Fog of War Poses Aviation Hazard

The most horrific development out of the current situation in the Middle East is the downing of a Ukrainian passenger jet two minutes after takeoff from the Tehran airport. Due to the number of Canadian passengers aboard, Prime Minister Trudeau issued a statement, opining that the Iranians probably shot the plane down with a surface-to-air missile by mistake. The grim euphemism for this sort of horror is 'collateral damage', which apparently gained traction during the Vietnam War. My guess is that a trigger-happy anti-aircraft crew saw a plane and launched the missile... well, Trump did promise to send big jet planes.

As can be predicted, Trump's response was pretty awful, a weird synergy of domestic racism and international belligerance:

Trump says the plane shot down in Iran was flying in a "rough neighborhood."

— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) January 9, 2020

Of course, being a liberal, I am cursed with memory, in this case, the downing of an Iranian passenger jet by an American missile. Maybe the Persian Gulf IS a bad neighborhood, but who's the principal thug in the region?

To make matters worse, the conspiracy fever swamps are roiling with hot takes, such as the notion that the attack was perpetrated by CIA backed 'Deep State' elements to eliminate evidence that sinister Canadian intelligence operatives brokered the Uranium One deal between Hillary Clinton and the Russians, who transferred the uranium to the CIA puppet state Iran... I'm not making this up:

QAnon supporter claiming all the evidence they are finding confirms what they already suspected? Knock me over with a feather! #QAnon pic.twitter.com/SeQirpMpcs

— Poker and Politics (@PokerPolitics) January 9, 2020

The Trump dead-enders would rather see their Golden Ass wage war on Canada than to admit that he's a terrible president. Meanwhile, the rest of us look on in horror at a war of errorist attacks waged by two not-so-stable countries, an actual theocracy and a wannabe-theocracy.