Tag Archives: Republican

Saudi Arabia Wants You To Vote Republican

Some analysts I trust have gotten a little too complex on this topic. Yes, there are many concrete reasons why Saudi Arabia’s intervention in the oil market at the beginning of this month makes sense. The fact that prices have not risen much since the announcement is an indication of just how quickly the world recession is destroying oil and gas demand. But the fact remains that Saudi Arabia decided to make this cut a month before the November mid-term elections. This is a calculated slap in the face to Joe Biden and the Democratic party. It is not, however an insult to the United States as a whole, as I explain in today’s video.

https://www.npr.org/2021/09/12/1036389448/biden-declassifies-secret-fbi-report-detailing-saudi-nationals-connections-to-9-
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/us/jared-kushner-saudi-investment-fund.html
https://www.propublica.org/article/9-11-investigation-saudi-connections-operation-encore-fbi

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The 4th Republican Disaster In 20 Years | Coronavirus 5

For most of this channel’s existence I’ve worked to remain fairly non-partisan. I’m generally uninterested in the whole performative, substance-free mess of party politics in the United States. I’ve adopted the understandably popular “pox on both their houses” approach. Obama’s foreign policy left plenty for me to bitch about, and it’s easy to cover Trump as if he’s some unique biblical plague, somehow distinct from the party he leads.

But at a certain point you’ve got to acknowledge facts. The Democrats are an uninspiring bunch of managerial, condescending twerps. But if your expectations are low, they can be trusted to be reasonably honest and competent. 20 years, and four disasters have shown us that the Republican party is filled with dangerous anarchists, and even worse, people who pretend to be principled, but are eager to bow down to the dangerous anarchists in charge. This video chronicles the 9-11, Iraq war, 2008, and Coronavirus disasters and the political party that brought them all to us. It also lays out why no other media outlet will talk about this…

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Trump Derangement Syndrome is Powerful… And Justified | Election 2020 1

One of the most standard right-wing rhetorical poses of the past four years has been “This is how you got Trump.” Whether it’s progressive snowflakes on university campuses, some egregious example of left-leaning media bias, or some new frontier in trans rights, many conservative commentators have regretfully observed, “you see this is why people opted for Trump, even though he’s gross…” etc. etc. There may even be some truth to these observations. There’s certainly a diverse and well-financed range of media sources constantly telling right-leaning people that they are embattled and without a voice.

What there is little appreciation of, is that the reverse is almost certainly true as well. If the perceived liberal lean of politics and society had a serious backlash in the form of Trump, what might Trump’s dominance of our political and media spheres be doing? Right-wing brand commentators love pointing to “Trump Derangement Syndrome”(TDS), the supposedly irrational hatred the majority of the country feels for the President. What they are not thinking through is how powerful that sentiment is, and the potential it has to warp the country much, much further away from the “conservative” principles they profess to cherish. Today’s video attempts to think more seriously about the consequences of TDS, and also launches my 2020 US election coverage!

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Mike Pompeo Reveals The Truth About Yemen | Yemen 13 | MIC 17

I’ve said this before, but I think it’s definitely worth highlighting again: WE NEED THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA. I’m not talking about the opinion pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal. I’m certainly not talking about CNN or Fox News. Most cable news could probably disappear tomorrow with little loss. But without the old print media titans, we’d know essentially nothing. Living on the ground in Istanbul, I could tell that almost everything the US government said about the war in Syria was a lie. But what gave me the confidence to finally put together my series on the topic was reporting from the New York Times.

It’s frustrating that the narratives that these institutions push often take no notice of the great reporting these institutions do. You can still find the New York Times pushing the idea that “We Didn’t Do Enough In Syria!!!”, even though the New York Times’s own reporting contradicts that story completely. Independent media is tremendously important. The world needs people like me to trumpet what’s really going on. We’re allowed to make the arguments that real reporters can’t. But independent media can’t fund real reporting. Most of what we do is just sifting through the real reporting that’s out there. Both branches are necessary. Today’s video would not have been possible without great reporting done by the Wall Street Journal.

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Trump Pulls A Pete Wilson | Immigration & Children

Today’s video gets into some very interesting territory that I hope to cover more in future (years?). So much of today’s politics in the United States is rooted in this weird idea of “whiteness” and who is a “good American” and who isn’t. These dumb, dumb conversations are of course as old as our republic. Let’s leave aside the fact that the “realest Americans”, the indigenous, and African Americans (few of whose ancestors were forced here after the early 1800s), are somehow never invited to the party.

What today’s video gets into in a small way, is the role of folks from our last (much larger) wave of immigrants around the beginning of the 20th century. It sometimes seems like it’s the newest members of US “whiteness” that are the most vicious in its defense. I’m thinking specifically of the very Irish Sean Hannity, and the very Italian Jeanine Pirro of Fox News. In a small way, the largely illusory “clash” between Trump and the Establishment is a clash between a fresher 20th century New York, Italo-Irish version of whiteness, and an older version. It’s the Nouveau Riche vs. the folks who never let them into their yacht clubs.

This too is a tale as old as time. I’m not sure if it’s seen as not polite, or just plain not relevant to bring up, but I think it’s worth focusing on a bit. You can’t really understand the silliness of conversations around Latinos and other immigrants without understanding how foreign the Irish, and later the Italians, Slavs and Jews were once seen. This idea of “Real America” or “Whiteness” is becoming more and more of a focus of the Trump administration’s public profile. Today’s pardon of the Hammond family, a goal of domestic white terrorists, is one example. As I’ve said before, Trump’s presidency is almost certainly the dying gasp of an older version of “Real American”. Presidential politics has served this role before, though in a more positive sense. John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 symbolized the acceptance of Catholics into the US mainstream. It didn’t prompt a Trumpian reaction the way that Obama’s presidency did. But that doesn’t mean that Trump’s version of White supremacy is any less dead than the WASP ascendancy is. Like I said, we’ve seen this story before. A new US identity is already forming. That’s why the “whites” are so pissed. Obama got into the yacht clubs before they did.

Is there a contradiction in the foregoing paragraph? Absolutely. And I think it’s worth exploring further. Someday.

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How To End The Forever War | Yemen 9 | AUMF

Occasionally I’ll embark on the 15-20 hour process of making a video, and then something happens that throws things in a new light. I still stand 100% behind today’s video, but if I’d known that Secretary of Defense James Mattis was going to weigh in, I probably would have incorporated a response. He’s a serious guy. I’ll have to respond here.

Secretary Mattis sent a letter to Congressional leaders yesterday afternoon, March 14th, objecting to the Sanders/Lee/Murphy resolution that the Senate will vote on next week. Today’s video advocates for that resolution pretty hard. I stand by that.

It’s easy for me to dismiss a lot of Mattis’s letter due to some pretty fundamental strategic and philosophical differences I have with him that regular viewers of this channel will be familiar with. Mattis believes that Saudi Arabia is a worthwhile partner in counter-terrorism. I do not believe that. Mattis believes that Iran is more of a threat to the US and the world than Saudi Arabia is. I do not believe that. Because Mattis believes these things I do not believe, he presents a narrative for the Yemeni war that strikes me as deeply flawed. If you’ve got a half hour or so, I set out a counter-narrative, that actually reckons with Yemeni history, unlike the standard Iran-Saudi proxy war fairy tale we’re told.

But there’s one concern that Mattis brings up that I can’t dismiss. He claims that ending US cooperation with Saudi Arabia in Yemen will make the humanitarian situation worse. I’m worried about this as well. Taking the US out of the equation is likely to degrade Saudi Arabia’s ability to continue the war long term, but I suspect it is also likely to make the Saudis more brutal. The 5,295 civilians that have been killed so far (Human Rights Watch), are probably the result of fairly targeted bombing. Saudi bombing is likely to have killed most of these civilians, but US expertise has probably put a bit of a cap on the body count. I’m no expert on warfare, but I was already worried about this. Having Mattis, one of the world’s greatest experts on warfare, express this opinion makes me more worried. But it does not give me pause.

More people may die by bombing, but Saudi Arabia’s ability to besiege the country will be seriously degraded. Millions are less likely to be at risk of starvation or cholera. And if Saudi Arabia’s attack on Yemen becomes more brutal it will also become less sustainable. A key point that I neglected to include in this video, and rarely gets included in the standard litany (“refueling, targeting, intelligence”) of goods the US provides to Saudi Arabia is diplomatic cover. It is a profoundly weird thing that Saudi Arabia is doing. Saudi Arabia is invading and destroying its neighbor. This sort of thing doesn’t happen much in the 21st century, or even in the second half of the 20th century. Most wars are civil. The few examples of cross-border invasion I can think of post Cold War are only possible because of US support. If the resolution passes in the Senate next week, and gets through the House, Saudi Arabia won’t just lose technical support, it will lose that diplomatic cover.

Without US support the war in Yemen will instantly become exponentially more cancerous for the Saudi re-branding effort than it already is. MBS and the Saudi government desperately need investors for their oil company’s years-delayed IPO, and that new tech city they announced last fall. Try doing that when US media and government are no longer covering up the war in Yemen.

I’m afraid that Mattis may be right about the immediate humanitarian costs of cutting off US support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. But continuing on the way we have for another two years would be much, much worse.

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Do You Care About US Debt OR the CDC? Pick One.

Budgets are boring right? Not really. They are certainly complex, and passing them is complicated, as Washington, DC’s seemingly perpetual shut-down dance shows. But the question of paying for government is the most important one imaginable. Time and again in history we see great empires brought down by the simple question of “How do we pay for this?”

In the 1500s the Spanish Empire encircled the world, and controlled something like half of Europe, if not more. Their American territories brought a constant stream of precious metals. They were brought down mostly by the fact that they didn’t understand inflation, and defaulted on their debt repeatedly. In the 1920s the British Empire reached it’s largest extent. The “Sun Never Set” on the British Empire. 40 years later it was gone. Because they couldn’t pay for it. The holders of British debt in the United States got to dictate British foreign policy in a few crucial instances.

So yeah, budgets are important. And they are what this week’s video deals with.

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