Day 76: Missiles from North Korea

Today was a good day! I only found enough articles to fill seven bullet points! Of course, there's concentrated horseshit in all of these bullet points. Fair warning.

• North Korea has escalated things by firing a missile ahead of Trump's meeting with the President of China. The official US response from Secretary of State? "North Korea launched yet another intermediate range ballistic missile. The United States has spoken enough about North Korea. We have no further comment." That this is a wildly inappropriate response should be obvious to everybody, especially given the rhetoric towards North Korea coming out of the administration recently. This is not leadership. This is an administration chomping at the bit to have a war. Conveniently, war would be such a good distraction from all those Russian investigations, right?
• Trump met with King Abdullah II of Jordan today. They gave a press conference, in which Trump made a grand fool of himself, essentially insulting everyone.
• Trump also reacted to the Syrian chemical attack today, threatening a forceful unilateral US response. However, like always, his bluster was not backed up by any details, in the name of "not ruining the element of surprise", aka "I don't know what I'm doing, but I need to look strong on this". Trump is simply demonstrating that his administration can't deal with multiple international crises at the same time. One might even posit that one is two too many for him.
• Bannon was removed from the National Security Council today. This appears to have been at the behest of McMaster, who appears to be the only cool head in the White House nowadays. Now the administration's tack is to say that Bannon was put on there to keep eyes on Michael Flynn, which a patently absurd thing to claim, unless you didn't think Flynn should have been there in the first place. But then, who has ever accused this administration of competence?
• Senators basically universally agree that invoking the nuclear option is a terrible idea. But they're going to do it anyway. Why are Republicans so dead set on Gorsuch, anyway? Here's a terrible nomination, and not worth doing this over.
• Speaking of Gorsuch, his 2006 book is rife with plagiarism. Not a good look for a Supreme Court nominee.
• The latest version of the Republican healthcare plan is dead, and it hadn't even been drafted yet. Good grief, these guys need to get their act together.