For most of his political career, Tennessee Senator Bob Corker has been an off-the-rack mainstream conservative Republican. His views on most issues are ready-made, not bespoke. His 2006 campaign ran a race baiting ad against his opponent but otherwise he’s been stolid, solid, and boring. That ended with the electoral college victory of the Insult Comedian. The two men have traded the odd barb throughout the year but it exploded into the president’s* latest WWE-style feud yesterday.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/917026789188399105

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/917029060471152640

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/917030148867682304

The response was perhaps the best I’ve seen from a politician:

It's a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.

— Senator Bob Corker (@SenBobCorker) October 8, 2017

I don’t know if Corker mans his own twitter feed but that’s a masterpiece of social media snark. If it’s a staffer give her or him a raise. They’ll be out of a job by January 2019, after all.

There’s a post smackdown piece in the New York Times wherein we learned that Trump lied about Corker “begging” for his support:

Mr. Corker flatly disputed that account, saying Mr. Trump had urged him to run again, and promised to endorse him if he did. But the exchange laid bare a deeper rift: The senator views Mr. Trump as given to irresponsible outbursts — a political novice who has failed to make the transition from show business.

CNN confirmed Corker’s account. Besides, anyone who believes anything that comes out of the Insult Comedian’s pie hole is too stupid to live.

More importantly, Corker expressed genuine concern in the same interview about the militant craziness of Trump’s foreign policy:

Senator Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, charged in an interview on Sunday that President Trump was treating his office like “a reality show,” with reckless threats toward other countries that could set the nation “on the path to World War III.”

Corker is referring to Trump’s increasingly unhinged and inaccurate comments about North Korea. The Kaiser of Chaos keeps confusing Kim Jong-un with both his father and grandfather. It’s unclear if he knows that the guy he derides as Rocket Man is the third member of the Kim family to be dictator since 1992. My hunch is that he hasn’t a clue, which would be par for the course for this president*.

Trump is out to disprove Teddy Roosevelt’s famous aphorism “speak softly, and carry a big stick.” Trump is screaming empty threats at the top of his lungs. At least I hope they’re empty threats. I’m afraid that the triumvirate (troika?) of Kelly, McMaster, and Mattis will have to bodily tackle Trump to prevent him from nuking Pyongyang.

I, for one, am glad that Republicans like Bob Corker are speaking out against Trump. Yes, some of them are responsible for electing the crazy motherfucker but Watergate teaches us that you can only dispose of a criminal president when their own party turns on them. Nixon was headed to conviction in the Senate. The reason Bill Clinton survived was that his party stuck with him. Thanks in part to research by Abbie Lowell who is now Slumlord Jared’s attorney. Ironies abound, y’all.

I’m in favor of building coalitions on an issue-by-issue basis. If previously hawkish Republicans are aghast by Trump’s insane pronouncements, working with them to stop a nuclear exchange is not only sensible but imperative. Does anyone think that Bob Corker wants to nuke North Korea? Donald Trump is the only one who seems to think making such threats is a winning strategy. He should look at a map sometime and see how close Seoul and Tokyo are to Rocket Man’s missiles. Of course, that would involve work and that’s not what this president* does. Instead, he watches teevee, golfs, tweets, and lies.

I eagerly await the next salvo in the war of words between the Republican president* and the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committe. It’s a Corker of a feud.