Tag Archives: Israel

Why do Democrat Jews vote for Democrat Jew-haters?

Posted on by
10

It’s a puzzle. It’s a conundrum. To use Winston Churchill’s quote about the WWII Soviets, it’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Why do Jews vote for Democrats?

Okay, I can understand why they vote against certain Republicans. For example, notwithstanding his defense of Israel, Donald Trump sometimes comes across as . . . well, let’s just say he does not come across as Albert Einstein.

A culture such as the Jews might find Trump’s social media postings and his in-person “weave” a bit off-putting. This off-putting is apparently not offset in their minds by his support for Israel.

But Trump is not the only Republican rejected by the Jews. The Jews as a group have never voted for any Republican Presidential candidate.

Never.

Was Eisenhower too dumb? This was the general in charge of Allied Forces in Europe, the bold genius who helped mastermind D-Day, and the good soldier who opened the concentration camps.

What about Richard Nixon? A man is not called “tricky” because he’s stupid. Nixon was clearly smarter than LBJ or Harry Truman.

How about Ronald Reagan? All he did was win the Cold War.

Reagan’s vice president who succeeded him, George H.W. Bush, was one of the most accomplished men in DC at that time.

The son of Bush senior, namely George W, was at least as smart as the men he ran against, Al Gore and John Kerry.

Was Mitt Romney who made zillions on Wall Street dumb? I should be so dumb.

Even Donald Trump was clearly smarter than his opponent the last two times.

The Jews voted against all of them, and every other Republican Presidential candidate. Why?

I have a theory.

Jews coming to America were much different than the ones here today. Jewish immigrants were more like the Irish or the Italian immigrants. They suffered discrimination for their ethnicity and religion (Catholicism in the case of the Italians and most of the Irish). All had heavy foreign accents that served to identify them, and the first language of the Italians and Jews was not even English.

They naturally voted for the political party that held itself out as just like them – working-class folk. The Democrats were the party that did not control the country clubs that refused to admit them.

The Irish and Italian immigrants assimilated within two generations, as most immigrants do. For example, I say I’m Scottish but the truth is that I have just one grandparent from Scotland. The rest came from here and there. Likewise, most of the Irish and Italian immigrants married outside their ethnicity and even their faith.

Today, there is no Irish vote or Italian vote, because there’s no longer a discrete Irish culture or Italian culture in America. Getting drunk on St Patrick’s Day doesn’t count, and Columbus Day has been cancelled.

But there’s still a Jewish vote, because there’s still a discrete Jewish culture. That culture is the reason that the Jews survived for thousands of years as a minority ethnic group with a distinctive non-Christian religion despite enormous pressures.

The Jews’ survival skills were forged in the furnace of Europe and, before that, the Middle East. There, they learned not to blend in because they weren’t allowed to.  They learned not to marry outside their faith because nobody outside their faith would marry them.

The Jews made a virtue of this terrible discrimination and periodic pogroms. Being ostracized from mainstream culture drove them into an observance and even obsession over their own distinctive culture, religion and traditions.

You have your Christmas, they said, but we have our Hannukah.  You have your New Year, but we have our Rosh Hashanah. You have your Easter, but we have our Passover.

And you have your Republicans, but we have our Democrats. In short, Jews vote for Democrats because it’s tradition.

Most traditions are good. There’s a Darwinian aspect to them; bad habits die out and never rise to the level of a tradition. In the context of Jewish culture and religion, tradition has been a very good thing, a sine qua non of these extraordinary and vulnerable people who comprise only 0.2% of the world’s population.

But I submit that the Jewish tradition of voting for Democrats is now unhealthy for them and us.

The Torah is full of traditions that may have been right for their time but are not right for the present. No longer is it appropriate for Jews to push goats off cliffs, decapitate calves, or light bonfires on mountain peaks.

Or vote blindly for barbarians who seek to destroy them. Even Tevye compromised tradition to save his people.

Many Jews seem conflicted about Jewry

Posted on by
5

The Ashkenazi Jews are a remnant of the Jewish diaspora. A couple thousand years ago, they fled from Judea to Europe, and then were driven east. They did not assimilate, but deliberately kept to themselves to practice a religion and engage in a culture that was persecuted through the ages.

Just in case they had aspirations for integrating into the local population, the locals ensured that they did not. Marrying a Jew was a good way for a gentile to get disowned and disinherited, and vice versa.

DNA analysis suggests that at one point the Ashkenazim dropped to a population of as few as 350 people spread over the European continent. They were very nearly extinguished.

But in some ways, what didn’t kill them made them stronger. They have an inbred vulnerability to certain diseases but a near immunity to others.

Ashkenazim often score high on standardized IQ tests and they’ve succeeded inordinately in science, law, literature and business. In analyzing the reasons for this success, it’s difficult to tease apart the role of their admirable minds from the role of their admirable culture.

It’s a culture that values education, achievement, wealth, power, and – not least – family.

I’ve wailed at the Western Wall, both literally and metaphorically, though I’m not Jewish. Then again, maybe now we’re all Jewish. In a way, everyone with a claim on Western Civilization is Jewish. I claim a heritage from Moses, Jesus, Paul, Freud, Einstein, Spielberg, Oppenheimer, Kasparov, Ben-Gurion, Kissinger, Bellow, Salk, Kafka, Chagall and Dylan – all Jews.

Thus, I’m saddened to see some of today’s prominent Jews equivocate in their defense of the Jewish state of Israel.

No less that the Senator Charles Schumer – the first Jewish Senate Minority Leader – is willing to throw Israel under the bus if necessary to save his job. No less than Rahm Emmanuel, Chief of Staff in the Obama White House and an advisor to Bill Clinton before that, is willing to put Israel back in the Jewish ghetto if it puts him back in the White House.

The Middle East has always been a complicated place. If only all of it were like Israel – largely an arid land with few natural riches. Instead, vast areas are cursed by black gold. The energy dependency of the world requires us to pay attention to this place. To mollify, cajole, bully and beg the barbarians.

It’s easy and habit-forming to blame things on the Jews and to see their oil-rich adversaries as the victims, notwithstanding the appalling atrocities committed in the name of those “victims.”

But as a matter of history, it was the Jews who were the victims. Their persecution for thousands of years culminated with the systematic murder of a third of their population. After the event that put an upper case “H” on the word Holocaust, the Jews swore that they would be victims never again.

In short, the Jews refuse to be exterminated. Should they be blamed for that?

For those who see the Jews as the source of the problem in the Middle East, I have a question: What would you have them do differently?

Are the Jews supposed to give up their ancient homeland, to give up Israel? Are they supposed to go back to the lands of their persecution and victimhood – to Europe, to America, to Russia? Because that’s what the Palestinians demand.

Look at a map. “From the river to the sea” refers to the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. That’s all of Israel. The slogan chosen by the Palestinians candidly calls for the abolition of Israel. 

The Ashkenazim of Europe were persecuted for a thousand years, but against all odds they maintained their identity, their culture and their religion. In their faith and unanimity, they did well and they did good. If only their American successors could be so united and so brave.

Who needs to moderate when you have Jew-hate?

Posted on by
10

Over the last year and a half, the Democrats have gnashed their teeth about why they lost in 2024 – against Donald Trump, the candidate they hate so much they imagine that everyone else does, too.  

Was it because the Democrats advocated transsexual boys in the girls’ bathrooms? Was it because they favored abandoning the southern border while simultaneously lying to us that it was secure?  Was it because they nominated a nitwit candidate without a nomination convention? Was it because the sitting Democrat President was demonstrably incompetent, and they lied to us about that, too?

The consensus was that they lost for all of those reasons. If they want to turn around their electoral misfortunes, it was said, some moderation was in order on all of those things.

Yet, here we are. Nearly two years later, the Democrats are not busy getting the transsexual boys out of the girls’ bathrooms. They have no time to secure the southern border. They threaten to nominate the same nitwit candidate (presumably via a bona fide nomination convention this time).

The incontinent sitting Democratic President has graduated from sitting to lying. Though he is persona non grata, he’s not entirely out of the limelight and onto the beach; his wife has some books to sell. Perhaps those books will be in the husband’s “library” which will be an added wing to Mordor, the library that Obama built. (Who would have thought that the south side of Chicago could be worse?)

All of this has nothing to do with the Democrats’ 2024 loss. Nope. Instead of moderating their crazy stances, the Democrats are hard at work in perfecting their pitch to be the world’s greatest at something alright – at being socialist antisemites.

They’ve elected an admitted socialist for Mayor of America’s greatest city. They nominated his apostles for the U.S. House of Representatives. Other self-proclaimed socialists have come out of the worm-infested woodwork nationwide and are running for office on the Democrat side. They don’t even hide their socialism anymore; they boast of it.

And they boast of their hatred for the Jews.

One of the nominated socialists brags that the Jews had it coming on Oct 7. She refuses even to condemn the 9/11 attacks on New York City. This is a candidate who will represent, in a manner of speaking, that very same New York City in the halls of Congress.

The Jewish angle is interesting. Antisemitism, socialism and Zionism have a complicated history. Let’s not forget that the architects of the Holocaust went by the name of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Nor that the term “fascism” was from the party of Benito Mussolini, a former labor leader before he brought Italy low. Nor that the Soviet Union blatantly and patently discriminated against the Jews.

And so, the Democrats have re-discovered a winning formula. Don’t side on the 80 side of 80/20 issues like transsexual boys in the girls’ bathrooms and illegal immigration of people who want to make a living by cleaning American’s toilets or putting their drywall up. Too many of those issues involve too few people. And to the extent they involve a lot of people, well, who are you going to get to put up your drywall?

The way to get elected is instead to own two timeless issues that almost everyone likes. One, is that really successful people have too much money compared to . . . um, me for example.

There are lots of reasons for that disparate rate of money-getting, including the fact that people who get money tend to be more adept at getting it. But let’s settle on one fact: luck. The good luck of those successful people and the bad luck of . . .  um, me for example.

Luck is by definition not fair. So, let’s take some of that unfairly-gotten money from the people who unfairly got it, and give it to the people who unfairly didn’t . . . like, um . . . me!

The other timeless issue for getting elected is to rely on people’s prejudices and bigotry. This is tricky, because it’s quite fashionable these days to be a racial minority. A politician cannot rely on people’s inherent bigotry if that bigotry is against what is fashionable.

It would be better to find a bigotry that is not racial per se, and offends only a small minority of the minorities – say about 2% or less. It would be nice if that minority has always been one step from being ostracized, anyway. It would also be helpful if that minority were to have a history, at least recently, of being financially successful. Such a history would dovetail nicely with the socialism.

What better than antisemitism? It might just work. After all, it has before.

Forget about moderation. As the person known for christening New York City “Hymietown,” let’s imagine that the late, great civil rights activist, Jesse Jackson, were still alive. He might say, rhymingly and rhythmically, who needs to moder-ATE if you have Jew-HATE?

Trump got an inartistic deal

Posted on by
11

Donald Trump did the right thing in Iran, for a while. He buried their enriched uranium under hundreds of feet of dirt and rock. He destroyed for years their ability to enrich more of the stuff. He made a lot of headway in crimping their ballistic weapons. He showed others in and around the Persian Gulf that the Iranians are bad guys.

But then he stopped. We’d already lost, um, just about no soldiers, but there was a possibility that we might lose some. He stopped because he believed, correctly, that Americans were tired of the war. Or, more precisely, Americans were tired of paying fully half what they pay in Europe for gasoline to power their monster pickups.

In the meantime, Trump showed the Iranians that they can hold the world hostage at any time by simply threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz.

And so, this artist has sketched us a deal. Details are finally emerging after being hid for days, apparently because they thought we’d forget about it. (Iran who?)

Turns out, this inartful deal was available many months ago, many “we’ve already won” proclamations ago, and many billions of dollars ago.

What has changed now is the U.S. midterm elections. They are fast-approaching, and Trump’s party is in danger of losing.

The gist of Trump’s deal is that the Iranians and the U.S. agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Iran gets buco bucks by exporting oil. Iran can also charge a toll on non-Iranian vessels after 60 days (in time for the midterms), thereby getting more buco bucks.

There’s even more buco bucks. Trump will unfreeze Iranian assets around the world. Iran will also get about 300 billion to rebuild its military arsenal, er, I mean its civilian infrastructure.

For all those buco bucks, the Iranians will talk about discontinuing their nuclear program.

Trump has now announced for anyone who still reads his social media posts that he’s the “greatest President” in American history. Greater than Washington who earned us freedom, greater than Jefferson who negotiated the Louisiana Purchase for less than $0.03 an acre, and greater than Lincoln who saved the Union at the cost of his life.

Uh huh.

Here’s what’s going to happen. The Iranians will embarrass Trump by refusing to give him squat in the continued negotiations. The WH will put the best face it can on such refusal, but the Iranians will not cooperate. Instead, they will close the Strait again, will attack Israel again, will assault shipping again, will demand ransom from ships again, and will demand more buco bucks.

What Trump fails to understand is that the Iranians are principled thieves. Sure, those principles are bad ones – they are right out of the 12th century. They don’t give a whit about commerce or prosperity. They don’t care about their people. They care only about their 47-year-old theocratic revolution.

Trump never encountered such principled people. Many of these people will die. The remainder will have Trump for lunch.

The Art of the Deal? Trump is about to learn that not everyone was born in Queens seeking a piece of the American pie. Midterms or not, you’re a fool to do a deal with madmen.

Israel has about 0.40% of the Mideast, is that really too much?

Posted on by
3

Ignorant media accounts and flighty college students would have you believe that the State of Israel holds a large percentage of the land in the Mideast. Those greedy, imperialistic Jews!

But they don’t. The State of Israel is about one-third of one percent of the Middle East. Virtually none of that land holds oil and gas reserves, by the way. It is very arid land that is challenging to just farm.

Jewish inhabitation of what is now Israel dates back to before recorded history. Their capital was Jerusalem, the site of Solomon’s Temple – which was a real, not mythological, building. The Temple was destroyed by the Babylonians in 587 B.C., long before the glory days of Athens.

The Jews rebuilt. The Second Temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. by the Romans – another civilization that was centuries younger than the Jews.

From the destruction of their Second Temple, through the diaspora and the Holocaust, and up to the time the State of Israel was established by the United Nations in 1948, Judea was controlled by the Romans, the Byzantines, a series of Caliphates, European Crusaders, the Ottoman Empire, and the British.

A people called “Palestinians” appears nowhere in that long list. Indeed, historical accounts do not refer to a people called “Palestinians” at all. The word “Palestinians” to identify a people is a modern invention, much like “gay” or “Native American” or “Latinx.”

Anyway, now that “Palestinians” have a name, there’s a move to give them a country.

I’m not sure that’s wise. These people have shown a singular inability to run their own show, as we recently saw in Gaza where they put on a display of barbarism for the ages.

But, OK. If it will make college kids feel good, let’s give the “Palestinians” some land. They can call it “Palestinia” or “Palestan.” Or maybe “Cuba” will be available by then.  

But here’s where it gets interesting. Those college kids want to give the “Palestinians” the State of Israel. They could be given any land, mind you. Such as a piece of the 99.60% of the Middle East that is not part of Israel.

But nooooooo. They have to be given land that’s part of Israel.

And not just some of Israel, but all of it. The college kids don’t hide this goal, they boast of it. They have a chant, which in their vernacular passes for analysis. The chant goes “From the River to the Sea.”

These kids don’t know the Jordan River from Michael Jordan, and they can’t tell the Mediterranean Sea from Club Med, but they know that this chant means the “Palestinians” get all of Israel. Not part of it, but all of it.

Remember that, next time one of these kids tells you he’s not antisemitic, but merely anti-Zionist. He doesn’t hate Jews, he’ll kid-splain to you; he merely wants them to have nowhere to live.

How long before these kids finally come up with a solution like affordable camps for the Jews?

Trump is winning the Iran negotiations

Posted on by
7

A few weeks ago, Iran had lost every battle but was winning the war. The regime had survived, even though its putative leader and probably his son and many others had not.

That’s because the Iranian regime was still raking in billions in the oil market, Moreover, they were disrupting the oil market for the rest of the world.

That disruption benefited the regime doubly. It garnered a higher price for their oil, and it incentivized the world to push for America to back off. Dependably venal and dependably short-term in its outlook and dependably anti-American, the world did as instructed.

Sure, a few thousand of Iran’s people had been killed by bombs, but the regime couldn’t care less about a few thousand of its people. After all, this is an outfit that killed ten times that many people in the streets last fall when they dared to protest the regime.

But as radicals often do – this is one reason they’re called “radicals” – the regime overplayed its hand.

They shut down the Strait of Hormuz to everyone except Iranian-approved vessels. As for the ones they approved, they conditioned their approval on payment of a multimillion-dollar toll. This is for an international waterway, mind you.

Their little pirate scheme was calculated to raise even more money for the regime. On top of revenue from selling oil at artificially high prices, they would collect tolls from their customers buying that oil.

“Free shipping,” it wasn’t. After paying through the nose for the oil, the customers paid again through the nose to pick it up.

It’s as if Amazon told you there was no free shipping on what you bought. In fact, there was no shipping at all. You had to pick up the merchandise from half way around the world – and you had to pay a hefty pick-up charge.

In response to all this, Trump did something I have to confess was brilliant, even though I hadn’t thought of it. He upped the Hormuz ante. He said in effect, “If you want to selectively close the Strait, fine. We’ll close it altogether.”

That eliminated most of Iran’s oil sales. Since oil is by far their biggest source of revenue, the move closed their ATM.

It gets worse for Iran. With nowhere to send its oil, Iran is forced to shut down its wells. Oil wells cannot be simply shut-down indefinitely. If the oil isn’t pumped, the well becomes inoperative and then dysfunctional within weeks.

Iran is thus facing a severe money crunch, which will become increasingly difficult to pull out of. They are denied their main source of revenue, and each day increasingly renders that denial permanent.

Now Iran is doing what losers do in negotiations. They’re trying to gracefully cave in. Two weeks ago, they scornfully refused negotiations unless America pre-conceded important points. It was if a seller on eBay told you, “If you pre-agree to pay full price, then I’ll discuss whether or not I’ll agree to sell this to you.”

That changed at the end of this week. Iran now says it will negotiate without those pre-concessions.

Here’s where I have to admit Trump is truly showing some art in the deal – or at least an instinct for the jugular. He told the Iranians, no thanks.

Trump seems to recognize an important negotiating point that it took me many years to learn in practicing law. It’s this: When you gain an advantage, and the other side realizes it, your advantage is probably bigger than you think.

Unless there’s a reason to let your opponent save face (sometimes there is), this is the time to annihilate them. Wait till they beg. Then let them grovel. Then go in for the kill.

I confess to a love-hate relationship with Trump. But this is yet another instance when I’m oh-so-glad Trump is President rather than any of the alternatives that were offered. I can’t quite imagine Sleepy Joe or Kam-A-La going in for the kill.

The market is irrationally exuberant today

Posted on by
5

Everyone loves a party. Especially when the party makes you money. Forget that the money you’re making now is the same money you lost last month. It’s still fun.

And so, the stock market is having fun today.

And why not? America and Iran are not exactly kissin’ cousins now, but at least nobody’s civilization will end. Not today, anyway.

The stocks of the boomers are booming, oil is crashing, monster pickup sales to monster drivers will certainly become monstrous again, the Pope (who is “God’s representative on Earth,” a reader informs me) will take credit for a few days, and we’ll probably get a docu-fiction war movie courtesy of War Secretary Hegseth, starring War Secretary Hegseth.

Still, I’m skeptical. I’m not selling into this market uptick, mind you, just as I was not buying into the preceding market dip. Er, market correction. Er, market crash.

You see, I’m a buy-and-hold sort of guy. I don’t pretend to know more about market values than, say, Goldman Sachs and their mega-massive-computing computers and their MBAs who learned at Harvard how to extract insider information from public company Chief Financial Officers. (I won’t give away their secrets, but have you heard the name Jeffrey Epstein?)

So long as you don’t bet against Goldman Sachs, a diverse stock portfolio has proven to be a good investment over a period of decades, and it will probably continue to be, and so that’s where I keep most of my meager money.

I’m just sayin’, as they say, that the people who try to time the stock market are probably getting this one wrong in their buying spree this morning.

Because this cease fire is flawed seven ways to Sunday. To name a few:

Even now after the cease fire has been announced, it still has not taken effect. Iran is still lobbing missiles and drones at its neighbors. I always thought the sine qua non of a cease fire was that everyone ceases firing, but I’m old school.

If Iran finally observes the cease fire by ceasing its firing, rest assured that it will then violate the cease fire by ceasing its cease fire.

It’s who they are: Missile and drone lobbers. That, and terror financiers.

We are told that the big condition to the cease fire is the re-opening of the Strait of Hormuz – that waterway that Iran has closed to the great angst of civilized people everywhere, and also those monsters in the monster pickups.

So how exactly is that supposed to happen? Who will police it? What happens when a rogue or not-so-rogue Revolutionary Guard lobs an ad hoc drone on a frolic of his own?

Um, details to follow. Uh huh.

This war is not over. But the cease fire is – before it even started.

This isn’t Suez in 1956 and it isn’t Vietnam in 1966; it’s Iran and it’s 2026

Posted on by
1

This war with Iran is one that had to be fought, and so we were right to fight it on our terms at a time before it became harder to win. The way Iran has lashed out at civilians everywhere, including with indiscriminate killing machines it denied having, has confirmed that.

But I recognize that there are arguments and counterarguments. Some of those are just the lame “Orange Man Bad!” or “Orange Man Good!” type, but others are more principled.

Here are two arguments – one against the war and one for it – that sound principled, even scholarly, but at the core are just sophistry.

First is the one that is against the war. It says, “Another Vietnam catastrophe!” (Yes, the argument is typically presented replete with the exclamation point, which should give you a clue that you’re about to receive more heat than light.)

But Vietnam was not really a catastrophe. It was indeed poorly conducted, but it achieved for a time its main objective: to stop the Communist advance through Southeast Asia.

The Communists eventually did get South Vietnam (and ironically have turned it into a haven of export enterprise) but we delayed that by at least 15 years.

And the Communists never did get Indonesia, Malaysia, or the Philippines, to say nothing of Australia and New Zealand. Was that worth 50-some thousand Americans? History’s jury is still out.

The point here is that Vietnam was not the debacle that kids today are taught in “schools” where they are indoctrinated by the teachers’ union arm of the Democratic National Committee – an organization sworn to pacifism except when their opponent is America.

When comparing Iran to Vietnam, here’s the bigger point. Vietnam was 60 years ago. Vietnam was literally much closer in time to World War One in the year 1918 (that’s One, not Two) than to today in the year 2026.

It should not need to be said that weapons, battlefield tactics, global economies and world alliances are vastly different now compared to 60 years ago.

We saw that in the first hours of the Iran war when the U.S. and Israel eliminated the Iranian leader and many of his subordinates. That’s the first time that’s ever happened in a modern war.

On the other side, we see the Iranians responding with inexpensive but sometimes effective missile and drone attacks throughout the Middle East, and a dramatic show of their capability of launching a missile as far as London or Berlin. (The accuracy of those missiles, and how long before their stock is depleted, are separate questions.) We also see them blocking the flow of 20% of the world’s oil supply.

In short, this is not Vietnam. This is not your dad’s war.

On the other side, supporters of the war sometimes compare it to the Suez Crisis in 1956. That’s when Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, ousting the U.K. and French interests that had controlled it. The U.K. and France tried to reclaim it, but backed down in the face of international pressure. The U.S. through President Dwight Eisenhower sided against the U.K. and France.  

Since then, the U.K. and France have never held much sway in the Middle East. According to supporters of the Iran war, the lesson to be learned is “never back down in the Middle East.” Or “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!”

But this “lesson” forgets the broader context. The U.K. and France don’t hold much sway anywhere, not just in the Middle East. Their economies and militaries were never completely rebuilt after being ravaged in WWII.

Even more ravaged were their national psyches. The cultural collapse we’re seeing today in the U.K. and France was not triggered by Suez. Rather, Suez was triggered by their already-emerging cultural collapse.

An equally valid – or invalid – lesson might be learned from the Camp David Accords in 1979 when Jimmy Carter in probably the best feat of his Presidency (I know that’s not saying much) moderated a lasting peace between Egypt and Israel. In that peace deal, both sides compromised – both sides backed down.

Of course, the Camp David Accords don’t teach us much about the Iran war, either.

The most that can be gleaned from the events of history is usually allegorical. Platitudes about history are of little use in another time under different circumstances. They are no substitute for hard analysis. In analyzing Iran, they’re about as useful as Aesop Fables.

The crux of the hard, real analysis on Iran is the point I made at the outset. Whether Donald Trump is a genius or a fool, war was inevitable. We were smart – it was the product of hard analysis – to choose the time and circumstances.

So, when should the war end? Again, it will take more than history to answer that question. Again, it will take hard analysis – of the costs, benefits, risks and rewards. Let’s have the patience and courage to undertake that analysis. Damn the Midterms.

Are the Dems rooting for Iran because Iran is America’s enemy, or because the new Supreme Leader is gay?

Posted on by
1

Given Iran’s half century of cruel barbarism in the Middle East, it’s hard to understand why the Democrats seem to be rooting for them in the current war. I have two theories.

One is the obvious one. The Dems are not so much rooting for Iran, as rooting against Iran’s enemy. Bad as Iran is, its enemy is even worse in the eyes of the Dems.

Iran’s enemy, you see – or at least the Dems see – has a history of its own cruel barbarism going back to at least 1619. Iran’s enemy has engaged in genocide against native people. Iran’s enemy has wrongly oppressed workers of the world who sought freedom in the workers’ paradises of the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, Red China and Eastern Europe.

Dems believe that Iran’s enemy has raped the earth, ruined the climate, undermined the sacraments of diversity, equity and inclusion, elected a man with bad orange hair to the Presidency, increased the wealth of everyone but at the cost of especially increasing the wealth of the wealthy, made “woke” a four-letter word, and is rapidly driving Starbucks out of business.

Iran’s enemy is of course America, which happens to be the Dems’ primary enemy as well. So, in a textbook example of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” the Dems see Iran as their friend.

That’s all that matters to the Dems. Forget about Iran’s atrocities. Forget about the hostage-taking, the baby-beheadings, the rapes, the murders, the incinerations. Forget about the imprisonment of people for political beliefs, the torture of dissidents for dissenting, the belligerent development of a nuclear bomb for use on Israel, and the throwing of gays off tall buildings for being gay.

(Correction: A reader has informed me that Iran does not throw gays off tall buildings; they pay ISIS to do that. Homer nods.)

Which brings me to my second theory. It has been reported that Iran’s new Supreme Leader who assumed the supremacy after the supreme demise of his supreme father is . . .

. . . gay.

President Trump, a supporter of gay rights, was reportedly pleased by the news. He laughed.

Gayness is not a sin, in my view. It’s barely worthy of mockery. For cheap mockery material, it’s on the order of baldness.

But under these circumstances it’s notable. The new Gay-atollah could be a second reason why the Dems are rooting for Iran.

It would be a DEI “resistance” exercise by the Dems, now that ordinary DEI has been outlawed or at least discredited. As in “I want the gay guy to win!” Or “I want the gay guy to beat Trump!” Or just “I want the gay guy!” (“But the bushy beard? Eww!”)

As for that newly-supreme-and-outed gay man serving as the putative Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran while cowering in a corner somewhere, he has yet another thing to watch out for. He has to watch out for not just bombs in the sky, but himself in the sky. Stay away from tall buildings, my friend.

Can there be any doubt what Iran would do with nukes?

Posted on by
2

The argument against the war with Iran boils down to two points. The first point is that this war was initiated by the hated President Trump, and so it should be opposed. That point cannot be rebutted because it is not a point at all; it’s simply a reactionary expression of hate by people who scarcely bother to conceal their hope that Iran wins.

So, let’s move on to the second point.

The second point is that we were able to handle Iran’s aggression for many years without going to war, and so we could have continued to handle its aggression for many more years without going to war. There was no “imminent threat” from Iran.

That argument ignores the fact that circumstances were on the brink of changing.

The impending change is that Iran was getting ever-closer to having a nuclear bomb in its arsenal. And it already had hundreds of ballistic missiles to carry that bomb across the Mideast and beyond.

In addition to the risk of ordinary nukes, there’s the risk of Iran using “dirty bombs.” Those are conventional explosives laden with semi-enriched uranium. A dirty bomb doesn’t produce the megaton explosion of a nuke, but it does contaminate the surroundings with lethal radiation.

Iran could construct a “dirty bomb” of sub-fissile enriched uranium, which it has thousands of pounds of, and mount it on one of its hundreds of remaining ballistic missiles.

Even more worrisome, Iran could dispense with the missile. It could instead smuggle abroad a refrigerator-sized dirty bomb, and position it in a leased office on an upper floor of a building in a major city where the detonation could produce catastrophic and long-lasting radiation contamination.

Think Chernobyl (and the Chernobyl contamination originated near ground level, not 50 floors up in the sky).

Let’s hope Iran has not already constructed and smuggled a dirty bomb to a detonation site where it is waiting only for someone, somewhere to push a red button.

If you think Iran is too pacific and humane to do such a thing, then you haven’t been paying attention. This is a regime that tosses gays off tall buildings, stones women for adultery, dismembers shoplifters, sponsors unspeakable acts of terrorism against women and children and babies, has chanted “Death to America” for half a century, and obdurately refuses to give up its nuclear weapons program.

In the course of the last week, Iran fired thousands of missiles and drones at American bases. Fine, I suppose that’s part of war. But Iran has also followed its policy of firing missiles and drones at both military and purely civilian targets in Israel – as well as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Türkiye, Iraq, UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Jordan.  

Iran’s aim is not to subdue those countries – heck, most of those countries are not even in the fight.

Rather, Iran’s aim is to produce a conflagration of the Mideast and the world. “If we go down, we’ll take you with us” is their apocalyptic cry. These are theocrats from the 12th century.

Can there be any doubt that an Iran possessing nuclear weapons would use them?

Sure, it’s annoying to see the price of gas go up, and to see the stock market drop a couple of percent. But it would be more annoying to see millions of people killed, to see civilians with the lifelong pain of radiation burns, to see cities rendered uninhabitable, and to see a generation of babies with birth defects.  

If necessary, bomb the Iranian leaders back to the age and time they’ve chosen for themselves — the stone age.