Iran: Waging War in Secret
Dan Rather raised an important question this week: How can Americans judge a war when their government tells them so little about it?
The United States has now been at war with Iran for six months. American service members are risking their lives, billions of taxpayer dollars are being spent, and the Strait of Hormuz remains severely restricted. Yet Americans have remarkably little independent information about what is actually happening.
Rather points out that there appear to be no American journalists embedded with U.S. forces in the region. That is striking. Reporters accompanied American forces during Iraq and Afghanistan and, in one form or another, have reported alongside American troops going back generations.
Instead, much of what Americans see today comes from Pentagon-produced material, administration statements, satellite imagery, anonymous sources and information coming from Iran—which itself can be difficult to verify. That becomes especially troubling when the administration escalates the war as has happened in the last two days as Trump ordered renewed strikes against Iran over the weekend. Iran retaliated, reportedly striking a U.S. base in Jordan. But Americans still don’t know the full extent of the damage.
There are also questions about whether six months of combat are straining America’s stockpile of weapons and potentially reducing our ability to respond to another international crisis. The Pentagon says our military remains prepared. Yet The Washington Post reported on a classified Pentagon assessment warning that prolonged operations against Iran could weaken America’s ability to respond to future threats.
Rather’s larger point is one worth remembering regardless of who occupies the White House: A democracy should not wage war in the dark.
There are obviously military secrets that cannot be made public. But secrecy necessary to protect American troops is very different from secrecy designed to protect political leaders from scrutiny. Americans should know why we are fighting, what our objectives are, what the war is costing, what progress we are making and—perhaps most importantly—what victory is supposed to look like.
Six months into this war, those questions are becoming more important, not less. American men and women are being asked to fight it. American taxpayers are paying for it. We have a right to know how it is going.
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The Abdication Caucus
Mary Geddry wrote a powerful piece this week entitled The Abdication Caucus. Her central argument is one we should all think about: Donald Trump’s expansion of presidential power isn’t simply about a president taking power. It is also about Congress failing to exercise the power the Constitution already gives it. As Geddry puts it, the Constitution can give Congress power, but it cannot make Congress use it.
Nowhere is that more important than with the war in Iran.
Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall recently described Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as the most dysfunctional defense secretary he encountered during a career spanning roughly a dozen Pentagon chiefs. Kendall says the removal of senior military officers has created a “climate of fear” in which people are reluctant to give leaders advice they don’t want to hear. Other retired military leaders have raised similar concerns about the loss of experienced officers, military readiness, depleted munitions, strained logistics and resources being diverted from other parts of the world to sustain the Iran war. Those aren’t partisan questions. They’re questions Congress is supposed to be asking.
The Constitution gives Congress enormous authority over the military. Congress controls appropriations. The Senate confirms senior officials. Congressional committees can investigate government operations, demand documents and call officials to testify. Yet six months into the Iran war, Congress largely watches.
Meanwhile, President Trump presents an increasingly sanitized picture of the conflict. Over the weekend he posted an AI-generated video appearing to show Iran’s Kharg Island being destroyed and declared Iran “DEAD.”
But an AI-generated video isn’t a war.
The real war involves exhausted military personnel, damaged bases, dwindling munitions, difficult supply lines, adversaries adapting to American strategy and civilians being killed.
Geddry points to another troubling example of executive power—the Postal Service ballot system I discuss elsewhere in today’s blog. A whistleblower says a hastily developed federal system could potentially prevent entire batches of mail ballots from being processed because of a single discrepancy. Again, the issue is larger than the individual policy.
The executive branch acts. Courts sometimes intervene. Individual members of Congress write letters, appear on television and complain. But Congress as an institution too often does very little.
Our founders divided government power among three branches for a reason. They understood that concentrated political power is dangerous regardless of who exercises it. Separation of powers, however, doesn’t operate automatically. Congress has to defend its authority. That means conducting serious oversight, demanding documents, compelling testimony, controlling spending and—when necessary—telling a president no.
And this isn’t just about Donald Trump.
Every time Congress allows a president to exercise authority that traditionally belonged to the legislative branch, it potentially hands that same authority to every president who follows.
Republicans should ask themselves whether they would be comfortable with a future Democratic president exercising these same powers. Democrats should ask themselves the same question when their party controls the White House.
Geddry closes with an observation that may be the most important sentence in her piece: Power left unused doesn’t stay in storage. Eventually, somebody else picks it up.
The Constitution gave Congress enormous power to check a president. The question is whether Congress has the courage to use it.
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When Criticizing the Press Becomes Trying to Punish the Press
Presidents have complained about the press since the beginning of our country. Thomas Jefferson did it. Abraham Lincoln did it. Richard Nixon did it. Barack Obama did it. Joe Biden did it. And Donald Trump certainly has every right to do it.
But there is an important difference between a president criticizing the press and a president using the power of the federal government to punish journalists and news organizations whose reporting he doesn’t like.
That is the concern raised by David A. Graham in The Atlantic.
Over the weekend, Trump became angry with NBC’s Kristen Welker after she described the results of his recent political endorsements as a “mixed bag.” Trump responded by saying she would be reported to the Federal Communications Commission for “rebuke or punishment.” He separately called upon the FCC to do something about what he called “fake polls” published by the media.
There is a rather fundamental problem with that idea. The FCC is not supposed to determine whether a journalist’s reporting is sufficiently favorable to the president. In fact, the FCC itself has said that substituting government judgment for the editorial decisions of broadcasters would be inconsistent with the First Amendment.
Trump has sued or threatened numerous news organizations and journalists. His administration has restricted the access of certain reporters. The Pentagon has dramatically reduced press access and has been engaged in its own battle with journalists reporting information the Defense Department would prefer remain secret. ABC and Disney are now suing the FCC, arguing that the administration’s unusual early review of eight ABC television-station licenses amounts to retaliation for the network’s speech.
President Trump has every right to call a reporter unfair. He can criticize NBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN or this blog if he wants to. But the First Amendment also protects the people criticizing him.
The press certainly makes mistakes. Journalists deserve criticism when they get stories wrong, and Americans have every right to distrust a newspaper, television network or reporter they believe is biased. But the remedy for bad journalism in a free society is better journalism—not government punishment. Republicans should be particularly sensitive to this principle. Conservatives spent years arguing that government officials should not pressure private companies to silence political speech.
That principle shouldn’t change depending upon who occupies the White House. Imagine a future Democratic president ordering federal regulators to investigate Fox News because she didn’t like its coverage. Conservatives would be outraged. They would also be right.
The First Amendment was not written to protect Republicans from Democrats or Democrats from Republicans. It was written to protect all of us from the government.
And that’s why threats to use government power against journalists—even journalists we dislike—should concern every American.
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If Voter Fraud Is So Rare, Why Risk Disrupting Millions of Legal Votes?
On Monday I wrote about election fraud and questioned whether the problem is remotely as widespread as President Trump and many Republicans would have us believe.
I pointed out that the Heritage Foundation—the conservative organization frequently cited by Republicans on election integrity—has documented roughly 1,600 proven cases involving various forms of election fraud over several decades. When the issue is narrowed specifically to noncitizens voting, the number becomes dramatically smaller.
Now comes a story that makes that discussion even more important.
On Tuesday, The New York Times, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal all reported on a whistleblower inside the U.S. Postal Service who has raised serious concerns about a new system being developed to implement President Trump’s restrictions on voting by mail.
The proposal represents a significant change in the Postal Service’s traditional role. Historically, state and local election officials determine who should receive a mail ballot, and the Postal Service delivers it. Under the new system, election officials would upload voter information into a new Federal Ballot Mail Portal, and specially barcoded ballot envelopes would be checked before the Postal Service accepted them for delivery.
According to the whistleblower, the computer system behind that process has been built on an extraordinarily compressed timetable.
The whistleblower says development began around June 15, with a planned September 1, 2026, launch. Work was interrupted because of litigation, leaving even less time for development and testing. According to the disclosure, a system of this complexity would ordinarily require substantially more time, yet normal testing and debugging procedures were compressed or eliminated.
Perhaps the most troubling allegation involves what the whistleblower describes as a “zero percent failure” policy.
Election officials would submit batches of ballot envelopes to the Postal Service. Workers would scan a sample of those envelopes and compare their barcodes with information in the new federal portal. According to the whistleblower, if even one sampled barcode failed to match, the entire batch could be rejected and returned for correction.
A batch could contain thousands—or potentially tens of thousands—of ballots.
That doesn’t mean thousands of votes have already been rejected. They haven’t. The system is not currently operating because a federal judge has temporarily blocked important portions of the rule. The Trump administration is appealing that decision.
And this is where I come back to Monday’s discussion.
There is nothing wrong with trying to make our elections secure. Only eligible voters should vote. Fraud should be investigated, and people who knowingly cast illegal ballots should be prosecuted.
However, election laws should also be proportional to the problem they are designed to solve. If widespread illegal voting were occurring, imposing major new safeguards might be an understandable response. But the evidence we looked at Monday showed something quite different: documented illegal voting—particularly voting by noncitizens—is exceedingly uncommon.
So, we should ask another question: Could the cure become more damaging than the disease? A system intended to prevent an illegal ballot from being mailed should not inadvertently prevent thousands of legitimate voters from receiving theirs.
The Trump administration argues that the new requirements will strengthen election security. The Postal Service’s published rule says the changes are intended to ensure compliance with federal election law and establish standardized procedures for federal ballot mail.
That argument deserves to be heard but so does the warning from the people charged with making the system work. Election security and voting access should not be opposing goals. We should be able to do both: make it difficult to vote illegally while making it straightforward for every eligible American to cast a legal ballot.
The real test of an election law shouldn’t be whether it helps Republicans or Democrats. It should be much simpler: Does it solve a demonstrated problem without preventing legitimate Americans from voting?
Right now, there are legitimate reasons to question whether this new Postal Service system passes that test.
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What Happened to the Detroit Tigers?
Less than three weeks ago, the Detroit Tigers were one game under .500 and still very much alive in the playoff race. Today they are 12 games under .500 and, their season is essentially over. In their last two games against the Twins, the Tigers were outscored 26-3. What happened to the Tigers?
In early August, the Tigers were only 2½ games out of the final Wild Card spot when management traded Tarik Skubal and Casey Mize. The logic was understandable. Both pitchers were approaching free agency, and the Tigers decided their long-term value as trade assets outweighed keeping them for a playoff run.
But there was a price. Detroit traded away its two best starting pitchers—including Skubal, the two-time defending Cy Young Award winner—while the team was still playing meaningful baseball. Surprisingly, the Tigers initially responded by winning. They climbed back to within one game of .500 and remained in the playoff race.
Then reality caught up with them. The starting rotation became thinner. An already questionable bullpen was asked to do more. And perhaps most importantly, the hitting disappeared. When you’re consistently scoring only one or two runs, there is very little margin for error.
Last Friday, there was something painfully symbolic about Skubal’s return to Comerica Park. Wearing a Dodgers uniform, he held his former teammates to one run over six innings as the Tigers lost 2-1.
I don’t blame A.J. Hinch, nor am I ready to declare that Scott Harris made terrible trades. The prospects Detroit received may eventually become very good major-league players. But the collapse raises a larger question:
At what point does a rebuilding baseball team decide it is time to win? The Tigers made the playoffs in 2024 and 2025. The Tiger’s leadership thought they had made the moves at the beginning of the season to prepare the team for a strong run in 2026. However, they didn’t strengthen the bullpen and that was their undoing as the Tigers have lost 28 games when leading after the sixth inning. At the trade deadline, the Tigers waived the white flag and decided to build for the future. At some point, constantly building for the future becomes frustrating when the future is supposed to have already arrived.
We’ll never know what would have happened had Detroit kept Skubal and Mize for two more months. Watching the Tigers fall out of contention makes it awfully difficult not to wonder what might have happened.
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Quote of the Day: “Power left unused doesn’t stay in storage. Eventually, somebody else picks it up.” — Mary Geddry
Orchid of the Day: To the military officers, government whistleblowers and journalists who continue to tell us things people in power would sometimes prefer we didn’t know. Democracy requires people willing to ask difficult questions—and people willing to answer them.
Onion of the Day: President Trump, for posting an AI-generated video depicting Iran’s Kharg Island being destroyed and announcing it was being “blown to smithereens,” when there was no evidence such an attack had occurred. A president can argue his case for a war. He shouldn’t need artificial intelligence to manufacture pictures of victories that didn’t happen.
Question of the Day: If Congress won’t exercise its constitutional powers when the president belongs to its own party, does the separation of powers really work?
Lyrics of the Day: There’s something happening here
But what it is ain’t exactly clear…I think it’s time we stop
Children, what’s that sound? Everybody look, what’s going down?
Lyrics of the Day August 31, 2026: I Will Always Love You, by Dolly Parton
Video of the Day: Freedom of the Press: Crash Course Government and Politics #26
All of your commentaries are substantive, enlightening, informative, and need a whole lot of prayer for the ongoing chaos and uncertainty they are triggering!