I introduce the characters of Leo and Max as a way of discussing issues that are not necessarily LGBTQ+centric for an LGBTQ+ readership, and also to represent the gulf separating Americans with liberal and MAGA world views.
Today — or tonight as it happens — they are disagreeing over Trump and Netanyahu's war with Iran.
It's rather curious that after Pete Kegseth spent a year insisting that we return to calling the Department of Defense the Department of War, the Lawless Trump Regime™ doesn't want to call what the Department of War is sending war materiel and soldiers to a "war." Nah, it's a "special military operation," just like the one Russia has been sending war materiel and soldiers to in Ukraine for the past four years.
Whatever. The Department of Special Military Operations vows that unlike previous administrations' special military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, we're not in Iran to execute regime change (only to execute regime leaders). Although in the case of Afghanistan, we've seen Trump's idea of a successful end to a long, drawn out war: bring back the very same people our special military operation was supposed to have gotten rid of.
This time around, our special military operation assassinated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and also, according to Trump himself, "most of the people we had in mind" to succeed him. Trump has expressed his pique at not having had a say in the selection of Iran's new Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba "Dubya" Khameini, who is probably holed up in the safest place from the Trumpster special military operation machine in Tehran: the Russian embassy.
Hardly anyone outside of Iran will shed a tear for the elder Khameini — for the 176 schoolgirls blown to smithereens by an American cruise missile, certainly — but it remains to be seen how his murder will play out within Iran's borders. Tehran's young, urban protesters have been no fans of his; but the poorly educated, rural peasants in the rest of the country were his MIGA faithful.
To put it in terms Americans might understand: some Liberal Leos might have, at best, mixed feelings were Iran — or North Korea, or Cuba, or Grand Fenwick — to eliminate Trump, Vance, Mike Johnson, and much of the remaining order of succession. But all Leos and Maxes would be united in condemnation of any attack that included wiping out a girls' school and setting Texas oil refineries ablaze.
Nor would any of us ever accept those countries appointing our next head of state.
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