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I don't buy the stories coming out of the White House.
There are 2 groups who have information.
One is those who have recently left the MAGA coalition (eg: Joe Kent). They seek to be re-integrated back into conventional politics. This group must find a narrative that fits : "I joined MAGA with the purest of intentions, but I could never have guessed that it was comprised because {reasons}". Israel as puppet-master is a perfect scapegoat for such a narrative.
Second is those who are still part of MAGA, but must find a reason for the sloppiness of the war with Iran. They must find a narrative that fits : "MAGA runs a tight ship, but our perfect plans got foiled by an outside {reason}". 'Bad intelligence from Israel' is the perfect story.
I will stick to the more plausible explanation (not necessarily Occam's Razor, but close) until proven otherwise. Iran has been an American military goal for decades. Trump thought he could could a Venezuela 2.0 with Iran. It did not work. The US has 30x the military spend & apparatus of Israel. If Trump takes major geopolitical decisions based on power point presentations from Netanyahu, then that makes Trump look incompetent rather than making Israel look malicious.
How many people are really in that first category?
I have learned to stop betting on a splinter faction of principled dissenters. Most of the people who wanted off the Trump Train got their wish over the last few congressional elections.
In this case, Joe Kent specifically. I expect there will be more if the Trump train derails further.
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Kent immediately resigned when the war started rather than waiting until the war seemed to be going poorly. He had been against new wars in the Middle East since 2021. His wife died in a terrorist attack; He served 11 combat tours. In early 2024 he warned that an Iran war would be a disaster. Why should anyone doubt that he believes what he says and is acting with good intentions? It’s hard to even imagine a more sincere person.
To further elevate your point, is Netanyahu the Messiah of Israel? Are there no political elements within Israel that look at this mess and think things should have been different? I genuinely don't know. Maybe every single Israeli voter really wants land from Lebanon. The underlying point here being, there would be no need for any of this if Israel had not pushed Trump into a bad war with Iran.
What should be very clear is that Kent has been a staunch zionist shill in the past much like Vance. The idea that they would 'scapegoat' Israel to save their own hides is just silly. How would their hides be saved if they went against the most powerful lobby in the country? Kent even went on Mark Levin's show to bare his belly.
The message seems to be a much clearer 'you're telling us to jump too high'. There's no reason to believe he is lying when he says 'Israel' pushed this war on the US, or that there were 'Israeli' elements laundering bad intel into the American decision making process. It's much more likely he genuinely believes the current Israeli influencers within the government are toxic and making bad decisions that harm both parties, which this Iran invasion certainly has done.
That being said, I wouldn't necessarily call him sincere, or at least it's not required. I think Kent has long hitched his wagon on the alleged new tech Thiel/JD Vance train. So dipping when he did can be explained similarly to how JD Vance has been distancing himself from the conflict, or positioning himself as a peaceful mediator. The Iran war was an obviously bad idea, with a lot of risk, and anyone with political aspirations for the future could feel their image being tarnished by proximity. Even if we assume everyone is on the same team in the admin, hedging your bets and keeping some of your elements away from the fire is a smart move. But voicing disagreement with Israel outside the toxic influence on display isn't needed to do that.
To that extent @DirtyWaterHotDog is not presenting the most plausible explanation at all and his rationale leaves me wanting.
Kent's point was that the reason for why Trump pulled the trigger and believed he could Venezuela 2.0 with Iran was because of bad agenda driven Israeli intel. Like, the thing that needs explaining here is why this long time adversary needed to be dealt with now and why people now believed it to be feasible, which is a direct break from prior assessments. And please don't tell me Iran was two weeks away from building a nuclear weapon.
This is just a logical non-sequitur. Yes, if Trump makes major geopolitical decisions based on obviously bad intel, including power point presentations by Israel's prime minister that had been in and out of the White House nigh every day in the leadup to the war, then that does make Trump look like an incompetent lap dog and it does make Israel and Netanyahu especially, look unbelievably arrogant, self centered and reckless with regards to US interest in the region. None of those facts preclude Kent from being truthful when he says 'Israel' has too much pull and is pulling in a bad direction. It just leaves everyone still bought in or involved with this charade looking foolish.
No republican candidate wants to separate from MAGA. It's practically half their electorate at this point. But they need be able to appeal to the other half as well. To do that they now need plausible deniability for Trumps and Netanyahu's errors along with support from the most powerful lobby in America.
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Is “I joined MAGA with the purest of intentions, but I made a bad decision” not an option?
Not if you want to be re-elected.
Ah, I read the OP again, we’re talking about politicians, not voters or commentators.
Perhaps this is just the right moment for electoral comeuppance, if you back a bad horse in politics you get taken down.
The GOP needs new blood that’s neither subservient to Trump nor wacko, but I guess grifters, wafflers, and “the Jews made me do it”-ers are what we get. If either party could stop being idiotic and start actually dealing with our domestic crises like adults, that would be great.
This will not happen because the Madisonian checks and balances are all at play in the domestic sphere, whereas very few operate in the foreign policy realm. It's been an established pattern for like 50 years that presidents get elected promising to focus on domestic issues, get jammed up, and then wind up getting sucked into foreign policy because that's the area where they can actually do stuff.
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The adults in the room on the Republican side are Mitt Romney, Robert Dole and John McCain, and the latter two are starting to smell a bit. The adults in the room on the Democratic side are Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, which isn't any better.
Uh...
Look, Elizabeth Warren isn't simply wrong about economics. That would be understandable. She's more than smart enough to note that her pie in the sky socialist economics won't work. 'But if we just tax the rich hard enough' is the adolescent impulse of not accepting limits, only in this case she should know better. It's totally understandable that AOC unironically thinks you can extract enough from taxing the rich to fund whatever nonsense or that 'universal' childcare will fix anything- she just doesn't understand economics, it's the voters' fault for putting her in office. Liz Warren knows these things aren't true, she's advocating them anyway because she can't hear the word 'no'.
As I said, it isn't any better on that side.
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I imagine McCain is smelling quite a bit, since he has been dead for several years now. My question is why his rotting corpse is in the room.
thats_the_joke.jpg
The funniest part to me is that Bob Dole actually outlived John McCain, even though Dole's age was a major angle of attack when he ran against Clinton in 1996.
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Is the path back to
Through
I would have thought that path leads further right.
In my observation, theories about Israel being a subversive and negative force in US politics are about equally common on the left and the right.
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Conventional politics of the future is antisemitic. There is bipartisan agreement on it among the youth.
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