IRAN: Trump's war?

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:14
VIEWED: 23215
PAGE 5 of 42

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Originally posted by second:
Trump prepares to bypass Congress to take on Iran

The Trump administration and its domestic political allies are laying the groundwork for a possible confrontation with Iran without the explicit consent of Congress — a public relations campaign that was already well under way before top officials accused the Islamic Republic of attacking a pair of oil tankers last week in the Gulf of Oman.

Over the past few months, senior Trump aides have made the case in public and private that the administration already has the legal authority to take military action against Iran, citing a law nearly two decades old that was originally intended to authorize the war in Afghanistan.

www.politico.com/story/2019/06/18/trump-congress-iran-1366756

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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The article continues...

In the latest sign of escalating tensions, National Security Adviser John Bolton warned Iran in an interview conducted last week and published Monday, “They would be making a big mistake if they doubted the president's resolve on this.” Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan announced on Monday evening that the U.S. was deploying an additional 1,000 troops to the region for “defensive purposes.” And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo jetted to Tampa, home of Central Command, on Monday evening to huddle with military officials to discuss “regional security concerns and ongoing operations,” according to a State Department spokeswoman.

The developments came as Iran announced it was on course to violate a core element of its nuclear deal with major world powers, exceeding the amount of enriched uranium allowed under the agreement in 10 days unless European nations intervened to blunt the economic pain of American sanctions. And they came as U.S. officials promoted video footage and images showing what they say were Iranian forces planting explosive devices on commercial oil tankers.

Yet even as the president’s hawkish advisers have highlighted Iran’s alleged bad behavior, administration officials privately stressed that direct military action remained highly unlikely absent an Iranian attack on an American ship or an American citizen. The president, who campaigned against getting the U.S. bogged down in unnecessary foreign wars, is considered the primary internal obstacle to a counterattack, officials said, noting that Trump continues to press for an improved nuclear deal.

Trump on Monday de-emphasized the international significance of the recent tanker explosions in an interview with Time magazine — downplaying the Gulf of Oman's value to U.S. oil supplies and describing alleged Iranian acts of aggression as "very minor."

“If you look at the rhetoric now compared to the days when they were signing [the 2015 nuclear deal], where it was always ‘death to America, death to America, we will destroy America, we will kill America,’ I’m not hearing that too much anymore,” Trump told Time. “And I don’t expect to.”

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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An election that changes the leadership from Republican to Democrat won't fix what is wrong with American voters.

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You see, SECONDRATE, what your problem is? You think that words are disconnected from reality, which is why you're so careless with them.

Sometimes (when it suits you) you claim that people (voters) have no effect on policy. Then at other times (when it suits you) you lay blame for bad policies on the American voter.
So, which is it?
Neither you nor your favorite political party can fix this Iran problem (or indeed ANY problem) until they figure out this conundrum.

*****

But instead of waiting for you to figure this out on your own ... because that'll take, like, forever ... I'm going to tell you the lay of the land, as I see it.

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ARE NEARLY 100% PROPAGANDIZED. Just look at how you fell for that RUSSIA!RUSSIA! disinformation campaign. It told you what you wanted to hear: TRUMP IS BAD! TRUMP IS A TRAITOR! TRUMP SHOULD BE IMPEACHED, OR SOMETHING! Your (willing) buttons were pushed and pushed and pushed with a campaign of evidence-free hyperventilating paranioa, and it worked!

If you had any intellectual integrity at all, you'd be at least quietly admitting to yourself that you'd been stampeded off an intellectual cliff because you let your extreme hatred of Republicans get the better of you but, no, you continue to make the same mistake that you castigate other Americans for making. THE ONLY DIFFERENCE BETWEEN AMERICANS WHO HAVE BEEN HOODWINKED INTO WANTING WAR WITH IRAN IS THE TARGET: YOU WANT WAR WITH RUSSIA INSTEAD.

****Americans are propagandized BECAUSE they really COULD change things, if they got off their brains and thought for a change.

But that just won't do for the people in charge: They want a stupefied public who'll stand in line for 10 hours to buy the latest iPhone or bend under the yoke while their standard of living is continuously eroded into poverty-level or support the latest war or buy into WHATEVER TPTB are "selling" that day. And so the corporate M$M and the tech-giant-controlled internet continues to feed people bullshit nonstop 24/7/365 ... everything from ads to movies to series to "news" is a completely fictionalized version of the world we live in ... not much reality to be found there.

REAVERBOT, SIT UP AND PAY ATTENTION!

This extends to the climate shift argument too. WHY does the government spew propaganda? WHY are people so abysmally ignorant of science or logic? (That includes YOU, my friend.) It's because it is being controlled by the monied interests that stand in the shadows.

So if you want to fix the problem, you have to fix the media. You have to get people used to being able to distinguish fact from disinformation, to ask key questions like cui bono?, to pay attention and think for more than three seconds at a time and believe me, Twitter and FB and Snapchat and Instagram aren't helping in that regard at all; I consider them to be part of the campaign to completely dumb down the population.

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People be Getting Dumber

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https://spectator.org/people-be-getting-dumber/


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Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Quote:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Quote:

---

An election that changes the leadership from Republican to Democrat won't fix what is wrong with American voters.

---

You see, SECONDRATE, what your problem is? You think that words are disconnected from reality, which is why you're so careless with them.

Sometimes (when it suits you) you claim that people (voters) have no effect on policy. Then at other times (when it suits you) you lay blame for bad policies on the American voter.
So, which is it?
Neither you nor your favorite political party can fix this Iran problem (or indeed ANY problem) until they figure out this conundrum.

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Conundrum? There is nothing confusing about this in the least bit.
Fact 1): so long as there are at least 41% of Senators from the GOP, they will be able to kill any legislation the GOP dislikes. It once was at least 34%, but a rule was changed in 1975.
www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Filibuster_Clotur
e.htm

Fact 2): If you reelect a Senator who screwed you over, you will get screwed again and again for the next 6 years. Senators and, especially, Representatives know they can screw the voters and still get reelected. The majority of voters never learn, quite clearly never understanding why their wishes are ignored. It is because the majority of voters are trivially fooled by a fast talking conman in politics or business or at work:
www.opensecrets.org/overview/reelect.php

Fact 3): If the majority of voters can be talked into a stupid war, America will fight stupid wars and spend too much on the Pentagon. Remember Iraq? The reasons for war were stupid and yet the majority of voters reelected their Senators, despite it being very predictable how that war would end:
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2002/11/the-fifty-first-state/302
612/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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SECONDRATE - So, the American voter CAN change policy.
Please don't bring up that whinge again about how they "can't". If you do, I'll remind you of your stated position.

Now, how do you explain why American voters so consistently vote against their own interests?

-----------
Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor - William Blake

"The messy American environment, where most people don't agree, is perfect for people like me. I CAN DO AS I PLEASE." - SECOND

America is an oligarchy http://www.fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=57876 .

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECONDRATE - So, the American voter CAN change policy.
Please don't bring up that whinge again about how they "can't". If you do, I'll remind you of your stated position.

Now, how do you explain why American voters so consistently vote against their own interests?

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They don't vote against their interests, at least they don't think they are. The bigger the gap between what they think will happen and what will predictably happen explains hundreds of millions of painful failures in America. I could go on-and-on about guys I know making decisions that predictably turn out disastrously wrong in business, even ending with bankruptcy. I tell them what will happen. When it happens, several years later, they never understand how I did it. It seems like magic! I had worked the figures on paper for them, showed them the estimated profit or loss, and they still don't believe I can predict their future. Somehow, they believe that God, or willpower, or luck, or working harder, with more passion, will make them a success. I cannot save them from their poor decisions which they feel are right and I predict are wrong.

I was actually looking at two movie scripts 4 weeks agos. The writer wanted to borrow $50,000 in a promissory note to be paid back either when a script sells in the next 6 months (but guaranteed to sell by July of next year!) or 10 years from now. I loaned the money at 0% interest, but I know how this story ends with failure. I didn't want to discourage the writer by telling her it will never sell because she would tell me I can't possibly know that. I gonna have to wait 10 years before I tell her the sad truth about her scripts. But maybe she will write other scripts, better ones, and those will sell in the next decade. Only then will I be repaid the $50,000. I hope for her success. I try not to think about her predictable failure.

I'll make a prediction about Trump's Iran War. It will be a more expensive fiasco than Bush's Iraq War. Will Trump go to war in his next term? That I can't predict. Trump is too scattered brained to know what he will do two weeks from today, let alone two years from now. He might not get reelected if the majority of voters think an Iran War is in Trump's future and, more importantly, the voters remember the Iraq War.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Quote:

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Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Now, how do you explain why American voters so consistently vote against their own interests?

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Quote:

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Originally posted by SECOND:
They don't vote against their interests, at least they don't think they are. The bigger the gap between what they think will happen and what will predictably happen explains hundreds of millions of painful failures in America.

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Americans are exceptionally heavily propagandized, with all sorts of unhelpful aphorisms like: you just need to believe in god and in yourself; or, if you have the right attitude, the things you seek will manifest themselves in your life; or, the US is a meritocracy, so if you've failed, it's because you're a failure.

Here's a few more: American 'exceptionalism'; or systematically calling the governments of elected leaders 'regimes'.

Remember this?

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The ... system of propaganda and censorship existed not so much for the purpose of spreading a particular message as for the purpose of making learning impossible, replacing facts with mush, and handing the faceless state a monopoly on defining an ever-shifting reality.

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That's us.

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I could go on-and-on about guys I know making decisions that predictably turn out disastrously wrong in business, even ending with bankruptcy. I tell them what will happen. When it happens, several years later, they never understand how I did it. It seems like magic! I had worked the figures on paper for them, showed them the estimated profit or loss, and they still don't believe I can predict their future. Somehow, they believe that God, or willpower, or luck, or working harder, with more passion, will make them a success. I cannot save them from their poor decisions which they feel are right and I predict are wrong.

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But then again, that's what they've been told all their lives. It keeps them from making rational evaluations.

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He might not get reelected if the majority of voters think an Iran War is in Trump's future and, more importantly, the voters remember the Iraq War.

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But voting is far more complicated than running arithmetic on someone's dreams, which you claim to be so successful at.

Many people are tribal. For example, you, and your cohorts here. If republicans are your anti-tribe, then democrats must be your tribe. Your actions more than anything else reveal you to be deeply biased, and extremely aggressive to anyone not in 'your' tribe. YOU are not rational. You are tribal. And that's why you vote for democrats. Not because they represent YOUR interests (as you so frequently remind us), but because republicans are your 'out' group.

That tribalism keeps you, and your cohorts here, from evaluating 'your' tribe - democrats - rationally.

Do you want examples? Shall I point out the many, many problems I posted regarding Hillary, the DNC, and the platform? Her historic NEGATIVE ratings, which were well-publicized? The shenanigans that went in to shoe-horning her in with the same-old business-as-usual? And most especially, the fact that she limited her message to victim-groups?

Now, rationally, that would be enough to give pause. It should have given you pause.

But, again, voting's not rational, it's mainly tribal. I think what happened was, by defining the party so closely with individual victim groups, she failed to connect with the tribalism of the larger distribution of people. Hence, she lost in a number of states where people didn't identify with the tribes she claimed to represent.


BTW - I'll make a prediction. JUST LIKE the prediction I made in the last election, this one won't be about firing up the established tribe. It'll be about which group has the fewest people running way from it. Democrats should think about that. Because impeachment pitches well to the tribe, but not to people outside of it.






And if democrats don't do anything different, how

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