The Opposite of Iraq

That was pretty interesting, rhetorically speaking, from Secretary of War (as you know, the title is his idea, not mine) Hegseth in yesterday morning's presser, the first official comment on the war they started on Saturday:  

To the media outlets and political left screaming, "Endless wars." Stop. This is not Iraq. This is not endless. I was there for both. Our generation knows better, and so does this president. He called the last 20 years of nation building wars dumb, and he's right. This is the opposite. This operation is a clear, devastating, decisive mission. Destroy the missile threat, destroy the Navy, no nukes.

One of the interesting things is that, two months ago, he said basically the same thing about the war on Venezuela, that it was the "exact opposite" of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I take that to mean that it's not a nation-building exercise but a nation-destroying exercise, and not "endless" because the intention was to walk away as soon as it was destroyed enough, except for the oil. Kind of like a Trump casino, where the Emperor always takes some money away from the catastrophe for himself. 

That's what happened in Venezuela, and it looks like what they're hoping for in Iran as well. Certainly Trump was planning to name a new Supreme Leader after the old one was assassinated, somebody from the existing Islamic Republic hierarchy, just as he named Venezuela's new president from the Bolivarian Socialist Party instead of looking to the opposition there, but Israeli bombs killed all the candidates, so that will be harder to do:

 Seems weird to be the one to name the replacement dictator (they were hoping to pick one from the more "pragmatic" faction of the IRGC) at the same time as you're urging the population to revolt against the dictatorship, like he's expecting to be on both sides of the civil war he's trying to start, but perhaps Binyamin Netanyahu, if that's really who's giving Trump his orders, along with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (in private calls with Trump, though he's publicly against the war), doesn't think Trump or his writers need to know how civil wars work. 

TACO War

 

Photo from the wonderful collection "Paradise Lost" by Adriana Loureiro Fernandez (@adriana.loureiro on Instagram), an ongoing project documenting the collapse of Venezuela over the last 10 years, from the crash of basic services and the national economy to widespread violence and hunger, leading to a massive exodus.

Has anybody seen that war with Venezuela? I'm sure it was around here just a few days ago, and now I can't seem to find it anywhere. 

That is, I guess the USS Gerald R. Ford is still wandering around the Caribbean with its 90 aircraft and 4,600 sailors (BBC saw it parked in the US Virgin Islands on Thursday, 600 miles from the Venezuelan coast, and it seems to be spending most of its time with its six-ship strike group entourage right in that northeast Caribbean neighborhood, just south of Puerto Rico), and there have been planes getting closer and presumably gathering intelligence as recently as November 21. Trump "Truthed" a violent-sounding announcement on the 29th of November that the airspace around and over Venezuela should be considered "closed in its entirety"

but a couple of days later the US government was asking Venezuela's permission to send a plane there itself, repatriating a bunch of Venezuelan migrants presumably gathered for deportation by ICE, and Venezuela cheerfully approved the flight, as it has been doing for months now, in spite of the rumors of war. Flights crossing Venezuelan airspace are down around 50%, according to Reuters, but that's hardly "in its entirety". 

For the Record: Xits 'n' Giggles

Tom reupped this beautiful old piece in honor of the appearance of Indicted Trump as a kind of Fonzie figure making women faint and reducing men to helpless envy at his badassery. 

 

For God's sake read the indictments, Marco. They detail an astonishing range of crimes, worse than Nixon's, committed by an organized mob infiltrating the highest levels of government. The justice system had to address it. It is the justice system, not politicians, who "decided". pic.twitter.com/w9MHxZ2uXk

— Yas We Can @yastreblyansky.bsky.social (@Yastreblyansky) August 27, 2023

Literally 30 years, starting with the stupid "Travelgate" investigation https://t.co/VmJqsTQUoV That's how old this "destructive new era" is. If you want to issue warnings, issue them to your own caucus.

— Yas We Can @yastreblyansky.bsky.social (@Yastreblyansky) August 27, 2023

Fifth of July: Antidisestablishmentarians

State of the Stupid, 2023: 

You can build this strawman out of any old resentments and prejudices you have lying around the house or in the garage, without an expensive and time-consuming trip to the Hobby Lobby. 

The genius of Rubio's tweet is in his focusing his hostility on those who see the US as "built on stolen land" as if it wasn't obviously true that Europeans and their descendants had appropriated virtually every bit of North America from its indigenous inhabitants between landfall in Mexico in 1519 and the closing of the frontier in 1890. A gasbag like Ted Cruz would have insisted on adding something about African chattel slavery beginning 1619 to the sentence, but there's not an ounce of fat on Marco's argument: he heads straight for the single most indefensible lie you can tell about the history of the continent and tells you you're "nuts" if you try to argue with it.

As well as possibly "influential" (unlike, say, Senator Rubio), rich (in contrast to Senator Rick Scott), famous (as opposed to infamous like Senator Lindsey Graham), or holding a "fancy degree" (instead of a no-frills plain one like Josh Hawley's Yale J.D., 2006). 

FAQ

We've got a question from Kevin in Bakersfield:

Has anyone ever asked the current president why would he have a classified document outside of the SCIF from his Senate days? Has he ever been confronted with that question? pic.twitter.com/kj6UOT2d4D

— Kevin McCarthy (@SpeakerMcCarthy) June 13, 2023

Your friends in the House Intelligence Committee could explain to you that a SCIF, short for Sensitive Compartmentalized Information Facility, is a place where you're allowed to keep SCI, Sensitive Compartmentalized Information, and the current president, who is former Senator Joe Biden (I guess you knew that), like former Rep. Mike Pence, probably never had any SCI at his house. The overwhelming majority of classified documents are not SCI, so that's the most likely reason.

Unlike former president Trump, who had a SCIF installed at Mar-a-Lago as president, and is known to have sent himself some SCI in the 80 boxes of presidential documents he shipped there on January 19 2021, a few hours before he stopped being president; some that turned up in the 15 boxes he shipped from Mar-a-Lago to the National Archives in January 2022, and some in the 65 boxes he kept there in spite of many polite requests and a subpoena. Including one of the 11 sets of classified documents he tried to hide from the FBI by keeping them in his desk drawer.

Hope that helps.

***

For the Record: Texas Trolls

Via National Women's History Museum.

Gish Galloped from Eleanor Roosevelt to Pudding Fingers DeSantis

That was a Democrat President that denied the Jews asylum. Many of the people at the border are being let in without court dates and the ones that are given dates are for the year 2030.

— Bluecaribe (@Bluecaribe2) May 21, 2023

I'm more concerned about Republicans in Congress today who are responsible for failure to pass comprehensive immigration legislation, especially Marco Rubio, who backed off it in one of the most cynical moves I've ever seen.

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) May 21, 2023

Shamelessness Is Their Superpower

In which the old Emperor shows more of a sense of shame than you'll ever see from Chris Christie, or Marquito Rubio, or the entire Roberts court.

Didn't everybody see this coming if RvW was overturned? I mean, I know a lot of people thought it would never happen -- Wrong! -- but the consensus was that it would be an electoral disaster.

— Charles P. Pierce (@CharlesPPierce) September 12, 2022

Kilgore in July https://t.co/Yf3bUBqvEs to Bump last week https://t.co/yyBSsS9CuJ chanting "don't get your hopes up"

— Three Blog Night (@Yastreblyansky) September 12, 2022

For the Record: Whatever it is, Marquito is against it

Byzantine mosaic, 12th or 13th century, in the cathedral of Monreale; the two wayfarers Lot invites into his house in Sodom turn out to be angels, and warn him to get out of town. Photo by Ghigo Roli.

This wonderful move by the Biden administration  to compensate some of the horrors wreaked by the Trumpies deserves more attention than it's getting—

The Wall Street Journal first reported on Thursday that the Biden administration is in talks to offer separated migrant parents and children around $450,000 per person. That would mean that if a parent and a child were separated at the border, together they would be eligible for a combined payment of $900,000.

—and Republicans want to provide it, in the worst way:

For the Record: Stupid Senator Tricks

 

Thomas Nast, 1872, "A Few Washington Sketches—In the Senate", via Senate Collection (where you can embiggen the image more effectively than here).

This thread has achieved something like virality, even as the issue seems to have been put aside for the next couple of months.

Actually the debt limit was exceeded in August 2019, when it was $16.6 trillion, the last time YOU VOTED TO SUSPEND IT, under McConnell's instructions. About $10 trillion has been added to the national debt WITH YOUR VOTE since then, plus $2 trillion without it last spring.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 7, 2021

This is 100% on Republicans, McConnell in particular, who has been insisting ten years on suspending the debt ceiling instead of raising it, your crazy tax cuts, your mishandling of pandemic and economic crisis, your phony accounting.

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 7, 2021

Another day, another stupid Republican senator:

For the Record: Hypercritical

 

Edward Burne-Jones, title page to William Morris's A Dream of John Ball (1888), via Wikipedia.

No, Marco. Business owners divide people into "makers" (themselves) who get all the profit and "takers" (the workers) who can barely sustain themselves and their families. Economists (including Marxists) notice the division--they don't create it.

— Specter of Happiness (@Yastreblyansky) June 20, 2021

Look for the Union Libel, Continued

 

Via redditor Honest_Horky.

Little Marco takes a stand on the Amazon workers in Alabama, in USA Today:

Here’s my standard: When the conflict is between working Americans and a company whose leadership has decided to wage culture war against working-class values, the choice is easy — I support the workers. And that’s why I stand with those at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse today.

Right. He'll support unionization at a company he thinks is too liberal, because they deserve to be punished. If he likes a company's "culture", like the Little Sisters of the Poor and their unrelenting efforts to stop their employees from getting affordable birth control, he'll side with the company.

Because the Little Sisters are on the side of "working-class values" and the workers are against them. Sure thing.

How does Amazon fight against "working-class values"? It

For the Record: Weak

Little Marco. Photo by Greg Nash/Getty via David Frum's impeachment piece from Wednesday in The Atlantic.

One of the things really striking me in the course of the impeachment proceedings was the appalling personal weakness of those tough-guy pro-Liberty Republican senators, which we often don't see because they have so much ability—I won't call it "power"—to make everything worse. It may sound like a paradox, but it's an ability born of failure, and impotence, and inability to rise to an occasion, and it got me ranting:  

Then what the fuck is it good for. Congress should be the branch that guarantees democracy. I don't want soft legislators like you getting pushed around by loony dictators because oh the Constitution didn't give me explicit permission. Jesus Christ you're pathetic.

— Chase Me Ladies I'm on the Calvary (@Yastreblyansky) February 14, 2021

"I'd love to do something about the psychopath who drove a murderous mob to trash my building and kill people who work here but oh my stars I'm not sure if the Constitution wants me to so I'd better play with my fucking phone instead."

How can you be so little and not ashamed?

— Chase Me Ladies I'm on the Calvary (@Yastreblyansky) February 14, 2021

And then there was Mitch McConnell, explaining how he knows Trump is guilty but doesn't think it's proper for him to do anything about it. Of course we know (I think Steve was the first to clarify this for me) what he really means, which is that his political position requires him to say both that Trump is guilty (for the suburbans) and that he's not guilty (for the rustics) and so by God he'll say both regardless of the contradiction, but the logic he used in his remarks showed what a loser he really is, and got me going:

For the Record: Unite the Country

 

Anybody else think this is kind of significant? The vice president effectively saying, "Behave yourself, Donald, or I'll have you fired."

Gotta say I'm a little impressed. Of course when Trump made clear he didn't care if Pence was murdered or not it prolly got Pence thinking. https://t.co/iJtpNGpijb

— Coup Coup Barabajagal (@Yastreblyansky) January 10, 2021

Not really sure it's sunk in for anybody else that Pence could be in a legitimately tetchy mood about this:

Useful Idiot in the Strict Sense of the Term

 

And the reason they held the meeting was so they could run a photo of the meeting. Duh. From Trump's Twitter account via USA Today.

Live-blogging volume 5—

Of what some have decided to call the Rubio Report, after Senator Marco, who has pulled a Billy Barr in this connection:

Hope you get a chance to read it. You should read everything you sign, you know. You've got some big surprises coming.

— Yas, Semite! (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2020

Marco taking a leaf from Barr's book. If you don't like what the report says, just announce that it says something different, and maybe enough people will believe you. https://t.co/t4b4NQwoAc

— Yas, Semite! (@Yastreblyansky) August 19, 2020

There is, as you can imagine, evidence of "collusion" in the report, some of it new, as in SSCI's certainty that Manafort's assistant Konstantin Kilimnik was a Russian intelligence officer, something previously only described as a possibility:

Honored to Know Him But Didn't Know Him Too Well

Stop me if you've heard this—

marco rubio's tweet about john lewis - which is now his profile pic - is a photo of elijah cummings. pic.twitter.com/S5N53I2tRI

— Oliver Willis (@owillis) July 18, 2020

Would have been an even greater honor to know which great bald African American congressman who's died in the past year he was.

Not Rubio's profile pic any longer, of course, and he's come up with a correction featuring an actual shot of Lewis

Earlier today I tweeted an incorrect photo

John Lewis was a genuine American hero

I was honored to appear together in Miami 3 years ago at an event captured in video below

My God grant him eternal resthttps://t.co/aEm4MxKxBP pic.twitter.com/0UpWSG3vNQ

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) July 18, 2020

Though he still couldn't do it without a typo "My" for "May").

A valuable lesson from one tweep:

Marco Rubio can't tell two black men he DOES know apart, but he's sure that police officers and eyewitnesses can tell black men they DON'T know apart.

— Jonathan Allen (@jallen1985) July 19, 2020

For the Record: Rage

Photo by Tyrone Siu/Reuters, via Trending A to Z.

Marco on Hong Kong

It enrages me beyond words that an ignorant hypocrite like Rubio should get away with capitalizing on the suffering of people in Hong Kong to build up his cred.

A people accustomed to liberty & democracy do not easily surrender it.

As tens of thousands protest #China’s plan to use #NationalSecurityLegislation to crush the autonomy of #HongKong we will #StandWithHongKong https://t.co/W11ecziWBd

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) May 24, 2020

You should think about your record of support for voter suppression measures in Florida--not that different in outcome from the way China maintains control of HK legislative council--and elsewhere and ask whether you're really a good spokesman for democracy.

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 24, 2020

It seems Americans are really not familiar with this: Hong Kong doesn't have democracy, though it has had economic freedom and a good deal of freedom of speech and assembly which are nowadays under very serious threat. The Hong Kong Legco has never been a representative body, though when Hong Kong was a British colony it represented the (originally all-white) business community. But even after elections were introduced there were always enough appointed seats to ensure the governor general (then) or Beijing-appointed executive (now) would command a majority, as the Republican governor of Florida does, through various techniques of disenfranchisement. Rubio doesn't see anything wrong with that. Coincidentally, it keeps him in a position of power.

The British had a chance to institute real democracy in Hong Kong in the years leading up to 1997 but they chose not to. Rubio has a chance to back democracy in Florida but don't hold your breath.

For the Record: Debate

Via The Log Cabin Sage, who retails a great story from the 1858 Senate campaign of how Douglas snidely noted that Lincoln had managed a grocery store in the course of his career, and showed himself to be "a very good bartender". Lincoln came back to it in his response: “What Mr. Douglas has said, gentlemen, is true enough. I did keep a grocery, and I did sell cotton, candles, and cigars, and sometimes whiskey; but I remember in those days, Mr. Douglas was one of my best customers. Many a time have I stood on one side of the counter and sold whiskey to Mr. Douglas on the other side; but the difference between us now is this: I have left my side of the counter, but Mr. Douglas still sticks to his as tenaciously as ever.”

Touché, gentlemen.

Candidate Yang made a couple of really annoying historical errors, when he suggested that folks in the ancient times when they used to debate socialism and capitalism never anticipated how economies would be transformed by automation

https://t.co/dY8d7cU1h2 pic.twitter.com/uZq9kDFokI

— Pray For the Opposite (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2020

and claimed the support of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for his silly "universal basic income" program

Dear Andrew Yang, Dr. King's MINIMUM guaranteed income pegged to the median wage was a very different animal from your $1000 universal handout, a lovely present for somebody like me but not close to a living income for those who need it.

— Pray For the Opposite (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2020

Other than that, the candidates were on their best behavior, and I was impressed:

Venezuela note

.⁦@NicolasMaduro⁩ has made a terrible enemy. His name is ⁦@realDonaldTrump⁩. Read here: https://t.co/3WX3zslAGg

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) January 24, 2019

Secretary of State Marco Rubio thinks he's engineered a coup in Venezuela, and he's so thrilled he can't stand it, but I want to say that this doesn't mean people on the progressive side should believe him and come out to denounce whatever has just happened as a return to the old banana republic policy where the US government can "make the right decision for Venezuela" as triumphal Eli Lake puts it in the attached Bloomberg article, instead of Venezuela making its own decisions, because it's more complicated than that, and reducing it to a war between Trump and Maduro is exactly the wrong way to look at it (though exactly what Trump and Maduro would prefer you to do).

As indicated by the way the international community is reacting, with all but one of the members of the Lima Group founded in August 2017 to work toward a resolution of the Venezuela situation without the help of the Trump government (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru), as well as Ecuador (which hosts a couple of thousand Venezuelan refugees, see map below), backing the self-declared temporary president, Juan Guaidó against actual president Nicolás Maduro—while the exception, Mexico, is remaining neutral, as is the European Union.

For the Record: Cheap Shots and an argument

William Simpson, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1855), via Wikipedia.

"You cannot count what is not there". God telling Marco to stop worrying about imaginary voter fraud. https://t.co/0RElslpdQp

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) November 14, 2018

Other than that, I just wanted to lay out this argument:

A lot of people giving Mitch a hard time over this because they think it sounds hypocritical, given that he has never in his political career worked with an opposing party and would gladly put partisan politics ahead of his own mother. https://t.co/QX82CJ40TZ

— Yasterisk (@Yastreblyansky) November 14, 2018

Smash-Mouth Liberalism

Apparently Smash Mouth was the name of the first band to give Trump permission to use their music at his rallies. Not sure how that relates to the way Douthat's using the expression, but it must be relevant.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, does not love the kids; he is deeply distressed by them, in particular their chillingly violent calls for the destruction of Senator Rubio ("Marco Rubio Must Be Destroyed"):

Since the Parkland shootings in Florida, Senator Marco Rubio has done many of the things liberals say they are desperate, desperate for decent Republicans to do. He has changed his position on gun control, expressing support for new restrictions: age limits on gun purchases, new background check rules, possibly magazine restrictions. He has co-sponsored legislation encouraging states to issue restraining orders that temporarily would strip people deemed dangerous of their guns. Some of these measures have conservative support, but in other cases the Florida Republican has effectively bucked the N.R.A.

When he showed up for the CNN town hall he met boos and heckles; one of the shooting survivors told him that just looking at him was like staring down the barrel of an assault rifle. Notwithstanding his subsequent policy concessions, at the March for Our Lives the students wore price tags around their neck, $1.05 each — the amount of money Rubio’s campaigns have received from the N.R.A. divided by the number of students in Florida schools. David Hogg, one of their leaders, began his speech with the price tag line, and told a CNN interviewer that if anything he feels that their attacks on the Florida senator haven’t been provocative enough.

I'm not having any luck finding cases of liberals saying "I am desperate, desperate for decent Republicans to" do anything. It's certainly not something I would say. I suspect Ross is making this up.