Update: 'I don't care what she said'
Oh, Trump and his brain trust are just talking about a war with Iran. It'll be fine!
Intro by Sam Bellamy
All’s not well in MAGA land, which would usually count as cheerful news were we not on the verge of joining Israel in a war against Iran.
There’s reportedly much clawing, screeching and skulduggery among the Trump cult’s hawks and doves this week— if you can picture doves that are rabid in demeanor and look like Steve Bannon after a long night with his bestie brownshirts at the biergarten.
Dovey Tucker Carlson is battling with the universally loathed Texas raptor, Ted Cruz. And Marjorie Taylor Greene, Bannon and other ordinarily pugilistic Republicans are doing their best impression of Gandhi or, rather, a depraved isolationist version who doesn’t like getting involved in international affairs because it detracts from squashing the life out of the poor and the brown and the woke here at home.
The oddest split in MAGAville, though, is between the president and his more-than-a-little-off director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.
As discussed in the piece below, she recently warned us in a video on social media that the “political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers” and pushing us “closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before.”
It was a rather strange declaration — haven’t we been on the brink for 80 years — and seemed aimed, perhaps, at European leaders, Democrats and sometimes Republicans pushing for continued support of Ukraine in its efforts to repel Russia and Gabbard-Trump pal Vladimir Putin.
But, as it turns out, Gabbard was referring to Israel — and her own boss. That’s at least how Trump took it.
Politico and others are reporting, based on interviews with unnamed White House officials, that Trump was infuriated by the video, which he saw as a rebuke of his working with Benjamin Netanyahu on the attack against Iran.
Politico reported: “Trump saw the unauthorized video and became incensed, complaining to associates at the White House that she had spoken out of turn, according to three people familiar with the episode — two of them inside the administration and all granted anonymity to describe sensitive dynamics.”
Another official told Axios that Gabbard will remain part of the team, but “here's been a little bit of self-aggrandizement that never goes over well anywhere, but certainly not in Trumpworld.”
Right. No self-aggrandizement in Trumpworld. We’ve all noticed … that.
Gabbard was cut out of a recent meeting at Camp David to discuss Iran. At first, it was explained that she was on Army Reserve duty that weekend, and then it was acknowledged that she hadn’t been invited at all.
She was reportedly in the Situation Room this week, but White House officials said her stock is quite low with Trump at the moment. In the video below, you’ll see him unload when a reporter asks about her previous congressional testimony that U.S. intelligence indicates Iran hasn’t resumed its nuclear weapons program. She said it’s at least three years from making a nuclear bomb.
Gabbard, obviously aware of her tenuous position in the administration, is now saying that she and the president are aligned in their views of Iran. She notes that she did tell Congress that Iran has high levels of enriched uranium necessary to build a nuclear weapon.
Few reasonable people would argue that the world will be safe if Iran has a nuclear bomb. But Gabbard, as unreliable as she is, did offer a take on Iran’s nuclear capability that matches at least some foreign intelligence: It doesn’t have a bomb.
Trump’s claim that Iran is close to a nuclear armament calls to mind the claims by Dick Cheney and George W. Bush that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. And we all know how that turned out.
Iran with nuclear missiles is a frightening thought. But the prospects of Trump, Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, Gabbard et al deciding what to do about it is no less unsettling.
The following — headlined “Gabbard, Gabbard .. what the hey?” — appeared June 11 at Fight the Fire.
Intro by Sam Bellamy
Tulsi Gabbard is apparently due for her annual review with Vladimir Putin.
That seems the most likely explanation for why our director of national intelligence chose to release a bizarre video this week warning Americans that “political elite and warmongers” are pushing the world toward nuclear war because … they have nice, safe place to live out the apocalypse.
Seriously. At about the 2:50-mark in the linked video below, Gabbard says this:
As we stand here, closer to the brink of nuclear annihilation than ever before, political elite and warmongers are carelessly fomenting fear and tensions between nuclear powers. And perhaps it’s because they are confident that they will have access to nuclear shelters for themselves and for their families that regular people won’t have access to.
Er. Right.
Because the smug, wealthy owners of luxury nuclear shelters who salivate for some boom-boom are willing to give up their multiple second homes, expensive art collections, yachts, tennis courts, trophy wives and impossible-to-get reservations at the world’s most exclusive restaurants so they can live in an underground bunker for the rest of their lives, eating C-rations, adjusting to the Zoom version of Davos and lamenting the inability to find good help.
For what? The light show?
Gabbard doesn’t mention who these evil people are, but given her long habit of parroting Russian propaganda, we might safely assume it’s Democrats and erstwhile NATO allies who’d like to stop Putin from taking Ukraine and marching westward across Europe.
You know, the sort of thing Republicans like Ronald Reagan used to warn us about and — for reals — push us to the point of nuclear conflict with Putin’s old pals in the Soviet Union. (“My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes,” Reagan “joked” into a soon-to-be-live microphone for a radio broadcast in 1984.)
The beginning of Gabbard’s video focuses on her recent trip to Hiroshima, where it was apparently revealed to her that hundreds of thousands of civilians suffered or died when the United States dropped the first of two nuclear bombs on Japan as World War II drew to a close.
This is the sort of history lesson that slack-jawed MAGA devotees, who seem to view international affairs as they might a WWE or UFC fight, could benefit from.
But rather than propose to the world a new round of disarmament we haven’t seen in decades, Gabbard suggests there’s some sort of cabal hankering to see a replay of Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Disarming the heaping piles of nuclear weapons across our planet would have been a fine direction for Gabbard to take with this weird production. Even if we can’t countenance the idea of eliminating all of our own weapons, surely we can see the wisdom in reducing their number further. We’d still have more than enough to bomb the cellular structure out of any place we’d like.
The unsettling reality is that an act of aggression wouldn’t be necessary to start a nuclear apocalypse. All it would take is laziness and incompetence — and you know which world regime has cornered the market on those.
Earlier this year, the Trump team and its barely postpubescent budget wizards at DOGE gleefully fired many of the men and women who oversee the safety and security of our nuclear weapons — those damned things do need maintenance — and then, realizing their mistake, scrambled to rehire them.
Only to discover they didn’t know how to get in touch with them.