Yesterday when I was buying groceries the young man at the cash register was talking with another employee about bombs dropping on the U.S., probably on New York City. If there are bombs, he said, he’d be on the first plane back to Ecuador. I asked who was planning to bomb us, and he said Iran. I assured him that Iran isn’t capable of such a thing at the moment, and I don’t believe it is. But I wished him good luck, anyway.
Today Iran’s ambassador to the UN said something along those lines in a press conference, but who was saying it yesterday? Somebody must have, somewhere. Just not in any of my regular media sources. Are we going back to melting down over yellowcake and centrifuges? Of course Iran could assault U.S. troops stationed in the region, not to mention U.S. ships and aircraft recently deployed to the region. So there are real risks here.
Trump is suddenly sounding very hawkish.
As others have said in other contexts, — who’s “we,” Kemosabe? I take it no decisions have been made yet, but Trump must be seriously considering getting in on Israel’s action in Iran. Some news stories say Trump is being “pressured” by Israel, but Josh Marshall has another take.
As I noted earlier, what’s driving Trump here is the hunger to get in on a “win.” It might be best to see it as a typical Trumpian branding exercise. Israel has got a product ready to go to market and they’ve offered Trump the opportunity to slap the Trump name on it. …
… Israel has created the circumstances which allow Donald Trump a risk-free “win” of immense magnitude. That is the issue here. Set aside whether or not doing this is wise. I’m talking about why we’re suddenly here. Why two or three days ago the White House was clear they weren’t getting involved and suddenly it all changed. The evolution here is that the Israelis have created an opportunity Trump simply cannot resist. A big, big win with very little risk in the short term. All the force is on one side of the question and nothing is pushing back in the opposite direction. It’s less an evolution of views than simple physics.
Of course, there’s more than the short term. But that’s not how Trump thinks.
The official White House position as of a few minutes ago or so is that Iran is “very close” to having nuclear weapons. Whether that’s true or not depends on whom you ask and what you mean by “very close.” From what I can gather, experts who are not speaking for Israel or for Donald Trump do not think Iran has nuclear weapons now, or has the ability to assemble such weapons by next week. But they could possibly do so within, maybe, a few months. It’s hard to say, since they don’t allow inspections.
Whatever. The new White House position is that Iran is imminently dangerous. Poor Tulsi Gabbard suddenly finds herself at odds with an increasingly hawkish Trump.
Those tensions came to the forefront early Tuesday when a reporter aboard Air Force One asked Trump about Gabbard’s declaration before Congress in March that Iran was not seeking to build a nuclear weapon. Trump appeared to dismiss her assessment.
“I don’t care what she said,” Trump replied. “I think they were very close to having a weapon.”
I guess it doesn’t matter that he blows off security briefings. For Trump, the truth is whatever he says it is.
Greg Sargent writes at The New Republic,
You may have heard it said that Donald Trump won in 2024 in part by vowing to end “forever wars.” During the campaign, Trump ripped Democrat Kamala Harris for campaigning with Liz Cheney, slamming her for wanting “war with every Muslim Country known to mankind.” News organizations credulously insisted that this sort of anger over military entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan fueled Trump’s “movement.” Some even suggested that war fatigue—not his unflagging affection for Vladimir Putin—drove Trump-MAGA opposition to arming Ukraine.
A new battle between Trump and Tucker Carlson over Israel’s war with Iran is severely undermining that understanding of MAGA. Carlson and MAGA podcaster Steve Bannon, among others, have been urging Trump not to deploy the U.S. military in tandem with Israel. Trump appears close to doing so, and people like Carlson and Bannon are loudly proclaiming that this would betray the MAGA movement—which in turn is angering Trump.
But I take it there are other rightie influencers who are breaking with Trump over this. The thing is, last year during the campaigns the right-wing media bubble was portraying Joe Biden as a warmonger and Trump as a peacekeeper. I started running into MAGAts on social media who called Trump a “man of peace” and were critical of Biden for starting wars, although if pressed on precisely which wars Biden had started they seemed confused. And this was the sort of propaganda that those not plugged into right-wing media would easily have missed.
But I do think “Trump will keep us out of wars” was a big part of the Trump cult mythos. And, yeah, I don’t doubt that 20 years ago some of these same people were all fired up to invade Iraq. But the wingnut Right seems mostly to have flipped back to being isolationists, which the Right hasn’t been since the 1930s. Can they all be re-flipped to support Trump if he decides to aid Israel against Iran? And what do his good buddies in Saudi Arabia and Qatar think about this? And for that matter, where is Congress? Oh, never mind … Everybody who thought Trump was a “man of peace” needs to get with the program.
Where we stand at the moment, according to the New York Times:
President Trump said Wednesday that the United States may join the Israeli bombing campaign against Iran. But he also said the U.S. may not.
“Nobody knows what I’m going to do,” he said during an event to install flag poles outside the White House.
I’m sure Trump doesn’t know what he’s going to do, either. I just hope Iran doesn’t say or do anything that pisses him off in the next few days. It’s always possible he’ll cool off and go back to isolationism, and then take credit for how brilliant he was to do that.
In other news: I want to say something about the arrest of New York City Comptroller Brad Lander by Ice yesterday. And, yes, that was just wrong. But now I’m wondering if this could shake up the Dem primary election for mayor. The primary is June 24, but early voting started June 14.
As you probably know, Andrew Cuomo is running and has been leading, by a little, in the polls. I seriously do not want Andrew Cuomo to win. The city’s progressives appear to be coalescing around another candidate, Zohran Mamdani, who has been closing in on Cuomo in the polls. Cuomo’s well-funded super PAC launched a $5.4 million attack ad campaign reminding voters that back in 2020 Mamdani said something about defunding the police. I don’t know if that tactic will work as well in NYC as it does in Missouri, but we’ll see.
Brad Lander has been running third. Late last week Lander and Mamdani cross-endorsed each other, which only makes sense in the context of NYC’s ranked-choice voting system. Instead of voting for one candidate, voters are asked to list their top five favorite candidates by rank. (Although they can choose just one candidate, if they like.) If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote, the ballots are recounted in rounds. The candidate with the least votes is eliminated. So for those ballots that had that candidate first, in the next round votes for the candidates listed second are counted. And if nobody has more than 50 percent, there’s another round. So it’s hard to know how a bump in support for Lander will affect the race. But polls have Cuomo just under 50 percent, so there could be multiple rounds of counting. I’d be happy if Cuomo got knocked out of the race by a can of soup, but I’d also be very pleased with either Mamdani or Lander as the nominee. Fingers crossed.
"what’s driving Trump here is the hunger to get in on a “win.”
That makes as much sense as anything else I have heard but who knows, Stump doesn't even know what motivates him, he's a fucking black hole.
I keep hearing on our Israel centered US corporate media that Iran is a "destabilizing force" in the middle-east that must not be allowed to posses nuclear weapons and needs to be reckoned with at some point. The biggest destabilizing force I see in the middle-east is the State of Israel who already has nuclear weapons and has been conducting an ethnic cleansing campaign for the past half century and a full out genocide for the past 18 months. In my opinion Israel is the greatest threat to peace in the middle east not Iran.
Iran used to be an ally. They received training at Orland basic in 1973 and at Keesler in Biloxi in 1974 when I was at those respective bases.
That was before the Shah was deposed and the Islamic Republic took over.
Just a little reminder that there are other ways to wreak havoc upon cities without requiring aircraft and missiles to do so. Why we imagine that there will be no backlash for any of this is rather mysterious to me. We will own it, too, no matter what Trump does.
Trump does not "think" in a human way. He reacts to stimuli, like an amoeba. The most recent input was the parade. DJT was heavily invested (not financially) in the birthday parade – emotionally. He imagined something like the awesome spectacle that Russia, France, or N. Korea delivers. The Army did not seem to even TRY to stroke Donnies…. ego. They could have put something together but (I think it was deliberate) they showed up – as ordered – and not a damn bit more. Adding to the trauma of dashed expectations was a pathetic turnout – pictures of mostly empty bleachers along the parade route – while tanks were rolling. (In other words, not a deceptive photo from hours before the parade.) "No Kings" put together millions of protesters, as few as five mil or as many as ten million, but they crushed his parade.
I bring this up to project Trump's frame of mind. Everything is a reality show built around ratings. Trump exected the parade to be a show-stopper. Not hardly. So Trump is looking for something that WILL be spectacular in the news and in the minds of MAGA because last week's episode failed. I think Trump will go for it, but I think in a limited way. Trump thinks pictures of dropping the biggest non-nuke bomb in our arsenal will impress. Maybe, but somebody will have to inspect the underground complex to determine the result. How much fissionable stuff will survive? What about a 'dirty bomb', which is less destructive than a real nuke but spreads a lethal umbrella of contamination downwind.
Can Iran "hit" the US with a nuke? Almost certainly not. Could they smuggle a dirty bomb onto a freighter and detonate it in NY harbor, killing many and making much of the city uninhabitable? I'm not sure of the answer but the Keystone Cops are running National Security and Intelligence. Oh, crap! Worst of all, nobody is telling Trump that an alliance with Israel combined with the US exclusively taking out the product of years of work Iran has put into nuclear weapons research, WILL create the incentive for revenge. (Russia could do the job, leaving a trail of bread crumbs in the direction of Iran to provoke the US into nuclear retaliation, which the world will denounce the US for.) Double, oh, crap!
Sleep well, everyone.
Fearless leader (He who does not merit a proper noun) does not for sure have or display normal human behavior. As for his thinking, I "went there" for a bit of writing and swore that off. He never was a successful businessman, but TV gave him that reputation and perception. It fooled and still fools a lot of people. His book (ghost written) provides but a facade of deal making ability, while in fact we see no ability to deliver on any deal. The Ukraine war is still raging (to be fixed on day one) and Israel is still on a genocidal rampage and now getting control (it appears) of the United States military in its new front in Iran. That seems a Netanyahu/ Mossad deal not his deal at all. So again, his deal making skills fool many people but, in fact, are but a facade or illusion. An illusion still fooling many even on the world stage.
Anyway, one's perception of that parade varies, and the right-wing version is said to convey quite the opposite message you give. The con continues. They are quite into the game of trying to fool some of the people all of the time.
Truth is an ideal to some of us, a problem to others. To quite a segment of what used to be the GOP now 'the truth' is something to manipulate for political purposes, and quite a problem.
Anyway, thanks for your efforts and ground reality report on the parade. The right-wing effort to reality bend on this one is embarrassingly weak to me. Not so to the decreasing number (we hope) of those fools who can be fooled all of the time.
End note: I could have been fooled that Iran was the primary supplier of drones to Russia. A Russian guest on the Amanpour Report claimed otherwise, that now these drones are all made in Russia. One Russian source does not make a truth, but this guy seemed more credible than a lot of United States's current top governmental staff. The claim by ICE of departmental data of 75% of detained immigrants "criminal" quite controversial of late and quite divergent from outside sources. My impression is that 75% figure is not credible at all. It is just 'now normal' United States government propaganda. Is it now more suspect than Russian 'claims'?
Prior to the election, my fear was that if Trump won and something bad happened, since he clearly still doesn't know what he's doing and lacks any intellectual curiosity about the details of the job of president, as a nation we'd be in big trouble. We saw that with covid. Now we're about to learn a hard lesson all over again, with Israel's attack on Iran. Trump doesn't understand the basics of foreign policy or diplomacy, and has blown off the daily intel briefings that provide information and background detail valuable in decision making and managing a crises like this. Just like his tariff "policy" and the effects it had on trade, our relationships with trading partners and the economy, this Israeli war is of his own making, starting with his tearing up of the Iran nuclear deal, solely because he saw it as a "win" for Obama.
In his first term Trump had some competent people around him he weren't total yes men/women, and they were able to guide and reign him in. Now he is surrounded by incompetent sycophants who don't know any more about their jobs that he does about his.
Ironic that during the campaign he said that if Harris or Biden was president, we'd have world war III, the stock market would crash, jobs would dry up and there would be no more free speech. But when it comes to Trump, the rule is every accusation is a confession. In the warped minds and logic of his stupid followers they're right when they mindlessly crow, "promises made, promises kept."
Boelter is not a leftie his is a Christian Assassin. David French reports in the NYT he was trained by and associated with one of America's most radical religious movements.
Citing and Atlantic article with this quote, French later elaborates upon:
French continues with this narrative in part:
The mix of religion and politics that spawned last week's horror. The dark reality of what the right-wing was so eager to cover-up and hide.
Opinion | The Problem of the Christian Assassin – The New York Times
TACO again! For once, I am pleased.
Aren't we always pleased when Chump chickens out?
Well Stump says 2 weeks! He says that for almost everything so again it is completely meaningless. The sense of disappointment exhibited among the corporate media is palpable. They really seem to want them another endless mideast war! CNN really has the says! The media in this country has had the knives out for Iran since I was a senior in high school, forty six years ago!
Suppose Trump only agrees to send Israel more ammo – no troops. Suppose Russia and/or China supply Iran. (Why would they? To dtain the US financially, divide us politically, and embarrass us through Israel.) Likely? Unlikely? Putin and Xi were on the phone yesterday fairly publicly making statements about the war.
At some point, you have to fight the war on the ground. Air superiority gives you distinct advantages, but that can be erased with high-quality portable ground-to-air defenses. If Iran does not capitulate, the war becomes the opportunity for Iran to end Israel in a bloody, prolonged conflict. Iraq has almost ten times the population of Israel.
Pardon me for being cynical but Iran has enough weapons-grade material to make nuclear weapons. Even by Tulsi's standard, they are close (months, not years), and the time-consuming element is the refinement of weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. If I was Iraq, I would have moved what I have to a secret location away from the primary target. The centrifuge machines can't be moved in a few days secretly, but it only takes a few pounds of U-235 to make a bomb. (Delivery is a different issue.) HAVING the bomb might move the negotiations. If Israel does not know the location of the weapon, they have to invade and find it, and take it. Or live in the shadow of the nuclear threat.
I'm FOR Israel's right to exist in peace and (relative) security. That does not mean I will defend their military aggression. Bibi started this fight – let him figure out how to keep from getting his butt kicked. That unfortunately includes a lot of innocent civilians. Still, Israel does not care about Palestinian civilian casualties, so excuse me if I care about Jewish civilians only as much as IDF cares about human suffering in Gaza.
The US created whe suffering we are in for by electing DJT. Israel, likewise, will have to pay a price for Netanyahu. For both of us, the price of our folly may be our way of life.