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DANIEL WOHLGELERNTER, MD's avatar

Brilliant post ! Outstanding point about the MSM and its beatification of Saint Jimmy Carter.

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Doug Israel's avatar

I genuinely fear for the future of the United States and the Western World. How long can a society endure when close to 50 percent of its population either hates it and serves as a political and media based fifth column for our enemies or at the least serves as useful idiots to the fifth columnists through denial?

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DAVID DEMILO's avatar

I think you're call-out of the dark side of media skepticism is on target.

Don't know if you heard Abby Phillips critique, but I was stunned by it. Here is a putatively educated (Harvard) CNN anchor saying (paraphrasing): "I think all the questions about whether or not it was effective is hiding the big issue: what business does the US have bombing a sovereign state, Iran, that never attacked the United States? And what business does Israel have starting a war with them? What right do Israel and the United States have to tell any sovereign country that they cannot have their own nuclear power?"

There are so many problems with her statement that it makes you dizzy: that Iran never attacked the US, that Israel started the war with them, and the big one - she is not able to grasp the difference between the technology required for nuclear power electricity and a nuclear fuel cycle.

So I'm not sure if Phillips is just ignorant or reflexively exercising a hatred of the US and Israel; I suspect both are true.

Meanwhile on the right, the quartet of Candace Owens, Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson and MTG are looking pretty silly right now, are they not? Trump took his time, executed a very precise and well-executed attack and did NOT get the US into a protracted regime change war.

I grant their point that the US government has acted on bad intelligence and even lied about it to justify regime change projects that have cost us lives and treasure. But that doesn't mean every case for military action is based on faulty intelligence or hidden agendas to start a broader war. It also doesn't mean that every conflict is an echo of WWII or Vietnam or Iraq.

Have they lost the ability to consider foreign conflicts on a case by case basis, mired in cynicism?

The argument from the isolationist right is very simmer to the argument from the left and anti-semitism is at the heart of it. For example, Bannon has called Israel "not an ally but a US protectorate." He thinks that BB "started the war with Iran to get himself out of political trouble. They knew they couldn't finish the job but they went ahead because they knew they could drag the US into it."

Left unsaid: You can't trust those clever Jews!

The whole episode was revealing, about Trump's ability in a high stakes moment, but also of his declared enemies and sycophants and influence peddlers who use his movement to advance their personal agendas.

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