This is such low-hanging fruit, it hardly feels worth the effort, but what the hell. Getting nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Netanyahu is like getting nominated for Father of the Year by Homer Simpson and King Lear (two guys who obviously belong in the same sentence).
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Tags: Netanyahu, Nobel Peace Prize, Trump
I did what?
(Photo Credit: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters)
Senator Jeff “Hawl’in-ass-out-of-there” Hawley is a guy who likes to raise his fist defiantly, and then bravely fold his cards and run away at the first opportunity. So it was no surprise that after sharply criticizing the Big Beautiful Bill, he voted for it anyway.
Lisa Murkowski (pictured above questioning her life choices) is no coward. She’s a woman of principle–her principle apparently being “Get what you can for Alaska, and the rest of the country be damned.” It’s that kind of moral courage that makes me also question her life choices. At least, Alaska whalers can sleep better tonight.
Meanwhile, the Trump Administration has withheld nearly $7 billion in appropriated funds from key education programs–including programs for teacher training, before-and-after school programs, programs for English language learners, and adult literacy programs. The New York Times noted that the Administration did so with “little explanation.” Actually, the Times exaggerates the amount of explanation that the Administration offered. A fairer characterization would have been “with virtually no explanation.”
The reasons for the move seemed to be as mysterious to the U.S. Department of Education as it is to the rest of us. The department, which had the unenviable task of announcing the withholding of the funds, advised anyone with questions to go ask the Office of Management and Budget.
But I have a theory about why the funding for one of the programs was withheld. Typically, when the Administration discontinues programs, it says the programs are not consistent with the Administration’s policies and priorities. (It bears noting that the White House denies that it is freezing the educational funds; it is just conducting a “programmatic review.“) It would certainly make sense if the Administration decided that adult literacy programs are not consistent with the Administration’s policies and priorities: after all, Donald Trump isn’t much of a reader.
So this is a little of what the MAGA party has wrought in the last 24 or so hours. In both the vote on the Big Beautiful Bill and the Administrations’s decision to withhold crucial education funds, we have yet more opportunities to marvel at the party’s lack of character and its laser-like focus on benefiting itself and its billionaire supporters, while giving the middle finger to everyone else.
Tags: Education funding, Hawley, MAGA, Murkowski, Trump
Yesterday, numerous media outlets reported that a preliminary intelligence assessment found that the US bombing mission set Iran’s nuclear program back by only a “few months.” To the extent this preliminary assessment holds up (and isn’t suppressed or manipulated by the Trump Administration), its results are not surprising: bombing campaigns often don’t work as hoped. The bombing of Tora Bora failed to eliminate Bin Laden, and the sustained air campaign against the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Viet Nam war didn’t shut down that vital North Vietnamese supply line. These are just two examples that come to mind. There certainly are others.
Some of us are actually old enough to remember these events. But even if the responsible Administration officials don’t remember them, they should have learned about them. Perhaps it’s news to the Trump Administration, but one can learn about things that happened in the past–sometimes quaintly referred to as “history.” For instance you can learn about history from books, Podcasts, and the internet. There are TV shows about history.
Admittedly, it’s naive to suggest that Trump could learn anything (especially, hard stuff like history), but what about the people around him? Are they all just as cognitively limited as their dear leader?
The problem may not be the Administration’s collective cognitive (in)capacity. It may be a shared attitude–one that regards “history” as inherently suspect. After all, history purports to deal in facts, interpretations, and explanations. Facts, in particular, are problematic, because Trump prefers to believe his “gut” rather than, say, analyses prepared by intelligence services. And to survive in the Administration, his underlings probably have to ape Trump’s approach to decision-making.
In addition, an Administration that instinctively gaslights the public at every opportunity is unlikely to care about facts and other old-fashioned rationalist preoccupations like objectivity. (There’s been a startling reversal in attitudes toward objectivity in the decades since I was in college. Back then, it was the post-structuralist and deconstructionist lefties who pooh-poohed facts and objectivity. Today, it’s the ostensibly ring-wing MAGAs who proclaim that there are “alternative” facts or facts that are “my facts.”)
A little more respect for facts probably would not have made Trump hesitate about bombing Iran. Doing so was attention-getting and transgressive–two features that make an option impossible for Trump to resist. But a bit of knowledge about history might have spared Trump the unpleasant surprise he no doubt experienced upon hearing that the bombing sorties were not entirely successful.
Trump can take some solace from the fact that he isn’t the first President to be disappointed by a much-heralded bombing campaign. And, of course, he and his Administration have already begun attacking the assessment as fake news–in the words of Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, its findings were “flat-out wrong.”
And it’s even possible that, as the analysts continue to pore over the evidence, the assessment may change (even without Trump Administration manipulation). That’s the nature of the search for truth: analyses, interpretations, and explanations may change as facts are discovered and reviewed.
But this has to sting, nonetheless. We can only hope that Trump can hold up in the face of this disappointment and the negative initial polling about the attack on Iran–a poll conducted before the news about the intelligence assessment. We wouldn’t want the guy to just up and quit, would we?
Tags: assessment, facts, Iran, Trump
It’s only been a couple of days since Trump’s big bombs (“Bunker Busters”) were dropped on Iranian nuclear sites. In the hours after the bombing raid, Administration officials crowed about the success of the mission. But sensible people knew that it was too soon to declare “Mission Accomplished.” (Remember that one? If you don’t, or are too young, Google “Bush Carrier Mission Accomplished.”) Bitter experience has taught (some of) us that after-action damage assessments, especially when conducted at a distance, take time.
As I write this, the “success” of the mission still isn’t clear. It is quite possible, however, that Trump’s unconstitutional gambit may not have accomplished everything that he and his enablers (including Netanhayu) wanted. If the mission didn’t succeed as well as the Trumpsters claimed, there may be a few reasons.
For one thing, bombing often doesn’t do as much as proponents of air power would like you to think, even when the bombs being dropped are called “Bunker Busters.” (Another lesson there: Don’t get fooled by brand names.)
And more importantly, the Iranians may have moved some of the targeted material before Trump started the festivities. After all, Trump repeatedly telegraphed that a raid like this one might be coming. According to a story posted by NBC news on June 16 and 17–four days before the bombing missions–when Trump suddenly left the G7 summit he “requested that the National Security Council be prepared in the Situation Room when he returned” to Washington, and he said “he believes Iran was close to developing a nuclear weapon despite the March testimony of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to Congress saying otherwise. ‘I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having it,’ Trump said. According to Fox News, he also posted on Truth Social that his departure from the G7 “‘certainly has nothing to do with a Cease Fire. Much bigger than that.'”
So if you were the Iranians, wouldn’t all that publicly available information prompt you to, maybe, find another hiding spot for the stuff that you would like to keep, but that the US and Israel don’t want you to have?
Perhaps this is just another case of Trump believing his big, all-knowing gut and not his defense and intelligence people. Prior to the bombing raid, there was satellite imagery of trucks lining up near the Fordow nuclear site. As Newsweek explained, “Pictures taken on Thursday and Friday showed ‘unusual truck and vehicular activity’ close to the entrance of the underground Fordow complex south of Tehran, satellite imagery firm Maxar said late on Saturday.” If Maxar had those images, it’s pretty obvious that US defense and intelligence agencies would have had that or similar imagery, as well. Were the defense and intelligence briefers too frightened of Trump’s reaction to tell him that the material he wanted to bomb might not even be at Fordow anymore, or did Trump simply not believe them? Eventually, we may find out.
Right now, we’ll have to wait to see what the bombing did to Iran, to prospects for peace and safety for people around the world, and to the political and constitutional fortunes of the American people.