By BRUCE LOWITT
An analysis of military strikes by Iran during the eight months of President Donald Trump’s war shows far greater damage than that reported by the Defense Department, including aircraft and buildings on more than two dozen Mideast bases, the White House ballroom and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
The Associated Press independently verified damage using satellite imagery and speaking to regional officials who acknowledged that some of the more than 115 Iranian drone or missile strikes also “blew the shit out of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Republican National Committee,” said one source who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wants to retire next week and keep his rank as a lieutenant general.
Another officer told The AP that the apparent destruction of the White House’s East Wing, built in 1902 and expanded in 1942, was not the work of demolition and construction crews but was caused by two missiles which pierced the national security infrastructure weakened by what he called “a certain orange asshole administration’s budget cuts.”
A White House source, who also spoke on condition of anonymity the same day she was fired, said the “bulldozers, cranes and all that other crap were just rented to make it look like work was being done there. If you don’t believe me, go ask any of the so-called ‘construction workers’, every one of them a member of the Screen Actors Guild.”
The reflecting pool damage, she said, “started with that crappy installation – I know this because I saw you-know-who’s personal no-bid kickback deal with that fat cigar smoker – but most of it actually was from a missile. I know this because you-know-who gave me a tailfin from it as a souvenir and going-away present if, he said, I’d keep my ‘pretty little mouth shut’.”
Just as the Trump Administration hired little-known and inexperienced Atlantic Industrial Coatings on a no-bid contract to repair, resurface and apply the blue coating to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the Kennedy Center, now run by a Trump-controlled board, recently hired a little-known Minnesota architecture company, ATSR, with no experience in theaters or historic buildings for the $257-million overhaul.
David B. Rubenstein, dismissed as the board’s chairman when Trump fired him and 18 board members in February, said he checked out ATSR, which mostly designs public schools and churches, and determined its eight architects “wouldn’t know the difference between their asshole and a hole in the ground – which, by the way, is what the middle of the Kennedy Center now has after a missile went through the roof, or so I’m told.”
Vice President JD Vance, Finance Chairman of the Republican National Committee, said spending millions to reconstruct the demolished RNC headquarters “probably wouldn’t be worth it. I mean, maybe in a week and definitely in two years we won’t need a lavish HQ like we have now because our membership will probably be small enough that we can meet at an IHOP or Denny’s.”
