The Vanish Armada

For over a week now, we've been told that a carrier task force led by the nuclear aircraft carrier Carl Vinson was heading toward the Korean peninsula as a show of force regarding North Korea's ballistic missile test launch. Incompetent buffoon Donald "Rump" Trump even referred to the task force as "an armada". The Beltway media stenographers and punditocracy took the bait, citing it as an example of Rump flexing America's military muscles toward North Korea.

Now, it appears that all of last week the task force was engaged in exercises with the Australian Navy, and was in the Sunda Straits in Indonesian waters last Saturday, and not headed toward the Sea of Japan some 3,500 miles away until earlier this week. As one news outlet charitably observed:

"It isn't clear yet whether the storyline about the Carl Vinson was the product of deliberate deception by the Navy, defense officials in Washington or the White House, or whether internal miscommunication within the government might have turned the snowball into the avalanche."

We'd surmise that it's a combination of deliberate deception and bumbling from Rump's White (Supremacist) House which keeps tripping on its shoelaces.