Fire & Fury?
Baffling, even after watching Trump's juvenocracy for the past six months. Is he really willing to put our young men and women in harms way (not to mention many Koreans and more) just to boost his plummeting poll numbers?

Rachel Maddow helps us sort this out, pointing out that the new variable is not miniaturized bombs or ballistic missile technology, but that for the first time in the history of this conflict the leader of North Korea no longer stands alone on the altar of crazy and clueless.

We are watching a race.

In lane one, we have an angry and ignorant old man with our nuclear codes on a track to starting a world war to vainly try to boost his own popularity in fear of being seen as a loser.

In lane two, we have largely Republican leaders in Congress, our military, and the president's cabinet who are the only ones who can stop him (25th Amendment) in time. There are signs that some of these have begun to move from 'we can use him without risk' to 'the risk is too great,' but we need more to move, more rapidly, to avoid a war.

If lane one wins, the pain and devastation that will result is difficult to overstate.Avoiding this requires those in lane two to move from an electoral calculation (timeline: by midterms) to a lunatic dictator calculation (timeline: ASAP).

Otherwise, lane one wins and we all suffer not just the daily humiliation that is this tweetocracy but both large loss of life and eight years of an angry ignorant old man as a commander in chief willing to do whatever it takes to boost his own popularity.