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Notes -
Why doesn't Ted Cruz know the population of Iran? And what is with him generally? Or the whole upper echelons of the US govt?
I reference a recent Tucker Carlson interview with Cruz, where it turns out he didn't know said population (and has since responded with an AI meme image of Tucker asking Luke the population of the Death Star).
Turns out that the population of Iran is 92 million, I thought it was around 80. 80 would be a fairly reasonable answer. Even Yemen is surprisingly populous, around 41 million. Fun game to try - estimate the population of various countries in these areas.
I thought Ted Cruz was supposed to be super-smart, wouldn't it be natural to read up on Iran? He is on the Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism. It's also relevant to US strategic choices and his particular love of Israel. Knowing about the subpopulations and relative size of the Azeris, Kurds and similar would be relevant to regime change, which is his professed goal:
To his credit he does know that Iran is Persian and predominantly Shia. And maybe being on a bunch of other subcommittees means he has to divide up his time and energy in all these different areas. But it's not like Tucker is asking really sophisticated questions about the position and integration of Azeri elites in the Tehran power structure. That really should be dealt with by an expert diplomat. But senators are supposed to be making strategic decisions, one has to have some base of knowledge to decide upon different courses of action.
Cruz also thinks that the Bible requires Christians to support the nation of Israel, which is somewhat non-mainstream in theology: "Where does my support for Israel come from, number 1 we're biblically commanded to support Israel". Tucker tries to ask 'do you mean the government of Israel' and Cruz says the nation of Israel, as if to say it's common-sense that the nation of Israel as referred to in the Bible is the same as the state of Israel today. It seems like he's purposely conflating the dual meanings of nation as ethnic group and nation as state, which is a stupid part of English.
Also Cruz said to Tucker "I came into Congress 13 years ago with the stated intention of being the leading defender of Israel in the United States”. How would this help in the context of a hostile interview, does he think that's a helpful thing to say? I can only imagine that Cruz thinks this is a winning issue, he wants to play hard rather than go down the wishy-washy 'Judeo-Christian' values route. Is declaring your devotion to a foreign country really that popular in America?
Trump also posted this somewhat ominous diatribe from Mike Huckabee (pastor and ambassador to Israel) praising Trump's divine prominence, his position similar to 'Truman in 1945' and how he has to listen to god and the angels only... https://x.com/Mondoweiss/status/1934999328583713096/photo/1
This episode reminds me of how George W Bush apparently didn't know of the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam until after deciding to invade, he brought up Gog and Magog when trying to persuade Chirac to join the war. Maybe that's false, some have disputed it. Or how Trump apparently won't read any long extracts of text and demands pictures. Maybe that's also false, lots of stories have been made about Trump policy. It's known that Biden didn't know whether people were alive or dead or what was happening much of the time. Large swathes of the Democrats can't tell the difference between men and women.
Here's another one I just found from another US congressman: https://x.com/VoteRandyFine/status/1839686465820766542
That's just weird!
There are serious structural problems with how America selects its politicians if this is the calibre of talent that's drawn into positions of great power. At the risk of sounding like an edgy atheist fighting a war everyone's tired of and moved on from years ago, surely theology should have no place in grand strategy. It's normal to have colourful characters in politics, some corruption, some old people who don't know what's going on, a certain level of lobbying. But this seems to be on a qualitatively different level, with serious results.
Your objections are
From this you conclude "There are serious structural problems with how America selects its politicians if this is the calibre of talent that's drawn into positions of great power." But this is mostly a Gish gallop. Cruz certainly fucked up not knowing the population of Iran. But neither Cruz's interpretation of scripture nor Cruz's open support of Israel support that. Nor does the use of religious language; you may find it embarrassing but it doesn't indicate a lack of talent. The various claims mostly from tell-all books published much later (and usually disputed) are pretty much worthless as evidence. As are claims reported in the press about Trump in general. Biden's senility is only weak evidence of a problem with selection; it seems clear his senility got much worse after he was elected. And perhaps I'm being uncharitable, but I'm pretty sure Democratic politicians CAN tell the difference between men and women, but they lie about it for policy reasons; they're evil, not stupid.
While I don't believe Cruz is stupid (based on his background, he is probably one of the most intelligent members of the current batch of leadership amongst the American right, although to be frank I think there are some genuinely not very smart people amongst them so perhaps I'm being too charitable due to who I'm comparing him with), the one thing that I genuinely thought was pretty 'stupid' in this interview was his inability to engage with the issue of whether the polity of Israel in 2025 is the same Israel referred to in the Bible. His arguments elsewhere were not particularly 'stupid', they were just occasionally dishonest or misleading, but in this one instance he seemed to be genuinely confused as to how two things that have the same name and are somewhat similar in 'type' couldn't be the same thing.
Also, even one accepts that there is a Christian duty to support the Jewish People, and that supporting the modern state of Israel is an extension of that duty, does that really require one to enthusiastically approve of every single act of depraved lunacy that comes belching out of the Israeli military-intelligence complex? Especially when those acts stand a high chance of getting regular Israelis and Jews killed. I’ve never seen anyone seriously suggest that supporting America means having to happily support the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, Operation Northwoods, or dosing random businessmen and hookers with LSD.
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