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Category Archives: current events
Sick and ridiculous
Indecency personified, with a nice assist from the jack-o-lantern-faced Secretary of Treasury and a cast of despicables. As always, Lawrence O’Donnell nails it. (Pasted wrong link, sorry, couldn’t find Bessent bit…)
It’s the incoherence, stupid
Lying is one thing, and it’s a bad thing, most of the time. Without trust, there’s not much basis for dialogue or friendship. You can lie to spare someone’s feelings, but outside of that, it’s hard to think of a good lie. The truly corrosive thing in human relations is incoherence. If someone insists on an incoherent version of events, no communication is really possible with that person. The only healthy course of action is to understand you’re dealing with someone who is incoherent and disengage.
You can never persuade an incoherent person to listen to nuance or to compromise based on shared reality because their need to believe what they believe is impervious to reason. They are incoherent because they have no emotional choice but to believe what they believe, 100%. Doubt would crush them, because, in any dispute based on what is really going on, they have no ammunition, outside of a blind, angry insistence that they’re right. Being wrong in any detail of anything is an intolerable humiliation they will never submit to. In a war with such brutal stakes, incoherence is truly their only play.
I’ve had the misfortune to know many of these motherfuckers over the course of my long life. Some have been very good companions, everything is fine with them, as long as you’re conciliatory. You can laugh with them, enjoy a good meal, go on an adventure together, until any conflict arises. In the event of any kind of disagreement, unless you drop it immediately and pretend it never happened, you get a childish insistence that what happened never happened, they don’t remember, or understand, or that you’re a liar, or that they might have been lying when you quote them as saying they might have been lying, that they never called you a liar and certainly never said they might have been lying, etc. It can make your head spin when these creatures really get going.
I knew an old lady, 98 now (same age my mother would be if she was alive), since I was her son’s best friend in fourth grade, who often insisted on things that were incoherent. She had to believe, for example, that the nightmarish marriage her son fought in for almost thirty years was completely the fault of his insane ex-wife. It was one of those conflicts, you know, where only one person is to blame for all the ugliness and the other, the innocent party, simply made the mistake of engaging with someone who was a violently enraged lunatic. There was no reason, in the old lady’s version, for the furious wife’s rage, outside of her own troubles. Her husband had absolutely nothing to do with it, even if he was passive aggressive, habitually untruthful, a provocative weasel, etc.
In the end I did the only thing possible in the face of an insistence on an insane worldview. After hearing the same insane insistence that I must forgive even people incapable of regret, empathy or apology, I stopped taking her calls and wrote her a note which I put in the mail. Her response was a classic, a close variation on the one you will always get from someone who insists incoherence by way of the last word is simply fine and dandy and there will be no further discussion of the matter. I put the perfectly polished turd of her last word in a frame, nobody I know ever phrased it more to the point:
Incoherence, when it comes from the most powerful man in the world’s most powerful country, is truly fucking horrific.
This morning, Trump’s social media account once again blamed U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for not joining his war, although NATO is a defensive alliance, designed to respond to an attack. The account posted: “Without the U.S.A., NATO IS A PAPER TIGER! They didn’t want to join the fight to stop a Nuclear Powered Iran. Now that fight is Militarily WON, with very little danger for them, they complain about the high oil prices they are forced to pay, but don’t want to help open the Strait of Hormuz, a simple military maneuver that is the single reason for the high oil prices. So easy for them to do, with so little risk. COWARDS, and we will REMEMBER! President DONALD J. TRUMP.”
This afternoon, Trump told reporters: “You know, we don’t use the strait…we don’t need it. Europe needs it, Korea, Japan, China, a lot of other people, so they’ll have to get involved a little bit on that one.” He also said: “I think we’ve won, we’ve knocked out their Navy, their Air Force. We’ve knocked out their anti-aircraft. We’ve knocked out everything. We’re roaming free. From a military standpoint, all they’re doing is clogging up the strait. But from a military standpoint, they’re finished.” . . .
. . . Aware that [Trump’s impulsive] war is historically unpopular, Republicans in Congress are refusing to exercise any oversight of the Pentagon and the White House. Megan Mineiro of the New York Times reported today that Republicans don’t want to expose disapproval of the war and so are simply cheering Trump on in public. Rather than holding public hearings that would allow the American people to hear the administration’s justification for the war and plans for its execution, as Democrats demand, Republicans are permitting the administration to inform Congress as it wishes, behind closed doors.
“You don’t want to show that kind of division to your enemy when you’re in the midst of a war,” Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Mineiro. “I don’t have a problem with the administration avoiding showing our enemy that they don’t have 100 percent support of the Congress.”
“They’re holding news conferences,” Senate majority leader John Thune (R-SD) told reporters last week, so there is no need for official hearings. source
See, as long as FOX NEWS CHANNEL is covering the ongoing story, there’s no reason for debate in Congress. Unite behind the Commander-in-Chief or make yourself liable to the punishment for treason. Debate only aids our enemy, whoever that might be, and the Commander-in-Chief is the only one who determines who is an enemy and who deserves death, so stop being disloyal and just support our troops. So-called intellectuals, and so-called pragmatists, always insist that men of action have to explain themselves. That is the fatal liberal error of history, according to devotees of the incoherence of the will.
Assholes assume everyone is like them
If you are the kind of person who cheats at games, you assume everyone else is cheating, that’s why you have to. Apply this to any asshole behavior and you’ll find the same thing. We “wise apes” (homo sapiens) rarely do anything without feeling completely justified. How do you lie about people legally in the country being savages who eat good people’s dogs and cats? Your enemy would do the same thing, to gain an advantage, if they had the cojones, el huevos. If you rig elections, it’s only because your enemies are rigging elections, otherwise how else would they win?
Trumpism, like the ethos of our own religious white Christian slaveholders, is the perfect illustration of this principle. The slaveholders used overwhelming violence, well-armed militias and the threat of death to keep the slaves in line because if the slaves ever got free they would, according to their innocent masters, mercilessly massacre all the people who committed what they felt were atrocities against them. For that reason, the terrible vengeance an enslaved people would rightfully seek, the masters had to be extremely violent.
Old Mr. Day of Love himself told the crowd he was whipping up to peacefully storm the Capitol to gently convince reluctant members of Congress to declare him the winner of an election all evidence, and several of his closest advisers (including giant human turd Bill Barr who used the word “bullshit” to describe the baseless election fraud claim) said he’d decisively lost:
“When you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules. So I hope Mike has the courage to do what he has to do, and I hope he doesn’t listen to the RINOs and the stupid people that he’s listening to.”
This little piece, repeated by MAGA spokespeople from time to time, reminded me of that timeless human principle, that wrongdoers always justify themselves by accusing everybody else of doing the same thing, in their position.
Let’s leave aside the fact that the Trump administration is continually pursuing baseless prosecutions, without any evidence of wrongdoing, with their weaponized, scofflaw Department of Justice, a department that also routinely defies court orders. And not to apply logic to an unfounded and false statement, but the FBI in the lead-up to the 2020 election was under the control of Trump enabler Bill Barr’s Department of Justice.
They had just suicided Jeffrey Epstein so he’d be nice and quiet about his long friendship with his longtime running buddy President Trump. There was, literally, nothing to see there — both guards were gone and the cameras were out when he suddenly died — a series of regrettable fuck ups, as Barr shrugged when the threat of Epstein was gone. Who exactly would have weaponized these “untrue and sensationalist” claims? Trump’s enemy former FBI director James Comey had been dismissed years earlier, he couldn’t have done it. Hugo Chavez, perhaps?
We are to believe that all the heavily redacted Epstein files that have been released are all totally kosher, in accordance to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law, veto-proof, by Mr. Trump. The names and nude photos of underaged Epsyein victims revealed to the public, oops, DOJ said they were under pressure to release files and mistakes happened (though no abusers’ names were mistakenly revealed). The three million pages Blanche and Bondi refuse to release? Well, the EFTA has no criminal enforcement provision, so fuck you. The president has nothing to hide (it’s not like he’s hiding his entire educational record or anything like that). How dare you question the most transparent administration in the history of the world?!
In fairness to the serially immoral, criminally insane Mr. Trump, he assumes anyone would do the same, act exactly as he knows he has to act, so he’s just doing it before somebody can do it to him. If you had evidence of your own crimes, wouldn’t you do everything possible to hide them? Come on, be honest.
Do not panic, induced despair is the main tool of Nazis
Though he lied about it at the time, obviously, the Hitler book the totally non-racist Mr. Trump had on his nightstand was not Mein Kampf, as some reported, but The Collected Speeches of Adolf Hitler. Trump is not known to be much of a reader, I suspect the Hitler tome was just there to remind his wife, Ivana, who she was married to. Anyway, the German strongman had nothing on our American Dictator On Day One. Though I got lots of shit for comparing Trump and his hand-chosen cast of freakishly cynical, ambitious, amoral shapeshifters to Nazis, I get less shit about it today than a couple of years ago.
I’ve always been fond of long sentences. Why place a period to end a thought you’re still thinking when you can use a comma, you know, sometimes an em dash — and continue on indefinitely; when in doubt, why not a semicolon? Anyway, here’s one of the longest English language sentences I’ve ever seen, and it’s a beauty in its catalogue of recent inhuman cruelty and incoherence. It’s written by a self-identified human named Gene Weingarten.
In the last two weeks alone, Donald Trump has destabilized the Middle East, turned the United States into a pariah state, killed more than a hundred little girls by mistake then denied he had done it and then admitted he might have done it but he didn’t know for sure because he hadn’t bothered to look into it, caused gas prices to spike by 25%, enabled Israel to commit atrocities against Lebanon, begged for military help from our historic allies whom he had previously insulted and alienated, and then threatened to punish those same allies if they don’t help him, said many in the media were “guilty of treason” for not cheerleading his benighted, unpopular war, gloated about having castrated the fourth estate, proudly identifying his conquests by name in a social media post …
… declared the Iran war over, then not over, and then over, again, then said that we had “totally demolished” a key Iranian oil facility, but added that he might bomb it a little more “just for fun,” continued pardoning his cronies and white-collar felons whose crimes have already wiped out nearly $2 billion in victim repayment and taxpayer recovery for various frauds, said that a former U.S. president he wouldn’t name had told him he regretted not bombing Iran first, but all four living former presidents immediately denied having said it, saw his approval rating plummet like a flapping turkey dropped from a helicopter, said he might “take” Cuba, revealed that his administration was considering withholding HIV aid to Zambia “on a massive scale” unless that impoverished country gives us access to their copper, cobalt and lithium stores … and played at least four rounds of golf.
According to my research, at 286 words the passage above was the longest single sentence ever written in a Substack newsletter.
Also, just an aside, in researching that item about Trump threatening widespread death to Zambians, I discovered that The Wikipedia entry devoted exclusively to DonaldTrump’s racist views is significantly longer than the Wikipedia entry for The Korean War.
These psychopaths (self-obsessed, manipulative, always ready to lie, lacking any ability to empathize) want you to believe their power is absolute, unchallengeable, the strongest force in the universe. They control their lackeys through transactional bribes, promises of unlimited opportunities for power and corrupt self-enrichment; their followers by lying promises they have no intention of keeping, and; all others by terror.
Terror is the main weapon of fascists. If they can keep masses of citizens in constant confusion, perplexed, anxious, in fear for their physical safety, the lives of their loved ones, they have a tremendous advantage. Like all bullies, pushing an incoherent claim to the right to make others do what they want, they are also very fragile. Defiance drives them insane. It is important, in these dangerous times, not to give in to the despair they are laser focused on instilling. There is nothing at all inevitable about their transforming the United States into a permanent one party fascist police state, though that’s clearly their goal. They are fucking up massively and spectacularly, over and over, in spite of controlling all three branches of the federal government. Every election, every poll, every utterance by any of them, demonstrates the unpopularity of their cruel grift, over and over.
FCC chairman Brendan Carr can’t cancel broadcast licenses for stations that don’t kiss an insane president’s ass passionately enough. He performs that threatening dance, on Elon Musk’s social media platform, to please his enraged master. Pete Hegseth can openly announce his intention to keep committing war crimes, and kick out photographers who don’t get his makeup and lighting right, he’s still ordering war crimes to be committed. Kristi Noem can’t keep her job, no matter how incompetently she did it, once she announces Trump was in on her $220,000,000 emergency vanity project that enriched her friends and her. The same holds for every one of Trump’s fire breathing lickspittles. Things are very, very bad when creatures like Stephen Miller and Jared Kushner have more power and influence on world affairs than Congress, than anyone confirmed as a member of Trump’s cabinet.
Remember that all of these people were chosen by the Very Stable Genius for their incompetence for their respective jobs. They were hired based solely on their fawning obedience to the master’s will, their ability to gratify his need for praise, and the destruction or weaponization of every federal administrative agency they oversee. The rightwing billionaires who pay for Trump’s campaigns have long been determined to destroy the “administrative state.” They are getting what they paid for, at the moment.
Trump, like his German hero of a century ago, believes he is an infallible genius in all matters. He’s a genius at conning about 35% of the country, he has an undeniable talent for that, got to give the handsome rascal his props there. His boy, the Austrian corporal with the little mustache, shared that genius for moving crowds of his aggrieved countrymen to passionate ecstasies of rage and religious fervor. Outside of that, their outsized talent for lying and throwing tantrums terrifying to their inner circles, and their recklessness, there is little remarkable about either one. True, Mr. Hitler racked up impressive numbers in the mass murder department, but that doesn’t make him a genius. Nothing that Mr. Trump has done so far suggests he will get the chance to match those numbers, though he may well try, and with the nuclear code and his thirst for murder, who knows?
The desperation of the deteriorating Mr. Trump is evident in his obsession with the election he lost, still insisting he won. He’s now trying to force the Senate to pass a bill for him to sign into law that will disenfranchise about half of the voting population. Massive voter suppression on a national level is his only hope for avoiding what is coming for him and his party.
If not voter suppression he must again provoke his followers to commit mass violence he can blame on antifa. That or stage a mass death terrorist attack on a sanctuary city in the US. He is perfectly capable of doing both of those things, as he’s already shown on his infamous Day of Love in January 2021. It would not be wise to bet against his willingness and ability to have his lackeys organize a false flag terrorist attack, if pressed. As always for his type, he must maintain power at all costs. Otherwise, it’s… crap, it just won’t go away, will it?
Take courage, my fellow humans, from Lawrence O’Donnell
Traitors, treason, execute them all!
Look at it from President Trump’s point of view. He has been totally up front with everybody about what kind of person he is, and about 35% of the country still loves him, unconditionally. He could, literally, have his masked agents execute peaceful civilians, in their car, restrained face down on the pavement, trying to run from a masked mob of heavily armed agents, and they’d still vote for him. He could promise lower gas prices and no new wars, get over 70,000,000 votes, and then, when necessary, start to carpet bomb Iran (excursion, not war, excursion!) declare immediate victory in the war, and watch as the price of gas spiked. Then righteously vent epic fury that traitorous Europeans and Chinese will do nothing to open the strategic choke point, the Strait of Hormuz
As the president knows very well, the world is a cruel and unfair place. If you don’t get your enemies first, and keep punching, kicking and shooting them while they’re down, they will eventually surround and kill you. That’s why the Iran Excursion is existential for the president. You don’t need a business degree from Wharton to know any of this.
In his first term, he surrounded himself with unreliable people. His first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, listened to the advice of the DOJ’s Office of Ethics (ethics, for fuck’s sake!), because he’d lied, in the Senate, about his contacts with Russia. Ethics (fucking ETHICS!) told Sessions his involvement in investigating Trump’s ties with Putin had a clear appearance of impropriety — and like a coward he recused himself and refused to un-recuse. By stepping away from the investigation, Sessions paved the way for the traitorous Robert Mueller, who then accused Trump, basically, of ten counts of obstruction of justice, while also totally exonerating him from the Russia Hoax. After his total exoneration Trump publicly humiliated Sessions, and later destroyed what was left of his political career. He had other disloyal, traitorous, selectively “ethical” assholes in his first administration, and they leaked terrible lies about him. Lessons learned, mistakes he would not repeat next time.
An oath of personal loyalty to the president, demonstrated by an ability to angrily lie publicly in any situation, (along with iron-clad nondisclosure agreements), would ensure Trump’s second administration would run much smoother than the first. With Kristi Noem, a posing pinhead, in charge of Homeland Security (along with FEMA and the TSA), Pete ‘no quarter, no mercy’ Hegseth, a misogynistic alcoholic sadist, in charge of the Department of WAR, Kashyap Pramod Patel, enraged author of a children’s book praising a Godlike Trump, leading the FBI, and a pliant, cherub-faced white Christian fascist as Speaker of the House — what could go wrong in squashing protests, intimidating enemies foreign and domestic, dominating the legislative branch, sodomizing the Constitution, and so on? Appoint your criminal and impeachment lawyers to head the Department of Justice and who can touch you? Only the fucking media, with their constant lies and fake news. That’s where loyalist Brendan Carr, partisan head of the FCC, comes in.
The New York Times, often named by name as among the worst of the worst by the president (along with the lickspittle Bezos-owned Washington Post, not currently licking quite enough spittle), reported on the attack on mass media with uncharacteristic urgency, and fewer qualifiers than usual. The gist is that Brendan Carr is openly threatening broadcasters with the loss of their licenses, for failure to serve the public good, if they report lies about the president’s perfect, already historically successful, meticulously planned and war gamed non-war excursion in Iran. Carr is equally outraged about the lie that Biden “won” in 2020, but that’s another story. The Times (from link above):
The goal seems to be pressuring journalists to back off critical coverage of the war effort, or to at least encourage the public to second-guess reporting that runs counter to the administration’s preferred narrative. And the effort has gone well beyond words.
Mr. Trump’s top media regulator, Brendan Carr of the Federal Communications Commission, issued an explicit warning to broadcast television networks on social media, writing that “hoaxes and news distortions” could lead to the revocation of licenses for local stations, a threat that Mr. Trump said he was “so thrilled to see.”
Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, doing what she does so well:
[She] said in a statement on Monday: “The media has been undeniably biased and negative in its coverage of President Trump and Operation Epic Fury. Anybody with eyes and ears can see this.”
So true, so fucking true, Karoline, it brings tears to the eyes, and also to the ears. Anybody with eyes and ears can see this!
Another [Trump] post blamed Iranian AI and disinformation for stories that he said are “FAKE and, in a certain way, you can say those Media Outlets that generated it should be brought up on Charges for TREASON for the dissemination of false information.” He reiterated support for Carr’s attack on the media and insisted he won the presidential election “IN A LANDSLIDE.” source
Obviously.
Brian Tyler Cohen, with a nationwide chorus of fair and balanced analysis of the spike in gasoline prices, “short term pain for long term gain.” You betcha.
Nazi enough for you?
While the NY Times frames things, often using the word “suggest”, to suggest everything is more or less normal, the abnormality of our criminal regime continues unabated.
Secretary of Maximum Lethality, Pete “War is Hell” Hegseth, spent over $93,000,000,000 in use it or lose it funds in September 2025, with no blowback. Hey, if he didn’t spend it all … it would have been waste, (not to mention abuse and fraud). On the other hand, Representative Nancy Mace, by signing a petition that allowed for the possibility of humiliation for Trump, simply for the fact that he loves beautiful women as much as Jeffrey Epstein did, and often they were on the younger side, (it is said) opened herself to a House Ethics Committee investigation of a $9,500 alleged overpayment to herself for her housing in Washington DC. Fair is fair. Nazis will be Nazis. Here’s Heather:
That argument [that Congress has the sole power to declare war and allocate funds for war] is potent again almost 250 years later. Democrats are calling out that Trump is spending $1 billion a day in his attacks on Iran but that he slashed through government programs that help Americans, claiming the need to address the country’s ballooning national debt. Just yesterday, Berkeley Lovelace Jr. of NBC News reported that Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administration official overseeing the Affordable Care Act, says that many of those enrolled in healthcare under the law should not be there. About 23 million people signed up for ACA coverage this year, down by more than 1.2 million from last year. Oz anticipates cutting another 4 million off the rolls as he targets “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
And yet, as Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling of The New Republic noted last night, according to a report from government watchdog Open the Books, the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blew through $93.4 billion in September 2025 alone, with more than $50 billion going out in the last five days of the month alone.
To spend the entirety of the defense budget, rather than lose it, Pentagon officials bought “a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. (Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth’s Pentagon—the department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October.) In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for ribeye steak (again, just in September), $124,000 for ice cream machines, and $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts.”
In October, Houghtaling noted, the administration said it could not fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as food stamps, because the government had shut down. Millions of Americans lost food benefits. source
Waste, fraud and abuse for thee, well-deserved perks for me!
That $1 billion a day figure for Trump’s war in Iran might be a little bit low, maybe by 100% or so. The New York Times reports:
The most transparent administration in US history, it was revealed, has more good news for the citizens:
There are major societal implications for that war. It is already costing at least $1 billion a day, and administration officials have suggested they are going to ask Congress for more money for it. That request will come on top of the news of March 10 that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. has borrowed $1 trillion over the past five months—that’s $50 billion a week on average—as Trump’s tax cuts slash revenue. source
Admittedly, some Iranian children (and others) are being killed, a DOD “preliminary” investigation shows that the missile that hit the girls’ school on Day One was an American one; the most unstable region on Earth has been radically destabilized, apparently at the behest of the rightwing expansionist Prime Minister of Israel, who stayed with the Kushners in New Jersey and remained buddies with now-Ambassador Charles Kushner; there is a widespread effort across the government to cover up crimes in many departments of the federal government, as well as ethical violations, (which are a thing of the past, if done by good people); the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed into law by President Trump, is being actively thwarted by Trump’s former criminal and impeachment attorneys who now run the Department of Justice; and Trump is quietly borrowing 50 billion a week to fund all this, BUT — there’s really nothing to see here.
The US Department of Obstruction of Justice, in conjunction with the Department of Maximum Lethality, the Department of Destruction of Public Education and “History” Erasure, and the president’s taskforce on Why Are Blacks and Dead People Still Allowed to Vote, have issued a joint statement. It reads, in full, “Sir YES, sir!”
Recent polling suggests that everything is still completely normal here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
Heather Cox Richardson concludes last night’s letter
The fantasy of those who embraced cowboy individualism was that if only they could have full sway, they would solve the world’s problems and keep Americans safe. But the conduct of the war is starting to illustrate that any claims of a moral code disappear when a leader exercises military might on a whim. According to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the U.S. will not be bound by any “stupid rules of engagement” and will rain down “[d]eath and destruction from the sky all day long. This was never meant to be a fair fight,” he said, “and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them when they’re down, which is exactly how it should be.”
On Wednesday, March 4, a U.S. submarine torpedoed an Iranian warship in international waters. The vessel was not participating in hostilities; it was off Sri Lanka returning from a naval exercise organized by India in the Bay of Bengal. In the past, the U.S. has participated in those exercises.
Andrew Roth, Cate Brown, and Hannah Ellis-Peterson of The Guardian noted that submarine attacks since World War II have been incredibly rare, as are attacks on vessels not taking part in hostilities. The ship was believed to have 180 people on board; Sri Lankan officials said they rescued 32 and recovered 87 bodies from the water. Hegseth boasted: “An American submarine sank an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters.”
On Thursday, Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali of Reuters reported that the U.S. appears to bear responsibility for the February 28 strike on a girls’ school in Minab, in southern Iran, in the early waves of the Israeli-U.S. attack. The strike appears to have killed 168 people or more, many of them children. Since the Reuters report, others have noted that the U.S. was operating in the area and Israel was not. The strike remains under investigation.
After Saturday’s dignified transfer, Trump told reporters on Air Force One. “I hate to do it, but it’s a part of war,” he said. “It’s a sad part of war.”
“It’s the bad part of war.”
So true, sad, and also, bad
War crimes are not war crimes, if done in the name of justice, truth, freedom, decency and Jesus, according to people like unindicted war criminal Secretary of Virile Maximum Lethality, Pete Kegsbreath. Genocide is not genocide, if God tells you to do it, according to indicted war criminal Bibi Netanyahu, whose radical religious allies, and a multifront all-out war of mass destruction, are keeping him from standing trial for corruption. Every mass murder in history has been committed with God on the side of the murderers. Thoughts and prayers, y’all, and a dignified transfer to each of us.
A few facts (and opinions) about the war/not war in Iran
The president, Caroline Leavitt told the press, launched the attack on Iran “based on a feeling based on fact.” You can take that shit to the bank, better than “concepts of a plan” even. Perfect.
The devastating attack was launched, by Israel and the United States, in the middle of Ramadan, the holiest month of the year for Muslims.
Iranian negotiators working with Jared Fucking Kushner (who elected him?) and Putin’s own Steve Witkoff (WTF?) felt they were making progress in their talks in Geneva. Israel and the U.S. were making their attack plans as Witkoff and Kushner cosplayed as diplomatic negotiators. The bombing commenced as planned. Such are negotiations when the major diplomats across the table are psychopaths who are themselves serving psychopaths.
The nation that could not afford health care premium subsidies for lower wage working people, or SNAP benefits for poor children and the disabled, or millions to continue preventing preventable deaths in poor countries (USAID) has spent over three billion dollars on the first four days of Operation I’m NOT INSANE and I’ll Fucking Kill All of You Fucking Fucks!!! (officially called Operation Epic Fury — Epic Tantrum works too) [1].
With the people we have in charge, the best of the best, what could go wrong by committing acts of war against Iran? Nothing the Board of Peace can’t handle.
Heather Cox Richardson adds:
In Need to Know, David Rothkopf today called out the madness of the fact world trade and global security is being shattered by a single man. “Not since Adolf Hitler blew his brains out in a bunker beneath the garden of the German Reich Chancellery on April 30, 1945, have the lives of so many people around the world been so buffeted by the psychosis of a single man.”
Why has Trump launched a war against Iran on a whim, attacked other countries, and upended world trade, Rothkopf asked. “Because he’s insane. Because he’s venal. Because he’s a malignant narcissist. Because he’s a sociopath. Because he has a fragile ego. Because those around him exacerbate and play to those traits to advance their own interests. Because CEOs and investors do likewise to fill their coffers. Because to some people, whether he is insane or malevolent or repugnant or not matters less than whether his actions will feather their nests, increase their power.
“Because they, the billionaires…play their games and the consequences for the little people down below, the consequences for us, hardly matter a whit.” [2]
On Thursday, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) called attention to another factor in play. In a speech to the Senate, Whitehouse noted that throughout his second term, Trump has advanced policies that help Russia, pausing weapons shipments to Ukraine, easing sanctions on Russia, and pushing a peace deal favorable to Russia. Last summer, he welcomed Putin to American soil, and administration officials have parroted Russian propaganda. Russian state media gloated when Trump “installed Russia apologist Tulsi Gabbard as his director of national intelligence,” and Attorney General Pam Bondi upon taking office stopped the anti-kleptocracy work that had targeted Russian oligarchs.
Trump’s new national security policy threw traditional U.S. allies overboard and favored policies that Russian government officials praised as “largely consistent” with their own.
“If Trump were purposefully doing Russia’s bidding,” Whitehouse said, “it is hard to see what he would be doing differently. The United States is the most powerful nation in the world. Russia is a weak, corrupt regime. My old friend Senator John McCain used to say that Russia is a gas station, run by gangsters, with an army. It doesn’t make sense that the President of the United States, who insists—insists—on being dominant in essentially every relationship, is so submissive to one person and that one person is Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin.” source
Here is Sheldon Whitehouse’s entire speech. I highly recommend it.
Last we heard, Putin was giving strategic information to the Iranians, to help them target the U.S. military. I wonder which side Elon Musk and Starlink is taking in that transaction.
[1] The war is costing about $891.4 million per day, according to a think tank based in Washington, DC, that analyzed the information the Pentagon has shared about targets it struck and the assets involved in the operation.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies predicts that the cost will decrease as the US shifts to “less expensive munitions” and as the drones and missiles launched by Iran declines.
“However, future costs will depend mostly on the intensity of operations and the effectiveness of Iranian retaliation,” CSIS added in its report. source
[2] Billionaires are happy when their insane puppet crashes the world economy helping them make even more profit. Crisis for us equals opportunity for them.
What critical thinking looks like
Sadly, critical thinking has become fleetingly rare in American “public discourse” which is based, largely, on advertising and its moral twin, political propaganda. Ads and propaganda, both designed to make money for the wealthiest, are aimed at our irrational impulses and they shape the angry black and white exchanges over who is right and who is wrong. We all want to buy the very best product, after all, and defend our choice in buying our particular brand.
Timothy Snyder demonstrates how critical thinking is done, and its usefulness (when applied widely) in debunking mindless propaganda, in this selection from his Substack Thinking About…
And so who does benefit [from war/not war in Iran]? Again, it has to be emphasized that we do not have the kind of sources that future historians would like. But there are nevertheless a few candidate who petition for our attention. Israel is the American co-combatant in this war, and its government has a clearly expressed interest in destroying Iranian power.
Saudi Arabia has been engaged in a regional struggle for power with Iran for 47 years. Interestingly, American war propaganda (picked up by regime-friendly commentators) now maintains that the United States has been at war with Iran for 47 years. (Orwell has gotten a lot of attention recently, but his “we have always been at war with Eurasia” in 1984 is very much a propos.) This obviously untrue claim implies that the United States has been a Saudi client state working against Iran for the better part of half a century.
This propaganda line is historically ridiculous — remember when we trafficked missiles to Iran in 1981-1985? or when Saudis flew airplanes into the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001? But it is telling. source
Of course, we also sold missiles and poison gas to a modern day Hitler, Saddam Hussein, lynched by an avenging George Dubya Bush in the middle of the night. Saddam used these American weapons to fight Iran and to gas ethnic minorities in Iraq. It doesn’t matter so much what we say or who we support in a given war, or what rationales we use, or nowadays don’t even bother to use, as long as the machinery of war, in its endlessly lucrative glory, continues to pump out obscene profits for the weapons industry and its savvy corporate shareholders. It matters not that we mass murder girls in a school on day one of a war that is not a war, as long as we perform maximum lethality against the rest of the worst of the worst and keep blowing up those million dollar missiles we make defending freedom.
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