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This is the sort of thing that got Joe Lieberman drummed out of the Democratic Party — 29 Comments

1. Since Tulsi supported watering down the House anti-Semitism resolution to a meaningless catchall that even Ilhan Omar laughingly supported, it’s just as well that she now condemns the airstrike on Suleimani. Politically, the two positions are one and the same.

2. Our public Democrats’ 180° out-of-phase lack of celebration at the death of this monster is likenable only to 1865 Democrats’ glee at Lincoln’s murder. Seen nothing else comparable that comes to mind.

3. I think neo meant to address OlderandWheezier in the other thread, Banned Lizard.

4. No company left at all. Democrats all have crossed the Rubicon to the crazy place now.

   There are various factions claiming to use the party and its dwindling resources but money is not coming into the party, only the candidates.

   Making a party out of factions means the party is over for the party,

5. “And of course, if President Obama had done it, the vast majority of Democrats would be agreeing with Joe Lieberman. ”

   That parallels very much this whole impeachment discussion wrt Trump.

   No doubt, if it were Obama, the crew here would be as vociferous with their rationales aplenty on how his impeachment is justifiable and ought to be.

   And a good many Dems would be equally so, making very much the same arguments we hear on the “right” today opposing impeachment.

   It is all team sports.

   Neither side can bear any recognition of problems with their side.

   No real attempt to convince anyone anymore about the ideas, principles, standards.

   H*ll, those are situational nowadays – whatever dear leader says, whatever is plausible for today’s decision – or whatever to oppose the other side – that’s what each side runs with.

   Instead, they each divert focus to how bad the other is – be it truthful, exaggerated, or lies – each giving the other plenty of ammo to work with, as they overstep and attempt to “own” the “other side”.

   Cater to the hard-“core” – who only wants their team to “win”.

   The worst part is there is a willing and receptive audience for each. Claiming otherwise, but are cynically un-serious and entertained by it all. Each side’s “core” wanting to tear it all down.

   Beginning to wonder if indeed dilbert has it right – meat puppets everywhere.

   And, those who might not be, that have a voice, are too incentivized to go along to get along – to keep their audience, or electoral favor.

   The silence in their cacophony is deafening.

   D*mn few Joe Liebermans in the lot.

   Thus, feeding the spiral.

6. So stupid. Do these people not know that Iran declared war on us 40 years ago? There has been no treaty or armistice since. Ask any Iranian official. They still believe the war is on. It is about time that we started actually fighting it. War is not like love. It doesn’t take two. In any war, the side not fighting is usually losing it. Yes our strike was an act of war, but so is attacking our embassies in Baghdad and Teheran.

7. BM
   No doubt, if it were Obama, the crew here would be as vociferous with their rationales aplenty on how his impeachment is justifiable and ought to be.

   Search the archives to test your “no doubt” claim.
   Many times this blog asked this question of Obama- knave or fool?
   The same question could be asked of you.

8. Gringo, thanks, and: endorsed.

9. Doug Purdie
   So stupid. Do these people not know that Iran declared war on us 40 years ago? There has been no treaty or armistice since.

   It was no accident that Obama did not submit his “agreement” with Iran for ratification as a treaty, as he knew his “agreement” wouldn’t pass.

10. If I had an once of respect for Dems left it disappeared after this traitorous response; one almost expects them to wear t-shirts with the martyred Terrorists image upon it. Omar suggested Iran attack Trump hotels worldwide. She should be be in solitary somewhere about now. They all sicken me.

11. Gringo,

    Your equivalence argument that both parties are the same is full of sh*t. No way would anyone here have had anything but full agreement with Obama had he taken out Suleimani. On the right, we still hold that politics should stop at the “water’s edge”. It’s the democrats who have declared war on the constitution, not us.

12. Tulsi Gabbard’s response to Trump’s taking out of Suleimani demonstrates that she’s a liberal/ leftist. In fact, she’s LESS honest than B. Sanders, E. Warren, etc. At least they unequivocally state where they stand on the issues. Her ‘moderation’ is a transparent attempt to be considered for the VP slot.

13. Geoffrey, Gringo argues against equivalence. He quotes BM, who does argue equivalence.

14. BM:

    “No doubt”?

    Plenty of doubt. In fact, I don’t recall anyone on the right doing anything but praising Obama whenever he took out a terrorist. Perhaps there’s an exception or two, but not only can I not recall one, but my guess is that the number of them is tiny if they exist at all.

    In fact, I still don’t even think Bill Clinton’s wrongdoings rose to the level of an impeachable offense. On that, people on the right often differ with me. We’ve argued it out here quite a few times.

15. In all the fool vs knave dialog on the blog, I never recall clamoring for the impeachment of Obama. BM is a highly appropriate moniker you ve selected.

16. Geoffrey Britain:

    Gringo wasn’t the one making that argument. He was quoting BM, and criticizing BM, who was the one who had made the argument.

    However, your phrase “full of sh*t” is actually a more apropos description of the argument of someone who calls him/herself “BM.”

17. Plenty of doubt. In fact, I don’t recall anyone on the right doing anything but praising Obama whenever he took out a terrorist. Perhaps there’s an exception or two,

    People on the paulbot / palaeo / Unz / alt-right spectrum likely complained. That’s much more of a set of hobbyist perspectives (intellectual perspective in the hands of some) than a popular or electoral-political one. Paul had the support of about 4% of the Republican primary electorate; three of the seven members of his Liberty Caucus endorsed his candidacy. NB, Rand Paul has (AFAICT) none of his father’s shortcomings.

18. In all the fool vs knave dialog on the blog, I never recall clamoring for the impeachment of Obama.

    It will be some time before a full elucidation of the IRS scandal or the current set of FBI / Main Justice / IC scandals is to be had, if ever. I’m not persuaded the buck stops with Lois Lerner or with Brennan / Clapper / Weissman / Yates / McCabe.

19. Headline Fox: Missile attacks target US forces in Iraq, senior military source says; Iran suspected

    https://www.foxnews.com/world/missile-attacks-target-us-forces-in-iraq-senior-military-source-says-iran-suspected

    multiple locations across Iraq, a senior U.S. military source in the country told Fox News, describing it as a series of attacks on U.S. forces from Iran.

20. White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said after the attack: “We are aware of the reports of attacks on U.S. facilities in Iraq. The president has been briefed and is monitoring the situation closely and consulting with his national security team.” It was not immediately clear how the U.S. may respond.

    Meantime, Iran state TV claimed Tehran launched “tens” of surface-to-surface missiles at Iraq’s Ain Assad air base housing U.S. troops. State TV described it as Tehran’s revenge operation over the killing of Iranian Quds Force Gen. Qassem Soleimani.

21. I agree art we ve all had the inklings of what o bamas admin was up to, seems like the tact taken was that if we all commit crimes there will just be too many of us to jail.
    A Chicago creation if you will * a flash mob* !!!

22. No doubt, if it were Obama, the crew here would be as vociferous with their rationales aplenty on how his impeachment is justifiable and ought to be.

    Nope. My objections to Obama were that he
    1) was useless
    2) was useless
    That he was a Democrat didn’t make any difference.

    I was firmly opposed to Clinton’s impeachment too.

23. shadow on January 7, 2020 at 8:44 pm said:
    There’s a difference between “I’m so convinced that I think any other position on this topic is stupid and ill-informed” and “it’s not debatable.” I think people often mean the former when they say the latter. Most things really are debatable, even things most people agree on – professors argue with their students all the time about principles they’ve been certain of for decades.

    I personally have a few political views that I’m completely convinced of, to the point that I’m not interested in being unconvinced. Supporting the Second Amendment, for example, or supporting the state of Israel. However, they’re still “debatable” as evidenced by the fact that those things are debated around me all the time.
    * * *
    Well said, back on the Debatable thread.

    When Andy McCarthy writes on a topic and doesn’t convince me of his position, then I will consider the situation to really be debatable.

    https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/qasem-soleimani-strike-enemy-combatant-terror-commanders-fair-game/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=third

    Last week, Iranian General Qasem Soleimani was killed in a targeted strike by U.S. forces authorized by President Trump. This preemptive attack has spawned a curious debate over whether Soleimani posed an imminent threat at the time he was taken out. The suggestion, mainly by partisan Democrats, is that it was illegitimate for the president to use lethal force without congressional authorization absent proof that Soleimani was on the cusp of killing Americans — or, better, killing even more Americans.

    The debate puts me in mind of the early-to-mid 1990s, when our counterterrorism laws were dangerously flawed. Back then, sensible Democrats — as most of them were — knew that these defects had to be addressed. Rather than sound like apologists for anti-American jihadists, they took admirably expeditious action.
    …
    It is interesting to contrast the mid Nineties to today.

    Back then, most Democrats were committed to the law-enforcement approach to counterterrorism. While you can debate the wisdom of that, those Democrats were at least serious about making sure that court prosecution was as effective as it could possibly be. In the 1996 overhaul of counterterrorism law, the Clinton White House and Justice Department worked closely with a Republican-controlled Congress. They not only addressed the flaws that made uncompleted bombing plots so challenging to prosecute. They also defined new crimes tailored to how modern international terrorism actually works. These improvements enabled investigators to thwart plots in their infancy; we were also empowered to starve jihadist organizations of funding, personnel, and materiel.

    The bipartisan message was loud and clear: We want terrorists aggressively prosecuted but, even more, we want our agents to have the tools to prevent plots and attacks from taking shape in the first place.

    Where is that message today?

    In neutralizing terrorists and their state sponsors, the venerable law of war is, to my mind, a necessary complement, if not a preferable alternative, to the criminal law. One of many reasons is that, when an enemy is making war on the United States, there is no need to wait for an attack to be imminent in order to justify a defensive, preemptive strike. General Soleimani was an enemy combatant commander for the Iranian regime and the jihadist terror networks it uses in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and elsewhere. For more than 40 years, Iran has unabashedly pronounced itself as at war with the United States. It has conducted major attacks that have killed hundreds of Americans. In just the past few weeks, Iran’s jihadist militias attacked American bases in and around Baghdad eleven times.

    Reports of intelligence indicating that Soleimani was planning more attacks in the near term are surely credible. Legally, though, they are beside the point. Soleimani was a proper target regardless of the evidence that any new attack was imminent.

    The real question is: Why is imminence even an issue? This is not a close call. We are talking about one of the most notorious mass-murderers of Americans on the planet, the top combatant commander of the regime that proudly tells the world its motto is “Death to America.” Why would we want to raise an abstruse question that would make eliminating such a monster more difficult?

    In the Obama years, Democrats were happy to line up in support of unprovoked U.S. attacks on Libya. The use of lethal force was not authorized by Congress, and Americans were not being threatened. Now, because the president at the helm is Donald Trump, they want to quibble over whether the latest Iranian atrocities and U.S. intelligence were a sufficiently flashing neon sign that more atrocities were imminent? That is irresponsible.

    In the 1990s, Democrats understood that we needed to fix our laws to make it easier to eliminate threats to attack the United States, regardless of whether they were about to occur or hadn’t even gotten beyond the recruitment-and-training phase. Maybe those Democrats make themselves heard only when one of their own is in the White House. Right now, though, we need to pull together as a united front against an Iranian enemy that could not be clearer about its murderous intentions.

    Yes, we’re in a period of extreme partisanship. That is no excuse for playing politics with our security.

24. This is a good companion to McCarthy’s article: NYPD took the reforms and threats seriously.

    https://www.city-journal.org/nypd-security-iran-threats

25. Ouch.
    https://spectator.us/democratic-media-hate-trump-love-iran-america/

    The Democratic media hate Trump more than they love Iran — or America …Only the ignorant or bad-faith actors would jump to the conclusion that Trump is about to bomb Iran’s mosques.
    Dominic Green January 7, 2020

    …
    TIME has a special department called TIME for Kids, full of useful cues for the indoctrination of woke attitudes at the earliest possible age, in case your ankle-biters damage their career prospects by developing thoughts of their own and accidentally expressing an honest opinion in public. The TIME for Kids take on Soleimani’s killing is uncannily similar to Elizabeth Warren’s squirming on The View when Meghan McCain asked her to confirm that she thought Soleimani was a terrorist.

    Soleimani, TIME says, was a ‘general’ and ‘a top military leader in Iran’, who was ‘called a terrorist’ by President Trump — which is to say, not a terrorist in the opinion of TIME and the decent people who read it, but a terrorist in the opinion of the warmongering white supremacist who has launched forever-war after forever-war since stealing the 2016 election. Soleimani, Warren said after repeated questioning, is ‘of course…part of a group that our Federal government has designated as terrorist’ — which is to say, not a terrorist in her opinion, because she wants to win the Democratic presidential nomination and because she is quite possibly so morally impaired that she can’t bring herself to call any enemy of her country a terrorist, but a terrorist in someone else’s opinion, probably the opinion of people who believe that she claimed to be of Cherokee descent, and allowed others to claim it without correcting them, just so she could work the affirmative action system to her advantage.

26. “Where is that message today?”

    Ilhan Omar is a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

    ‘Nuff said.

27. So many people seem to be dissatisfied.
    What’s wrong with us? Why aren’t we able to just count our blessings?
    (Perhaps because we have received too many of them? Because we’ve been too, too blessed? Perhaps…)

    Anyway, from the Some-People-Are-Never-Satisfied Department:
    https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/01/ask_an_iranian.html
    (H/T: Blazingcatfur blog)

    P.S. From the same site:
    https://twitter.com/davereaboi/status/1214598750674571267?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1214598750674571267&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blazingcatfur.ca%2F

28. Barry – good post from the Iranian point of view.

    A couple of companion pieces via PowerLine; they resonsted together to me even before I read the comment at the end of the first one.

    https://spectator.org/the-schiff-effect/

    Dems’ chickens come home to roost in lack of Soleimani consultation.
    by JEFFREY LORD January 7, 2020, 12:04 AM
    “When you put someone who is wrong as often as Adam Schiff is wrong and is as deeply partisan as he is, in charge of the intelligence committee, then no, you’re not going to share confidential information because Adam leaks like a sieve,” Gowdy said. [in September 2019]
    …
    Trey Gowdy got it right. And with the refusal of the Trump administration to “consult” with congressional Democrats, Schiff prominently included, the chickens have come home to roost.

    A furious Speaker Nancy Pelosi bitterly complained that “this action was taken without the consultation of the Congress.”

    In a priceless post, conservative author, filmmaker, and ex-Reagan aide Dinesh D’Souza said this of Democrat Senate Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer’s complaint about not being consulted:
    “Neither were the Iranians, and for pretty much the same reason.”

    Well aside from the humor, in fact D’Souza’s comment was clearly, if sadly, on point.
    …
    All of this is hurting Democrats. As former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has said, all of this rabid, crazed anti-Trumpism is not merely doing incredible damage to the Democratic Party, but it is also fueling a surge of millions of dollars into the Trump campaign from angry Americans.

    Or, put another way, the Schiff Effect has not only done serious damage to his party’s reputation for handling secret information — it is also helping to do the one thing his party says they are determined to prevent.

    That would be reelecting Donald Trump.

    APPPS • 3 hours ago
    It seems democrats have literally gone insane and are doing everything they can to drive us into another Civil War.

    Could be.
    https://americanmind.org/post/our-elites-are-steering-us-towards-civil-war/

    by Glenn Ellmers 01.07.2020
    …
    It was said of the ancien régime—the nobility that reigned prior to the French Revolution—that “they learned nothing and forgot nothing.” In his monumental book on Lincoln and the principles of self-government, A New Birth of Freedom (2000), the late Claremont professor Harry Jaffa expounds on this observation: “They could forget nothing, namely their undeserved and socially useless privileges; and they could learn nothing, namely that their fellow countrymen would no longer tolerate the continuance of their privileges.”
    …
    In New Birth and other writings over the course of his long career teaching political philosophy, Jaffa explained that the American Founders solved the crisis of religious warfare (which had plagued Europe for centuries) through the separation of church and state. The power of government would no longer be used by believers who were in authority to persecute different believers who were out of authority.
    Yet the danger of religious warfare can return in secular form when people no longer agree on the basic principles of republican government and regard each other as political heretics rather than fellow citizens. “Elections,” Jaffa wrote, “may properly decide only between those whose differences of opinion are not differences of principle.”
    …
    While most Americans acknowledge the fact that America is deeply divided, many of our leaders remain in denial about the potential result of this growing, fundamental distrust. We are confronting again the dire situation New Birth describes prior to the Civil War: “both parties [see] the contest as a zero-sum enterprise in which the advantages of one side [are] losses to the other. From this viewpoint, ballots can never really substitute for bullets.”

    Not for the first time in our nation’s history, if this state of affairs continues force may be embraced as the only alternative when reason fails. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. We must fervently hope that things will change before they become violent. But if the clueless attitudes of our sclerotic elite remain unaltered, it is not hard to see what’s on the horizon.

    RTWT.
    My only complaint is that he ascribes all the nastiness of the left to (really truly privileged) white upper-class coastal elites, and does not acknowledge the virulence of their POC & victim-class allies.

29. Wow – simple typo, but spell check fail to the max.
    “resonsted ” should be “resonated”

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