Right-wing supporters of President Trump’s war against Iran have pivoted from bragging about low gas prices to saying that the high prices caused by the conflict are a small price to pay to liberate the people of Iran (assuming this war can do that). Will voters buy that pitch this fall?
Those who back Trump’s war against Iran argue that the United States has defeated Iran because it has killed many Iranians and destroyed so much of its military and civilian infrastructure. As we’ve learned in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, however, outkilling the other side is hardly a guarantee of military victory.
After President Trump posted a social media message threatening to destroy Iranian civilization, his defenders and supporters argued that words are meaningless, that he wasn’t serious, and that nothing he says is meant to be taken seriously. If true, should such a man be president?
The DNC and Democrats who dominate the nation’s op-ed pages and cable news networks argue that Democrats must move right to win, never that Republicans must move left to win. Self-serving?
President Trump claims he has already obliterated Iran’s nuclear program and other infrastructure, yet he also claims he must continue bombing Iran in order to destroy those same exact targets. At this rate, when will he overshoot and bomb all the way through the Earth to himself?
President Trump didn’t bother to consult with America’s European allies before attacking Iran. Yet now he wants their help, both to finish off Iran—which is proving to be a formidable adversary—and to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran has closed to oil and gas tankers. He’s like your drunken friend who picks a fight at the bar and then wants you to help him.
One common tactic of the Right is to arbitrarily fixate on a story that is or purports to be an outrage and then demand to know why people on the Left—who often never heard about it in the first place, because news is so siloed—didn’t have anything to say about it.
Our elected representatives spend little to no time addressing, much less solving, the actual day-to-day problems of the American people. Instead, they address made-up fake problems that don’t exist at all.
It’s a cheap tactic that frequently works for the US: when a nation espouses a rival ideology that capitalists don’t like, they sabotage, isolate, and attack it so it never stands a chance. Then, when it fails, they blame the system rather than what the US did. We’re seeing that playbook at work in Cuba right now.
Leave it to the US government to wallow in pretzel logic. Just as the Bush Administration refused to release detainees it knew were innocent because it had abused them so badly in custody that they might now be radicalized against us, the Trump Administration is worried that Iran might have to be finished off entirely because we’ve gone and royally pissed them off beyond repair.
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