How to Power a Perpetual Motion Machine…
Just harness Senator Mullin's views on regime change in Iran.
This interchange between CNN’s Kaitlin Collins and Senator Markwayne Mullins (R-OK) really is something to behold. The topic of discussion was the potential for US strikes on Iran. The full transcript can be found here, but here are the key bits (emphases mine).
COLLINS: So, it sounds like you’d support U.S. military strikes?
MULLIN: Well, I would support removing the regime that’s killing their own people. Reports are coming out right now that the number could be 12,000 to 20,000. It’s 12,000–
COLLINS: Because you are in favor of taking out the Iranian regime?
MULLIN: I am, at this point. They’re murdering their citizens.
[…]
MULLIN: […] Even though we’re not into regime change, we’re not — we’re not — this isn’t the Arab Spring like happened underneath Secretary Clinton. But this is the people of Iran standing up to a murderous regime. And if that leadership is going to kill their own people, the President said, We’ll come to your rescue.
COLLINS: But you just said you are for a regime change here.
MULLIN: No, I said I’m for the strikes. I didn’t say–
COLLINS: But you said, before that, you are for taking out the regime.
MULLIN: Yes, absolutely, because they’re the ones murdering their own people. That’s different than regime change. The regime change is up to the Iranian people. We didn’t — we’re not going actively to remove the regime. We’re going after the people that are killing their own people, and that happens to be the regime.
COLLINS: But just to be clear, you support taking out the Supreme Leader?
MULLIN: If he’s the one that’s calling these air strikes, you mean?
COLLINS: But that would be–
MULLIN: Or the killings of his own people? Then absolutely.
COLLINS: OK, but that would be regime change.
The video can be viewed here.
On one hand, I guess it doesn’t fully matter what Mullin thinks vis-à-vis the administration’s Iran policy, as he is not a key decision-maker, although he does serve on the Armed Services Committee. (But who cares what Congress thinks these days? Amiright?)
On the other hand, it is always incredibly disheartening to listen to a member of the US Senate to sound this, well, dumb. Although the good news for Mullin is that until Tommy Tuberville leaves to become Governor of Alabama, he is out of the running for Dumbest Sitting Senator. BTW, I recognize that this hardly counts as profound analysis, but I nonetheless stand by the basic assessment.
Members of the US government ought to have a better grasp of what all of these actions mean. If the US targets leadership in the hopes of decapitating the regime, that is a step towards changing the regime by definition. Indeed, any offensive action aimed at degrading the regime’s capacity to put down protests would be a step towards regime change.
Just because there isn’t a plan about what to do if we help the regime topple doesn’t mean we wouldn’t have fostered regime change under the kinds of scenarios being discussed in that interview.
It just means we would have acted rashly and without much thought beyond immediate action, which is not a smart way to engage in international politics. Which, unfortunately, appears to be a core component of this administration’s foreign policy approach.
At any rate, the above is a stunning display of circular reasoning (if I might be bold enough to deem it “reasoning”).
Granted, he may be confused by the fact that we are claiming to have taken over Venezuela when all we have done is remove the president while leaving the entirety of the regime otherwise in place.
We won’t even get into the notion that if a regime murders protestors, it ought to be taken out…
There seems to be a divide in the electorate. Those who are secure enough to prefer leaders who are smarter than they are, trusting that intelligence will help them make the right decisions, and those who don’t trust people who are smart, and so are electing leaders “like them.”
It is so disheartening that someone this DUMB is in a position of authority, but voters are to blame. They picked this empty shell.
“Long Live the Bolsheviks! Death to the Communists!”
Mullin has never been the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Just wait until he hears about Renee Good.
@Jen:
Some of the founding fathers, e.g. Benjamin Franklin, feared “the will of the people” because they believed a portion of the electorate might end up being uninformed and easily influenced.
@Daryl: It’s a failure of leadership. The electorate are a box of rocks. And always have been. The difference now is the complete moral and intellectual collapse of the Republican Party.
I have this horrible feeling that this is just how messaging is done this day. We have certainly seen contradictory messaging before from many parties, just on a longer time scale.
Information warfare. Flood the zone with, ahem, garbage. Always keep them guessing.
So it’s not that Mullin is dumb. I have no idea. He might be. But he’s executing his messaging strategy and staying on track with it, it seems to me.
@gVOR10:
Well, yeah. And social media.
Bro culture doesn’t require smarts. Mullins has a ’67 Shelby, wrestles with steer, and can lay his own pipe.
@Jay L. Gischer:
I have enough observations over time to feel safe in the conclusion that he is, in fact, pretty dumb.
It wasn’t that long ago that John Cornyn was the dumbest guy in the Senate, and he was second only to Louie Gomert as the dumbest guy in Congress. Texas! But then along came the likes of “Coach Tuberville,” Ron Johnson and ‘MarkTwain’ Mullin, who didn’t just lower the bar, they shattered it. Cornyn now seems at least normal, if not kind of smart.
ETA – in the early aughts, I thought that George W. Bush had proven that America and the world couldn’t afford to have a dumb president. Never dreamed we’d get a guy who would make W seem like an erudite statesman.
@gVOR10:
The difference is so many Americans are now proud of their ignorance and meanness — belligerently anti-intellectual. Was there ever a time with a higher percentage of Americans applauding trolling, assholery, and hostility towards the educated?
I can recall someone around here sneering at my alleged “moralism.” Sure bro. As if asserting decency and ethics is a bad thing. And this is an anti-Trumper. Imagine such thinking from my grandparents and great-grandparents. I can’t. Those generations had major flaws — but I don’t think men of those eras aspired to be Philistines like our “manosphere.”
In the past, people were hateful and bigoted due to provincialism, segregation, lack of mobility, lack of information, etc. Modern Americans have no excuse. It’s embarrassing tbh.
It sounds like threatening regime change is a tactic and not the goal. The goal being to stop the murder of Iranian protesters.
So that could all be a consistent message repeated by an idiot who cannot handle any follow up questions.
Whether it is a good tactic, or even a credible threat, is another matter. We are moving a carrier group into the region, having moved one out to threaten Venezuala, and I expect many of our European allies would be cautious of getting involved with us (particularly Denmark).
The Trump Doctrine of threats upon threats and random flailing is likely to have about as much success abroad as it does at home. Minnesota, for instance, doesn’t seem to be lying down in submission, and non-US NATO forces are being deployed to protect Greenland.
Temper Tantrums are not an effective leadership style, whether it’s complaining about wanting a lollipop, Greenland, or a White America.
@Jay L. Gischer & @Steven L. Taylor:
I prefer “simple” over “dumb,” because I believe that better explains what is going on with the Republican Party and their box of rocks more generally. It’s Dunning-Kruger governance for a Republican base that’s easily impressed by the smartest guy at the bar.
Look across the spectrum of issues the country is dealing with right now and you can trace each back to an origin I would call “Simple Answers to Extremely Complex Problems.”
Iran’s leadership shouldn’t be murdering its citizens (hard to argue with that) – we’ll just take out those leaders: simple. What it will cost the US to take out those leaders?; what will emerge from the leadership vacuum?; what it will do with our country’s standing with world (Arab states in particular)? Those implication aren’t important if you only focus on how we solved the obvious problem with our simple solution.
Maduro is obviously a really bad guy. Go in and remove him: simple. We’ll just use the oil revenue to run this distant state by proxy. What might go wrong with that is immaterial.
Greenland should be owned by the US because it’s could be valuable and no one lives there anyway. We can make a beneficial deal when the opposition is in a weak negotiating position: simple. The people who live there and the end of NATO aren’t given a thought.
Immigration is problematic (not so obvious why but easy to find several weak arguments on why). We don’t even have to condemn all immigration to a country of mostly historic émigrés. We will mass deport only the worst of the worse: simple. That we don’t know where the worst are, so a lot of innocents will get swept up and that’s going to piss their neighbors off. Unimportant – just let us do our simple job and trust us that the final outcome will be what you wanted all along.
Over and over again – we will simply give you what you want and the experts & elites are just making it overly complicated. Ergo, it is the elites who are preventing you from getting what you want.
@Jen:
It is so disheartening that someone this DUMB is in a position of authority, but voters are to blame. They picked this empty shell.
I’m with you, I’m tired of people giving voters a pass on the blame: guys like Markwayne Mullin didn’t come from nowhere (and yes, I know where Oklahoma is). (Royal) We voted for the dysfunction we’re getting now.
I do not want to hear anyone use the phrase ‘Wisdom of The People,’ for a while. Stop with the naive thinking that ‘Wisdom of The People’ is some kind of enduring characteristic of the American People. It comes and goes – sometimes ‘We The People’ collectively have wisdom, some times We do not.
I don’t like the term “regime change” on this one. I know everybody is using it but this may be about supporting a side in a Iranian civil war. The regime has long-standing support from a significant portion of the population, primarily rural people. It’s been their base for most of their existence. Have they lost their base? I don’t know. The press is obsessed with “regime change”.
@Scott F.:
¿Por qué no los dos?
Reminiscent of this at the New York Post three days ago:
Predictably this triggered hundreds of comments demanding that the Iranian government, if not the whole country, be “turned into a sheet of glass” or other lurid fates popularised since 9/11.
Within 48 hours, the same newspaper published a story confirming that Israel tried and failed to kill Iran’s leaders in their brief war last year. Today, columnist David Harsanyi speaks approvingly of the possibility America might be able to “take out” Khamenei, which for some unexplained reason will help the protesters.
None of the commenters hysterical with excitement at shedding blood in Tehran noted any inconsistency with their professed outrage at the earlier threats from Iran.
@dazedandconfused:
Like it or not, that is supporting regime change.
Setting aside any normative judgements, this conversation is absolutely about regime change, one way or the other.
@Kathy: Indeed. I think dumb people like simple solutions, to that point.
@Scott F.: As with Kathy, I don’t think this is either/or.
But I do agree that we are currently being governed by a bunch of people who think that all of these complex problems have simple solutions. And it is quite maddening!!