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It's not really ironic, because I and others do believe in a high likelihood that Khamenei is dead or severely injured also due to the lack of public presence typically shown by a wartime leader.
You want irony, I saw some IDF guy on Fox News earlier today float the theory Khamenei is dead, and he actually said the Iranians should release a video of him to prove he's not dead... it was literally like he was saying "we released the Coffee Shop video to prove Netanyahu isn't dead, what do you have Khamenei?" It's a strange situation.
Of course Twitter uses proceeded to AI generate a video of Khamenei in the exact same coffee shop scene replacing Netanyahu, pretty funny warfare nowadays.
If we go in with no priors, then the situations can seem somewhat similar.
However that is not the case. In real life, we know Mossad knows where and when substantial portions of Iranian leadership takes a piss. On the other hand, we also know that Iran and the IRGC's best plan is typically to try and shoot as much shit as they can in the general direction of an Israeli airbase to hopefully kill a few pilots and temporarily take a runway offline.
I think this is true, which is why I don't see how security concerns would be the reason for Netanyahu's total absence in his public-facing role. He can do meetings and pressers and meet-and-greets! The Iranian leaders actually can't. So why hasn't he done any public engagement like that, at all, for a week?
Could be some unrelated medical issue. The guy is 76.
For the record, if it turns out Netanyahu has died there is no information, medical records, doctor testimony, audio, video that could convince me it was a poorly timed medical event rather than an Iranian attack haha.
The sheer Larry David-esque humor potential would greatly bolster the "dankest timeline" hypothesis.
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Back circa 2011-12 I speculated that if Obama wanted to win in such an incredible landslide that Dems could get back to close to their 2008 landslide would be to basically go away. The theory was that, in my opinion, "Fake Obama" aka the person who didn't really have policy positions and just had really good posters saying "Hope and Change" was much more popular than the real Obama. This is obviously true for Israel. Netanyahu is reviled by Europeans, so much that they have brought a bunch of pseudo-real criminal prosecutions against him for warcrimes of dubious veracity. If, instead, generic Israel is seen as a second tier actor in this war, they can default back to something like being 20% underwater instead of 30-40% in those areas.
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