Remember the years after 9/11? Bush, Cheney, Rice and Powell parading in front of cameras every day telling us over and over again how Saddam had all these weapons of mass destruction and we needed to do something about them before it was too late. By repeating this message so long, so often, on so many forums, the country eventually believed it. And then we started another war in addition to the one that was already waging against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The war itself ended quickly, and Saddam, his sons and his henchmen were soon found and executed. It seemed like a winning situation when Bush announced Mission Accomplished after the major military operations were complete.

What we didn’t know at the time was that it was just the start of another decade of instability in the entire region. We had, without realizing it, taken out the dictator who was also the one element that kept the region somewhat stable. That gone, instability took over, costs rose, and we learned that nation-building is far more complicated and expensive than waging war.

After enough death and expense, the nation got sick of it and elected Obama who promised to end the war. He kept his promise and pulled out all troops, only to find years afterwards that it was a colossal mistake and it had given rise to a much more serious nemesis: ISIS.

Obama and Hillary are the founders of ISIS. They’re the founders!

— Donald Trump

Now, in just the first two weeks of Trump, we find new saber-rattling. Now it’s not Bush, Cheney, Rice and Powell parading in front of cameras every day, it’s Trump, Tillerson, Bannon, Conway, Spicer and Kushner.

It’s funny to read that. In 2003, if you had read to me these six names, the only one I would have even recognized was Trump. Otherwise, blank. Now, these names are already infamous. And they came out of nowhere.

They are now systematically setting up Iran as the great evil. I am not sure why. I guess another good war will be good for business, both the military industrial complex and Exxon and its cronies. It’s good for Wall Street.

You all know the simile about the frog in the pot of cold water. If you threw a frog into a pot of boiling water, the frog would jump out and save itself. But put a frog into a put of cold water and slowly boil it, the frog gets used to the heat and eventually dies.

Let me announce that the frog has been put into the lukewarm water, and the flame has been started. Our six friends on national TV on what I now call “America – the Reality Show” are going to tell us night after night in prime time how evil Iran is, how it’s Iran’s fault that there is ISIS (which is wrong, and they’re actually on our side of ISIS), and how dangerous Iran’s nuclear weapons program is. We will be egging on Iran in the Persian Gulf and we’ll wait for a convenient opportunity when Iran makes an aggressive move so we can start a shooting war.

The American public, the frog, will be sufficiently hot by then, and desensitized to the heat, and it will buy into this folly. We’ll have another multi-decade military debacle at our hands, we’ll spend another $10 trillion and thousands of American lives, and the middle east will be more unstable than ever before.

Just what we needed. Another war.

This is what happens when you elect a madman.