Susan Hennessey: caught in the crossfire crossfire
I’d never heard of Susan Hennessey before last night. Then I saw, via a link on Instapundit, that she’d tweeted this about this about the tragic shoot-down by Iran of a Ukrainian plane taking off from Tehran airport:
176 completely innocent lives, killed in the crossfire of reckless escalation. Just an unbelievable tragedy. https://t.co/LTI0kfHPrx
— Susan Hennessey (@Susan_Hennessey) January 9, 2020
When I saw it I thought Susan Hennessey must be some celebrity, perhaps an actress of some sort. But no. Here’s her bio: “Lawfare Executive Editor, Brookings Senior Fellow, CNN National Security and Legal Analyst, Former IC attorney.”
If you go to the replies to that tweet, you can see an almost unending stream of ridicule, richly deserved, about her misuse of the word “crossfire.” But I want to look beyond that, because what Hennessey did is quite revealing of the mind of a seemingly intelligent and supposedly well-educated leftist Trump-hater.
This is obviously not a case of a person who made a mistake because she literally doesn’t know what “crossfire” means. But just for the record, of course there was no actual crossfire here. Only Iran had been firing on American positions in Iraq, although not all that successfully. Only Iran fired at the plane. Iran, Iran, Iran doing the firing.
But when the left wants to blame someone, they trot out “the cycle of violence” (the better to make both sides seem equivalent) or “tit-for-tat” (likewise), and they arbitrarily choose a starting point that makes the side they want to call the bad guys seem like the instigators and then attribute all the bad things that happen subsequently to that side’s agency. No matter who actually does the deed.
And since the starting point is chosen not because it’s the actual starting point but because it’s the way to blame that side, it’s an almost infinitely flexible way to mount an argument. Or it might seem that way, as long as you don’t stretch it so far that it breaks, as Susan Hennessey did here.
It’s a sequence like this, and any point can be chosen along the way to highlight, depending on who needs targeting:
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
As long as Trump is an actor somewhere in the mix, they can blame him for the whole sequence and everything that follows after whatever his role was in it. And if you’re writing propaganda, as so many tweeters are (and as Susan Hennessey certainly was here), you use words like “crossfire” quite loosely for effect rather than for truth or accuracy. After all, we did something violent to some Iranian at some point, right? So yeah, “crossfire” will do, Hennessey must have thought.
And later she tries to define “crossfire” in a way she thinks makes her look less knavish and/or foolish:
Since I think this is a genuine attempt to be helpful (though it is hard to sort out among my mentions), I'll note that there is an alternate and extremely common usage of the term cross fire that is not related to the literal exchange of fire and is not a military term of art. pic.twitter.com/eeLMsLifzh
— Susan Hennessey (@Susan_Hennessey) January 10, 2020
Yeah, Susan, sure thing. But when you use “crossfire” to refer to the actual, literal shooting down of an airplane you’re not using the word that way. You’re just not, and the fact that you’re trying to make it seem as though you were only makes it even more clear how disingenuous you are being. This situation involved no firing from two points in which the line of fire crossed, nor one in which the forces of the sides met or clashed, and it most certainly was not the rapid or heated exchange of words.
But “crossfire” seemed to Hennessey such a useful way to look at it that it’s been hard for her to give it up.
I’ve seen her referred to as ‘Fusion Susan’ for her uncanny ability to parrot talking points that match up with Fusion GPS propaganda.
“But when you use “crossfire” to refer to the actual, literal shooting down of an airplane you’re not using the word that way. You’re just not, and the fact that you’re trying to make it seem as though you were only makes it even more clear how disingenuous you are being.”
So…you’re saying it’s “not debatable?”
Mike
MBunge:
It’s already been shown to be debatable, because Hennessey is certainly debating it right in that thread.
She’s losing the debate, though, by a mile, because her argument is abysmal.
Plus, whether there was a crossfire or not is a rather simple issue, so it’s not a complex question. As I’ve said in a previous thread, simple questions can come closer to being “not debatable.” But few things are truly not debatable.
Hennessey is caught up in a Crossfire Hurricane of her own making.
Thing is, Susan’s “crossfire” is merely one in a blizzard of simultaneous “crossfire”s that popped up on Twitter. So nothing special in that sense. I guess it’s her necessarily knowing better that attracts the extra flak? Journolist Partyline sheep: baaaaaaah.
Baaaaaah, Mr. Sheep.
I’ve been following Fusion Susan for the last few years. She’s one of the inveterate Russian collusion cronies at Lawfare. She literally spent two years peddling the Steele Dossier and saying that Trump was a Russian agent. Then when the Mueller Report came out, and the dust settled, she has utterly refused to apologize for gaslighting gullible people.
She’s a hack.
The plane departed the Tehran airport with clearance from Iranian authorities, and was shot down a couple of minutes later by Iranian anti-aircraft fire. The use of “crossfire” is grossly inappropriate.
Paul in Boston, “Crossfire Hurricane”: Good one!
Mayor Pete made a similar misstep on Twitter.
https://mobile.twitter.com/petebuttigieg/status/1215349135991287809
Not completely untrue; but just because it’s arguably true does not mean it is worth sharing on social media.
Twitter is for throwing red meat to the animals. Gotta know your audience.
Booty-guy and Fusion Susan both tried to make a subtle point about gamesmanship and statecraft to the wrong folks at the wrong place at the wrong time using the wrong language.
Try code-switching next time!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
Hennessey and others of her ilk are too brainwashed to realize that, in resorting to deceit in order to advance their ideology, they reveal the illegitimacy of that ideology.
That brainwashing starts with acceptance of the proposition that there is no such thing as objective truth.
Iran has defiled the crash scene, scrubbing it down, bulldozing, etc. All which to be expected, no surprise.
What would be more interesting to know is whether they’re scrubbing the ground just downrange from the site of the anti-air missile explosion? As I
understand it, these things spew shrapnel of a specific type designed to rip up the targeted aircraft, which expended telltale shrapnel will then fall to earth in an ordinary way . . . calculable, in other words, given missile type, flight path, velocity at detonation, altitude and so on. If this stuff is on the ground and the Iranians aren’t actively vacuuming it up, I’d reckon we’ll be hearing from Mossad a few months hence with news of “Look what we found laying about in the Iranian countryside!”
Curiously enough, if I understand what Susan Hennessey is saying, her statement is even MORE damning of the Iranians. Because what I’m gathering from her tweets is either:
A. That Iran and the US were exchanging deadly fire, and the airplane was caught in the crossfire, (demonstrably false, and Hennessey ultimately acknowledges that), OR
B. That Iran was firing from two different locations (the ballistic missile launch pad and the anti-air missile launchers), and the Ukranian airliner was caught in the crossing of those two launch locations.
The second explanation, which is what Hennessey dredged up after having to acknowledge that the first explanation did not hold water, is even MORE damning of the Iranians.
She would have been much better off just tweeting “I got it wrong in my first tweet — there was no exchange of fire, and thus no crossfire.” But no, she wouldn’t admit she was wrong, so she made an even bigger fool of herself.
Iran carries out deadly terror attacks over the years that kill Americans. POTUS gives order to kill Iranian terror master as a signal to stop the attacks. Iran vows revenge. Iran holds mass state funeral for terror master. 32 people die due to a stampede at the funeral. Later, Iran fires missiles at, and misses, U.S. targets in Iraq to get revenge for death of terror master. Six hours later a Ukrainian airline is inadvertently shot down by the Iranians. 176 innocent people die. Casualties – 1 combatant and 208 non-combatants. Unintended consequences? Tragic collateral damage? The fog of war? Yes, yes, and yes. But hardly a crossfire due to POTUS ordering a legal military op.
She’s representative of a cultural dispensation. See Thos. Sowell on the one-uppers. If we care about our prosperity as a nation, people like her will be shoved out the door and told to learn to code.
You could have just said ‘Brookings’ and saved yourself a bunch of typing :).
Arguable.
She clarified:
She’s not wrong; she’s just not persuasive.
Honestly, her choice of the word escalation is the real scandal.
This was post #54, the tail end, of yesterday’s Iran thread, so I humble repost here:
Motive! Motive! Motive!
Look for the motive.
Tehran is in northern Iran, and the Ukrainian plane was on a NW flight path, keeping it over Iran for, oh, 150 miles or so.
A large # of the passengers, now deceased, were Iranian expats heading back to an appallingly secular, non-Shia Canada.
What better way to send a message to the increasingly restless Iranians suffering under the yoke of the ayatollahs at home while keeping the evidence under ayatollah control?
Heck, it wasn’t an Iranian plane that was sacrificed. It was a Boeing 737 made in “Death to America” country. Owned by Ukraine.
No skin off Khomenei’s nose, and lessons to all Iranians, including the expats: do not come home again!
Blaming the Ukrainian air crash on Trump makes me want to puke.
Did she choose that word carefully? lol obviously, not carefully enough.
The Democrats I know are still taking Trump pretty hard.
One Dem can barely look at the news these days without feeling bad. Another, while discussing local restaurants with me yesterday, went off on how stupid and dangerous Trump is about Iran.
But the BEST part was missed!!! She could have controlled herself and said NOTHING rather than insert herself and show the world that college degrees now held by women, are more for show than for their real thinking – thanks to feminism..
and she certainly put on a show believing in such substance..
reminds me of what i think of much philosophy.. big, fluffy, and large…
seeming to be too much… until you really taste it and find it cloyingly sweet cotton candy absent of real substance other than its own toxicity when and idea like a virus spreads.
My psychiatrist brother, who would never ever visit this putative right-wing site, was asked by me, ” What do you think of Soleimani’s death? Just your thought, no debate or discussion.”
His answer, “I’ll pass”.
I heard a very short clip on the radio of Wolf Blitzer interviewing someone. He asked his questions in such a way as to lead them right up to saying that it’s pretty much America’s (Trump really) that the Iranians shot down that plane. I thought if it was a courtroom the opposing attorney would have jumped in with – “Objection, leading the witness”. So Hennessey is just going along with the rest of her gang.
He asked his questions in such a way as to lead them right up to saying that it’s pretty much America’s (Trump really) [fault] that the Iranians shot down that plane.
Patrick: David Brooks has a classic sanctimonious column today in which he accurately catalogs the Democrats’ crazy over Iran, then blames it all on Trump:
This is Trump’s ultimate victory. Every argument on every topic is now all about him. Hating Trump together has become the ultimate bonding, attention-grabbing and profit-maximization mechanism for those of us in anti-Trump world.
“Trump has made us all stupid”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/opinion/trump-iran-media.html
Democrats could be responsible, thoughtful adults who choose their behavior. But no, they’ve been driven crazy like Elmer Fudd by that wascally wabbit, Donald J. Trump. They have no choice. It’s all Trump’s fault!
This is made worse by David Brooks’ positioning himself as America’s elite, yet crackerbarrel, moral philosopher, chiding Americans, more in sadness than in anger, to do better.
Well now Iran has said they unintentionally shot the plane down.
Interested to know why they have admitted this when they could have just did the proverbial ‘nothing to see here move along’ routine.
okay, let’s play a game here with Susan Hennessey. Let’s say that she is correct in that there was a “crossfire” between the US and Iranian forces. Or that there was a military tit for tat going on?
If this is true then I have to ask the question: Why on earth is the Tehran Airport giving them clearance for takeoff then? Why aren’t the Iranian authorities telling all civilian planes to stay put until it is safe? Why aren’t the Iranian leaders saying “the Orange mad man is shooting at us everybody take cover”?
Paul in Boston on January 10, 2020 at 4:14 pm said:
Hennessey is caught up in a Crossfire Hurricane of her own making.
* * *
Good quip.
I have been wondering for ages why the anti-Trumpers chose that particular name.
Yes, it’s the first line of a very popular song, but why that particular evocation?
And what is a “cross-fire hurricane” anyway?
Somebody on the internet knows everything!
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Crossfire%20Hurricane
“According to a biography of Keith Richards, the first line of the song, “I was born in a crossfire hurricane,” is a reference to the fact that Richards was born near London during World War II in the midst of a German air raid.”
https://www.answers.com/Q/What_is_a_crossfire_hurricane
“As the eye of a hurricane passes over a fixed spot the wind direction changes 180 degrees. Hence a crossfire.”
AesopFan,
That may be true about ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ but just like the Lennon/McCartney Beatles songs the Jagger/Richards songs are sometimes hard to figure as the years and drugs have led to many conflicting stories about who did what and why.
As for naming their coup attempt I’m sure it’s just more boomer nostalgia and Orange Man Bad was too obvious.
I hear “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” as a boasting blues song filtered through a lot of acid and other drugs. I don’t think the lyrics mean all that much beyond the narrator coming through dramatic trials to a better place.
Its main appeal is the killer riff plus the usual Stones music magic back when Brian Jones was still around.
No one seems to be credited for Crossfire Hurricane as an FBI codename. I imagined it as James Comey trying to be hip.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/us/politics/fbi-code-names-investigations-crossfire-hurricane.html
huxley – that’s the way the lyrics read to me also.
It reminds me of another song about a dramatic narrator and overcoming trials, who is optimistic in its defiance despite the complaint of the chorus, but with perhaps a little less acid in the mix.
https://genius.com/Tennessee-ernie-ford-sixteen-tons-lyrics
I was born one morning when the sun didn’t shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
I loaded sixteen tons of number 9 coal
And the straw boss said, “Well-a bless my soul!”
You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter don’t you call me, ’cause I can’t go
I owe my soul to the company store
I think we could extend her the benefit of the doubt here, at least with regard to her use of the word “crossfire,” if she were speaking figuratively. If you call the attack of the US embassy a “shot” and Trump killing the head terrorist a “shot” and Iran firing the missiles a “shot,” then you can say the airliner was caught in a “crossfire.” That word serves as a figurative word for “ongoing struggle.”
I have a problem with Susan’s position, but not with her use of that word.
“Interested to know why they have admitted this when they could have just did the proverbial ‘nothing to see here move along’ routine.”
Because their media sycophants have convinced them that, by admitting they shot down the plane, the media will be able to blame it on Trump and have him impeached for it.
Just one more really big mistake in a whole circus of them.
Trump is unbelievably lucky in his enemies. Now the Democrats are acting like defense counsel for Iran. If somehow the Iranians manage to pull down this regime and China has a recession, what will the Democrats do ? Lie, of course, but they made this a big story when they didn’t have to. “Those whom the gods would destroy…”
“Rapid or heated exchange of words” don’t blow defenseless commercial aircraft that took off in your own country out of the sky. So there’s that.
If I remember right, jumpin jack flash was the first or one of the first songs where the stones worked with Mr Jimmy Miller (brother of Times reporter Judith Miller)
sdferr on January 10, 2020 at 4:18 pm said:
simultaneous “crossfire”s that popped up on Twitter. So nothing special in that sense.
Based on what I saw she was the first out of the gate with it.
But it was obviously a talking point that went out, or something that others latched onto.
Mentus on January 10, 2020 at 7:58 pm
said[quoted]:killed in the crossfire of reckless escalation.
Not even arguable. BEcause the word crossfire in that phrase implies that both sides were escalating. And that is demonstrably NOT the case. (Though many certainly were assuming we were preparing to escalate.)
huxley on January 10, 2020 at 10:49 pm
said[quoted]:“Trump has made us all stupid”
As much as I dislike Brooks, when you’re right… you’re RIGHT!
No, it doesn’t.
She’s blaming escalation for #PS752, not a literal crossfire.
It’s a bad choice of words, since there was also actual, active fire from one of the belligerents. Now some people refuse to acknowledge the legitimate use of the term as a metaphor.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cross%20fire
Does this mean Trump is literally shooting down farmers?
Mentus:
Yes indeed, “crossfire” can be used metaphorically to talk about speech and or debate and/or argument or even at times policies. But I don’t see anyone saying it can’t ever be used that way, so it seems to me to be a strawman argument to act as though they are saying that.
As I wrote earlier, though, if a person uses the word “crossfire” to describe a situation with missiles firing and people dead as a result (as Hennessey used it), then no, it is NOT being used metaphorically. The crossfire of words doesn’t kill people.
That example you gave is not analogous to Hennessey’s used of the word “crossfire.” It would be analogous if those farmers were killed by bullets that Trump had ordered National Guard troops to fire at someone else, and the farmers were standing in the way and got inadvertently hit by stray bullets. In the example you gave, “crossfire” is obviously used in a metaphorical way and there is no firing going on at all and no one is killed – just as, for example, a “trade war” is not a war in the literal sense of bullet and missiles and bombs.
But Brooks is NOT right. A correct version of his statement would read:
“We have made ourselves stupid in response to Trump.”
Of course the federal govt hired her.