[AMV] VS #1297 Iran has been decimated. Go get your own oil!

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 10:38 schreef GarlandBriggs het volgende:
Judge "box 'o Wine" Jeanine lijkt me inderdaad wel wat. Kan niet wachten tot de hearings waar ze wrsch met een enorme kater verschijnt, de volle laag krijgt van de Dems en Rand Paul, Susan Collins zich zorgen maakt en Fetterman haar een kans wil geven...

En de Trumptrein dendert door...

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 09:42 schreef Knipoogje het volgende:

[..]
Het is zo dom he? Trump zegt zelf dat hij amper boeken leest. En dan voel je je verplicht om te zeggen dat Trump de most well-read in the room is. Net als die JFK jr. die zichzelf verplicht te moeten zeggen dat Trump een encyclopedische kennis bezit en landkaarten uit zijn hoofd kan tekenen met troepen. Het is Noordkoreaans
Ze hoeven het niet te zeggen, maar doen het toch. Ergens heb ik het idee dat velen in de Trump-ecosphere er een soort sport met elkaar van maken om dit soort dingen te uiten en er in prive-appgroepjes smakelijk om lachen. En ondertussen zichzelf verrijken tot het moment dat ze onder de bus worden gegooid. "It's my turn now...oh well, it was a good ride... 10 million on my bank account now"

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 11:46 schreef Monolith het volgende:

[..]
Ergens heb ik ook altijd wel bijna plaatsvervangende schaamte hoor, was het niet dat dit soort types volkomen schaamteloos zijn. Als je de man hoort praten, dan hoor je als je eigen IQ ook maar enigszins boven de 100 uitkomt dat het onsamenhangend raaskallende bejaarde is?

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 11:59 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
Aan z'n woordenschat en manier van praten hoor je al dat Trump nooit een boek openslaat en qua intelligentie niet tot de scherpste messen in de lade behoort.

Ik ben een taalliefhebber, dus ik kan de speeches van Trump ook niet aanhoren.

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 11:59 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
Aan z'n woordenschat en manier van praten hoor je al dat Trump nooit een boek openslaat en qua intelligentie niet tot de scherpste messen in de lade behoort.

Ik ben een taalliefhebber, dus ik kan de speeches van Trump ook niet aanhoren.

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 13:03 schreef Knipoogje het volgende:

[..]
Dit bewijst voor mij ook dat al die MAGA fanaten hier die Trump verdedigen en adoreren niet oprecht zijn.
Hooguit dat ze het ideologisch prima vinden wat Trump doet. Maar geef gewoon toe gewoon dat hij objectief gezien een raaskallende bejaarde is, maar dat allemaal van secundair belang vindt zolang de wereld maar richting jouw ideologie beweegt.

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 11:59 schreef KoosVogels het volgende:
Aan z'n woordenschat en manier van praten hoor je al dat Trump nooit een boek openslaat en qua intelligentie niet tot de scherpste messen in de lade behoort.

Ik ben een taalliefhebber, dus ik kan de speeches van Trump ook niet aanhoren.

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 15:12 schreef Klopkoek het volgende:
Ohhhhhh, van duizenden miljarden voor het leger krijgen rechtse oorlogshitsers toch een harde plasser van. Dag kan niet meer stuk.

quote:

And yet behind the bluster has been a growing recognition within the West Wing that the situation may be slipping out of its control. Key Trump officials, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, were surprised by the barrage of retaliatory attacks Tehran launched against U.S. and Israeli targets across the region, including in countries long assumed to be off-limits: Kuwait, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, a state that had both harbored Iran’s terrorist proxies and served as a conduit for backchannel diplomacy between the U.S. and Hamas. The response shattered the assumption that Tehran would confine itself to performative retaliation. In internal deliberations before the war’s launch, Hegseth had pointed to Iran's muted reaction to Trump’s past attacks as evidence that calibrated force could impose costs on Tehran without triggering a broader war. Hegseth “was caught off guard. There’s no question,” says a person familiar with his thinking.

(…)

As preparations for the war began, the Administration believed it had a winning formula. The U.S. would deliver an opening strike so overwhelming Tehran’s only viable response would be limited retaliation—enough to satisfy domestic audiences without inviting more attacks. It was a theory rooted in precedent. When Trump ordered the killing of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani during his first term, Iran’s response was a missile strike on a U.S. base that caused no casualties and was telegraphed in advance. After Operation Midnight Hammer, the June 2025 air campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities, the retaliation was similarly tempered.

Trump has long favored what aides call “one-and-done” operations. He has launched them in Yemen, Syria, and Somalia. In January, he pulled off the audacious capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, spiriting the autocrat out of the country to face trial in the U.S., and creating room for the ascension of a more compliant partner, acting president Delcy Rodriguez. He then moved to facilitate U.S. access to Venezuela’s oil reserves, among the largest in the world. Aides say Trump saw Venezuela as a demonstration that a swift, surgical intervention could topple a hostile regime, install a cooperative replacement, and secure American interests without drawing the nation into an open-ended confrontation.

(…)

Operation Epic Fury began with a sweeping round of strikes that killed Iran’s supreme leader. Tehran’s response was expansive: volleys of missiles and drones targeting U.S. bases in Iraq and Syria, barrages against Israeli cities, harassment of commercial shipping in the Persian Gulf, and coordinated attacks by proxy militias across the region. Hegseth was among those taken aback, says the person familiar with his thinking: “He was expecting the Iranians to fight back in some form. When they started attacking virtually the entire region, it sort of hit him like, ‘Whoa, we’re really in this now.’”

The Administration also appeared to be taken by surprise when Iran reached for a source of leverage: control over the Strait of Hormuz, which roughly 20% of the world’s oil supply passes through each day. In response to U.S. strikes, Tehran implemented a de facto blockade, declaring the channel effectively closed and restricting passage to non-hostile vessels. The resulting economic shock had domestic reverberations that went beyond the expectations of Trump’s inner circle. As gas prices skyrocketed, Trump sought to recast the higher costs as a necessary trade-off—a short-term burden in service of eliminating the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran.

(…)

Trump also faced a Catch-22 of sorts. He wants to end the war, but not without achieving objectives that would definitively prevent Iran from inching closer to a nuclear weapon. In internal discussions, some national-security officials warned a sustained assault might do more to accelerate Tehran’s ambitions than deter them. “The only way they will think they can prevent something like this from happening again is to have a nuclear weapon,” says another White House official. “There is more of a burden on us now to have a tangible, enforceable agreement that keeps them sufficiently blocked from crossing the nuclear threshold.”

As the fighting drags on, Trump has been struck by Tehran’s resolve. “They are very tough. They're able to withstand tremendous pain,” he tells TIME. “So I respect them for that. The fact is, I think they're better negotiators than they are fighters.”

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 14:25 schreef Szura het volgende:

[..]
[ x ]

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 15:22 schreef Szura het volgende:
Nog maar eens een artikel over de incompetentie van de vuilniszak-in-chief en zijn trawanten, die totaal verrast waren (ongetwijfeld door de rooskleurige voorspellingen van de corrupte oorlogsmisdadiger Bibi, die wel even een opstand zou creëren op de grond) dat het stoute Iran flink van zich af beet. Hoe kón dat nou toch gebeuren, nadat Iran het zelf al meermaals had aangekondigd als het aangevallen zou worden (en ongetwijfeld ook gewargamed is in het Pentagon).

https://time.com/article/2026/04/02/trump-iran-off-ramp/
[..]
En met al z’n oorlogsdoelen die all over the place zijn en waarvan er geen één is bereikt, zit hij nu met een nog slechtere situatie dan voorheen: een regime dat beschadigd is, maar nog staat en z’n wraak inzet tegen de gehele regio en daarmee de wereldeconomie en de Straat van Hormuz nog meer als leverage kan inzetten dan voorheen.

En dan het zomaar dat hij zo gek is om ook nog een grondoperatie te starten of met een idiote actie het verrijkte uranium wil ophalen, iets waar de Iraniërs ongetwijfeld op voorbereid zijn. Zodra de doodskisten en bodybags binnenstromen op Amerikaanse bases waar hij met z’n belachelijke petje acte de presence geeft, krijgen al die republikeinse hielenlikkers die niks doen om deze mafketel te stoppen, een pandoering a la Jimmy Carter na z’n mislukte reddingsactie toen de ambassade in Teheran was gegijzeld.

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 18:32 schreef Sherlock_Holmes het volgende:
Ben trouwens dat hele Charlie Kirk verhaal van de kogel aan het volgen en extreemlinks is net zo van het padje af als MAGA zeg

Het is toch ergens wel droevig.

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 18:32 schreef Sherlock_Holmes het volgende:
Ben trouwens dat hele Charlie Kirk verhaal van de kogel aan het volgen en extreemlinks is net zo van het padje af als MAGA zeg

Het is toch ergens wel droevig.

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 20:21 schreef Bluesdude het volgende:

[..]
Ik las zoiets dat de kogel die Kirk trof niet uit het vuurwapen kwam van de schutter Tyler Robinson.
Begrijp ik het zo juist?

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 20:41 schreef kladderadatsch het volgende:

[..]
Candace Owens en Tucker Carlson zijn nu ook al 'extreemlinks'!? Wow...

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 17:56 schreef Kijkertje het volgende:
[ afbeelding ]

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 20:56 schreef Sherlock_Holmes het volgende:

[..]


En wees in elk geval blij dat ze aan jullie kant staan op een aantal punten.

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 21:05 schreef Szura het volgende:
F-15 kaputski
Black Hawk beschadigd tijdens het zoeken naar de piloten
A-10 ‘Warthog’ op de zeebodem

Lekker dagje in de speciale militaire operatie

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 21:09 schreef kladderadatsch het volgende:

[..]
Aan 'jullie kant' nog wel, hahahaaaaa!

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 21:10 schreef Isdatzo het volgende:

[..]
Stafchef eruit geflikkerd

So much winning kijk al die libs eens janken

quote:

Op donderdag 2 april 2026 19:22 schreef Ronald-Koeman het volgende:
Pam Bondi weg als AG aldus Fox News.

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 21:23 schreef kladderadatsch het volgende:

[..]
Place your bets, ik denk dat Kash Patel de eerstvolgende is die eruit vliegt.

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 21:25 schreef OMG het volgende:

[..]
Nah, ik gok op Gabbard. Eerst alle vrouwen eruit werken natuurlijk, want het zijn geen big strong guys waar Trump zo op geilt.

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 20:53 schreef Sherlock_Holmes het volgende:

[..]
Klopt ja, maar gelukkig heeft extreemlinks niks met complottheorietjes

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 21:30 schreef kladderadatsch het volgende:

[..]
Of allebei, op dezelfde dag!

quote:

Op vrijdag 3 april 2026 15:17 schreef Perrin het volgende:

[..]
een paar dagen geleden:
[ x ]

quote:

My friend has a perfect pitch for a reality show for Paramount+: “Pam and Kristi’s Spring Break Barf-fest.”

With no figs left to give, fed up with everything, especially the mean boss who canned them, the girls head to Cancún. They hold each other’s hair back as they upchuck. And they sweetly keep up each other’s spirits. But then they lose their passports and can’t get back across the border. Ay, caramba! ...

quote:

Op zaterdag 4 april 2026 18:54 schreef Hyperdude het volgende:
[ afbeelding ]
Bijbehorend artikel, maar deze foto zegt meer dan woorden:
[..]
https://www.nytimes.com/2(...)RypIr&smid=url-share

quote:

Justice Department staffers were quick to chuck Bondi’s portrait in the trash.

quote:

Dear Reader (especially those of you who just realized that opossums and possums are not the same animal),

Okay, I have very little time today. I’m in Baton Rouge for a talk and then have to race to the airport. So I am relying on Bill Buckley’s advice: When you don’t know what to write about, write about something that annoys you.

Now, after decades of doing this, I’ve added a few corollaries to this rule. Annoyance is a great muse, but so are other less-than-wholly-virtuous emotions, like schadenfreude.

And it is with a mixture of schadenfreude and annoyance I come to the issue of Donald Trump’s supposed betrayal of MAGA by launching a war against Iran.

But let’s start from the beginning.

“Meet the Harvard whiz kid who wants to explain Trumpism.”

That was the headline for a 2017 profile of Julius Krein written by my friend Eliana Johnson for Politico. It began: “A 30-year-old conservative wunderkind is out to intellectualize Trumpism, the amorphous ideology that lifted its namesake to the presidency in November.”

In pursuit of the effort to create an ideologically serious thing called “Trumpism,” Krein was launching the journal American Affairs. Given what I thought then—and now—about Trump, Trumpslaining, and other forms of Trump apologia, it would be reasonable to assume that I heaped scorn on Krein’s project. I didn’t. I welcomed it. But as I told Eliana for her reporting, he had his work cut out for him:

“It will take a good deal of time for even Trump’s most gifted apologists to craft an intellectually or ideologically coherent theme or narrative to his program,” said Jonah Goldberg, a senior editor of National Review. “Trump boasts that he wants to be unpredictable and insists that he will make all decisions on a case-by-case basis. That’s a hard approach for an intellectual journal to defend in every particular.”

I’ve been making versions of this argument for a decade. Trump has no “ideology.” He does have a few ideas. Off the top of my head: take the oil, tariffs are economic Viagra, strength good, never apologize, women won’t resist celebrities when they grab them by their privates, “good genes” matter a lot, allies are whiny bitches, a bunch of romantic convictions about the supremacy of his instincts, and some Norman Vincent Peale-inspired nonsense about willing the reality you want into existence.

Taken together, these ideas, gut impulses, sentiments, and irritable mental gestures do not amount to an ideology. They could be the foundation of an ideology. But constructing an actual ideology requires thinking about how your various commitments might conflict, where the trade-offs are, what the edge cases might be, etc. That’s why I’ve been writing, over and over again, that Trumpism isn’t an ideology, it’s a psychology. When he attacks critics or even loyalists who defy him, it’s almost never because of the arguments or reasons offered by the critics and defiers. It is the mere fact that they don’t defer to him. If you say “no” to something he really wants, it’s because you must “hate Trump.”

But Trumpism is not just about Trump’s psychology, it’s the psychology of many of his supporters. If Trump is for it, it must be right.

Ron DeSantis’ 2024 presidential campaign conducted focus groups to ask Republican voters about issues like COVID lockdowns. Seventy percent of participants said they opposed them. But then, when they were asked about Trump’s COVID lockdowns, 70 percent supported them. Simply “attaching Trump’s name to an otherwise effective message had a tendency to invert the results.”

What is true of random voters in poorly lit hotel conference rooms is also true of a great many pundits, politicians, economists, and intellectuals. The motives may be more cynical and mercenary, but the effect is the same.

If you could do a comprehensive search of every form of media and interaction, I bet you’d find I have been accused of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” more than a million times. If you want to understand my occasional political dyspepsia, please consider that the vast majority of people who level that charge at me are people who literally change what they believe (or say they believe) based on whether Trump believes it—at any given moment.

Seriously, think about that. Trump changes his positions constantly, and hordes of his supposedly principled intellectual defenders change their positions with him—and I’m supposed to be the deranged one for not doing likewise? When the Trumpists said that merely carrying a legal weapon was proof of criminal—even terroristic—intent, how many longtime, dogmatic, Second Amendment boosters aped the talking points?

I have some grace for normal voters when it comes to this kind of thing. Most Americans aren’t politicians, ideologues, or intellectuals. They trust Trump—foolishly, I think—but often understandably. But it’s difficult for me to hide my contempt for self-styled intellectuals and ideologues who routinely jettison their convictions based on what Trump does or says on any given day. If you thought Bill Clinton’s sybaritic and priapistic tendencies were appalling but simply laugh off objections to Trump’s even more sordid behavior, you don’t have a principled objection to adultery. You have a “principled” objection to objecting to immoral behavior by politicians you like. That is the single unspoken standard behind every double-standard regarding Trump and his most committed opponents. They are making Trump the standard for their views.

Swap out sexual licentiousness for industrial policy, protectionism, corruption, mental incoherence, arrogance, and replace Clinton with Joe Biden or Barack Obama and the argument doesn’t change.

Oh, and now you can add to that list “Middle East wars.”

Which brings me to the revolt of some Trump “intellectuals” over the Iran war. Tucker Carlson, Sohrab Ahmari, Christopher Caldwell, Mollie Hemingway, and numerous others are stunned, shocked, appalled by Trump’s “betrayal” of MAGA. And it’s schadenfreudtastically hilarious.

It pains me to include Caldwell in that list, because there are few writers and intellectuals I have respected more over the last 30 years, regardless of my disagreements with him. Caldwell is probably best in class of a group of intellectuals who have tried to argue for a serious intellectual consistency to Trumpism.

He has declared the Iran war “The End of Trumpism.” He writes:

Contrary to its portrayal in the newspapers, Trumpism was a movement of democratic restoration. At its center was the idea of the deep state. In recent decades, selective universities created a credentialocracy, civil-rights law endowed it with a system of ideological enforcement, the tax code entrenched a class of would-be philosopher-kings in the nonprofit sector, and civil-service protections armed government bureaucrats to fight back against any effort at democratic reform.

There is more wisdom in this than some knee-jerk Trump-haters will allow for. That wisdom accounts for a large portion of why I have grace for generic Trump voters. It’s also why I said they were foolish for putting their faith in Trump. Because the high-minded versions of Trumpism were always ridiculous when applied to Trump himself.

Let’s give Trump the maximum benefit of the doubt and assume he saw what Caldwell sees about how America got off course. The guy who took a plane from Qatar never held this “democratic restoration” of American government as his goal. The guy who is turning the Department of Justice into a score-settling and self-aggrandizement machine and who sees personal loyalty as the only non-negotiable criterion for government employment didn’t care about “The

And, just to check the box, the guy who tried to steal an election doesn’t care about actual nuts-and-bolts democracy. Caldwell has talked himself into a strange corner. He sees Trump as a paladin for the informal, atmospheric, poetic, abstract concept of “democracy” while yada-yadaing over the slap-to-the-face reality that Trump has nothing but contempt for the formal, non-poetic, practice of actual democracy.

Simply put, Trump got into politics for himself. To the extent Trump saw and understood the zeitgeist that Caldwell identifies, he considered it an opportunity, not a cause.

The idea that Trump’s war on Iran is a betrayal of “True Trumpism” is the last gasp of people who told themselves that Trumpism was an ideology. And it’s embarrassing.

I don’t agree with Trump on much, but he is incandescently, blazingly, irrefutably correct when he says “I think that MAGA is Trump.” Or as he told The Atlantic, “Well, considering that I’m the one that developed ‘America First,’ and considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that.”

Now, just to be clear, Trump did not invent the term “America First.” Because he doesn’t know anything about American history, he didn’t know what “America First” meant until a reporter used the phrase with him in an interview.

But on his larger point, Trump is right. Whether you call it MAGA or America First or Trumpism, he determines what it is. And that has been true from the beginning. If you sincerely thought otherwise, the joke is on you.

Now, ascribing sincerity to Trump’s intellectual defenders is not a concession I am willing to grant wholesale. I think some intellectuals, Caldwell among them, came to their positions in good faith (you can tell from his “End of Trumpism” piece that he saw Trump the man with fairly clear eyes). But Tucker Carlson and many of the others were always liars. They knew the beast they were hitching themselves to. For instance, Carlson once texted a friend “I hate [Trump] passionately” but publicly insisted “I love Trump.”

One reason I find this moment so deliciously hilarious is that some of the people turning on him are discovering that I was right all along. They were fine with all of the terrible, ugly, cruel, and stupid things Trump did so long as they thought Trumpism meant what they wanted it to mean. It’s like they cheered Godzilla smashing one building or another, crafting ornate theories for why he crushed that school or why he melted that radio tower. But when Godzilla turns his gaze toward something they love, they shout “Betrayal!”

Others knew all along what Godzilla was all about, but they benefited from pretending otherwise for money, fame, or influence. Or they reasoned that after Godzilla retreated to the sea to go live on Mar-a-Monster Island, they would be able to rule the rubble he left behind.

Regardless, the war on Iran isn’t a betrayal of Trumpism, this is Trumpism on full display.

That people are calling it a betrayal is what economists call a “revealed preference.” Godzilla smashing things is wise, defensible, and worthy of celebrating. But smashing things allegedly in service to Israel is an outrage.

As I wrote earlier this week, there are many defensible arguments against this war and for it. I do not believe America is doing it for Israel. Yes, it benefits Israel. And haters of Israel, like haters of Jews (not necessarily the same thing), tend to operate from a conspiratorial—cui bono?—theory of causation. If Israel benefits from something—or can even be perceived as benefiting—then Israel must be the author of it. That’s the gist of Joe Kent’s preposterous, ahistorical, and delusional letter of resignation from the National Counterterrorism Center. None of these people resigned or denounced Trump because of Trump’s tariffs, or his seizure of Nicolás Maduro, January 6, or any of the other ridiculous or heinous things Trump has done. They defended it. They polished the turds until they could see their own reflection in them. But helping the jooos? Stop the Trump train. I want to get off.

The invasion of Iran reveals nothing new about Trump or Trumpism. The reaction to it reveals a great deal about a lot of people.