The Drums Of War (On Drugs)

The brutal massacre of an American Mormon missionary family in Mexico by drug cartel soldiers has Donald Trump howling for military action.

At least 10 members of a prominent Mormon family – three mothers and their young children – were killed in a shooting attack relatives suspect might have been a case of mistaken identity by drug cartel gunmen. About a dozen family members remain missing.

The victims were U.S. citizens and members of La Mora, a decades-old settlement in Sonora state founded as part of an offshoot of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It's located about 70 miles south of Douglas, Arizona. 

The mothers were driving from Bavispe to a wedding in LaBaron, another Mormon community in the state of Chihuahua, when their three vehicles loaded with children were attacked by gunfire, causing one of the vehicles to explode in flames. 

Leah Staddon, a relative who grew up in the same Mormon community before moving to Arizona, said her nephew's wife and her four children died in the blaze.

She said her brother discovered the bullet-ridden vehicle still smoldering.
"It's devastating," Staddon said. "It's incomprehensible, the evil. I don’t understand how someone could do that."

The attack happened near Rancho La Mora on the border between Sonora and Chihuahua, the Mexican newspaper El Diario reported.

The vehicle exploded when bullets hit the gas tank, the newspaper said.

Trump hates Mexicans, who he thinks are all drug criminals and child-killers anyway, so actual Mexican criminals killing kids has sent him into paroxysms of rage on Twitter this morning.

President Trump said Tuesday the U.S. is ready to "wage war" on the drug cartels and "wipe them off the face of the earth" after at least 10 members of a prominent Mormon family were killed in an ambush attack near U.S.-Mexico border.

In a series of tweets, Trump said the U.S. was willing to aid Mexico in "cleaning out these monsters" and that "sometimes you need an army to defeat an army." 

"We merely await a call from your great new president!" he said.

Sending in thousands, maybe tens of thousands of US troops into Mexico to kill cartel soldiers would be quite the escalation of the War on Drugs, now in its sixth decade, and would certainly serve to get impeachment off the front page.  Trump is at best unstable but controllable by his inner circle, but this is a rage boner that may not be able to be contained right now.

We'll see if Republicans talk him down or enable him with legislation.