Another two weeks: Same, same water buffalo with Iran...

The joke is Iran violates the ceasefire and the Trump Administration responds only on the weekends, timing the response so that it doesn’t affect “the markets.”

How many times have we been down this road before? How many weeks? Now how many months? 

My friend (now deceased) said, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”  

I had another friend who vehemently hated liars. I told him liars were like the bad weather speech given by Captain Paul Eddington (Kirk Douglas) in the 1965 U.S. Navy movie “In Harm’s Way,” about Pearl Harbor and its aftermath. (The cast of this World War II epic included John Wayne and Kirk Douglas.)

They are like bad weather, it (bad weather) is always with us. Liars are just a fact of life. They are like change — get used to it.  

I asked him, “Why the intensity?” 

His answer surprised me. Something I never thought of, or would never think of...  He said he hated liars because they were extremely arrogant.  

I wasn’t following, and asked for a further explanation. He said liars assume that they are very smart, and that the rest of us are extremely stupid... that we will believe any “hogwash” they choose to serve upon us.  

I was going through my third divorce at the time, and for some reason his explanation hit a “home run” for me at that time.  

I have often thought what is the purpose of a lie. Duh — to deceive. If you can’t deceive, why tell a lie? 

Maybe because they (liars) really do believe they are smarter than the rest of us. 

Maybe it’s like a sergeant of mine once said about killing in Vietnam. He claimed it gave him an (expletive deleted) charge. 

Maybe it gives them some kind of narcissistic (is that a good word?) charge.  

I don’t know, but it is frustrating. 

Maybe these “Persian rug merchants” think they are getting one over on us.

Maybe they believe that they can play this game through to the midterm elections.  

Maybe they believe it will benefit their left-wing apparatchiks. 

Maybe they think Santa Bama will some how clean out the banks in the Washington D.C. area again, and leave them billions of dollars on the midnight runway.  

That is, if only they will promise to be good “little” boys.  

For me, gas prices are dropping. Markets are up. 

With the Hormuz embargo lifted, the world is not choosing to buy Iranian oil, and it’s not within my pay grade to know everything.  

Me, being a “little redneck” from Enka-Candler, I don’t know; but I “ain’t” fooled.  I’m just a smelly “Wal-Mart” shopper with normal-colored hair, appropriate to my age — not No Kings’ cotton candy-colored.  

I chose to stay the course, and it seems Trump is winning… what? AGAIN!

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Roger Buckner, a political conservative and an Asheville native, lives in South Asheville. In his retirement, he is a hiking, biking, ballroom dance and motorcycle enthusiast. Earlier, as a member of the United States Marine Corps, Buckner served in the Vietnam War. Later, he worked for the Asheville Police Department and the Buncombe County Sheriff’s Office.