Representative Jim Banks of Indiana seems to think that PTSD is something that only soldiers experience. He tweeted,
Rep. Ilhan Omar complained she’s “stricken with PTSD” because of recent events in the Middle East.This is a disgrace and offensive to our nation’s veterans who really do have PTSD after putting their life on the line to keep America safe. pic.twitter.com/twhZDuUDu0
She has good reason to feel that as she said when she responded to Banks:
“War doesn’t have a reset button, I learned this lesson at the age of Eight. Lives will be lost, many innocent lives will be lost and the future of generations will be impacted. Let’s call for peace.”
Omar, the first refugee to serve in Congress, fled civil war torn Somalia with her family when she was 8 years old. She lived in a refugee camp for 3 years. But any decent person would agree with her sentiments. This congressman is obviously not a decent person.
That is indicative of the bloodthirsty war cries that are coming out of he supposedly isolationist GOP this week. It makes me feel ill too, mostly that so many people said that Trump wasn’t a president who would use the military for personal political advantage. Please. He’s a vicious, vengeful conman who will do whatever it takes for him to survive.
The only thing that’s holding him back right now is personal cowardice and the mistaken belief that Tucker Carlson represents the thinking in his base.
The Guardian reports that Ivanka gave a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics show on “the path to the future of work.” She spoke from experience and told them how to be born into a family of con-artists and fame whores and then marry into a rich family of criminals. Tried and true.
Actually, she apparently blathered about her father’s great record on jobs and how she’s working on an advertising campaign to encourage “all pathways to work.”
The women in tech were not amused by her appearance as a keynote speaker. The conference has been heavily criticized for its lack of diversity but it was pointed out that simply plopping this unqualified nepotism hire (who, by the way, is known to have committed fraud as an executive in the Trump organization) on the stage when there are hundreds of women who are actual tech experts and have something useful to say. This wasn’ it:
“I believe innovation is a net job-producer,” she said. “Innovation will allow for more inclusive growth.”
This piece in the Columbia Journalism Review calls out writers and commenters for their use of the term “blood on his hands” when referring to General Suleimani, which I noticed was being used almost as much as “off-ramp” in the last few days.
He notes that Sulaimani, like any military officer from any country, would have “blood on his hands” and explains that this particular charge stems from the fact that during the Iraq insurgency, which was largely a religious, sectarian conflict, he was responsible for flooding the country with a weapon, the IED, which killed and maimed many people on behalf of the minority Shia militia. He was himself wounded by an IED as a journalist in Iraq.
Anyway, his point is this:
The invasion of Iraq is now widely seen as a disaster, resulting in hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. But few in the US political and media mainstream would describe former President George W. Bush, who started that war, or the American generals who waged it, as having “blood on their hands.” Nor would it be said of successive American administrations that have collaborated on covert operations in Iraq with the Mojahedin-e Khalq, a cult-like anti-Islamic Republic terror organization in Iran responsible for hundreds of civilian deaths. Nor would it be said of George H.W. Bush, who, while campaigning for president in 1988 ostentatiously refused to apologize for the killing of 290 Iranians aboard a civilian jet-liner that was shot down that year by the US Navy in the Persian Gulf.
“Blood on his hands” is, clearly, a political cliché. For the right, it is an expression of their politics of grievance, an assertion that Americans are the victims of irrational, baseless Middle Eastern Islamic terrorism and hatred. The right is attempting to use conflict with Iran to assert the moral high ground of American military violence, despite decades of evidence to the contrary. For the mainstream media and what remains of America’s foreign policy elite, calling out Suleimani as having “blood on his hands” allows them to warn about the consequences of a war with Iran without seeming to sympathize with the enemy or ask deeper questions about the morality of American force. It calls out the killing as perhaps unwise, but legitimate, even inevitable. “Qassem Soleimani was never going to die peacefully in his bed,” Bobby Ghosh wrote for Bloomberg Opinion.
“Inevitability” was all over the media in the wake of the assassination and it was deeply disturbing. They didn’t cheerlead as enthusiastically as they did back in 2002, in the wake of 9/11, but you could see where this was leading.
Trump chose to escalate the conflict by withdrawing from the nuclear deal and then imposing crippling sanctions. Then he turbo-charged it by assassinating Sulaimani based on dubious evidence (if any.)
Read on to get some important context about the relationship between the US and Iran. There has been a concerted campaign on the right to demonize Iran based upon a sense of besmirched American honor from 1979. And Iran is also acting on “honor” in reaction to the US installing the Shah back in the 1950s. And the wheels go round and round.
Trump brought up the 52 hostages from 1979, which means that the Iran hawks are pushing HIS “revenge” buttons. And we know that he considers revenge to be his primary motivating factor in life after money and fame:
Take my word he’s a madman, don’t you know
by Tom Sullivan
Unverified cell phone video from Iran’s Fars news of missiles landing on the al-Asad air base in Iraq.
As of this writing, it is still unclear if the retaliatory barrage of missile Iranians launched last night at U.S. bases in Iraq resulted in casualties. The Guardian reports Adil Abdul-Mahdi, Iraq’s prime minister, had warning of the strikes from Tehran and passed on that warning to U.S. and Iraqi troops. He was advised the Iranians’ retaliation for Trump’s assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani would be limited. The Guardian’s Michael Safi reports that Iran’s warning adds “to sense this morning’s attacks were a piece of elaborate theatre.”
To be continued
“I know more about ISIS than the generals do, believe me,” candidate Donald Trump bragged in November 2015. “[T]hey don’t know much, because they’re not winning,” he told CBS News in June 2016. He knows more about anything than anybody. Believe me.
Trump’s critics have used “The Emperor’s New Clothes” analogy since before Trump took office. (It’s a fair guess his wealthy parents never read little Donny the Hans Christian Andersen tale.) Media critics have asked when the press would stop covering the 15,000 Lies Man like a normal president and stop branding his actions unorthodox or chalking up his erratic behavior to a matter of style.
Hillary Clinton warned during the 2016 campaign that Trump is “temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility.” She warned, “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons.” And here we are in 2020, missiles flying.
In the wake of the Trumpian drone-slaying of Suleimani, the media offered “detailed descriptions of the president’s decision-making process” as if there was one, Jamelle Bouie laments in the New York Times. Bouie has had his fill of attempts “to turn away from the reality of what he is for fear of what it means,” adding:
This is reckless but it isn’t shocking. Trump is not a steady hand. He’s never been one. Three years in office have neither changed his character nor enhanced his capabilities. He is as ignorant and incurious as a president as he was as a candidate (and as a would-be mogul before that). His main goal is self-preservation, and he’ll sacrifice anything to achieve it. His current assault on the authority of Congress — his refusal to have the White House or members of his administration release documents or obey subpoenas — is an attempt to escape responsibility for his own unethical (and potentially illegal) actions. He is self-involved, unethical and unstable — a dangerous combination to have for the commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military forces, under pressure from impeachment and a re-election campaign.
H.L. Mencken once observed, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” Do they have a taste for a Trump-branded war?
That’s how Kathleen Geier describes Elizabeth Warren in this excellent profile in In These Times. It’s a must-read for all of us who plan to vote in the primaries this year:
If Elizabeth Warren win the Democrtic presidential nomination she will have prevailed against daunting odds. She will have overcome a potentially career-ending scandal (the DNA test debacle) and defeated not only the runner-up in the 2016 Democratic presidential contest, but a popular two-term former vice president. If she defeats President Donald Trump, it would mean an economic populist defeated a corrupt plutocrat, that the most leftwing Democratic presidential nominee in history defeated a racist reactionary, that a woman defeated America’s most famous misogynist. It would be an extraordinarily powerful moment.
To understand how Warren would create big structural changes as president, it’s helpful to look at how she has made change in the past.
I have not endorsed anyone and I’m not spending much time proselytizing for any of the candidates in this primary. But I don’t think anyone would be surprised to know that I’m a big Warren fan. I have been one for a very long time and I think she would be a wonderful president. If you are interested in her candidacy, I urge you to read this profile. I think you will come away understanding why.
Last week I predicted that the cable news shows would book “retired” generals to talk about how to respond to Trump’s assassination of Iran’s General Soleimani but would fail to inform viewers if they worked for firms that would profit from war. Here was my piece:
It wasn’t a hard prediction to make. I linked to a Lee Fang article from the Nation in 2014 Who’s Paying the Pro-War Pundits? Today Lee Fang, (now at the Intercept), identified some of the same retired generals who went on TV and the failure of the media to disclose their ties to defense contractors.
In my piece I suggested that we should contact the producers of the cable shows to remind them to disclose the ties of these people. What I neglected to do was provide a way to do that. You could use the”Contact Us” link for an email. but who knows who that goes to. So I looked up producers who work on Face The Nation from their “About Us” and added their twitter handles.
Moderator: Margaret Brennan (@margbrennan) Executive Producer: Mary Hager (@hagerhoo)
Director: Alison Hawley Senior Producers: Ed Forgotson (@CBSEdF) Catherine Reynolds (@reynoldscat) Broadcast Producer: Jillian Hughes (@JillianBHughes) Producer: Jake Miller (@WJakeMiller)
Digital Producer: Emily Tillett (@EmilyETillett)
Associate Producer: Elizabeth Campbell (@ECampbell360) Broadcast Associates: Shani Benezra (@shaniben_ezra) Kelsey Micklas (@klmicklas) Richard Escobedo (@RichardEscobedo)
It’s not like who Petraeus works for is hard to find. KKR is proud he works for them, why don’t they want his title and employer in the chyron at Face The Nation? David H. Petraeus, Member, Chairman of the KKR Global Institute
The producers of these shows have been busted in the past for failing to disclose that the “retired generals” aren’t living off their military pensions. When one of these “retired generals” talks about the need for a strategic missile strike vs boots on the ground, we should know that they work for the company that makes the missiles.
Please Book War Deescalation Guests
I know at least one of the people on the list will read this piece (probably a broadcast associate since they do the real work of background research for guests), please look into people who talk about options besides war and historical deescalation of wars. It would be a nice switch from the usual suspects.
.
Ron Brownstein says that whether Trump comes out politically on top in this national security crisis depends upon whether people see what he did as impulsive or decisive. He points out that “decisive” vs “deliberative” has long been the way president of the two are described with Reagan and the Bushes portraying themselves as decisive while the Democrats like Carter, Clinton and Obama see themselves as deliberative. How you value those two things probably governs for whom you prefer to vote.
Of course, this is a pretty silly distinction but I think Brownstein is right that it’s illustrative of how people see the two parties. But the fact is that none of those previous presidents of either party were what you would call impulsive, at least not in the Trumpian sense.
Nobody would try to make he case that Trump is deliberative. Whether people come to see Trump’s clear impulsivity as being “decisive” seems to depend on what happens now:
These assessments have “pluses and minuses for both parties,” Rosner says. “Whether it is a plus or a minus tends to depend heavily, fundamentally, about how a particular operation or issue comes out. National security is the most unideological issue in the realm of public affairs. The only ideological [impulse] the public has is they like things that work.”
For that reason, Feaver thinks Trump is in a more exposed political position than his Democratic critics over Soleimani’s death. Most Democrats, he notes, have not definitively said they would have rejected the strike; they have only accused Trump of approving it without fully considering the potential costs. That leaves them enormous flexibility, he notes, to second-guess Trump if events warrant.
While the attack has not yet prompted retaliatory violence from Iran or its proxies, it has already produced diplomatic disruption, including Iran’s announcement that it was withdrawing further from its international agreement to limit its nuclear program, and the vote by Iraq’s Parliament to demand the withdrawal of American troops from the country. Trump has responded with counter-threats to bomb Iran, including cultural sites protected under international law, if the country strikes American interests and to impose sanctions on Iraq if it evicts US forces. Though not yet producing military confrontation, this immediate cycle of action and response underscores how quickly tensions can escalate beyond the complete control of either side.
He adds, “the Democrats have an easier play here. The ‘decisiveness’ of the President only wins politically if there are no unintended consequences, and I don’t even think the Trump team believes that they are going to get away with this with no unintended consequences. There will be blowback, and whatever the blowback is will take the bloom off this rose.”
His rose is already wilted and diseased. He’s clearly wagging the dog and being egged on by a handful of fanatics who’ve been wanting a war with Iran for decades. He gave the go-ahead at a moment of high personal stress, which we could all see right there on his twitter feed, and now we’re stuck with the consequences. It was neither deliberative nor decisive.
“Use the right words or you are a terrorist-lover!” (Just don’t use the word “assassination”)
Check out Meghan McCain turning herself into Lindsey Graham before out eyes:
On Monday morning, during The View’s first new show of 2020, Meghan McCain defended President Donald Trump’s targeted killing of top Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani. “For me, when a big, bad terrorist gets blown up, I’m happy about it,” she said.
The fatuous nonsense spewing out of these apologists’ mouths is enough to make you sick:
“You issued a statement calling Soleimani a murderer. Later, you issued a second statement saying that he was ‘an assassination of a senior foreign military official.’ Now, this is a man who is obviously responsible for hundreds of American troops’ deaths, carnage that we can’t even imagine… I don’t understand the flip-flop. I don’t understand why it was so hard to call him a terrorist, and I would just like you to explain the change.”
Meanwhile, they’re having a tantrum when anyone says the assassination of Suleimani is an assassination.
You can see in the video above that Warren handled that idiocy with dispatch.
But I want to give a big shout-out to Chris Cillizza for spreading this bullshit yesterday.
Warren, Jan 2: Soleimani is a “murderer”
Warren, Jan 3: U.S. “assassinated” Soleimani
Warren, Jan. 5: Soleimani is “a government official, a high-ranking military official” https://t.co/Bz8Squds0c
“I rarely tweet about stuff like this but I can’t hold back here. Chris, this is embarrassing. Every statement is true & consistent. The reason you were able to cherry-pick her many comments is b/c she’s the only candidate who’s done multiple interviews & media avails about it.”
There were many, many more. Thankfully. Maybe he’ll stop.
Cillizza was one of the most responsible for dogging Hillary Clinton with the email story day in and day out in 2016. One day when I asked him how many times he was going to re-tweet one particularly snotty tweet on the subject (he’d done it at least four times in one day) he blocked me.
He was one of the very worst offenders hammering the email flap and he got a fancy new job not long after on CNN.
To me, the biggest sin of 2016 was proportionality. Particularly vis-a-vis Hillary Clinton and the email story, and then the Wikileaks story. When you look at the word cloud of what people heard from the news, there’s one huge word in the middle and that’s (Hillary Clinton’s) emails. There’s no justification whatsoever for the proportion of coverage devoted to that story.
And sometimes I think people want to defend the coverage by using the strawman of, it was news. Yeah, it was news. It was a news story when it turned out Ivanka Trump was using unsecured communications at the White House, it was a news story when it turned out Nikki Haley was using unsecured communications as UN Ambassador, in some senses. The president uses unsecured communications. Those have all been news stories. Then everyone moves on to something else because it’s not that big of a story. The proportionality is one of the key challenges here.
Chris Cillizza always finds something snotty like this to use as a punch line to entertain his fellow journalists and it’s one of the reasons we have Donald Trump today.
I hope some super-pac somewhere is going to take advantage of this. I haven’t seen any ads, but I would hope there are some going up in these states. That’s what this whole gambit is really all about, after all. The House has bought everybody time to bring the heat. They need to bring it.
As I watch the media be more skeptical about the Iran escalation than I’ve ever seen them in my life when it comes to military action, I’m struck by the idea that Trump may have done us a big favor. Skepticism over the rationales the government uses for war has usually been in short supply at times like these so perhaps the fact that Trump is an inveterate liar — and his government is too — has finally opened their eyes to the fact that all is often not as it seems in these situations.
If we get through this, the key will be to hold them to this when someone other than Trump is doing it. Because he certainly is not the first. He and his men are just so crude and lacking in credibility that it’s impossible not to notice.
Recall:
Friday, November 28, 2008
Poppy’s Legacy
by digby
…[I]t pays to remember that the vaunted “realism” of George Bush Sr led to a war that’s still going on today. He’s the guy who got us caught up in Iraq and he did it in ways that his decidedly unrealistic son took to heart. The propaganda, for instance:
Take the Kuwaiti babies story. Its origins go back to the first world war when British propaganda accused the Germans of tossing Belgian babies into the air and catching them on their bayonets. Dusted off and updated for the Gulf war, this version had Iraqi soldiers bursting into a modern Kuwaiti hospital, finding the premature babies ward and then tossing the babies out of incubators so that the incubators could be sent back to Iraq.
The story, improbable from the start, was first reported by the Daily Telegraph in London on September 5 1990. But the story lacked the human element; it was an unverified report, there were no pictures for television and no interviews with mothers grieving over dead babies.
That was soon rectified. An organisation calling itself Citizens for a Free Kuwait (financed by the Kuwaiti government in exile) had signed a $10m contract with the giant American public relations company, Hill & Knowlton, to campaign for American military intervention to oust Iraq from Kuwait.
The Human Rights Caucus of the US Congress was meeting in October and Hill & Knowlton arranged for a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl to tell the babies’ story before the congressmen. She did it brilliantly, choking with tears at the right moment, her voice breaking as she struggled to continue. The congressional committee knew her only as “Nayirah” and the television segment of her testimony showed anger and resolution on the faces of the congressmen listening to her. President Bush referred to the story six times in the next five weeks as an example of the evil of Saddam’s regime.
In the Senate debate whether to approve military action to force Saddam out of Kuwait, seven senators specifically mentioned the incubator babies atrocity and the final margin in favour of war was just five votes. John R Macarthur’s study of propaganda in the war says that the babies atrocity was a definitive moment in the campaign to prepare the American public for the need to go to war.
It was not until nearly two years later that the truth emerged. The story was a fabrication and a myth, and Nayirah, the teenage Kuwaiti girl, coached and rehearsed by Hill & Knowlton for her appearance before the Congressional Committee, was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. By the time Macarthur revealed this, the war was won and over and it did not matter any more.
(For more on the propaganda war, read this award winning article about John Rendon in Rolling Stone.)
Trump is so bad at all this that it’s impossible to ignore. But he isn’t the first, not by a long shot.
