Severing the Renewable Head

AMONG THE RIGHT WING reprobates who inundate the small town senior center where I take lunch is man who was recently reprimanded for using the word "nigger", his having been reported by me. This is the "gentleman" who, when I told him that the president is a self proclaimed sexual predator replied: "I don't care; I did the same thing thirty years ago". He's eighty six, and, God willing, won't be with us much longer, and is therefore essentially harmless. Predictably, he was pleased with the president for knocking off the Iranian general, and accused the mainstream American communist media for emphasizing that Trump ordered the murder, insisting that this was another unfair media assault on the president, and that Obama would never have been so unfairly attacked. To acknowledge where the buck stops, so it seems, is to treat Trump unfairly. Our resident reprobate (the eighty six year old, not the president) further stated that the only way to kill a snake is to sever its head, a metaphor which has several serious flaws. First, General Soleimani was not the head of the snake. far from it. Or if he was, its news to the Ayatollah, and the governing council of Iran. Secondly, the metaphor goes off the track when you consider that the severed head of a snake does not grow back, or at least not without a massive intervention by cloning. Once severed, the snake is dead and gone, forever. The general is, like the rest of us, replaceable, makeshift. If you kill one, the second in command transitions smoothly into his vacated place, with a complete collection of notes, instructions, and most likely the same skill set and hatred of foreign occupying armies as his dearly departed predecessor. The most pressing problem is the one the Democrats keep harping one, the one which prevent bush and Obama from pulling off the same hit, notwithstanding numerous windows of opportunity. By whacking a popular Iranian icon, tens of thousands of potential terrorists, imbued with patriotic and religious fervor, looking forward to an infinite succession of heavenly trysts with six hundred and sixty six heavenly virgins, (or whatever their number), are doubtless even now plotting their revenge against what they perceive to be "The Great Satan (their words, not mine). If this was sufficient reason for staying the hand of a born again reformed alcoholic cowboy chief executive, and the war mongering Hillary Clinton and her boss Obama, it should at least have been enough to give pause to America's gangster in chief. But then, Trump is not known for taking advice or consulting experts, nor is he known to admit mistakes, to confess, repent, or atone, facts of which his evangelical base conveniently omits mention, for political, and presumably theological expediency.