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Roaming Charges: Neo-Conned Again!

15 1
20.06.2025

Still from footage of Israeli missile strikes in Iran posted to X.

For years, I’ve kept a copy of Primo Levi’s If This is Man on the night table. It’s not exactly the kind of reading that eases you into a restorative sleep, but who can slumber soundly at my age and in this time of mass death and disappearances? Last night at 2 AM, the broken spine of Levi’s memoir of Auschwitz opened to this apposite passage:

“Everybody must know, or remember, that when Hitler and Mussolini spoke in public, they were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods. They were ‘charismatic leaders ‘; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from the soundness of things they said but from the suggestive way in which they said them, from their eloquence, from their histrionic art, perhaps instinctive, perhaps patiently learned and practised. The ideas they proclaimed were not always the same and were, in general, aberrant or silly or cruel. And yet they were acclaimed with hosannas and followed to the death by millions of the faithful.”

Using Israel’s logic for attacking Iran (to protect itself from (non-existent) Iranian nuclear weapons), every country in the Middle East (and beyond) would be justified in attacking Israel and destroying its (still undeclared) arsenal of 90 nuclear warheads. Trump’s assertion that if Iran developed a nuclear weapon, it would automatically use it against Tel Aviv is preposterous, since Iran doesn’t want to be annihilated and surely would be if it did so. Israel, on the other hand, could nuke Iran and get away with it, as the US did Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Just to be clear about who the real nuclear menace in the region is…

Map by the indefatigable Stephen Semler at Polygraph.

Trump’s Iran negotiations–a brand of diplomatic trickery usually deployed in Hollywood movies by Nazis, mobsters and alien invaders (from Alpha Centari not San Salvador)–served the same function as the food distribution stations in Gaza, using the cover of “humanitarianism” to lure Iran into a kill zone.

Jeet Heer: “What’s driving this war is not the fear that Iran won’t sign a nuclear deal but the fear that it will.”

The Transition is complete…(I don’t know if it required hormones.)

Trump: “I think Iran was a few weeks away from a nuclear weapon… I believe Iran would use a nuclear weapon if they had one. We’re long beyond [a] ceasefire” with Iran, “We’re looking for a total complete victory…You may have to fight. And maybe it’ll end. And maybe it’ll end very quickly. There’s no way you can allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon because the entire world would blow up.”

REPORTER: Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that the intelligence community said Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon.

TRUMP: I don’t care what she said. I think they were very close to having one.

Tulsi should’ve gotten off the Trump bus before he threw her under it…

Gabbard’s assessment is backed up by reporting from CNN that US intelligence assessments had concluded that Iran was not actively pursuing a nuclear weapon and that “it was also up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver one to a target of its choosing.”

NBC News reported on Thursday that Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, is now being excluded from White House discussions about whether or not to strike Iran.

The War on Iran, Made in the USA…(Bush didn’t gloat like this until six weeks after Shock and Awe. Then got his ass kicked from Mosul to Fallujah for the next five years.)

Having “complete control of the air” meant nothing in Afghanistan or Iraq. It will mean even less in Iran.

Only 16% of Americans think going to war against Iran is a good idea. But the Democrats still can’t come out against it. (You know why.)

Stephen Semler: “A political party that has built its identity around opposing Trump is not opposing Trump’s march to war with Iran.”

To this point, only 37 members of Congress have endorsed any of the pending resolutions designed to keep the US out of a war with Iran.

Instead, the Democrats have allowed the resistance to be led by the likes of Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Alex Jones, Matt Gaetz, Rand Paul, Steve Bannon, and Thomas Massie.

An Ipsos poll earlier this week asked Democratic voters:

“Democratic party leaders should be replaced.”

Agree: 62%
Disagree: 24%

Ipsos / June 16, 2025

In which Ted Cruz is exposed by Tucker Carlson as an arrogant ignoramus, who knows nothing about the country whose regime he wants to decapitate…

Tucker Carlson: How many people live in Iran, by the way?

Ted Cruz: I don’t know the population.

Carlson: You don’t?

Cruz: No. I don’t know the population.

Carlson: You don’t know the population of the country you seek to topple?

Cruz, with a dismissive wave of his hand: I uh…How many people live in Iran?

Carlson: 92 million.

Cruz: Ok. Yeah, I, uh,..

Carlson: How could you not know that?

Cruz: I don’t sit around memorizing population tables.

Carlson: Well, it’s kind of relevant because you’re calling for the overthrow of the government.

Cruz: Why is it relevant, whether it’s 90 million or 80 million or 100 million? Why is that relevant?

Carlson: Well, because if you don’t know anything about the country…

Cruz, belligerant now: I didn’t say I didn’t know anything about the country…

Carlson: Okay. What’s the ethnic makeup of Iran…

Cruz: They are Persians, predominantly Shia…

Carlson: You don’t know anything about Iran.

Cruz: I’m not the Tucker Carlson expert on Iran…

Carlson: You’re a senator who is calling for the overthrow of a government, who doesn’t know anything about the country.

Cruz: No. You’re the one who doesn’t know anything about the country. You’re the one who claims they’re not trying to murder Donald Trump.

Carlson: No. I’m not saying that…

Cruz: You’re the one who can’t figure out if it was a good idea to kill General Suleymani and said it was bad…

Carlson: You don’t believe they’re trying to murder Trump, because…

Cruz: Yes, I do!

Carlson: … because you’re not calling for military strikes against them in retaliation.

Cruz: We’re carrying out military strikes today!

Carlson: You said Israel was.

Cruz: Right. With our help. I said “we.” Israel is leading them. But we’re supporting them.

Carlson: You’re breaking news here. Because last night the US government denied, the National Security Council spokesman, Alex Pfeiffer, denied on behalf of Trump that we were acting on behalf of........

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