Trump Will Repeat Iraq. Here.
The next victims of bad intelligence will be people living in America
Sept. 12: Trump and Vance double down on bad intel … GOP greenlights new season of government-shutdown drama … Biden weighs letting Ukraine further into Russia … Air Force Academy proselytization …
Sept. 11 didn’t change everything. We did.
The reason Osama bin Laden did 9/11 — the reason all terrorists terrorize — is the hope that the victims will fuck up, overreact, wrong-react. Change everything.
And after 9/11, boy howdy.
People forget that Republicans responded fairly okay in the first days afterward. Pres. George W. Bush and Mayor Rudy Giuliani both. They talked about getting the criminals who did this. Which, yes, please. Only after the neocons switched out the script were America’s leaders talking about wars and eradicating evil around the globe. And then, boy howdy.
We tortured the Constitution so that we could torture people. We built torture sites around the globe.
Started a at least two bullshit wars.
At home, we started saying “the homeland” unironically and even invented a Department of Homeland Security despite already having a Department of Defense, the closest thing to official acknowledgment that it’s not for defense.
Here at homeland, we started rounding up Muslims people who looked Muslim people who someone thought looked Muslim.
We turned civilians into snitches (“see something [that you in your bias and ignorance fear], say something [to justify militaristic policing of the populace].”
We spread the fear that the terrorists wanted spread. We turned our police from protecting and serving1 into militarized monitoring and order-keeping. We armed Mayberry cops with the weapons of RoboCop™.
We did all that. We’re still doing it — politicians sanctimoniously and dishonestly telling everyone yesterday, “Never forget” the stories of those who died, virtually none of whom any of us can name. The never-forgetting has become the casus belli the terrorists wanted us to embrace forever.
Because eventually a terrorized society will turn its fear and its “defenses” against itself. And terror will lower your bar for threat-assessment and reasonable response.
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney didn’t “get” bad intelligence. They incentivized it and then cherry-picked it to justify invading Iraq, which had not attacked us and wasn’t going to because Saddam Hussein wasn’t crazy or an idiot.
When they wanted to crack down on voters…here…they not only cited bad made-up intelligence lies about voter fraud, they fired federal prosecutors who refused to buy the voting-crimes epidemic.
In other words, a martial government, a terrorized populace, and incredibly debased epistemological standards for threat assessment are exactly why terrorists terrorize: Because they’re the perfect combination to make a nation kill itself.
Which brings us to cat-eating Haitians.
In recent days, including at Tuesday’s debate, former Pres. Donald Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) doubled down on Vance’s Monday Tweet warning about the dangers of pet-hunting Haitians in Springfield, OH. And their reasons should terrify us.
Here’s Trump and ABC moderator David Muir:
Trump: The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food. So maybe he said that and maybe that's a good thing to say for a city manager.
Muir: I'm not taking this from television. I'm taking it from the city manager.
Trump: But the people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.
“The people on television say.” America, meet your new intel standard.
The New Republic’s Edith Olmsted has a good round-up of the would-be administration’s intelligence failures on Springfield pet-eating.
As Olmsted points out, the morning of the debate, when there was pressure ridicule to move on from the story, Vance posted that, “It's possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”
After the debate, after the would-be recidivist commander-in-chief doubled down on the claims of unlicensed feline cuisine, Vance was suddenly sure of those claims that the people on television say. “Many of my constituents said that has been happening,” Vance said. “No one has spread a false claim.”
Did he spend the day of the debate vetting his constituents’ claims, which he called rumors that very morning? Did he even vet whether they were his constituents? Because if the prospect of one false vote merits forcing everyone who votes to prove they’re citizens, I’m pretty sure that one claim of Haitian cat-eating merits some tire-kicking before we send in the National Guard to round up alleged Haitian petnappers.
This kind of cavalier/amateurish/mercenery approach to empiricism is what gave us the Iraq “intelligence” that Bush and his people used to sell people on the same war that Trump and Vance have said for years was a bad idea.
Trump has already talked about unleashing the National Guard and (somehow) local police on the American people in places he deems in need of militarization. That’s a problem.
Their commitment this week to basing their assessments on “Shit I saw on the craptastic, standard-free TV I watch” and “Whatever my boss says” mean that literally none of us is safe. That’s a problem.
National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby called the latest Trump/Vance cat bullshit “yet another conspiracy theory that’s just seeking to divide people based on lies and, let’s be honest, based on an element of racism.”
Which is good. But insufficient. Democrats have cheered on the cultural world-changing that got us here; the see-something, say-something bullshit; militarizing police, etc.
The Fable of the Haitian Cat-Eaters is see-something, say-something writ large. What we need from Democrats is see-something, spay-something.
Democrats have to do more than push back on this specific bullshit. They have to push back on the bullshit philosophical grounding for this specific bullshit. They have to push back on security-at-all-costs, on fear, and on the notion that everything is justified in response to baseless fear and for the sake of eliminating all risk everywhere.
Which means we have to abandon the notion that the government’s top job is keeping us safe. I take that back, we have to flip where we expect government to prioritize our safety. The government’s top security job should be keeping us safe when it comes to Big Oil and corporate polluters killing us but not when it’s fearful, uninformed, racist bozos who go into afib at the sight of a Black person carrying a goose.
MORE VANCE LIES Speaking of shoddy intel and lax empiricism, remember when Vance said that Trump would sign a national abortion ban? That’s a factual claim, right? So Vance must have had some empirical basis for making it, RIGHT?
As Trump said Tuesday night, “I didn’t discuss it with JD, in all fairness. And I don’t mind if he has a certain view, but I don’t think he was speaking for me.”
In other words, Vance didn’t just get it wrong about Trump, he had NO basis for his claim. That’s taking bad intel to whole ‘nother level.
FLASHBACK I dug into Vance’s history of unrepentant lying as part of the TFN series, The Vance Files, original reporting that you can support by becoming a paid subscriber:
Who Wants a Government Shutdown Right Before the Election?
You guessed it, MAGA do! does!
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) had expected to hold a vote yesterday on a continuing resolution to keep government funding at current levels until next year, after the election, so voters wouldn’t see Republicans doing their dirty, dirty business until after voting.
But Politico reports that MAGA don’t want to toss rePresident Donald Trump into a funding fight while he’s busy deporting 15 million people he thinks look like undocumented migrants. So Johnson doesn’t have enough Republican votes to pass the continuing resolution. And last night he yanked it from the schedule.
But MAGA suspect that Johnson is just drama-ing it up to justify caving to Democrats in order to get their votes and avoid an Oct. 1 shutdown. Caving to Democrats on what? engaged Newsfuckers who actually care about substance might ask.
The continuing resolution doesn’t just maintain funding, it includes language that would make it federal law to require everyone to prove they’re U.S. citizens every time they vote in a federal election. Why? Because rich Republicans are a lot more likely to have a butler who can find their passport or secret Davos/Aspen Ideas Festival global citizenship ID.
As Politico notes, Johnson couldn’t cave to Democrats the moment everyone returned from the late-summer break. Why not? Because MAGA is too empirically challenged to deal with future issues ahead of time and have to be pushed to the brink of a shutdown before they’re able to see how far down it is. So, drama it is.
More Debate Fallout…on the Right
Former Pres. Donald Trump on Tuesday night managed to stick his foot in his uterus yet again on the subject of people’s freedoms to have or have not babies.
The Christian right was already pissed at Trump for waffling on abortion bans from the moment of conception. And they’re angling to end legal contraception and the destruction of embryos that don’t get turned from frozen Dippin’ Dot™ cell clusters into humanoids.
Then Trump promised socialist IVF, forcing insurers or the government to pay for it — even though his party for years has successfully used Democratic laws to argue in court that Christian business owners shouldn’t be forced to pay for insurance related to fun stuff their Jesus doesn’t like.
And then, on Tuesday, Trump called himself an IVF “leader.” Hilariously, he also called himself a “leader on fertilization,” apparently confirming my long-held suspicion that Trump is personally responsible for more abortions than anyone else in human history.
And now right-wing Christian leaders are hot enough to melt a cluster of frozen Dippin’ Dots™. Politico reports. The Pro-Life Action League wants Trump to “walk back” his plan to kill legless embryos with free IVF.
Running mate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH), who has been Catholic for five years, voted against establishing a federal right to IVF. Which Republicans will be doing again as Senate Democrats plan to troll them with more IVF votes to remind everyone that Republicans oppose IVF and killed the Roe Supreme Court ruling that stood in the way of IVF bans.
Ukraine-Russia War May Soon Include Russia
One of Ukraine’s biggest problems in its war with Russia — in addition to the thousands of Russian troops on Ukrainian soil — is that the invading ground forces are backed by air power based in Russia. And the folks arming Ukraine have been very persnickety about where Ukraine can aim those arms.
But the New York Times reports that the U.S. and the U.K. sent envoys to Kyiv yesterday so that Pres. Volodymyr Zelenskyy could make his latest case for attacking Russian air bases with the weaponry the two countries have provided. Tomorrow, Pres. Joe Biden is expected to discuss the issue with Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
And with an increase in the number of Russian glide-bomb attacks — launched from airplanes — the Times says there are signs Biden may be willing to end his opposition to Ukrainian counter-strikes on air bases deep in Russian territory. The fear, of course, has been that Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin will take such news poorly.
Russia says it’s preparing “appropriate countermeasures,” which is actually great news because inappropriate countermeasures would be bad.
But as the Times notes, Russia hasn’t significantly escalated with other nations in response to other provocations, such as allowing limited strikes across the Russian border and giving Ukraine F-16s and tanks. So let’s hope…that Putin doesn’t want a war with NATO.
Victory for Real Religious Freedom
In case you missed it, yesterday, on my normie Substack, I revealed that war had broken out between the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) and the U.S. Air Force.
The issue: The superintendent of the USAF Academy in Colorado was sitting on a request for a Jewish student group to use its own funds to attend the Jewish Warrior Weekend coming up at West Point.
The same superintendent, a cadet reported to the MRFF, was streaming evangelical Christian sermons on Sunday into the academy dining hall. And at a Saturday football game blasted Christian rock and rap.
The superintendent is Lt. Gen. Tony Bauernfiend, nominated by Pres. Joe Biden with apparently zero mandate to clean up the academy’s well-known and ignominious history of providing Jesus air cover for proselytizing helpless cadets on the ground.
Well, yesterday the MRFF announced that the funding has come through.
It’s a miracle! Praise Christian Air Force Jesus!
The approval came through after I requested comment from the academy, and after MRFF Founder and President Mikey Weinstein sent Bauernfiend a hilariously over the top letter:
“Hey, Lt. Gen. Bauernfiend, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING at USAFA vis-à-vis your disgusting and relentless efforts to promote fundamentalist Christianity?!”2
Of course, even if Bauernfiend did relent — or even atone! — for his antisemitic sins, it remains to be seen whether he’ll keep inflicting those sermons (from the New Life Church founded by meth and male-sex-worker fan Ted Haggard) on lunch-eating cadets and whether he’ll still punish football fans with Christian rock and rap, a war crime that even Israel isn’t doing to Gaza.
TCB
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Go get ‘em, kids.
I know, I know; I’m talking about what our ideal policing was.
The juxtaposition of coarse language with the grave accent in vis-à-vis is the coup de grâce.
Trump proclaimed himself a leader on “IVF, which is fertilization”. When Trump explains something completely obvious like this, it usually means he just learned it, and he thinks others will be just as astonished as he is. Remember “people don’t realize Lincoln was Republican”?
So funny; and wellwritten; thanks for the laugh!🤣