…it’s simple: they will do ANYTHING and EVERYTHING…even side with one of America’s most implacable foes…to prevent The Donald from gaining even the slightest edge heading into November.
“House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was reportedly too busy to take a call from Vice President Mike Pence Tuesday that was to inform her Iran was launching a ballistic missile attack on U.S. forces in Iraq. “Tell him I’ll call him back,” Pelosi said, according to a Politico reporter.
…As Julio reported, Pelosi later tweeted that she was “closely monitoring the situation” but minutes before she was spotted at the grand opening of a restaurant…”
The intensity with which Pelosi evidently monitored the Iranian missile attack has only been rivaled by that of Barry and Hillary during the assault on the Benghazi consulate.
Now, here’s The Gouge!
First up, if you didn’t catch Trump’s speech on Thursday, have a listen, as it was perhaps the The Donald’s equivalent of Reagan’s “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
Trump may never be a powerful public speaker nor possess a comprehensive command of the English language, but we’ll take his Queens-accented “I say what I mean and I mean what I say” directness over Obama’s polished platitudes and patent prevarications any day of the week.
In a related item, as Jim Geraghty records at his Morning Jolt, Wednesday was…
“…Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister, issued a statement on Twitter declaring, “Iran took and concluded proportionate measures in self-defense under Article 51 of UN Charter targeting base from which cowardly armed attack against our citizens and senior officials were launched. We do not seek escalation or war, but will defend ourselves against any aggression.”
Notice that word, “concluded.” That suggests that in their minds, they have now settled the score — at least in their public rhetoric. Last night was not the first of multiple waves of missile attacks.
Military experts will be debating this for a while, but if a country fires 22 missiles at targets and doesn’t kill anyone, either they’re really bad at their jobs or this operation was primarily symbolic. The Iranians could have tried other methods more likely to kill Americans last night, but they didn’t. The Iranian Air Force stayed within its own territory. They’re telling their people that they won a great victory. The message to us, between the lines, is that they don’t want this fight to get any bigger.
If both sides are willing to deescalate, we can avoid an all-out war between the United States and Iran — and that’s pretty darn good news.
But it is also worth remembering that the Iranian regime has a history of responding to attacks with terrorism through proxies.Yashar Ali spotlighted examples last night— hitting back after an Israeli strike by killing Israeli diplomats in Georgia, India, and Thailand a month later, and then six months later, bombing a bus full of Israeli tourists in Bulgaria. Last night may just be the symbolic, short-term retaliation while Tehran plots a more dangerous operation for some time down the road. All we can do to prevent that is continue our spying and eavesdropping, be on alert for all of the traditional targets — embassies, consulates, groups of Americans living, working, or traveling abroad —and make clear that any Iranian attack on civilians would bring a thunderously devastating response.
The ball is now in President Trump’s court. He probably has two competing impulses right now. Iran threw a punch, and Trump’s instincts are always to counterpunch. But last night’s Iranian “punch” by and large missed, and the president can avoid getting drawn into a larger and more deadly conflict by making any U.S. response similarly symbolic and deescalatory.If the fight ends now, the United States is the big winner.We killed Soleimani, demonstrated that we can target just about anyone in the Iranian regime and eliminate them without warning, and have, so far, not lost any American lives in the Iranian counterattack, nor have our Iraqi allies.“
In other words, to borrow a phrase from Vincent LaGuardia Gambini, the message the Mullahs may have been trying to convey was…
Maybe they did…maybe they didn’t; and while we’re of the opinion the Mullahs are biding their time, only time will tell. Perhaps they’re hoping a new Administration may take office next January which will prove more appeasing to their purposes.
But if it was a rough night for Iran, it was a terrifying evening for the passengers on Ukraine International Airways Flight 752, shot from the sky shortly after take-off from Tehran:
Again courtesy of his Thursday Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty called it from the outset:
“…We don’t know the cause of the Ukrainian plane crash in Tehran, and they’re apparently not eager to share the black box.But one theory that might make sense is that Iranian air defenses were presumably on high alert last night, and had been since the strike that killed Soleimani. A combination of fatigue, stress, inexperience, insufficient training, or just plain routine human error prompts some Iranian air-defense team to mistake the passenger jet for an American fighter jet — and tragedy ensues.“
It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. It’s easy to picture the crew of a mobile SA-15 launcher, already more than a little nervous in the service, overreacting to the sudden appearance of a relatively fast-moving, low flying aircraft on their radar.
The problem here will be the difficulty if not impossibility of conducting, let alone completing, a thorough crash investigation. Tehran has undoubtedly already tampered with or destroyed the CVR and FDR, neither of which they likely possesses the technology to decipher regardless.
Next up, writing at NRO, David Harsanyi corrects another myth perpetuated by the MSM in their dogged defense of The Dear Misleader, as he accurately avers…
“In his address to the nation this morning, Donald Trump asserted that the ballistic missiles that targeted the al-Assad and Erbil bases in Iraq yesterday were paid for using “funds made available by the last administration.” Few things irritate media fact checkers more than Trump’s accusation that Obama helped fund the Iranian regime and its terror apparatus.Probably because it’s completely true.
Now, we don’t really know that Obama’s ransom payments to Iran in 2016 subsidized those specific ballistic missiles, but we do know that money is fungible — especially when you have access to small denominations of European cash — and that the military, IRGC, and Hezbollah were the major beneficiaries of the replenished coffers of the Iranian state.Distinctions over the details of the exact allocation of fundswould be completely irrelevant in any conversationnot involving Donald Trump. Yet Andrea Mitchell and CNN, and all the usual suspects, immediately rallied to Obama’s defense to also explain that actually Trump is talking about money we owed Iran.
We never “owed” the Islamic Republic any money. This is a myth.In 2016, the United States was in the middle of an unresolved dispute in front of the Iran-U.S. Claims Tribunal at The Hague over cash advanced by the Shah for military equipment we refused to deliver after the 1979 revolution. You might recall, this is when Iran began prosecuting its war against the United States, taking hostages, and killing service members.
It is unlikely that U.S. would ultimately have been obligated to hand over a single deutschmark to the mullahs. For one thing, the U.S. had its own counterclaims over Iran’s many violations — which, in total, exceeded the amount supposedly “owed” to it.Obama, in his obsessive goal of placating Iran to procure a deal,unilaterally dismissed a stipulation held by the previous administration that the United States wouldn’t release funds until other court judgments held against Iran for its terrorist acts on American citizens were all resolved.
Let’s remember, until the Wall Street Journalreported that the administration had secretly airlifted $400 million in ransom payments for four Americans detained in Tehran — seven months after the fact — we were never informed about the cash transfers. And Obama never offered any legal justification or accounting for the billions he transferred. Nor did Obama ever explain the fiscal calculation of tacking on an extra $1.3 billion in interest payments. The president, in fact, risibly claimed that the agreement had saved “billions of dollars.”
Reporters like to point out that “$150 billion,” the amount Trump likes to claim Obama transferred to the Iranians, is almost surely the high-end estimate, or likely an exaggeration. But we don’t know for sure because institutional media didn’t mobilize its considerable resources to find out. If reporters had spent as much time talking about the ransom payments — or the600 soldiers murdered by Iran — as they do fact checking Trump’s ransom assertions, the public would be a lot better informed.“
“A Facebook post claimed: “Iran will be shooting at our soldiers with bullets, etc., purchased with the $150 billion Obama gave them.”
The 2015 Iran nuclear deal involved multiple nations, not just the United States under Obama, and did not involve the United States giving cash to Iran. (Fact: the Iran nuclear deal was signed in July 2015, while the cash was shipped a scant six months later. This is a disingenuous and deceptive splitting of hairs. Hells bells, even the L.A. Times has acknowledged…
…the Mullahs received the money.)
It’s also debatable whether Iran ultimately got access to $150 billion of what were its own assets — which had been frozen in retaliation for its pursuit of a nuclear weapon — or whether the amount was much less. (Fact: the use of the term “debatable” means you have as much proof it was less as Trump has it was $150 billion!)
What is correct is that largely because of the U.S. involvement, the deal resulted Iran getting access to likely tens of billions of dollars of its own funds, and it’s unclear how they might be spent. (Fact: This is an utter falsehood: even Lurch admitted it was clear how at least some…
…of the funds would be spent.)
For a statement that contains only an element of truth, our ruling is Mostly False.“
The only thing containing a mere element of truth is Politifact‘s report, which WE are ruling PURPOSEFUL PROPAGANDA.
Since we’re on the subject of purposeful propaganda masquerading as fact, in the What Goes Around Comes Around segment, NRO‘s Jack Crowe informs us…
“Lin Wood, a libel lawyer hired by the family of Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann to represent their son, produced this 15-minute video providing vital context to the viral incident. “A mob rushed to judgment to wrongfully condemn, threaten & vilify Nick Sandmann based solely on an out-of-context video clip,” Wood tweeted. “It only takes 15 minutes to learn the truth. Here it is…”
Think about that: a major “news” organization has settled a ground-breaking lawsuit with a teenager it defamed while reporting on a “story” during which it reached conclusions without the benefit of any facts…facts which, as even Trevor Noah noted…
…were easily accessible to any inquiring, unbiased mind.
It’s also worth noting the way CNN treated the victim of their fake news optically…
…according young Mr. Sandmann the same malicious misrepresentation with which it so inaccurately compared George Zimmerman and the son Barry Obama never had:
Funny how such misrepresentations only work one way!
Which brings us to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s these four memes from Ed Hickey…
…along with this one from Speed Mach…
…and this new uniform patch in recognition of the Big Apple’s new “no bail” policy, courtesy of Ed Harvey:
Finally, we’ll call it a week with conclusive evidence Inspector Callahan was not behind the Great Cartoon Caper which triggered a number of the WaPo’s sensitive snowflakes:
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