"In a stark constrast to his last address, the vice president warned graduating military cadets to prepare for a world where war is increasingly unpredictable and potentially shaped by conflict in the Middle East."

Gee, ya think?

Apparently, the Hillbilly Who Never Was thinks cadets are too mentally limited, isolated, or incurious to understand basic phenomenon without having them diagrammed on a rhetorical etch-a-sketch. Or maybe he's LARP-ing Captain Obvious, one of his favorite skins.

At least he's stating facts, which is rare and likely accidental.

"Unpredictable." Defined roughly as trick-fucking 70 million people into voting for an isolationist platform and then belly flopping into a(nother) energy shocking Middle East quagmire with no exposed, vetted, credible justification ... no consent, no notice to impacted allies, no American conversation, and no sound plan.

Or maybe I'm wrong.

Because the regularity with which our government, regardless of which color of factional flag adorns the scenery, invents reasons to start and extend wars to distract from domestic issues has become so metronomic that we are no longer entitled to be the slightest bit surprised.

Until further notice, we can't be shocked by wars or the liars who lie about them.

Nor can we taken aback by suited stooges using captive military audiences as stage props for the delivery of bitter partisan messages. It was an old norm, and a good one. But political gangrene eventually rots everything.

While it's tempting to pretend doing so started five minutes ago, we're observing the advanced stage of pathology dating to 2004.

An "interest group" which allegedly wasn't representing GW Bush's re-election campaign but got legal advice from said campaign and money from said campaign's biggest donors, decided to wage a propaganda campaign against John Kerry's military service.

They embellished, sensationalized, made up people and events, distorted facts, and outright lied. All with the sponsorship of the United States. This wasn't the beginning of politicizing the military services, but it crossed a thick red line demarcating a previously sacred no-fly zone.

It became okay to attack someone's service as a means of nullifying a key strength making them more electable. The practice of cultivating antagonism with information ops was normalized in the 90s, but a few things were still considered off-limits.

Bush's team changed all that by playing grab-ass with "Swiftboat Veterans For Truth" ... a malignant collection of ideologues pretending to be motivated by the errors of Vietnam when they were actually just ill-tempered, regressive old curmudgeons. Their founder had an old rivalry with Kerry and used our political process for his personal vendetta, which aligned with getting his preferred politician re-elected.

Our entire system shrugged. Even when it was obvious illegality had occurred and enabled the group to have far more influence over the election than should have been possible.

Now we have swiftboating in any election with veteran candidates. And to make things worse, we have shitbag veterans exaggerating the facts and meaning of their service, which rationalizes calling such things into question.

It's one of a million ways we've untethered from any discernible set of values in the way we conduct our most crucial civic process.

So it's no surprise other sacred things, like allowing military formations to stay out of partisan frames, have been made cheap.

JD Vance is a liar. That's not a partisan statement. It's just a fact. His statements contradict his own statements. Nothing he says can be trusted.

Anyone who still chooses to believe a man this changeable deserves whatever they get. Unfortunately, those of us who don't trust him are in the sidecar, like it or not.

Once the cadets forced to sit still for this crap figure out their careers are hard-capped (unless they are white, male, and Christian), subject to pendulum-mounted authoritarian whimsy, and that military officers have had their authority completely embezzled by temp-employed bureaucrats, good luck fielding enough good leaders to contend with the predictably unpredictable world we are shaping.

If you're looking for actual unpredictability, look closer to home.

Vance's buddy Peter Thiel is apparently moving to Argentina to "distance himself from American instability." Which is Kreplachi for "billionaire worried the rich may soon be eaten."

That's the truly unpredictable world being created by politics unmoored from unifying values, the rule of law, and basic accountability.

There's only so much stackable bullshit in the world. After that, things get messy, and beckoning becomes reckoning.