Mike

Iran has had a miserable few weeks.

First the middle- and senior-level management of its top-tier proxy was taken out because, basically, Iran bought its communications network from its most hated enemy.

Then the next week what was left of the C-level suite of said proxy was taken out in its underground bunker by the same hated enemy.

Then the other day former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad declared that the agency dedicated to targeting agents of your most hated enemy operating in Iran was actually riddled with that same enemy’s agents, including the unit head.

I mean this is the type of buffoonery that you only find from the Three Stooges or the Biden administration.

So having been utterly humiliated on the world stage, what does Iran do to try to restore credibility? It decides to launch a massive attack, estimated at 180+ missiles, on that same hated enemy. The result? The same as the last time it tried, back in April, little to nothing.

After last April’s attack washed out, the Iranians could not have had any expectation that any future missile attack would be any different. In other words, Iran just squandered a big chunk of what is left of its credibility. The strong horse they are not.

Today’s missile attack is what it is like when a government has a nervous breakdown. If the last two weeks were a chess match, Iran has been so thoroughly outclassed that today’s missile strike is the equivalent of it hysterically throwing the pieces off the board at Israel and then curling up in a ball on the floor.

However, now things really get dangerous because as I have said, desperate people do desperate things, and desperate people with power do catastrophic things. Added bonus, back home the mullahs are hated and their praetorian guard, the IRGC, has been shown to be incompetent. These guys are fighting for their lives.

So, on our timeline, we are now at the point where the Iranians will probably try a really futile and stupid gesture. And unlike Israel, we in the US do not have our security act together.

One: We Will Report No Story Until It’s Time

I had a post all ready to go regarding the media ignoring the devastation in the southern Appalachians caused by Hurricane Helene; about how the story had been dropping from the front page faster than the latest Trump assassination attempt, despite the mounting death toll, towns wiped out, etc…

Then the other night I see all the media outlets, as if a switch had been thrown, starting to give the story (some of) the attention it deserves.

I was curious as to why the change. Why did the bat signal go out for corporate media to acknowledge what’s happening out there (for them) in Gap-Toothed Cletus Land?

Then I realized what it was. With the carnage coming out of Appalachia too big to ignore, there was the danger that with the bad optics of Kamala, and Biden out-of-view, that this could be the Democrats’ version of Katrina. So if you read the stories since Sunday night, nearly every one contains an element of what Biden and Kamala are personally doing to help people who will never vote for them. Case in point, the five-minute photo-op of Kamala visiting FEMA.

You can’t buy the quality of public relations the corporate media provides the Democrats.

Two: Army Recruitment Weasels

A friend of mine contacted me about an op-ed in the Washington Post regarding military recruitment. It’s full of the usual gaslighting regarding how the Biden Administration was solving the military recruitment problem (that it had created) by meeting goals through better marketing and reorganizing the recruitment process.

In reality the military only achieved its goals because it lowered both the goals and the recruiting standards. Note, any time you hear about an organization that doesn’t meet KPI but crows about “momentum,” do a quick look at the numbers and you’ll find a bunch of one-time tricks used to juice the numbers. That’s what is happening here, with lowered standards dealing with physical and mental fitness, proficiency, and red flags such as tattoos and prior drug use. Good luck keeping that “momentum” going next year.

Then again next year isn’t an election year, right?

There are many causes of the military recruitment crisis, but a key one is a lack of leadership especially at the civilian level. I saw this exchange between Army Secretary Christine Wormuth and Senator Cotton when the latter questioned her playing with enlistment targets in order to prevent negative headlines. Her response?:

Wormuth said the Army looks at “what’s possible” and sets goals that are achievable.

I found that response horrifying. Management 101 states that failure to meet a KPI is a key information signal in the organization that something is wrong and needs to be changed. Goals are set to the needs of the service and then actions are geared toward the accomplishment of those goals. What Wormuth is saying is that either recruitment goals have no relation to the needs of the service, which is a failure of senior leadership, or that she is just going to ignore those needs in favor of avoiding bad optics. Either way she’s willingly corrupting the signal and this cannot be tolerated.

Three: Kerry, the Cr*p Weasel

I’m trying to think of a bigger scoundrel, a more ridiculous figure in American politics for the past 50 years besides Joe Biden and I keep coming back to John Kerry. Biden and Kerry both have so much in common: criminally ambitious, greedy, insecure, and dumb as a box of rocks.

Kerry has been in the limelight for 50 years: star witness to Congress on war crimes, US Senator, presidential nominee, Secretary of State, Special Envoy for Climate. He really is (unfortunately) an elder statesman.

This is a guy who got his political start in a way that makes Kamala Harris look like a saint, by throwing his fellow Vietnam War veterans under the war crimes bus. He was willing to be a figurehead as Secretary of State (foreign policy under Obama was run by the West Wing and staffers at State) in exchange for the title which he later leveraged into business connections. Then there was his time as special envoy on climate, where he lectured the world on consumption and fossil fuels while flying around the world in his private jet and living the high life on his wife’s (Republican) money.

So he’s been a corrupt, power-hungry hypocrite for half-a-century. So is a lot of DC. What makes him a a cr*p weasel? This:

”And people go and then people self-select where they go for their news and information. Then you get into a vicious cycle. So it’s really, really hard, much harder to build consensus today then at any time in the 45, 50 years I’ve been involved in this and there is a lot of discussion now about how to curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc… Our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to hammer it out of existence. What we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern by hopefully having winning enough votes that you are free to be able to implement change.”

So there you go, a man who has sworn numerous times to support and defend the Constitution just told his globalist buddies at WEF that he (meaning the Democrats) was going to throw that document under the bus. Given that he’s dumb as the aforementioned box of rocks, this thought is not his own, but there is a special place in the pit for an elder statesman willing to trash our Constitution in front of foreigners.

Who is going to hold him to account?

You know, Walz made a crack about the First Amendment not protecting misinformation. I wonder if Vance will force him tonight to defend that and what Kerry said at WEF.

Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala reminded me of the role that “Never Trumpers” play in our political system. They form a “normative boundary” on the right side of the political system which enables the Left to tar anybody outside of that boundary as “extremist” or “far-right.” Think of Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney, and the rest as the Great Wall of the Establishment Right, beyond which rage the marauding hordes of Trumpist populism and MAGA who will never get invited inside for fellowships or Bethesda wine tastings.

That role of “right-wing” normative boundary setter is filled on the media side by sites such as The Dispatch and National Review which market themselves to the political ecosystem as the “respectable” Right. So it was with interest that I saw Kevin Williamson’s piece The Exotic Cat-Eaters of Springfield, Ohio at The Dispatch. Given the title, that it’s Williamson who is a founding member of the Never-Trumper brigade, and that it’s being published by The Dispatch you can reasonably guess where this is going.

Williamson is part of the larger National Review ecosystem that has lashed itself to the mast of “Never Trump,” and like Penelope of ancient myth is faithfully waiting for the spirit of Reagan and Buckley to return. There’s nothing wrong with that, I was a big fan of both in the day, but there’s nothing heroic or even virtuous about keeping a candle lit for ideological purity and trying to LARP Buckley’s purge of the John Birchers when the other side wants you dead.

Then again, better dead than rude.

Williamson sees his role in the political ecosystem as the heroic free-thinking man from the heartland of America, in this case Texas. There’s a lot to commend his earlier writings and he’s paid a professional price for his stances: he was ousted from The Atlantic for his public views on abortion. Now he is on what can only be described as a jihad, a maniacal obsession to rescue the soul of America from what he sees as the grifting sewer that is Trump and MAGA. In that, he’s found a home at The Dispatch.

If Teddy Roosevelt lionized the man in the arena, Williamson thinks he belongs there with him, charging up his literary San Juan Hill with a 6.7-liter diesel truck as his steed and armed with deadly metaphors and bon mots.

His Springfield piece reads as an American version of Heart of Darkness where instead of taking a boat up the Congo river our hero ventures up the country highway through Appalachia and onward toward Springfield in his “big 6.7L diesel.”

As he drives toward Springfield, he observes the contrasting scenes of the landscape. The wonderful natural beauty interspersed with “the inescapable herpetic rash of Dollar General stores and the strip-joint billboards sprinkled like pox.” You get the feeling that this would be a better place if not for the people in it. This is his sympathetic side and he’s just warming up, because when arrives in Springfield he finds the Haitian newcomers are just another demonized group of hard-working immigrants pursuing the American dream, a modern-day equivalent of the Irish and those groups that came before them.

The locals complaining about them? Bunch of “marginally employed white people on the dole” xenophobes. See? He’s the truth-teller who got it all figured out within a day or two of arrival. Everybody is playing the part assigned. Rather than using induction and seeing where the evidence takes him, he applies ideology as a reductionist lens to explain Springfield to the larger world. Well maybe “large” isn’t the right word, it is the readership of The Dispatch after all.

Then he writes:

“You can send little J.D. to Yale to make him polished, you can send him to Silicon Valley to make him rich, and you can send him to the Senate to make him powerful, but you cannot stop him from being what it is he apparently wants to be: Cleetus the Gap-Toothed Twitter Troll.”


So that’s really the whole purpose of his trip to Springfield. The locals, the Haitians, the American Dream… they were just bit players to support his predetermined narrative of bashing J.D. Vance. You wonder why he burned all that diesel to drive there when he could just have researched his hit piece with a Zoom call. You don’t need to do any research or investigation, just talk to the right people to get the quotes you’re looking for to write the piece you wanted in the first place. That’s Journalism 101.

Nothing about the effects on the local community of suddenly increasing the population by a third through dropping thousands of people from a 3rd World country that came here on a dodgy Biden TPS program. Nothing about how daily life has changed for the people who lived there or their complaints to the elected officials who betrayed them. Nothing about the effects of mass 3rd World immigration on America as seen through the eyes of one American town. America doesn’t belong to the people who live here as much as it does to Williamson’s vision of it.

That’s how you get more Trump.

For Williamson, Vance isn’t just wrong about Haitians and cats or the virtues of Springfield. He’s wrong because for him, Vance betrayed his upbringing — because for Williamson, Vance came from a place where “…. the biggest business was organized crime and where politics vacillated between demagoguery and banditry, beautiful in some parts, hideous in others, and
poisonously backward — you know: Haiti, but with white people.”

There it is and Williamson has quite willingly lent his years of credibility as a conservative writer and his down-home, truth-telling persona to same project Dick Cheney has; that is to define the right-wing side of the civilizational boundary and cast MAGA, Vance, Trump, and all of those “marginally employed white people on the dole” xenophobes in Springfield outside of it. There’s no place in Cheney’s and Williamson’s America for any of them, except to be the target of The Two Minute Hate.