The bombs paused over the weekend, but the rhetoric didn’t. Senator John Kennedy wants more. Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, the Louisiana Republican made it clear that the White House isn’t losing sleep over the two-week-long bombardment of Iranian infrastructure. In fact, Donald Trump is enjoying the show. “The president likes the daily attacks,” Kennedy told host Margaret Brennan, offering a folksy, somewhat chilling justification for the violence. “He believes that sometimes you have to kill a few chickens to scare the monkeys.”
It is a brutal calculus. Kennedy wants to double down. He advocated for starving the country out with a tight blockade and dropping munitions on Pickaxe Mountain to crack open whatever secrets lie beneath. To him, the adversaries in Tehran aren’t rational actors. They are lunatics. He compared Iran’s leadership to Charles Manson and the “Son of Sam” killer, labeling them “more than mildly insane.” Still, he warns against retreat. “If we can stand the pain of the rising cost of energy, we need to stay the course,” he said, though he drew the line at deploying American boots on the ground.
The public is not amused. The conflict, ignited on February 28 by joint U.S. and Israeli strikes, has been a disaster in the polls. With midterm elections looming, Republicans are sweating over voter turnout as gas prices spike. Not everyone in the party is singing from Kennedy’s hymn sheet. Fellow Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy took a more sober tone on CNN, admitting that a quick resolution “seems unlikely” and demanding Congress force a real debate on the war’s actual objectives.
Diplomacy is dead. Or at least on life support. While both nations pay lip service to negotiations, the rhetoric tells a different story. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently upgraded the old biblical law of retaliation, declaring Trump’s policy to be “a head for an eye” after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi promised an “eye for an eye.” Meanwhile, Iran’s Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei took to social media to slam the door on peace entirely, declaring that “jihad and resistance” are the only options left against American and Zionist tyranny.
