The Smell of Burning Cities in the Morning

Look, I know that President Trump has been a bit of a disappointment, but you have to remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good.  If you demand that the President pass all your purity tests, you'll never have a President at all.  Politics is a messy business, and you have to be realistic. Better let the grownups in the room handle this.

... I hope no one reading this will think that I'm being anything but bitterly sarcastic. The mainstream reaction to Trump's memorandum of understanding with Iran hasn't been surprising.  Many of the commentators, in government and in the punditocracy, don't seem to understand what a memorandum of understanding is, and like Schumer, they're lying wildly about the details that were leaked before the text was released. As far as I can tell, the $300 billion for reconstruction is supposed to come from a multinational group that doesn't include the US. Of course it's possible that, like many numbers Trump has talked about that supposedly won't cost US taxpayers anything, the multinational group is a mirage, but Schumer and his ilk seem so far to be misrepresenting it. It's hard to know, given a choice between Trump and the Congressional Democratic leadership, who is lying, but it would be foolish to trust Schumer.

For one thing, similar lies are flying about sanctions relief and the unfreezing of Iranian assets. None of that is taxpayers' money.  The frozen assets belong to Iran, and should have been released many years ago, but both US parties have refused to do it.  The same panicky yelling about Iran's "nuclear program," which is a dogwhistle for "nuclear weapons program," is false too. Iran has the right under international law and the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.  So why believe these guys on the $300 billion?  One can't trust the Iranian government either, but so far they have been somewhat more truthful than the US and Israelis.

As numerous, mostly left-wing commentators have pointed out, the loser in a war normally does and should pay reparations.  Israel, as joint aggressor, should pay reparations to Iran too, but that's never going to happen, and the US should take responsibility for its criminal aggression for once. The words "lose" and "defeat" are, to my mind, not exact here. The US hasn't been defeated as I understand the word.  Our cities haven't been bombed, our leaders haven't been carted off to trial and imprisonment in Iran, and Iranian troops don't occupy American soil.  The same is true of Israel, where similar caterwauling is going on.  US jingoes will always refuse to admit that this country has ever been the aggressor, and if US critics mean by "lose" that the US failed to achieve its objectives, it's fair to rub the jingoes' noses in it.  There's a lot of squalling about Trump's "bad deal."  Maybe it is, but it could be so much worse.

I meant to write this post a couple of days ago, and worried that the situation would fall apart before I got started.  That it hasn't collapsed yet says something about Trump's determination to get out of the mess he's mired in, even as Israel continues killing Lebanese and undermining the ceasefire. On Thursday morning NPR had a fairly good interview with a former Lebanese ambassador to Jordan. For some reason, they didn't post a transcript, just a summary with a few quotations; it's worth listening to the whole thing. By contrast, a Friday morning interview with Richard Haass, a "veteran diplomat ...who served in both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations," and who criticized the memorandum from the right, got a full transcript.  Host Leila Fadel pushed back gently, but let him run on.

By Israeli standards, of course, "ceasefire" means only that the other guys have to stop shooting; Israel will continue its atrocities.  As Avedon Carol noted yesterday, "Not sure where we are in any given minute with the Iran ceasefire deal, during which, as usual, Israel has not done any ceasing to fire, and then complained that Lebanon broke the ceasefire by killing four IDF soldiers who were invading their country at the time. I'm reminded of all the definitions of chutzpah when Hezbollah is called 'terrorists' for defending their own country against invaders."

But our elites will never admit that the US is in the wrong, and Trump's fans are trying to pin the MoU on JD Vance -- anybody but Trump, who to be fair is mainly concerned with his optics rather than substance, as usual.  As I've indicated, the MoU looks much better than anything I'd have expected from this administration, and could be a reasonable beginning. For that reason, it will probably fail, because of Israel and the rest of our government.

I See You; I Hear You

It's a good thing the Average Voter doesn't pay attention to Twitter (so I'm told); the prospects keep looking worse by the day.

The attempts to reassure us aren't persuasive.  Today someone scoffed at Left Twitter's concern about reports that Obama's hand-picked candidate Joe Biden is considering (so we're told) numerous Republicans for his cabinet, for diversity's sake.  The scoffer declared confidently that Biden won't actually appoint Republicans (though Obama did), he's just vetting them, you big sillies. I can't see any reason to vet them in the first place.

Then Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer delivered himself of this great gob of liberal compassion:

I was going to link to Schumer's original tweet, which included video of his statement, but it has mysteriously vanished.  Maybe Left Twitter is more effective than we're told?  But let me get into why it was so offensive, not just to me but to numerous other people who piled on. 

That Rochester veteran didn't kill himself because he lacked access to suicide prevention counseling; he killed himself because he'd lost his job, couldn't make his mortgage payments, and was probably going to end up on the street.  Counseling isn't going to help.

Schumer's clueless response is part of a pattern.  Joe Kennedy helped tank his own campaign against Ed Markey by tweeting "Not a single patient should be forced to fight off medical bankruptcy in the midst of a global health pandemic without a lawyer by their side."  That didn't go down well, so next day he backpedaled: "Let me be clear here: We need Medicare for all. We need an end to medical bankruptcy. Period. But until we get there, we need assurance that every patient will have access to legal counsel and aid if they are forced to fight their insurer in court."

Maybe Schumer is cobbling together a similar clarification.  And yes, I know, the lack of financial assistance to people like that veteran is not entirely Schumer's fault, it's due to McConnell's obstruction.  The proper response is to hammer the Republicans as hard as he can, not to thunder that not a single unemployed American should commit suicide without a professional suicide counselor by their side, with maybe a "Hang In There, Baby!" motivational poster thrown in at cost.  (I mean, how much could it cost? Ten dollars?)

A self-identified mental health professional weighed in too, gently chiding Schumer for insensitivity: 

Such a tragedy. <Broken heart emoji> As you work on matters of suicide prevention, for which we are grateful, it might be helpful for you to know that many of us in the mental health field prefer to say someone "died by suicide," not "committed suicide." Thank you.

I knew I should screencap it, because I expected her to block me for jeering at her; but she deleted hers instead.  (Luckily, I'd quoted the text on Facebook.)  Maybe she realized how close she'd come to Trump's claim that if we stopped testing, we'd have fewer COVID-19 cases.  Incidentally, her response was a reminder that the most laughable "PC" terminology comes not from activists but from mental health professionals; the rest comes from management consultants.  When my employer began downsizing, they preferred the euphemism RIF, Reduction In Force.  They offered professional counseling to those who might be upset about losing their jobs.

Our leaders and their enablers are making it very difficult to miss that they aren't competent to handle a crisis like the one we're in.  How it's going to play out, I don't know, but it doesn't look good.