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Well, of course — 18 Comments

1. Crossfire!

2. How odd that Pope Pete says his thoughts are with the families and loved ones of the dead when manifestly his thoughts are on domestic partisan politics. What, he thinks we haven’t eyes to see? Silly silly man.

3. HAHAHAHAHA, It was as predicable as the sunrise, and it didn’t take them long.

4. I see Buttigieg’s face and the phrase which pops into my head is ‘incorrigible twerp’.

5. Buttigieg and Rachel Maddow are examples of the “scholarship” coming out of the Rhodes Scholarship program. Logical thinking is not required.

6. WWII was also Trump’s fault.

7. You know how screwed up we human beings are? Even NeverTrump freaks like Tom Nichols and David French recognize how wrong it is to blame Trump for this…but will this change their opinion that we should hand power back to the people blaming Trump? Not a chance.

   Mike

8. I’m in schools. Two fifth graders I was speaking to believe Trump is bad, with huge shakes of their head, and that he’s equivalent to Hitler because “when Hitler was elected he was well liked but once he got power he did bad things.”

9. “…fifth graders…”
   Well, you gotta get ’em while they’re young.

   On the other hand, it’s never too late, since so many are taking their sweet time to grow up….
   …including far too many in academia and in the teaching professions.

   Some parents, though, may be a bit perturbed when they discover that they’re paying big, big bucks for the privilege of filling their kids’ heads with horse-shite (courtesy of some of those in academia and the teaching professions that haven’t yet grown up…):
   https://freebeacon.com/issues/no-zionists-and-no-straights-tweets-from-teacher-rattle-elite-new-york-city-school/

10. Jx: Whew, man, they really hate you, they hate all of us with a boiling redhot loathing.

    Jk: Yeah, those totalitarian Mullahs are truly the worst. When will they ever quit?

    Jx: Mullahs? I was talkin’ about the Democrats, not the Mullahs.

11. Buttigieg: “My thoughts are with the families and loved ones of all 176 souls lost aboard this flight”

    Yea, but, are his thoughts with the families and loved ones of Americans and our allies killed by the terrorists? (rhetorical question)

    Jeez, I hope this lame brain never gets to be president or even a senator!

12. Cross-over from the technology post; excellent article (paragraphing added):
    Mac on January 9, 2020 at 7:36 pm said:
    Some observations on the left and the mullahs in the Iranian revolution here:

    https://quillette.com/2020/01/08/irans-fawning-western-apologists/

    War is hell and, all other factors being equal, we all want peace. But the cause of “peace” activism now often operates as a cover for leftist hashtaggers acting as propagandists for dictators who spit on everything that Western leftists claim to support, including democracy, pluralism, feminism and LGBT rights.
    As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once noted, when the Soviets realized that they had fallen behind in the nuclear arms race, they “changed their tactics. Then they suddenly became advocates of peace at any cost. They started to convoke peace congresses, to circulate petitions for peace, and the western world fell for this deceit. [But] although an open war could not be conducted, they could still carry out their oppression behind the scene—terrorism, [p]artisan war, violence, prisons, concentration camps. I ask you: Is this peace?”

    The Soviet Union is long gone. But this tactic lives on.

13. Useful data additions, and thoughtful analysis by J. E. Dyer, although for some reason she dates the airliner downing to 7 February instead of 8 January.

    https://libertyunyielding.com/2020/01/10/an-accidental-shootdown-of-the-ukrainian-airliner-doesnt-really-make-sense-but-ok/

    Money quote for this post:

    One group, the mainstream media, is leading an unflagging charge to depict everything as a negative reflection on Trump (as opposed to just doing their best in good faith to convey it as news). In ways big and small, this produces a lot of misleading reportage.

    Just one example would be the Washington Post article about the U.S. having advance warning that Iran was preparing to launch missiles into Iraq. Our LU editorial comment on this sums it up: the article reports this “almost” as if it’s a bad thing. I would go further and say, Don’t kid yourself about the “almost” part.

    The WaPo report appears to have come from someone who knew there was prior U.S. intelligence about the Iranian missile movements, and may have had legitimate information that a foreign government gave us a heads-up as well. The purpose of feeding it to WaPo seems to have been to suggest something questionable about our having that intelligence and then doing what we did. Which – according to multiple other indicators as well as the WaPo account – was to pluck people and equipment out of harm’s way in advance, and prepare defensive systems to the extent possible on short notice.

    Leaving a vaguely negative impression looks like the goal here, since it’s not clear what else we should have done. Preemptively attack Iran’s missile systems as they were setting up in Iran? Beg Iran, out of quivering terror, to sit down for a parley instead?

    But there’s an important informational point we mustn’t miss. It’s this: deploying the “leak” about prior intelligence, as WaPo’s source did, packages the “intelligence” itself in a way that is likely to mislead us. It associates having prior “warning” with a negative feeling about the event – and with an implication of surprise and indignation for the public. It’s as if it was a policy failure that everybody wasn’t told about the intelligence in the first place, five minutes after the watch chief for the Joint Chiefs of Staff was notified.

    What an informational mess, of oddly framed facts and straw man expectations. The clean truth is best expressed very simply. Of course we had prior intelligence. Du-uh. We have a vast, very expensive national and theater intelligence apparatus to ensure that we’ll have prior intelligence on such activities by an opponent like Iran. It’s perfectly normal for it to perform as described. That’s what it’s supposed to do. Having done this for a living for years, I don’t just accept that we had prior intelligence; I assume we did. The taxpayers are getting value for our dollar.

    There are quite a few other examples of informational goose-chasing. It’s really getting to where the public dialogue doesn’t even make any sense; it’s just a lot of talking points running in fake camos through the woods trying to paintball each other. It’s no wonder none of the shaky-fisted declaiming makes any informational headway against the simple outcomes Trump produces, where you can tell the difference between the before and the after.

14. Just when you thought…

    https://libertyunyielding.com/2020/01/10/to-fact-check-trump-lies-msnbc-turns-to-benghazi-liar-susan-rice/

    Susan Rice is best known as the top Obama adviser who lied on five different network talk shows in 2012, claiming the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi was caused by a YouTube video. But MSNBC put Rice on the air shortly after President Trump’s speech about Iran on Wednesday as a “fact checker.”
    …
    It’s a little silly for MSNBC to complain that Trump “ham-handedly politicized” his speech, and then follow that up with one of the most ham-handed politicians in the Obama White House. Mitchell didn’t mention the Benghazi talk-show fiasco as she touted Rice’s “wealth of foreign policy and Oval Office experience.”

    Originally quoted from here, where there are more examples of spinning, if not outright lying.
    https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/tim-graham/2020/01/08/fact-check-trump-lies-msnbc-turns-tobenghazi-liar-susan-rice

    AesopSpouse remarked last night that, on a recent NPR report, everything they said was, objectively, true, but was put together in such a way that the entire story gave a misleading, really false, impression.

    Fake News.
    It’s what they do together.

15. Here’s that convincing information Mike Lee complained about not getting earlier this week.

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/trump-says-soleimani-was-plotting-attacks-on-four-us-embassies/ar-BBYQ3hp?ocid=spartandhp

    President Trump said in an interview airing Friday that Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani was plotting attacks against four embassies before the U.S. carried out last week’s airstrike that killed the top commander.

    “I can reveal that I believe it would have been four embassies,” Trump told Laura Ingraham during an interview on Fox News that will air in full Friday night. The president also said Soleimani was targeting the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, repeating a claim he made on Thursday.

    “Don’t the American people have a right to know what specifically was targeted without revealing methods and sources?” Ingraham asked Trump.

    “Well, I don’t think so. But we will tell you that probably it was going to be the Embassy in Baghdad,” Trump replied.

    Trump’s comments went beyond what senior administration officials have said about the alleged attacks plotted by Soleimani, which they have described as posing an imminent threat to American lives without going into further detail in a purported effort to protect intelligence sources and methods.

    He had said in a prior press event that the military could decide to release more information, but implied he was leaving the choice to them.

16. The URL header says it all.
    Iran shot down their people, but it’s our fault for droning Soleimani in Iraq, because Trump has a crystal ball that showed Iranians shooting down a civilian airliner in TEHRAN as a 100% sure consequence of killing a notorious terrorist who precipitated an attack on our Embassy in Baghdad (note: that’s a long-established act of war).

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/evidence-that-plane-was-shot-down-in-iran-may-upset-us-canada-relations/ar-BBYObjG?ocid=spartandhp

    If it is determined that it was an Iranian missile, Mr. Trudeau will have to grapple with the question of whether the United States, Canada’s most important ally, played a role in provoking the events that ultimately resulted in the loss of Canadians’ lives.

17. http://carolineglick.com/donald-trump-and-the-mythmakers/

    …
    To protect and preserve their 40-year old delusion-based policy, Trump’s domestic opponents are effectively supporting the Iranian regime against the United States. And as they see it, they have no choice. They are in a race against time. The more successful Trump’s reality-based policies towards Iran on the one hand and Israel on the other are, the harder it will be for the foreign policy establishment to restore their delusion-based policies when he leaves power. Given the stakes, we can assume that their attempts to clip Trump’s wings and debase him will increase in intensity, churlishness and irrationality as time goes by and as his successes mount.

18. “The more successful Trump’s reality-based policies towards Iran on the one hand and Israel on the other are, the harder it will be for the foreign policy establishment to restore their delusion-based policies when he leaves power.”

    Um, no. I’d have to disagree with Caroline Glick on this.

    Seems to me perfectly obvious that if the Democrats regain the presidency in 2020, they’ll be able to do whatever they damn well please…and unless the Democratic candidate is relatively sensible and a true believer in an America that has no need to be “fundamentally transformed” we are going to see a total about face, mirroring Trump’s reversal of direction in 2016, except that the MSM et al. will be gushing unapologetically in support.

    Truly “Darkness [if not insanitt] visible”…

    However, there no candidate of this description in sight, as far as I can see; and it seems rather unlikely that they’re keeping someone in the wings (or on ice at the DNC caterer’s).

    If 2016 was the “Flight 93 Election”, then 2020 is going to be its every-bit-as-consequential sequel.

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