Freak Out Friday – January 10, 2020

FREAK OUT FRIDAY – JANUARY 10, 2019

The country has spent the last week in a most unexpected and unusual position.  

We have been praying that the Iranian government is smarter than ours.

We’ve been praying that they realize the actions of our president do not reflect the will of the majority of the citizens of the United States.  That as much as they shout “Death to Americans,” they come to the realization that most of us not only do not wish death on Iranians, but truth to tell, we don’t really give much of a crap about them.  We don’t advocate attacking them.  They haven’t launched terrorist strikes against our country directly; haven’t blown up a skyscraper or assaulted a mall or whatever.  On an average day, most Americans don’t give Iran a second thought.  

And absolutely none of us knew who Quassem Soleiamani was.  He may well have been a national figure, and people wound up getting stampeded on his funeral, but the average American didn’t know his name, and even now can barely pronounce it, let alone spell it.  Whatever plans he may have been scheming, it had zero impact on our daily lives.  We didn’t give the slightest of dámņš about him, and I can assure you that even the most advocate of Trump supporters wasn’t interested in launching World War III in order to take this guy out.

Yet the idiot joint chiefs presented the prospect of killing him as an option to Trump in order to make the other options look more palatable.  Yeah, I’ve done the same thing.  One time Pocket needed me to come up with three concepts for a Trek novel.  I came up with two really good ones and a cliché-ridden rehash of previous episodes in order to make the other two look better.  Naturally Paramount selected the rehash.  So that stunt doesn’t always work when you’re dealing with people of limited intelligence.  And Trump certainly falls into that category.

So for the past week we actively rooted for the Iranian government to display more restraint than we would in such a situation.  Especially considering that, whatever Soleiamani may have done in the past, we have seen zero proof presented that he was an “imminent” threat, despite all of Trump’s claims that he was.  We automatically know Trump is lying because Trump always lies, and the further proof of those lies was that in subsequent briefings, his people provided no evidence to back up the claims.  When both Republican and Democrat senators are saying the briefings were BS, you know that they most definitely were.  Not to mention that seventeen years ago we saw George W. and his people launch an invasion based upon a series of lies that Saddam Hussein presented a threat with weapons of mass destruction that he was discovered not to have.  

Yet here we were now hoping that the Iranian government wouldn’t launch World War III.  Because let’s face it:  if they had retaliated by killing, I dunno, Colin Powell, Trump’s response would have been scorched Earth.  Despite the Geneva Convention, he would have targeted cultural centers, day care centers…hëll, you can’t convince me he wouldn’t have strongly considered just dropping nuclear weapons on them.  

Yet Iran’s response was remarkably restrained, lobbing some missiles at a military base and killing, as near as we can determine, no one.  Considering what they could have set into motion, we’re left breathing a sigh of relief and pray that Trump will not provoke further response.

Which of course we can forget about, because he’s busy hitting them with sanctions.  Even more ludicrous, he’s actually blaming President Obama for the missiles.  And for anyone reading this who only gets his news from Fox and Trump’s lying mouth:  No.  Obama, in a move that was coordinated with other countries, unfroze money that was already Iran’s in various banks.  And he reimbursed them for the purchase of weapons they bought in the 1970s that were never delivered.  

Yet, of course, Trump has to find yet another reason to blame Obama for things.  It’s become as reflexive as Trumpies crying “But Hillary’s emails!” every time Trump is criticized for some new outrage.  It’s expected from his blind followers, and is typical for Trump who is psychologically incapable of admitting or accepting blame for anything. He continues to blame his impeachment woes on Pelosi and the Democrats even though all of it is as a result of his own actions, phone calls, and duplicity.  He constantly presents himself as the most victimized president in our history.  No one has been treated worse! Declares the occupant of the office where others have been prosecuted for lying about sex or been shot or been killed.  He cries “witch hunt,” apparently oblivious to the fact that witch hunts went after innocent people as opposed to the investigations that have jailed and fined several dozen people.  

Meanwhile Mitch McConnell continues to protect his ášš while the GOP completely abrogates their oath to support the Constitution and instead fall in line behind a bullying narcissist.  Oh, but don’t dare criticize the fact that his assassination of the Iranian General was ill-advised and poorly thought out, because then you’re on the side of terrorists.

You know what?  Assassinating a representative of a foreign government with which war has not been declared and then stating you’re going to blow up cultural centers?  Those are the acts of terrorists.  So if you’re on Trump’s side, you support terrorism.  Simple as that.

PAD