The Grand Illusion
Although Trump and Bondi hope that “Operation Epic Fury” will fade their faults and overshadow all the domestic unrest, the fact still remains that two peaceful protesters were killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis. A disabled woman was dragged from her car even though she wasn’t part of the protests and was on her way to a medical appointment. She is a U.S. citizen, but she was removed so violently that her shoulders were injured, possibly permanently. None of the ICE agents have been investigated, let alone charged in any of these incidents.
As a follow-up, the disabled woman attended the most recent State of the Union Address as a guest of her Congresswoman and was arrested for disturbance even though she said nothing and bore no signs and did nothing to create a disturbance.
Yet Attorney General Pam Bondi has charged thirty-nine protesters for disrupting a service in Minneapolis at a church where one of the pastors was an ICE official, even though no one was injured or hurt. Bondi claimed that the protesters “attacked” a house of worship and stated that if any such protests occurred again, “we will find you, arrest you, and prosecute you.”
Contrast the reaction to a peaceful protest against a pastor who is an ICE official with the lack of Department of Justice response to the killings and violence perpetrated in Minneapolis by ICE agents.
Disturbing a church service merits charges against 36 protesters and three media types who were trying to report on the protests, but ICE killings and violence against peaceful protesters doesn’t merit investigation and charges?
What does that tell you not only about ICE, but also about the power of the religious right in the United States?
It’s all about the retribution. (It’s also all a con but it always has been.)
Remember when Ukraine’s prez didn’t suck up to Chump, and got ambushed on camera in the Oval Office? Now Iran didn’t kowtow sufficiently. A physical assault this time.
But the pattern is clear.
Protest against ICE? Get shot. Disrupt a (Christian) church? Get charged. Do anything whatsoever that Dorktator Don doesn’t like? Get attacked. Somehow.
Fascism lives.
Protest? That’s speak or carry a sign and do not assault, threaten, accost, or interfere with anyone or damage any property or obstruct vehicular or pedestrian traffic, or loiter, or litter, or create a public nuisance.
The camera footage suggests that that line was crossed by the “protesters” before they got shot.
Clearly there are screwups. Maybe someone WILL face consequences in the cases where agents clearly did wrong, maybe not. I don’t think that’s a policy from 1600 PA Ave one way or the other.
Ukraine? I don’t ALWAYS agree with Trump. Anyone that fights Putin should get some backing, which is not to say we should end up paying for it.
Iran? Destroying their government has been overdue since their revolution, definitely since Khobar towers, USS Cole, etc.
We’re not the world’s police, we’re the executioners, who should be neither reluctant nor eager to do the job, not always every dictator, but those that are a continuing problem (addicts deserve their fate, but those who profit should die too; and psycho theocrats desiring to bring on their peculiar apocalypse should NEVER be allowed brinksmanship in the pursuit of nuclear weapons or the means of delivery).
So in lieu of tiresome nation building, just be clear that only acceptable successors will survive, whether in Venezuela, or Iran, or hopefully Cuba one day.
I don’t like your America, Mr. Hamilton, one that is vicious, mean, and retributive. I want my America back, one that stood as a beacon of freedom and democracy in the world.
Exactly how can you honestly declare that retribution isn’t a White House policy (especially with a straight face) when everything Trump’s doing is either retribution or has an element of retribution?
Are SOME situations intentional retribution? One could think so, given some of what DOJ looked at and then (properly) gave up on. That doesn’t thrill me, but it is unfounded to suppose that everything that could be retribution, is.
I don’t think personal factors mainly (one could be understood to take assassination threats personally) are driving taking Iran down. Everything I’ve read says we want them to end enrichment (with guarantees of access to low-enriched reactor fuel), stop work on longer range missiles, and stop using terrorist proxies. They said they wanted to talk, but on the essential points they didn’t want to change. So they were stalling. Stalling a few months away from having nukes is not acceptable.
As I said, I don’t agree on severely limiting aid to Ukraine, or expecting them to make unreasonable concessions; I want Putin smacked down, and ideally gone, save that some successors might not be much better. But the history is clear, that Ukraine has a corruption problem (so does Russia and most of the other former SSRs). Some of their corruption had political spillover here. Hunter got money from Burisma for nothing more than his last name.
I don’t believe for a minute anyone gave an order to shoot protestors, or to refrain from investigating such incidents. So lumping that in with retribution doesn’t make sense to me.
When trying to deport millions (2/3 of which seem to be leaving on their own, so fear has its uses), there WILL be people hurt or killed that shouldn’t have been, but the answer is more training or more body cams or something, NOT letting all the illegals just stay.
Whether it’s reversing illegal immigration or taking down Iran, these have needed doing for decades, and Presidents of both parties just left the problems to their successors. Now we finally have someone with ego bigger than all the reasons (whether reasonable or political) that action wasn’t taken before.
I disagree. But I don’t see arguing further as productive.
In the wake of WWII, back in 1953, Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh ***seemed*** to be taking the country in a Soviet-friendly direction – and the USSR was right there next to Iran, too.
The CIA went to Truman and said, “We can do a coup if you want.” Truman gave the okay, and soon a more “acceptable” regime was in place.
Washington looked at how “easy” that was compared with the war that had ended 8 years earlier, and saw the (very) short-term success of it, and thought they had a model for how America could interact with the world.
Not so much.
Nation-building takes decades and patience. Long years of slow influence. And still is likely to fail, because humans.
It should never be embarked on in anger, or on a whim. Failure should be expected. A country, like Iran, that ends up more hostile to the US than it was at the start.
Yeah, sometimes we have to fight. Pearl Harbor for sure. Korea, pretty much. Vietnam, not so much. Iraq…oops.
Iran? Didn’t improve things in the long run in 1953, and in fact set the table for the hostile post-1979 regime. I don’t see this one taking us anywhere useful either.
The Khomeini/Khamenei regime always angered me. But anger and realpolitik don’t go together.