Veteran's Fiery Takedown of Lindsey Graham: Exposes Shocking Push for War with Iran!

 

LINDSEY GRAHAM IS A WAR MONGER! 

LINDSEY GRAHAM NEEDS TO BE REPLACED!

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#iranwar #trump #iran

🔥🔥Watch this Veteran's fiery takedown of Lindsey Graham, exposing the latest push for war with Iran! "This resolution sets the stage for Donald Trump to start the Iran War if he's elected. Graham is already trying to build support in Congress, so it'll be there if Trump takes office. This is some seriously insane sh*t...They're deadly serious. We need to be, too. Vote for Kamala Harris. VOTE BLUE up and down the ballot!" #votevets #veterans #veteran #voteblue #vote #veteransforkamala #veteransforharris #veteransagainsttrump #foryou #votevets #veterans #veteran #suckersandlosers #trump #maga #traitortrump #usmilitary #militarylife #militaryfamilies #militaryfamily #usa #nationalsecurity #vote #voteblue #veteransvoteblue #freedom #foryou #trumpisacoward #iran #iranwar #lindseygraham

JUST FOREIGN POLICY: WEAPONS MANUFACTURERS, AIPAC, WAR ONGERS

FROM JUST FOREIGN POLICY:

In the Democratic-controlled House, the Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC) is generally seen as the leader of House Democrats on issues of war and peace. The Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee decides what bills and amendments to end and prevent wars will get a vote on the House floor and which ones will not. The main exception to this is when someone successfully invokes the War Powers Resolution on an unauthorized war, bypassing HFAC to force a floor vote (a key purpose of the War Powers Resolution is to allow any Member of the House to bypass HFAC to force a floor vote on an unauthorized war.)

Currently, the chair of HFAC is Eliot Engel, who voted for the Iraq war, voted against President Obama’s Iran deal to prevent war, and was one of only 16 House Democrats to vote to keep sending cluster bombs to the Saudi regime for use against civilians in Yemen, even after President Obama stopped doing so. (164 Democrats and 40 Republicans voted the right way.) 

But there are growing indications that this may be Eliot Engel’s last term in Congress. 

If Engel departs, House Democrats would have to choose a new chair of HFAC. Given that Americans are increasingly opposed to war and interventionism, one might expect that House Democrats would take this moment to choose an HFAC Chair that is in line with the American people.  

But the conventional wisdom in DC is that the HFAC chair is owned by pro-war interests like the weapons manufacturers and AIPAC. According to this view, the next HFAC chair must have the same record on war and peace as Engel.

As the Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports: 

“If Engel is unseated, the Foreign Affairs Committee would get a new chair responsible for steering its direction, likely drawn from the moderates who still occupy leadership positions in the House because of their seniority. One person considered a likely fit for the role is Rep. Ted Deutch, a Democrat from Florida who chairs the committee’s Middle East subcommittee and is staunchly pro-Israel.”

What does JTA mean when they say that Ted Deutch is “staunchly pro-Israel”? Most Congressional Democrats say are “pro-Israel.” So how “staunchly pro-Israel” is Ted Deutch? He opposed President Obama’s deal to prevent war with Iran, even though most House Democrats supported the deal. Ted Deutch was so proud of himself that he opposed President Obama’s Iran deal that he wrote an op-ed about it at the time and still proudly displays the op-ed on his Congressional website. 

Let’s get ahead of Democratic leadership and make clear that we demand a new HFAC chair who will support diplomacy and #EndEndlessWars.

Thank you for all you do to make U.S. foreign policy more just,

Erik Sperling, Sarah Burns, and the Just Foreign Policy Team

If you think our work is important, please make a donation to support it.

FAIR: In the Name of Anti-Trumpism, Media Elevate a Lying Warmonger

View article on FAIR's website In the Name of Anti-Trumpism, Media Elevate a Lying Warmonger BRYCE GREENE John Bolton with his White House memoir (cc photo: Gage Skidmore) Opposing the current president is a worthy goal for anyone who wants a better world. But if that opposition is based on TV ratings and ad sales, then it is just as morally bankrupt as the president himself. John Bolton’s new book, The Room Where It Happened, has earned him enormous amounts of free publicity for antagonizing the president. In their zeal to once again expose Trump as an all-around bad man, corporate media have elevated someone who should be condemned by a civilized society. Bolton’s entire professional history should be enough to make him persona non grata in any respectable circles--from his work on the Buckley v. Vallejo case that legalized mega-spending on election campaigns (Intercept, 6/18/20), to his efforts in the Reagan administration to dismantle regulations on advertising baby formula in the Global South (USA Today, 4/24/05). Bolton is most known for his hyper-militaristic foreign policy. During the George W. Bush years, he was one of the loudest cheerleaders for the murderous US invasion of Iraq, a war that has been responsible for as many as 3 million deaths (AlterNet, 3/15/18). He threatened international officials who got in his way, telling one, “We know where your kids live.” In order to sell the war to the public, he told outright lies to the public. Bolton has said that he has never regretted his support for the war. After he joined the current administration as National Security advisor in 2018, Bolton spearheaded some of the Trump White House’s most aggressive foreign policies. In the spring of 2018, he encouraged a massive strike to “eliminate Syria's air force” in response to alleged Syrian chemical weapon use (Vox, 4/16/18). He was also a driving force behind Trump’s withdrawal from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) weapons treaty (Washington Post, 10/19/18). Bolton was at the head of a massive campaign to delegitimize the government of Venezuela, part of the years-long American project of destroying Venezuela’s political stability through economic and public relations warfare (Time, 1/30/19). Washington’s economic sanctions killed an estimated 40,000 people in the country in 2017–18 alone (Independent, 4/26/19; CEPR, 4/19). The New York Times (3/26/15) promoted Bolton's call for an unprovoked attack on Iran to eliminate its nonexistent nuclear weapons program. Bolton has also long been at the forefront of the neoconservative call for war with Iran. He has accepted tens of thousands of dollars from a group of Iranian exiles known as the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), dedicated to overthrowing the current government; the group was officially designated by the US as a terrorist group from 1997 to 2012, due to a long record of bombing and assassination campaigns (Politico, 12/13/16). Eight months before joining the Trump administration, Bolton told the group that regime change in Iran should be the US’s stated policy, and that “before 2019, we will celebrate here in Tehran.” In 2015, the New York Times (3/26/15) published Bolton’s opinion piece, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran.” In addition to failing to disclose Bolton’s ties with the MEK, the piece contained multiple factual errors (Intercept, 4/4/15). According to Jon Schwartz of the Intercept, the Times initially linked one of Bolton’s key claims to a source that contradicted the claim, only fixing it after Schwartz pointed it out. Despite this long history of lying, and advocating a violent and aggressive foreign policy, Bolton’s latest project has been attacking the Trump administration for its gross incompetence and corruption. Media allowed Bolton to frame himself as a whistleblower trying to stop the lawlessness of an out-of-control Trump administration. For the New York Times (6/21/20), Bolton's main importance seemed to be his pertinence to the 2020 election. Bolton's central importance to corporate media is illustrated by a New York Times headline: "Trump Poses ‘Danger for the Republic’ if Re-Elected, John Bolton Charges" (6/21/20). Bolton’s usefulness as a club to bash Trump renders all of his past deeds beyond mention. The Times (6/18/20) provided a summary of the main takeaways from Bolton’s book. One of the most prominent was that Bolton professes to substantiate key accusations from the House impeachment of Trump. This is not a surprising revelation; Bolton's opposition to the administration's efforts to force Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden was a major topic of discussion during the impeachment hearings. (For what it’s worth, Bolton also argues that impeachment was a political stunt rather than a serious inquiry, offering this as an explanation for why he didn’t testify about it at the time.) The rest of the book’s revelations center around the familiar narrative of Trumpian disregard for established norms and rules. There has been debate about Bolton’s decision not to testify at the impeachment trial without a subpoena. According to CNN (6/17/20), Bolton “betrayed his country” by neglecting to blow the whistle on Trump and Ukraine earlier. Of course, there was no mention of Bolton’s history of leading (or trying to lead) the US into deadly wars. These past several days, substantive policy issues were mostly drowned out by political gossip and pointing out the most obvious of Trump’s flaws. But on the few topics that Bolton has discussed, he feels that Trump hasn’t been hawkish enough. In 2019, when Trump decided to call off a strike that could have killed 150 Iranians, Bolton felt this aversion to war was “the most irrational thing I ever witnessed any president do” (despite the fact that a war with Iran could make Iraq look like a cakewalk). On Trump’s ongoing coup attempt in Venezuela, Bolton believed that Trump wasn’t sufficiently undermining the current elected Venezuelan government. Last week Bolton had some of his highest visibility ever, with interviews all across the media. ABC News (6/21/20) had a much-hyped special, while USA Today (6/26/20) offered a similar interview. Several political cartoons have depicted Bolton as a significant challenge to Trump’s administration. Stephen Colbert (Late Show, 6/23/20) laughing with John Bolton. Late-night television personalities touted Bolton’s book. Bolton even appeared on CBS’s Late Show (6/23/20) with Stephen Colbert; the two ended up sharing laughs, much like Colbert had earlier rehabilitated Trump press secretary Sean Spicer (FAIR.org, 9/19/17). Mother Jones (6/24/20) called this interview “The Interview John Bolton Really Deserves,” because Colbert took the bold step of calling him “naive” for believing that Trump would follow the rules. Bolton’s main contribution to the national discourse is exemplified by what he said to George Stephanopolos on ABC's Good Morning America (6/22/20): [Trump’s] policymaking is so incoherent, so unfocused, so unstructured, so wrapped around his own personal political fortunes, that mistakes are being made that will have grave consequences for the national security of the United States. Giving Bolton a platform to express his disdain for Trump also allows him to turn a realistic critique of Trump foreign policy on its head: Rather than being too violent and militaristic, the problem is that Trump is “incoherent” and “unfocused” in his violence and militarism. Bolton also made appearances on the two main Sunday talk shows. Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press (6/28/20) asked Bolton whether or not Trump “is afraid to make Putin mad, because maybe Putin did help him win the election and he doesn’t want to make him mad for 2020?” Bolton’s name is reaching peak levels of interest, according to Google Trends, and his book even made it to the top of the New York Times Bestsellers list. The book follows in a long line of anti-Trump insider White House accounts; Michael Wolff's Fire and Fury, Bod Woodward's Fear and Omarosa Manigault Newman's Unhinged each hit the top of the New York Times Bestsellers list. In our pop culture world, Bolton, like many prominent public policymakers, is most importantly a celebrity. Sure, he may have had a troubled past, but that is a distant backstory to this current season. Regardless of his past disregard for human life, he is a new man, and has ridden the media wave into the halls of the anti-Trump #resistance. Bolton’s ideas are dangerous to America and the rest of the world. Was rehabilitating the public image of a warmonger and elevating his voice really worth telling us, for the thousandth time, that Donald Trump runs the White House like a selfish child?

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Mike Bloomberg is not the lesser of two evils

A REMINDER OF A CLOWN!

I will not be voting for the former New York City mayor in November — and I'm not alone

theweek.com

Mike Bloomberg is not the lesser of two evils

I will not be voting for the former New York City mayor in November — and…

I will not be voting for the former New York City mayor in November — a

Mike Bloomberg is not the lesser of two evils

Ryan Cooper

Like the vast majority of Americans, I have been effectively disenfranchised in the last few presidential elections. In 2011, I moved to Washington, D.C., which is so heavily Democratic that any vote for president is totally meaningless — in 2016, Hillary Clinton won with 93 percent of the vote. But last year, I moved to famously swingy Pennsylvania, and suddenly I'm a full citizen again. (I'm already lording it over my friends from California and New York.)

As I have written on many occasions, I think Bernie Sanders is the best candidate. But given the abominable Trump presidency, I have also said that I'll vote for whoever wins the Democratic nomination.

However, that was before Mike Bloomberg became a serious presidential contender (currently in third place in national polls and rising fast). I have given it very serious thought, and while I would happily vote for Elizabeth Warren, grudgingly vote for Joe Biden or Amy Klobuchar, or secure an entire bottle of Southern Comfort to get sufficiently hammered to vote for Pete Buttigieg, I will not vote for Mike Bloomberg in November if he is nominated.

To start with, it is not at all obvious that Bloomberg would even be a better president than Trump. As Alex Pareene writes at The New Republic, he is a right-wing authoritarian with nakedly racist views who constantly violated civil rights laws during his time as mayor of New York City. He locked up thousands of protesters during the 2004 Republican National Convention (where he gave a speech warmly endorsing George W. Bush, and thanked him for starting the war in Iraq), and a judge held the city in contempt for violating due process law. He created what amounted to a police state for New York Muslims, subjecting the entire community to dragnet surveillance and harassment, and filling mosques with spies and agent provocateurs. The city had to pay millions in settlements for violating Muslims' civil rights. (All this did precisely nothing to prevent terrorism, by the way.)

As Nathan Robinson writes at Current Affairs, he drastically escalated the infamous "stop-and-frisk" program in New York, in which innocent black and brown youths were jacked up by cops literally millions of times. Typically 85-90 percent of the stops found nothing, and many police used it as a handy pretext to vent their racist prejudice. At its peak in 2011, there were more stops of young black men than there were young black men in the entire city. And because it was mainly young men being targeted, some were stopped dozens of times. Innocent people were routinely beaten senseless.

Bloomberg justified the policy with straightforwardly racist collective guilt. In a 2015 speech, he said "it's controversial, but first thing is, all of your — 95 percent of your murders, murderers and murder victims, fit one M.O. ... They are male minorities, 15 to 25."

These statistics are hideously inaccurate. In reality, the relatively few whites stopped under stop-and-frisk were more likely to be carrying weapons, and as The Atlantic's Adam Serwer points out, after the program was halted, crime continued to fall unabated. The whole thing was completely useless — unless the point was to constantly remind black and brown New Yorkers that they were second-class citizens. Bloomberg also espouses the racist theory that the financial crisis was caused by government efforts to reduce prejudice in home lending — thus scapegoating minorities to deflect blame from the real culprit, Wall Street oligarchs like himself.

Bloomberg's newfound commitment to progressive policies is so transparently fraudulent that his campaign apparently plagiarized huge chunks of his campaign platform. He is just trying to trick the Democratic electorate with a tidal wave of cash (with evident success).

Now, Bloomberg does have a legitimate history of supporting gun control and climate policy. But it is exceedingly unlikely that he will be able to get past a Senate filibuster on gun control, especially given his sneering know-it-all approach. And given his politics and personal wealth, his climate policy would probably look a great deal like Emmanuel Macron's diesel tax in France — a carbon tax whose revenues would go towards cutting taxes on the rich. Macron's move sparked violent protests and was quickly abandoned.

Does this sound like a guy who would do anything substantial to reverse Trump's worst policies? If we're lucky, he might reverse the Muslim ban and let a few people out of the CBP camps. If we're not, he'll implement a much quieter and more effective version of the same policies, and partisan Democrats will reverse-engineer justifications for these being somehow necessary (or just ignore them, as they did during the Obama years). Recall that Bloomberg once argued that every Social Security card should have fingerprints so unauthorized immigrants would be unable to get jobs.

On the other hand, in some areas Bloomberg would likely be worse than Trump. As Mehdi Hasan writes at The Intercept, Bloomberg is a committed and pitiless warmonger — he supported the war in Iraq and repeated the Bush administration's lie that Saddam Hussein had plotted 9/11. (In January he said he had no regrets about doing so.) He opposed President Obama's Iran deal, and had few complaints about Trump's assassination of Iran's Qassem Soleimani. While Trump has escalated conflicts across the globe, he appears to have at least a mild hesitation about starting new full-scale wars of aggression. The chances of a shooting war with Iran probably increase if Bloomberg wins in 2020.

Given his wretched politics, even Bloomberg's superior competence is a mark against him. Right now one tiny silver lining of the Trump administration is that the people trying to commit atrocities through the federal bureaucracy are so inept they keep fumbling the legal procedures and getting stopped in the courts. Bloomberg is sure to appoint competent authoritarian maniacs.

Given his wretched politics, even Bloomberg's superior competence is a mark against him. Right now one tiny silver lining of the Trump administration is that the people trying to commit atrocities through the federal bureaucracy are so inept they keep fumbling the legal procedures and getting stopped in the courts. Bloomberg is sure to appoint competent authoritarian maniacs.

And for all the people who complain that Bernie Sanders is not a real Democrat, Bloomberg was literally a Republican up until 2007, and worked to elect Republicans until very recently. In 2014, he or his political action committee donated to the senate campaigns of Susan Collins in Maine and Bob Dold in Illinois. In 2016, he donated $11.7 million to Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania — making it the most expensive Senate race in history up to that point, and likely securing victory for Toomey, who won by less than two points. Though he has also donated a lot to Democrats, Bloomberg is a guy who did more than almost anyone to help protect Mitch McConnell's Republican majority in the Senate, and hence to put two more conservatives on the Supreme Court.

At bottom, Bloomberg is basically just like George W. Bush, with a dollop of maddening nanny-state condescension. Without question he would be one of the top five worst major-party presidential nominees in the last century of American history.

This stance will no doubt infuriate the "vote blue no matter who" crowd who view Donald Trump as some kind of Lovecraftian nightmare. But even aside from how horrible a president Bloomberg would be, perhaps the most compelling reason not to vote for him is what his nomination would reveal about American democracy. It would mean that the oligarch class has so thoroughly corrupted the system that the voice of the people is drowned. His entire candidacy is a cartoonishly blatant instance of how money can corrupt democracy. Right now he is scooping up thousands of campaign operatives and field organizers by offering them as much as $6,000 a month — creating a desperate shortage for other campaigns. He's racking up endorsement after endorsement — of representatives, mayors, and one governor, so far — who have cashed checks from his vast empire of bribery. His nomination would mean the Democratic Party can be "bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese."

Partisan Democrats insist that everyone has an obligation to vote tactically — that is, to always pick the lesser of two evils in the voting booth. But as Daniel Davies argues, given that one's individual vote has virtually no chance of actually deciding the outcome, the truly tactical choice is to not bother to vote at all. The only compelling reason to vote is about civic duty and one's patriotic conscience. 

And as Davies writes, "it seems pretty clear that there is some point at which it becomes obvious that a morally and politically valid response is simply to declare that the fundamental basis of the implied contract has broken down, and that it's a reasonable choice to simply refuse to participate further." If the choice is Cthulhu versus Nyarlathotep, I for one see little point in voting for the candidate that might have one fewer grasping eldritch tentacle.

Among Bernie Sanders supporters, I am far from the most die-hard. If I simply cannot countenance putting my name down for Bloomberg in November, there are millions more who would do the same — plus no small number of supporters of the other candidates, in all likelihood. Then there is the general fact that Bloomberg's extreme wealth and extensive record of racism and sexual harassment would negate most of the strongest attacks against Trump. 

Bloomberg would be highly likely to bleed enough support to third parties (or no one) to lose to Trump, just as Hillary Clinton did.

Luckily, it will be easy to avoid this dreadful possibility. Simply vote against Michael Bloomberg in the Democratic primary.

Editor's note: This article originally wrongly described the number of black men arrested under stop-and-frisk, and the percentage of stops that found nothing. It has since been corrected. We regret the error.

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