The Inlet, The Reddening, 48th Day of Spring, 526 M.E. (Aldebaran) - I don't know why it happened, but when I turned my television on yesterday morning, it was tuned to the Fox News channel. 

I don't have my television set to a default station, so whenever I turn it on, it airs the last channel I was watching. Yesterday morning, the appearance of the Fox News channel means that I must have been watching that cesspool of misinformation last thing the night before. But I have no memory of watching Fox News that night and can't for the life of me imagine why I would have turned to it before bed. 

But regardless, the first thing I saw was two Fox hosts smugly announcing that the Strait of Hormuz was once again open and the inflated oil prices were rapidly dropping, and that the Stable Genius' prediction that it would reopen "naturally" and prices would soon return to normal have been proven true. "You see?," they were saying, the war was worth it, the ayatollah has been killed, and there was only minor and temporary disruption to the stock market and the economy.

Setting aside the morality or the consequences of assassinating the leader of another nation, no matter how despicable, the quick drop of the price per barrel of oil will not immediately be realized at the pump. Those prices, it's been said, tend to take the elevator to the top and the stairs coming down. But what really annoyed me in my 30 seconds of watching Fox News before I switched to another channel was the hosts' smug conclusion that the Stable Genius had been proven correct and had been right all along.

The unfortunate side effect of their smugness was that I wound up hoping the reopening wouldn't last and the Stable Genius would be proven wrong. I was cheering against my own and the world's well being. A closed Strait and skyrocketing oil prices puts not only my own retirement in peril, but negatively affects the entire world economy. Stable Genius Derangement Syndrome: my distaste for our so-called "president" has me cheering against my own economic interest. Ironically, my case of Derangement Syndrome came not because of the left's bashing of the President but was due to his media cheerleader's celebration.  

No Fox News this morning, thankfully, and no television, either, but I saw online that Iran has re-closed the Strait. This should be considered bad news, but my first reaction was, "Hah! Proves the Stable Genius was wrong!," not "Shit! Oil prices may never come back down again."

To be clear, I had let myself fall into Fox News' framing of the volatile and complicated situation in the Middle East. Before the Stable Genius decided to kill the ayatollah and bomb Iran, the Strait was open and had been open for decades. The price of oil fluctuated based on market factors of supply and demand, not the holding hostage of international waterways. But after a month of carnage, chaos, and disruption at the sole and inscrutable whims of the Stable Genius, the Strait is closed and the price of oil is stratospheric. 

The Stable Genius didn't re-open the Strait - which, remember, was open before his reckless adventures - but Iran did, and the reopening of the Strait is no "victory" for the U.S. or for the Stable Genius. At best, it merely puts a closing parenthesis on the damage and cost of the stupid war, and is no cause for celebration. No matter what the smirking white boys and their bleached blond cohosts on Fox News say.