with Iran to contain its nuclear capabilities, and Donald Trump who subsequently destroyed that agreement.
As we all know, Donald Trump is doing everything he can to distract from the Epstein files and to illegally stay in office for the rest of his life.
This war with Iran is his latest distraction, and it is a real phenomenon called " Wag the Dog, which describes the act of manufacturing a distraction — typically a foreign crisis or military conflict — to divert public attention from a domestic scandal.
The phrase owes much of its modern cultural resonance to the 1997 film Wag the Dog, directed by Barry Levinson and starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro. In the movie, a Washington spin doctor teams up with a Hollywood producer to fabricate an entirely fictional war with Albania — complete with fake footage, an invented war hero, and a carefully crafted media narrative — all to shield a sitting U.S. president from a sex scandal erupting just days before an election.
The timing of Trump’s “wag the dog” initiative is not lost on anyone, especially since there is now credible evidence that he raped a 13-year-old girl, the knowledge of which has come out just as the country is preparing for the 2026 midterm elections.
Now, in an era of 24-hour news cycles, social media, and algorithmically amplified outrage, the tools for shaping public perception have grown exponentially more powerful. Trump and his billionaires and political operatives don’t need a Hollywood producer to wag the dog — they have created an entire ecosystem of media incentives doing much of the work for them.
The term itself has roots older than the film, derived from the idiom about a dog being “wagged” by its own tail — the smaller, less important part controlling the whole. Applied to politics, it suggests that the spectacle, the noise, the manufactured crisis is the tail wagging the dog of genuine democratic discourse.
Now, the best question to ask when Trump creates a new crisis that dominates the headlines isn’t what happened, but what aren’t we supposed to be looking at?
The next equally important questions to ask are:
Will the Republican-led Congress step up and do its job on war powers lying only with it?
Is Trump going to send his son Barron to the front lines?
What are “We the People” going to do?
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