Last week, the Washington Post bitterly, and correctly, chastised the entire flock of Republican presidential candidates for their conduct at their most recent debate for remaining very largely mute while Donald Trump went on his now-standard war dance against folks who ain’t like us, and the Constitution, not to mention simple common human decency, be damned. With only occasional exception, the Post pointed out, Trump’s “ludicrous proposals went unremarked on by the Republican contestants, for whom bigotry, hatred and magical thinking are the new normal.”
Yesterday, however, the Post went on a war dance of its own, one of a continuing series, actually, castigating President Obama for, well, for not kicking Iran’s motherfucking ass all over the Middle East. “Iran provokes the world as Obama does nothing” bellowed the Post. The Iranians launched a rocket, which, it seems, is something that only good nations are allowed to do.
Frothing at President Obama’s “fecklessness,” the Post demands that the president tear up the nuclear agreement that the U.S. reached with Iran, which is not going to happen. The Post has also recently demanded that the president tell the Russians, the Chinese, and the Cubans where to get off. Because the United States is the moral arbiter of the world!
The Post is enraged by Russia’s intervention in the Middle East, forgetting our own far more egregious—and disastrous—forays into that region, which the Post wishes would be repeated on an ever larger scale. The Post is also provoked by the very real human rights violations in other countries, to which I can only say “Guantanamo”.
The Post wants to go back to the good old days of the Bush Administration, when the U.S. was at war with “Evil,” a war that cost hundreds of thousands of people in the Middle East their lives and which made conditions in that region far worse than they were before. And the unspoken reason for all of this is that Fred Hiatt and his AIPAC buddies who set the Post’s agenda fear that without an all-encompassing commitment to a “forever” war against the once-famed (and ever shifting) “Axis of Evil” American support for Israel’s expansionist agenda will dwindle. That isn’t magical thinking. That’s deceit.
Afterwords
The Post is disgusted by not only Trump’s bigotry but his apostasy on the neocon line on foreign affairs, which had reigned unchallenged in the Republican Party for decades. Trump is an unlikely nominee, and, in any event, his nomination would almost surely wreck the Republican Party. However, Ted Cruz, who shares Trump’s apostasy, has a good chance of winning, particularly since both Chris Christie and Jeb Bush appear likely to make a “not hopeless” showing in New Hampshire, making it impossible for Marco Rubio to become the Establishment’s unchallenged fair-haired boy. Expect more frothing on the Post’s editorial page in days to come.
