BREAKING: The State Department's entire senior management team just resigned.

[tclambert]

100. Do you recall the 1998 movie "The Siege?"

Denzel Washington, Bruce Willis, Annette Benning, and Tony Shalhoub starred in it. I kind of liked Willis' portrayal of General Devereaux, who "implores" the politicians not to order martial law. "It will be noisy. It will be scary. And it will not be mistaken for a VFW parade," he warns. But the President orders it, and he rolls tanks into New York City. At the end, Agent Hubbard (Denzel Washington) identifies the last member of the terrorist cell and shoots him before he can set off his bomb, then arrests General Devereaux for "the torture and murder of Tariq Husseini, an American citizen." (The military had, of course, gotten carried away with their "aggressive" interrogation of a suspect.) Devereaux threatens to order his men to shoot all the FBI agents who came to arrest him, but decides in the end that what is best for the country is for him to submit to being arrested.

I think that movie addressed the subject of terrorism and possible responses to terrorism in a much more mature way than the Bush administration ever did. I expect the Trump administration will make the Bush people look like deep thinkers by comparison.