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.
As America continues its unprovoked war of aggression against Iran, American citizens find themselves feeling the uncomfortable emotions of the “Good German.” What do you do when your country is clearly in the wrong and goes to war?
American foreign policy wallows in paranoia. If Saddam lied and kept WMDs, and if he gave them to terrorists, and if those terrorists could somehow bring those WMDs to the US, then Iraq would be a threat. Twenty-three years later, it’s the same bizarre logic when it comes to Iran. Meanwhile, countries that really do hate us and really do have WMDs don’t use them against us.
American troops deployed to places like Iran are frequently said to be defending “our way of life.” But who is this “our,” and whose way of life are they actually protecting?
Many Americans, particularly conservatives, insist they can’t tolerate an Iran where crowds chant “Death to America!” and label the US “the Great Satan.” Rarely, however, do they pause to consider why Iranians feel compelled to express such sentiments.
Barely a day or two into the US–Israeli war against Iran, the deaths of half a dozen American servicemen were announced under mysterious circumstances. Administration officials immediately called for revenge—offering, retroactively, the very justification for war that had never been convincingly provided to the American public beforehand.
As they always do, Democrats bent over so far to give credence to the Republican argument—this time, in favor of starting a war against Iran—that they wound up tacitly agreeing with them. Perhaps they never notice that Republicans never give credence to the other side, no matter what.
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