Before I get on to personal stuff, I saw that Israel took out yet another Hezbollah big shot yesterday, this time the head of their drone unit, a guy named Mohammed. (Unexpectedly!) He had an apartment on the third floor of a 10-story building, and the IDF managed to put three missiles into his apartment.
The tone of the media coverage is interesting. The AP mentioned that Mohammed’s apartment – it used to be turn-key, but now it’s a fixer upper – is in a building very near the one where the Dirty Dozen Hezbo commanders were flattened last Friday. The story noted that Thursday’s strike was the fourth to hit a specific area in Beirut, calling that neighborhood “a Hezbollah stronghold.”
The AP needs to look up the definition of the word “stronghold,” because I think they’ve confused it with “missile magnet.”
You’d need a heart of stone not to laugh at the no-win situation the terrorists have gotten themselves into. They can’t use cell phones, pagers, radios, walkie-talkies or smoke signals – unless the smoke involved is rising from their braised hands or genitals. They can’t meet out in the open, and they can’t meet in an office building.
And now they can’t spend time relaxing in their own apartments, flipping through potential matches on Goat Tinder™.
And you know that none of them saw this coming when they decided to fire off a few hundred missiles at Israel, thinking that they were preoccupied with the terrorists in Gaza, and wouldn’t be able to respond effectively.
How does that old cliché go? “Everybody has a plan until their pager blows various appendages off?”
On a personal note, I am writing this from Tennessee, where I have once again come up to visit my mom, while my sister and her husband took a previously scheduled trip for a few days. Regular readers will remember that mom is dealing with Alzheimer’s, which makes every trip to see her both precious and a little heartbreaking.
This trip is a little more fraught because I’ve inadvertently left my wife at home in Gainesville, to ride out a hurricane! When I got up here on Tuesday, Helene was tracking out in the Gulf, around 300 miles from our home in the middle of north central Florida, so we expected some heavy rain and only some moderately gusting winds.
But the storm grew stronger in the last two days, so even though the track has not come closer to our area, the expected winds are stronger. As I’m writing this overnight, my wife has texted to say that she’s lost power, and she’s going to be updating me regularly. She’s got the company of our Wonder Dog and three moderately-useful-at-best cats, and her brother lives nearby, but it feels lousy to not be there with her.
Of course we are praying for the residents of the Big Bend area where the storm has made landfall. The expected devastating effects there will dwarf any that we expect to see in our area, so we won’t be complaining about any clean-up that we’ll need to do in the coming days.
At a time like this I’m grateful for our excellent governor, and the efforts that our state has made to prepare for and respond to this storm. And I hope to be able to report good news and then get back to the usual commentary and snarkery next week.
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 