great big beautiful bill

Did you prefer a rose

 

Colorful but you can still get pricked

Then

Around 1200 BC, the most sophisticated network of civilizations the ancient world had ever produced, spanning Egypt, Greece, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and beyond, came apart within a single generation. 

Historian Eric Cline argues this collapse wasn't the work of one invading force or one bad harvest, but something far harder to stop: An overly interdependent system that had no way to absorb multiple shocks at once.

Now

In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, members of the George W Bush administration presented the case for war exhaustively...

 Bush himself routinely addressed the American people, making the case for war. They were all lying, it turned out, but the lie served a purpose: it was a concession to the idea that the American people would have a say in whether or not their country went to war.

 

This time around,     

there has been no such concession. The Trump administration launched a war on Iran with no organized attempt to persuade the American public of the justice of their course of action, no effort to get the constitutionally required approval from Congress, and no attempt to put forward an even minimally coherent post-hoc rationalization for their decision.

Back to Then...