Hmm. Did someone recently say that this White House seems to make policy as if its understanding of the world came from the movies?
Well, I guess that someone was onto something.
Side note: Walter White (“I am the danger”) and Kylo Ren (“More!”) are bad guys in the context of the clips. And Jimmy McGill (“You have no idea what I am capable of.”) is morally compromised, at best, at the point he is quoted.
And since we are communicating via pop culture references:
It really is all amazingly grotesque.
I guess now is a good time to note that the Secretary of Defense thinks that reporting on fatalities is just, as The Atlantic put it: Pete Hegseth Treats Fallen American Soldiers as a PR Problem.
The defense secretary, the man who is supposed to carry this news to the American public and mourn with them, instead whined about the unfairness of it all. “When a few drones get through or tragic things happen, it’s front-page news. I get it,” Hegseth told the reporters, military personnel, and civilians gathered this morning in the Pentagon. “The press only wants to make the president look bad, but try for once to report the reality. The terms of this war will be set by us at every step. As I said Monday, the mission is laser-focused.”
So, unserious and morally reprehensible. Just the sort of people we should all want in charge of the most powerful military the world has ever known.
By the way, while I have more nuanced views than to call a large chunk of Americans “bad” (as per James Joyner’s post this morning), I have no reservation categorizing our current leadership as such. Further, there is a point wherein supporting all of this stuff is, in fact, very bad indeed.
There is some hope that some (although not enough) Americans understand this.
Source: G. Elliot Morris.
The big takeaway from these numbers is that the new war in Iran is very unpopular. Not merely negative-number-so-what unpopular, but worst-ever-support-for-war-when-it-started unpopular. With just 38% of Americans in favor, support for bombing Iran is lower than retrospective support for the war in Iraq was in 2014.
[…]
No president in modern polling history has launched a major military operation with the public already against him. After the September 11 attacks, a November 2001 Gallup poll found 90% of Americans approved of military action in Afghanistan, with just 5% opposed. The Gulf War in 1991 hit 79-80% approval. Gallup measured 76% support for the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 (Pew had it at 71%).
Side-note: if this level of unhappiness continues, alongside things like gas prices going up and already existing economic anxieties, the midterms are going to be very, very blue as voters are going to want to register their displeasure. The basic political stupidity of all of this is pretty stunning.
