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Pod people by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on January 4, 2020

Pod people
by Tom Sullivan


Still image from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).

“Starve a cold, feed a cold?” says the bleary cold sufferer misremembering the old adage.

Our acting president’s explanation for his assassination-by-drone of Iranian commander Qasem Soleimani brought back dialogue from an old TV commercial.

“We took action last night to stop a war, we did not take action to start a war,” Donald Trump told reporters on Friday.

Stop a war, feed a war?

It doesn’t make sense. In the Trump administration, nothing has to make sense. Spokesmen at the State Department were not in a mood to even try.

“Officials gave differing and incomplete accounts of the intelligence they said prompted Trump to act,” reports the Washington Post. (I first read that as “dithering.”)

“Soleimani was planning imminent attacks against American diplomats and our armed forces members in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and in the region,” State Department officials said in a press briefing.

But we went down this road in 2003, a reporter observed, asking administration officials to show their work. What evidence did they have for that statement? Officials simply got argumentative:

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: No, no. I’m saying there’s been so many presidential terms —

QUESTION: Well —

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: — in between then and now. It’s just – it’s a failed analogy.

QUESTION: I’m not asking you the analogy. It’s – the question is —

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: You just made the analogy.

QUESTION: — the administration – the administration then said “believe us,” so why should we now believe you when you say “believe us”? What was this intelligence? Can you be a bit more specific?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: You’re saying because another administration made one claim, why should we believe in a different administration this claim? It just – it doesn’t make any sense. It’s entirely separate.

QUESTION: Let’s limit it to this —

MODERATOR: Ah, ah, ah, that’s not what we’re doing today. Matt, you can finish.

But won’t the Iranians retaliate? a reporter asked. Iranians had already escalated by attacking our embassy, the official replied, saying, “And so this was a – this was a defensive action, but it is also to de-escalate, because Qasem Soleimani was escalating.”

QUESTION: So you do expect them to retaliate or not?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: When I hear these questions it’s like you’re describing Belgium for the last 40 years. It’s the Iranian regime. We’ve got 40 years of acts of war that this regime has committed against countries in five continents.

QUESTION: So you expect additional acts of war on their part?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: No, I don’t.

QUESTION: Well, why don’t you?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: I’m just saying that weakness invites more aggression. Timidity will invite more aggression.

QUESTION: Why don’t you? Why do you think they will be deterred? When you said, “I don’t,” why don’t you expect retaliation?

SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: Because we’re speaking in a language the regime understands.

“This entire transcript is a nightmare,” tweeted Adam Mount, Director of the Defense Posture Project of the Federation of American Scientists. “Deluded soundbites substitute for reason and rationality, antagonism for transparency. There is no indication here these officials have thought seriously about the potential consequences of the action.”

Theirs is not to reason why. Or to reason at all.

Elsewhere, the Trump cult gathered to anoint him with the laying on of hands and evangelical vibrato.

Lou Dobbs of the Fox Business channel slathered on the praise even thicker.

This is all pretty disorienting. It’s not as if these people weren’t already acting like beings from another planet. It’s just that, as in “Body Snatchers,” it seems increasingly difficult to know if the person in front of you went to sleep next to a pod.

That’s only apparent, of course. The result of too much time on Twitter and cable news. The truth is the cult’s size is self-limited. Trump’s base has held steady for years. But even as he works to shore up their support, there are signs he’s losing ground there. Watch that (outer) space.

Update: A fresh thread on possible Soleimani fallout from the NYT’s Rukmini Callimachi.

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