Geopolitical WrestleManiaTo a POTUS stuck in the past, the Iran bombing campaign was nothing more than 80s nostalgia—Hulk Hogan versus the Iron Sheik, re-enacted with GBU-57 bunker-busters.
It feels like pro wrestling. Fake pro wrestling. From back in the heyday. It feels like Hulk Hogan versus the Iron Sheik. It feels like the same tired formula, a rehash of the same old song-and-dance—a new iteration of the testosterone-fueled, homoerotic-but-also-beloved-by-straight-young-men type of spectacle that made the Secretary of Education and her husband inordinately wealthy. Even the jargon is straight out of the WWE: Unconditional Surrender. The 12-Day War. Massive Ordnance Penetrator. It feels like something from the 80s—the go-go decade of Aqua Net and Izod and cocaine, when Trump’s orange star was still ascendant, when he published The Art of the Deal, when he and Ivana were bold-faced names on Page Six, when he hobnobbed with Robert Maxwell, when he hit Studio 54 with Chuck Schumer and Roy Cohn, when the Kremlin started to cultivate him, when he returned from his maiden voyage to Moscow and immediately began bashing NATO. Everywhere you look, now, you find creatures of the 80s: Linda McMahon in the Cabinet. Hulk Hogan at the RNC. Sly Stallone is an ambassador to Hollywood. Mel Gibson, too. The National Guard, the U.S. Marines, have been sent to the state that elected 80s poster boy Arnold Schwarzenegger governor. Twice. All that shitty AI, bequeathing flabby Donald the physique of Hulk Hogan, of Rocky Balboa, of Rambo. All the amped-up “U-S-A” memes. The guns, the fist pump. Fight fight fight. The spurt of blood on his ear—an old pro wrestling trick? Trump: the Last Action Hero. This is not diplomacy. This is not a show of military might. This is Thunderdome. This is Geopolitical WrestleMania. It’s 2025, we should know by now what’s real and what’s fake, but fantasy and reality have blurred together too completely, the special effects are too good, and it’s fun, isn’t it?, it’s fun to have heroes and heels, decisive winners and irredeemable losers, Hulksters and Iron Sheiks. It’s the 80s all over again. In 1981, Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor outside of Baghdad. Operation Opera, that was called. Iraq’s nuclear capabilities were destroyed. In 1981, Israel was selling arms to Iran, helping the Ayatollah in the Supreme Leader’s war against Saddam Hussein. Operation Seashell, that was called. In 1981, Ronald Reagan became president, he got Tehran to release the American hostages, and his shadowy underlings began covertly, and illegally, selling arms to Iran, to thwart the Soviets. In 1981, the Talking Heads released “Once in a Lifetime” as a single. Washington, Moscow, Tel Aviv, Tehran. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Tehran, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Washington. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. In the 80s, Benjamin Netanyahu was the Israeli ambassador to the United States. He was buddies with Mitt Romney, his colleague at the Boston Consulting Group, whom he met after graduating from MIT. He was friends with Fred Trump. He was friends with Charles Kushner. He was a shill, a carnival barker. He was there to sell something. Later, back in Israel, he became prime minister with help from Arthur Finkelstein, purveyor of the darkest of dark arts. A crook, these days; a criminal, a maniac. Bibi was on the way out, hundreds of thousands marching in the streets demanding his resignation, and then the Hamas leaders his Likud party abetted returned from Moscow, launched a horrific terrorist attack, and took Israeli hostages—on October 7, which oh-by-the-way is Putin’s birthday. An excuse to unleash pure hell on the Palestinian people. Now Bibi is in power until the war is over, which means the war is never going to end. The U.S. taxpayer-funded genocide in Gaza is almost complete. It’s a tiny place. There’s only so many hospitals you can bomb, only so many journalists you can kill. Bibi desperately needs a new front. So: Tehran. Israel hits Iran, decapitates its military leadership, destroys its air force and its defense capabilities. Flaccidly Iran strikes back. With the skies safe over the old Persian Empire, the U.S. Air Force illegally bombs nuclear reactor sites with names out of Tolkien: Isfahan, Natanz, Fordo. The sites had already been evacuated, the nuclear material moved. Trump spent a billion dollars and risked the lives of God knows how many service members to blow up some holes in the ground. In retaliation, Iran hits an empty U.S. military base in Qatar. And now we’re done, there’s CEASEFIRE, there’s PEACE—or so says Trump, who so badly yearns for his Nobel Prize, although no sooner does he announce an end to the hostilities than Iran sends another volley of missiles into Israel. The Washington piece of this is performative: pure theater. There is no substance to Donald Trump. No grand strategy. It’s all fake, all for show. This is cosplay. These are LARPers—but their actions have horrible real world consequences. People are suffering and dying so they can live out their fantasies, so Trump can rehash his glory days of 40 years ago. “Glory Days,” another vestige from the 80s. As a child of the 80s who religiously watched pro wrestling, I can attest: when Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka leapt from the top turnbuckle and landed an elbow with maximum force on some hapless opponent; when “Rowdy” Roddy Piper smacked a defenseless fool with a metal folding chair; when the Iron Sheik deployed his patented Figure-Four Leg-Lock; when Hulk Hogan appeared at the end of a tag-team match, miraculously but inevitably, to pry victory from the jaws of defeat: it was exciting. It made you feel good. It made you feel powerful. Like you yourself were the warrior in the ring. Like their strength was your strength; their triumph, your triumph. This is why pro wrestling was, and remains, so popular. It’s visceral. It was a similar feeling—vicariously violent, righteously euphoric—to what I experienced one afternoon during this same time period. In April of 1986, I watched on TV, spellbound, as the U.S. military rained 60 tons of munitions on strategic targets in Libya. This was after a terrorist attack at a West Berlin nightclub that had killed two U.S. service members and injured 79 others was found to be the work of a Libyan terrorist cell in East Berlin. Ronald Reagan decided to strike back—and did he ever! We bombed the shit out of targets in Tripoli and, yes, Benghazi. In just 12 action-packed minutes, we wrecked military bases, airfields, barracks, and a residential compound where Muammar Qaddafi lived with his family. That loathsome madman survived, but we killed his mom—or so the rumor was at the time. If I could somehow articulate the surge of adrenaline coursing through my veins that afternoon, watching all that glorious destruction on my TV set; if I could give voice to how I felt that day, it would be summed up in three words: “America! Fuck yeah!” When I close my eyes, I can still feel it, still summon it. And I’m sure I’m not the only one. I was 13. That feeling is what Trump hoped to recapture, I believe, as he sent U.S. service members in harm’s way to cluster-bomb some empty holes in the ground in Iran. He wanted the adrenaline surge, the vicarious burst of triumphant glee, the satiation of the national bloodlust. That’s why he went against the advice of literally every single one of his advisors, including the drunken Defense Secretary who, with his muscles and his tattoos and his hair gel, looks not unlike some lesser pro wrestler from the bygone era (Brett “The Hitman” Hart, maybe?). The birthday military parade was a flop, could not rekindle the feelings. No—to access emotions that reptilian, that primal, he had to blow shit up. And so he did. But it didn’t work. Despite being in his eightieth year of life, Trump remains a pubescent boy. He is forever 13, forever the dorky, paste-eating kid desperately trying to be tough, to be cool, to be liked and admired. (Come to think of it, this arrested development explains his lifelong and perverted attraction to girls of that same age group.) The MAGA faithful may be similarly stunted in growth, but we are not, thank God, a nation of 13-year-old boys. It didn’t work. The ill-advised bombing campaign elicited no nationwide feelings of “America, Fuck Yeah!”, just another dip in his plummeting approval numbers. His preening and posturing on Truth Social did not make him look tough, just cowardly and dumb and divorced from reality. The carefully curated photos from the Situation Room did not afford him the gravitas he so desperately seeks. All we saw was an old man in a branded red baseball cap with a cake of burnt-siena makeup spackled on his old man’s visage, thumb hooked on his belt like a cosplay cowboy. The look on his face that he thought projected Leadership and Strength was one of utter and abject stupidity.
It didn’t work. The 80s nostalgia play was ineffective. We are sick to the death of that decade: the same tired characters, the same old plots. We bomb empty holes in the ground, they bomb an empty military base, everyone talks tough to save face, and life goes on. How many times can we watch the same movie before we change the channel? Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. It’s the U.S. versus Iran. Hulk Hogan versus the Iron Sheik. Again, and again, and again, like an animated GIF on a loop, forever. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. In real life, two American pilots died bombing Libya in 1986. In real life, pro wrestlers suffer from arthritis and back problems and chronic traumatic encephalopathy. In real life, Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri served as a bodyguard to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, before fleeing his native country out of fear of political prosecution, moving to the U.S., and recasting himself as the Iron Sheik. In real life, Terry Bollea is a serial fabulist whose lawsuit against Gawker was underwritten by the sinister billionaire Peter Thiel—more Donald Trump than Hulk Hogan. In real life, actual wrestlers, amateur ones, were abused by a doctor at Ohio State, a serial rapist enabled by Trump’s House ally Jim Jordan. In real life, Donald Trump is directly responsible for the needless, preventable deaths of half a million people—and the number keeps increasing. Pro wrestling is fake. But the death Donald brings is real. The destruction is real. The threat to our democracy is real. And unlike at WrestleMania, there’s no referee to end the match. Photo credit: Rick Foster. Trump at Wrestlemania 29, 2013. |
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
Geopolitical WrestleMania
Tuesday, May 7, 2024
Informed Comment daily updates (05/07/2024)
Turkey Suspends Trade with Israel over Gaza: Solidarity or Politics? Turkey, Israel, boycott, Gaza |
Istanbul (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – On Thursday, Turkey announced the suspension of all trade with Israel, citing the “worsening humanitarian tragedy” in the Gaza Strip as the reason. The Turkish Ministry of Trade said: “Export and import transactions related to Israel have been suspended for all products. Turkey will implement these new measures strictly and decisively until the Israeli Government allows an uninterrupted and sufficient flow of humanitarian aid to Gaza.” This move follows a previous trade restriction announced last month, during which Turkey restricted exports in 54 categories, including iron and steel products, jet fuel, construction equipment, machinery, cement, granite, chemicals, pesticides, and bricks. In 2023, trade between Turkey and Israel amounted to $6.8 billion, with 76% representing Turkish exports to Israel. According to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TÜİK), Israel ranked 13th on Turkey’s list of export destinations in 2023, with $5.4 billion in exports. Turkish exports played a crucial role in Israel’s economy. Before the embargo, Turkey had been Israel’s largest steel and cement exporter. Azerbaijani oil and even barbed wire were shipped to Israel through Turkish ports. Additionally, Zorlu Holding, a Turkish company, produced 7 percent of Israel’s annual electricity. A Move to Regain Domestic Support? During the campaign for the elections held on March 31, Erdoğan’s governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) faced criticism for maintaining trade relations with Israel despite the ongoing conflict in Gaza. Romney Admits Push to Ban TikTok Is Aimed at Censoring News Out of Gaza  A conversation between Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the Republican senator offered an “incredible historical document” showing how the U.S. views its role in the Middle East. By Julia Conley ( Commondreams.org ) – A discussion between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Sen. Mitt Romney over the weekend included what one critic […] |
Media Coverage of Campus Protests focuses on Spectacle, rather than Substance By Danielle K. Brown, Michigan State University | – Protest movements can look very different depending on where you stand, both literally and figuratively. For protesters, demonstrations are usually the result of meticulous planning by advocacy groups and leaders aimed at getting a message out to a wider world or to specific institutional targets. To […] |
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Police have now arrested more than 2,500 students at pro-Palestine protests across the U.S., yet students continue to call for an end to the war on Gaza and universities' investment in companies that support Israel's occupation of Palestine. We speak to three student organizers from around the country: Salma Hamamy of the University of Michigan, president of the school's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, about the commencement ceremony protest she helped organize, and Cady de la Cruz of the University of Virginia and Rae Ferrara of the State University of New York at New Paltz about police crackdowns on their schools' encampments. De la Cruz was arrested in the UVA raid and banned from campus without an opportunity to collect any of her belongings. She says repression has strengthened the resolve of many protesters, who are willing to risk their academic futures to push for divestment. "All of us there felt like we have more time on our hands … than the people of Gaza," she explains, "We would hold it down for anything."
Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET.
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361 episodes
Old posts you may have missed
Friday, April 19, 2024
Fox host goes OFF SCRIPT, calls Republican out on BLATANT SHAM LIVE on air
UTAH SENATOR MITT ROMNEY WAS PREVIOUSLY MASSACHUSETTS
GOVERNOR & DESERVES LOTS OF CONDEMNATION FOR HIS ABSCENSES
WHILE CAMPAIGNING FOR PRESIDENT...BUT MITT ROMNEY GOT
THIS RIGHT!
REPUBLICANS AREN'T LISTENING!
Fox host Neil Cavuto didn't hesitate to call the Republicans out for their latest failed impeachment sham. Francis Maxwell reports.
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Friday, January 26, 2024
Trump pushing for a delay on border deal to undermine Biden
"R" voters are conspicuously uninformed, embrace disinformation, refuse to research issue and continue to embrace MAGA LIES regardless of facts.
Don't bother your little heads with FACTS!
Trump pushing for a delay on border deal to undermine Biden
Senior Republican Mitt Romney says the former president is hurting Americans by playing politics with illegal immigration
Senior Republican Mitt Romney says the former president is hurting Americans by playing politics with illegal immigration
Friday, September 15, 2023
Mitt Romney Is Horrible And ACAB
Today on Morning Fam, we discuss why Mitt Romney is terrible and why you should never ever trust the police.
September 14, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
Yesterday, Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) announced he would not run for reelection. That announcement came just as The Atlantic published an excerpt from a forthcoming biography of Romney by McKay Coppins in which Romney expressed disgust with his Republican colleagues for feeding Trump’s lies to their voters in exchange for power and acknowledged that “[a] very large portion of my party really doesn’t believe in the Constitution.” Coppins had access to Romney’s private journals, correspondence, and interviews. He describes Romney as isolated from other Republicans in Washington, unwelcome first because he was disgusted by Trump and vowed to be independent of him and then because, in the first impeachment trial, Romney voted to convict on one of two charges. Romney said that “[a]lmost without exception” his Republican colleagues “shared my view of the president,” but they refused to speak up out of fear that their voters would turn against them. Coppins recounts a weekly caucus lunch at which Republicans gave Trump a standing ovation, listened as he boasted and rambled through remarks, and then burst into laughter as soon as Trump left. That loyalty appears to have been behind leaders’ refusal to address rumors of violence on January 6, 2021. According to Coppins, on January 2, 2021, Senator Angus King (I-ME) warned Romney that a high-ranking Pentagon official had told King that right-wing extremists online appeared to be planning to attack the government on January 6 to stop what Trump had told them was the stealing of the 2020 presidential election. They talked of guns and arson and bombs, and they talked of targeting the traitors in Congress, among whom they counted Romney for his vote to convict Trump on one count in his first impeachment trial. King was concerned for Romney’s safety. Romney promptly texted then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to recount the conversation. “There are calls to burn down your home, Mitch; to smuggle guns into DC, and to storm the Capitol,” Romney wrote. “I hope that sufficient security plans are in place, but I am concerned that the instigator—the President—is the one who commands the reinforcements the DC and Capitol police might require.” McConnell never answered. When even after the events of January 6, fellow senators continued to execute their plan of objecting to the counting of electoral votes for certain states, Romney called them out on the floor of the Senate for “being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy.” Romney recalled that some senators refused to convict Trump in the second impeachment trial out of concerns for their safety and that of their families. Romney himself had hired a security detail for his family since the attack on the U.S. Capitol, but at $5,000 a day such security was out of reach for most of his colleagues. Just eleven years ago, Romney was the 2012 Republican nominee for president. Almost 61 million Americans voted for him. Now he is leaving public service with voters calling him a traitor and threatening his life. In the House of Representatives today, Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had to pull back one of the eleven spending bills that Congress needs to pass before the end of the fiscal year on September 30 to fund the government. Extremists say they will not bring any of those bills to the floor without deeper cuts than McCarthy agreed to in a deal with President Biden earlier this year. In a conference meeting today, McCarthy allegedly exploded at the extremists stopping the budget process, who hold over him their power to challenge his speakership. “If you want to file a motion to vacate,” he said, “then file a f*cking motion.” Rather than backing down, an extremist leader, Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), continued to needle McCarthy on social media. The House went home for the weekend. While it made no progress on the budget this week, Speaker McCarthy did manage to initiate an impeachment inquiry into President Biden in an unsuccessful attempt to appease the extremists. According to Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman and Alyce McFadden of the New York Times, those extremists have been conferring with Trump. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who has led calls to impeach Biden, told the reporters that she told Trump she wanted the impeachment inquiry to be “long and excruciatingly painful for Joe Biden.” Ultimately, she says, she wants a “long list of names” of those she claims are involved in crimes with the Bidens, and when Trump wins the presidency in 2024, she wants “to go after every single one of them and use the Department of Justice to prosecute them.” Today the independent counsel appointed by then-president Trump to investigate Biden’s son Hunter charged Hunter with three felonies related to the fact that he falsely claimed he was not using illegal drugs when he applied to buy a handgun that he owned for about 11 days in 2018. Los Angeles Times legal affairs columnist Harry Litman noted that in June, after five years of investigation, the Justice Department negotiated a plea agreement with Hunter Biden’s lawyers in which Biden would plead guilty to two tax offenses and receive probation, and a gun charge would be dropped after two years if he continued to stay drug-free. Although Biden had taken the unusual step of retaining Trump’s appointee, then–U.S. attorney David Weiss, to continue to investigate Hunter even after Trump’s term ended, to avoid any appearance of interference, Republicans protested what they saw as preferential treatment for the president’s son, harassing Weiss’s team and FBI agents and their families. Then the deal fell apart for reasons unrelated to Hunter. And now Weiss has brought more charges. Litman notes that “the charges Weiss brought are rarely pursued for their own sake. The department does bring such charges against defendants who use improperly obtained firearms to commit other crimes. And in one or two instances, prosecutors appear to have used such charges against defendants whom they knew to be particularly dangerous. But this indictment over an isolated lie by a relatively harmless firearm applicant seems to be without precedent.” But, Litman notes, the Republicans now have something with which “to muddy the waters with respect to Trump’s multiple criminal indictments.” As if on cue, House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) claimed that “[m]ountains of evidence reveals that Hunter Biden likely committed several felonies and Americans expect the Justice Department to apply the law equally. Today’s charges are a very small start, but unless U.S. Attorney Weiss investigates everyone involved in the fraud schemes and influence peddling, it will be clear President Biden’s DOJ is protecting Hunter Biden and the big guy.” Yesterday, President Biden spoke at a campaign reception. “Everybody always asks about impeachment,” he said, but he didn’t think much about it. He noted that Greene had vowed to impeach him the first day she was elected, and said: “I get up every day…not focused on impeachment. I’ve got a job to do. I’ve got to deal with the issues that affect the American people every single solitary day.” That focus today demonstrated the vision Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have for the U.S. After yesterday’s meeting between Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un, U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan today held a trilateral call with his counterparts in Japan and South Korea, honoring the agreement forged at the historic trilateral summit of the three countries at Camp David in August. Together, they noted that North Korean arms exports to Russia would directly violate multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions, including ones for which Russia itself voted. And in Largo, Maryland, today, after listing the economic accomplishments of his administration, Biden called out the Republicans for their lack of policy plans. For all the time they spend attacking Bidenomics, he said, “here’s what they never do: They never talk about what they want to do…. They tell you what they’re against. What are they for? It’s like they want to keep it a secret.” Biden pointed out that just months ago, Republicans threatened to default on the U.S. debt, and now they are breaking the commitment they made to resolve that standoff. Working from a budget produced in June by the Republican Study Committee, which has 156 out of 222 of the Republican members in the House, Biden explained that Congressional Republicans now are doubling down on the old trickle-down economics that “hollowed out…the middle class…blew up the deficit…produced an anemic economic growth…and…stripped the dignity and pride and hope out of a community, one after another.” “[Y]ou hear from our friends on the other side, the MAGA Republicans, what’s wrong with America. Everything’s wrong with America. They keep telling us America is failing,” Biden said. “Well, they’re wrong. They’re failing. America is not failing. America is winning. And there’s one reason for it: you. All you people get up every single morning and go out to try to do the right thing. You, the American people—you’re the one with grit and determination. Not me or your elected officials. You.” “We’re the only nation based on an idea—an idea. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. Look,” Biden said, “we’ve never fully lived up to it,’’ but “[w]e’ve never walked away from it.” “These other guys are trying to walk away from it.” — Notes: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/elections/2012 https://twitter.com/ArthurDelaneyHP/status/1702319112985448648 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/us/politics/trump-gop-biden-impeachment.html Twitter (X): RepJamesComer/status/1702384158398619967 |
Top News | 'He’s Not Going to Run Unopposed': Sanders Rejects Schumer for Majority Leader
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