NO, ISRAEL HASN'T LOST THE UNITED STATES

New York magazine's Ross Barkan writes:

Years from now, February 28, 2026, might be remembered as the day Israel finally lost the American public.

The Iran war, launched by the U.S. on that date and executed in direct coordination with Israel, is predictably a catastrophe....

It's not going well, but the usual 40 or so percent of Americans support the war, as they support everything Donald Trump does. In a recent NPR poll, the public opposes the war, but only by a 56%-44% margin, with 84% of Republicans in favor.

Barkan writes that Americans believe the U.S. is "fighting Israel’s war" in Iran, and they're not happy about that:

The fiercest supporters of Israel in the United States do not quite understand that there is no going back. Gavin Newsom, California’s governor and a 2028 presidential front-runner, now calls Israel an “apartheid” state. A few years ago, this would have been unfathomable — a mainstream Democrat who spoke like this would have been ridiculed and censured, driven to the margins of the party.

That's a sign that the Overton window is moving, but Newsom isn't rejecting Israel outright. He's trying to thread the needle.

Gavin Newsom to Ben Shapiro, January 15, 2026:

"I don't share that opinion as it relates to genocide [in Gaza]. I do not agree with that notion. I'm also crystal clear on my love for Israel." https://t.co/RiblgJdiVO pic.twitter.com/Sup5z2eMcn

— lindsay 🙈🏳️‍🌈 (@virtueemoir29) March 4, 2026

Barkan argues that Israel is losing America because anti-Israel critics on the left -- including mainstream liberals -- are being joined by anti-Israel critics (and anti-Semites) on the right:

We are in a new era, and it’s going to be a permanent one: Poll after poll shows that Americans under 40 take a startlingly dim view of Israel.

For a while, Israel hawks could dismiss these polls because they showed only the left-wing youth turning on the Jewish State. They were the radicals who could be, perhaps, nudged off the political stage. Now young people on the right, the MAGA youth, are coming to a similar place, if for different reasons: They view the special relationship between the two countries as a violation of America First. Some of this might be antisemitism; some of it, though, is genuine skepticism of an arrangement that doesn’t make sense to most Americans.

On the right, I think a lot of it is anti-Semitism -- maybe all of it. There's anti-Semitism on the left, but I think it's the dominant reason for Israel skepticism on the right.

But I don't agree that the U.S. and Israel are headed for a divorce, for two reasons: (1) the prominence of Bible-bashers in the GOP and (2) Cleek's Law.

Barkan writes:

The Iran war could be what decisively breaks the United States from Israel. Not yet — certainly not now, with Trump in the White House. But there will be presidents after Trump. A future Democrat will have no incentive to cater to the whims of a warmongering Israel. A Republican not explicitly bound to pro-Israel, right-wing Evangelicals might not care a great deal about Israel, either. Why should he?

Working backward: Does Barkan seriously believe there can be a leader of the GOP who's "not explicitly bound to pro-Israel, right-wing Evangelicals"? I'm reminded of a statistic cited by David French, a product of the Christian right who's become disaffected with the movement:

I’ve shared this statistic before, but if you look at 2024 exit polling, you’ll see that Trump won white evangelical and born-again voters by a 65-point margin, 82 percent to 17 percent. He lost everyone else by 18 points, 58 percent to 40 percent.

There is no GOP without these people. They're not going away. Even a guy like J.D. Vance, who's clearly unfazed by right-wing anti-Semitism, will have to stay on their good side if he wants to be the next president.

But the main reason the GOP won't turn against Israel is Cleek's Law:

Today’s conservatism is the opposite of what liberals want today, updated daily.

Despite the anti-Israel remarks of thought leaders like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes, and despite the increasing anti-Semitism among young rightists, the GOP will continue to back Israel because Democrats will increasingly reject Israel. Whatever we hate is what Republicans want.

It's an easy fit, of course: Prime Minister for Life Benjamin Netanyahu doles out cruelty to Muslims, whom even the vilest anti-Semites hate more than they hate Jews. (Hatred of Muslims is all but universal on the right.) If you agreed with Adam Serwer that "the cruelty is the point" of GOP policy in most areas, then it's easy to recognize that Israeli policy toward the Palestinians is cruel in a way that's extraordinarily satisfying to the U.S. right. And I agree with Barkan that "even if a more moderate politician replaces Netanyahu, religious zealots and anti-Arab fanatics will continue to hold sway" in Israel -- to the delight of Rpublican voters in America.

Republicans were generally pro-war from roughly the Nixon years through sometime in the Obama presidency, because they thought the Democratic Party was full of peaceniks. Donald Trump was able to sell skepticism about war to the GOP largely because Barack Obama killed Osama bin Laden and deployed drones against Islamicists. Joe Biden finished the job of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, and was criticized for the execution of that withdrawal, which gave Trump an opening to be a neocon again. It's always Cleek's Law.

So Republicans won't turn against Israel unless Democrats rush to its defense. They'll attack any Democrat who questions Israel's goodness, even if they're extending a welcome to anti-Semites themselves. All of this will prevent a thorough rethinking of U.S. policy toward Israel.

IF THE ECONOMY WERE EVERYTHING, TRUMP'S POLL NUMBERS WOULD BE LOWER

NBC News has just released a new poll. It was conducted from February 27 -- the day before the Iran war started -- through March 3. The topline number is bad for President Trump, but not awful:

NBC's survey hasn't been one of Trump's really terrible polls -- we're told,

Trump’s job approval rating is at 44% — essentially stable since the NBC News poll conducted in October, when it was 43% among registered voters.

But Trump's overall job approval rating is much higher than his rating on the economy:

Across five issues tested, voters give the president their lowest marks on the economy, with 62% disapproving of Trump’s handling of inflation and the cost of living and 36% approving. It’s an issue Democrats are trying to capitalize on heading into the midterms, after the party’s candidates found success on the issue in 2025....

Many Democratic politicians and candidates behave as if the economy is the one and only issue they should talk about -- even when other issues are in the headlines. Here's Senator Mark Kelly, a likely 2028 presidential candidate:

Why do this? Why not criticize Trump's handling of the war by ... criticize Trump's handling of the war? The war is unpopular. Americans think Trump should be prioritizing their needs and not foreign adventurism. They think the war will make Americans less safe. Why not talk about that?

Democrats who broke out of the "talk only about the economy" straitjacket have helped drive Trump's poll numbers down on immigration (with an assist, of course, from brutal and incompetent Trump subordinates like Kristi Noem). They need to keep pushing on every issue, and offer real plans of their own that differ from what Republicans are doing. Voters still think Republicans have better ideas on too many issues:

And after all the Democrats' talk about the economy, they're merely even with the GOP on who'd do a better job managing it, probably because they mostly say, "I'm laser-focused on affordability," which is not a better idea, or an idea at all. (To be fair, cutting the gas tax is an idea, though it's a Republican-style idea.)

Sometimes you do want to pivot to the economy -- I recently wrote that Democrats should focus on the skyrocketing cost of this war. But Democrats should also talk about the war as a bad idea, one that's depleting our military resources, putting lives at risk, and highly unlikely to make the world safer or more stable.

Trump has thoughts about everything -- ignorant thoughts, but they're thoughts. They impress approximately 40% of the country. Democrats could try having well-thought-out responses to every issue. The public won't fully trust the party, especially with the White House, until it seems ready to handle every issue the country faces.

MAYBE CHAOS IS THE POINT

The Atlantic's Tom Nichols sees Donald Trump's war in Iran as one of "Operational Excellence [and] Strategic Incompetence."

The war in Iran has reaffirmed two truths. One is that the United States is blessed with the most professional and effective military in the world.... The other truth is that the Trump administration, when it comes to strategy, is incompetent.

... The president and his team ... have not enunciated an overarching goal for this war—or, more accurately, they have presented multiple goals and chosen among them almost randomly, depending on the day or the hour. This means that highly effective military operations are taking place in a strategic vacuum.

... Operational competence ... cannot answer the question of national purpose. What is the war about, and when will America know it’s done?

I'm thinking about this in the context of a piece by David Sanger that ran in The New York Times a couple of days ago under the headline "Trump Follows His Gut. His National Security Advisers Try to Keep Up."

On a range of issues, from the goals of the Iran strike to Mr. Trump’s objectives in Venezuela or even in threatening Greenland, there are a blitz of answers. Inconsistency is sometimes celebrated by the administration as wily strategic deception, rather than as a failure to think several chess moves ahead.

... A top Arab diplomat said this week that his government has no real insight into the administration’s planning for a transition of government in Iran — or even whether it wants to play a role, given Mr. Hegseth’s repeated statements that “nation building” was not on the Pentagon’s list of tasks.

When I look at this war, and when I look at the ever-changing tariffs, I start to think that -- apart from the obvious motivations (self-aggrandizement, self-enrichment) -- the chaos is the point for Trump. He spent much of his life wanting to be the most important person in his world -- the biggest builder in New York, the richest, and the most admired -- but he could never pull it off. Other people with less chaotic and more strategic brains were better at building, made more money, and easily avoided the bankruptcies that plagued Trump. The adrenalized fizziness of Trump's brain made him bad at planning, bad at passing up whatever seemed immediately gratifying. He overpaid for what he wanted. He experienced failure.

He's no better at being president -- but what he can do, now that he has a 100% loyal Cabinet, Congress, and Supreme Court, is try to drag the world down to his level. He doesn't know what he's doing (on trade, in geopolitics), but that's fine if no one else knows what he's doing either. Global destabilization is the point. It makes smarter people struggle to react. It makes the world as jittery as Trump's brain.

TRUMP SHRUGS AND SAYS SHIT HAPPENS BECAUSE HE THINKS SHIT HAPPENING WOULD BE FINE FOR HIM

This passage from Time magazine's cover story on President Trump and the war in Iran is getting a lot of attention:

Asked whether Americans should be worried about retaliatory attacks at home, Trump acknowledges the possibility. “I guess,” he says. “But I think they’re worried about that all the time. We think about it all the time. We plan for it. But yeah, you know, we expect some things. Like I said, some people will die. When you go to war, some people will die."

First, I want to draw your attention to "But I think [Americans are] worried about that all the time." I live in Manhattan. I lived here on 9/11. The vast majority of my fellow New Yorkers aren't "worried about that all the time." We know the risks, and we know they haven't gone away. We know, for instance, that an ISIS-inspired terrorist drove a pickup truck into cylists and runners back in 2017, killing eight of them. Terrorism happens, and we know our city is a much more likely target than the outer-ring suburbs and rural communities where Trump supporters tend to live. But we get on with our lives. We're not perpetually fearful. It's Trumpers who are obsessed with terrorism fears and the fear of "sleeper cells."

🚨 THIS IS INSANE: Democrats have ONCE AGAIN voted to KEEP DHS CLOSED, despite the highly elevated terror threat by Iranian sleeper cells in the United States

Democrats DO NOT CARE about the safety of you and your family.

It’s ALL about political power.

STOP VOTING DEMOCRAT! pic.twitter.com/LFU5HrsSVy

— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) March 5, 2026

🚨 BREAKING: US Senate REJECTS effort to reopen the Department of Homeland Security in a 51-45 vote, despite an ACTIVE threat of terrorist sleeper cells amid conflict with Iran

John Fetterman joined Republicans voting YEA

Chuck Schumer and the Democrats are TRAITORS and must… pic.twitter.com/g6lEnSyXeJ

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) March 5, 2026

Which gets us to the calculation Trump has made. We know he's a narcissist who doesn't care about other people's deaths unless he thinks he can leverage them for his own purposes. So his administration has waved Charlie Kirk's bloody shirt ever since the bigoted podcaster was killed -- but if you're a servicemember who's a casualty of this war, Trump doesn't want to talk about you.

I don't know whether he'll want to talk about any victims of terrorism on U.S. soil. Other Republicans obviously will -- they'll want to blame the casualties on Democrats, even if Homeland Security funding has been restored. But Trump might just want to shrug the deaths off the way he's shrugging them off here, and the way he's shrugging off the deaths of servicemembers now.

But in any case, he thinks he can avoid blame, either by persuading us (or at least the Republican voter base) that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, shit happens, or by leveraging the deaths to stir up outrage. It's certainly worked for Republican presidents in the past.

The Republican voter base will be enthusiastically on Trump's side if there's a terror attack here. I don't think he should assume that the rest of America will feel the same. Most Americans despise the war, according to nearly all polling on the subject.

Many politicians make cynical calculations about life-and-death issues, but I think Trump cares less than any other president we've had about the lives lost as the result of his actions. He's gambling that civilian deaths won't lower his poll numbers. That's pretty much all he cares about.

STOP CEDING "CULTURALLY NORMAL" TO THE PARTY OF NAZIS

The Wall Street Journal has just published the latest in a series of nearly identical mainstream-media puff pieces about Rahm Emanuel. These stories always focus on Emanuel's scolding remarks aimed at fellow Democrats, which are portrayed as exactly what the party needs:

Rahm Emanuel is delivering the Democratic Party a dose of tough medicine—in his usual blunt style—as the party enters a critical midterm primary season.

Asked at a recent fundraiser in this affluent Detroit suburb how Democrats might be able to win back the working-class voters who have defected to President Trump, Emanuel faulted his party in 2024 for being too focused on things such as transgender rights and not enough on pocketbook issues.
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“We weren’t very good in this last election at the kitchen table. We weren’t very good in the family room,” said the former congressman, mayor and U.S. ambassador to Japan. “The only room we occupied in the house was the bathroom—and it’s the smallest room in the house.”

Democrats weren't talking about transgender issues on the campaign trail in 2024, of course, and Emanuel knows this. Remarks from Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential campaign were used against her in 2024, though it's doubtful that they were the reason she lost. Republicans tried playing the trans card in the 2025 Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races and had their heads handed to them.

The Journal story quotes other scoldy Democrats:

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear implores Democrats to talk more like “normal human beings” and avoid “advocacy speak” ...

Even California Gov. Gavin Newsom ... recently said Democrats need to be “culturally normal.”

If I were an undeclared Democratic candidate for president like these guys, you know who I'd be denouncing as not culturally normal? Republicans -- specifically, racist, misogynist, Nazi-loving anti-Semite Republicans like these folks:

The secretary of Miami-Dade County’s Republican Party started a group chat primarily for conservative students last fall — and within three weeks it was filled with racist slurs, someone wrote dozens of ways of violently killing Black people and the chat was renamed after what one member described as “Nazi heaven.”

In WhatsApp conversations leaked to the Miami Herald, participants used variations of the n-word more than 400 times, regularly described women as “whores,” used slurs to talk about Jewish and gay people and mused about Hitler’s politics....

The conversations included some of the campus’ top conservative leaders: the county GOP secretary, FIU’s Turning Point USA chapter president and the former College Republicans recruitment chair....

... William Bejerano — who tried to start a pro-life group at Miami Dade College — was the primary user of the n-word in the group. At one point, he posted a block of text calling for dozens of acts of extreme violence against Black people, who he referred to using the n-word, including crucifying, beheading and dissecting people....

The group chat members — which included some women — also frequently discussed sex, sometimes describing women as “whores” and at one point using the k-word, a slur for Jewish people, to describe women they avoid.

[Dariel] Gonzalez [the College Republicans’ recruitment chairman at the time] said, “You can f–k all the [k-word] you want. Just don’t marry them and procreate.” Ian Valdes, the Turning Point USA chapter president, responded, “I would def not marry a Jew.”

If you think you've read this story before, you might be thinking of a story about a different racist, sexist young Republican chat group, from last fall:

Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway.

They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery.

William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n--ga” and “n--guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

I know this is a wild, crazy, out-of-the-box idea, but maybe, instead of attacking his own party every time he talks to a journalist or makes a public appearance, Rahm Emanuel could try attacking the opposition party -- y'know, as a change of pace. Maybe he and Beshear and Newsom and Josh Shapiro and James Carville could portray Republicans as extremist freaks and weirdos once in a while. It's a crazy idea, but it might work!

The Florida bigots in this chat -- and, apparently, a lot of other young Republicans in the state -- appear to have a favorite politician: a young insurgent candidate who's challenging Byron Donalds, a Black congressman who's been endorsed by President Trump, in the Florida gubernatorial primary.

... James Fishback — a relative political unknown who has used racist and white nationalist rhetoric throughout his campaign — is highlighting the generational divide around extremism on the right in Florida.

Rhetoric such as ...?

“His undisguised racist comments describing a Black candidate’s vision as ‘Section 8 ghetto’ and referring to Byron Donalds as ‘By’rone’ and a ‘slave’ are deliberate, offensive, and beneath this state,” Democratic gubernatorial candidate David Jolly said....

Also:

He says that the only “systemic racism” that exists in the United States is against white Christian men. He’s also proposed burning abortion clinics.

And:

At a recent campus campaign stop, Florida GOP gubernatorial candidate James Fishback dropped some unusual verbiage while inveighing against junk food in school cafeterias.

“I’m not saying that the test scores are the result of the Pop-Tarts,” Fishback told a crowd at the University of Central Florida, in remarks boosting locally grown produce over convenience foods. “But if you wanted kids to fail, if you wanted to set our kids up for failure, you would feed them the absolute goyslop in our cafeterias.”

Goyslop?!

As an Instagram user explains:

In this context, it reflects an antisemitic concept suggesting that “goyim” (non‑Jewish people) are fed this “slop” by supposed Jewish elites to keep them unhealthy.

More:

The term is making the rounds among the largest white nationalist and antisemitic influencers. Clavicular, a popular manosphere influencer recently seen dancing and singing to Ye’s “Heil Hitler” at a Miami nightclub, appeared on a recent livestream with white nationalist Nick Fuentes to lament how “the entire grocery store is filled with goyslop.”

This isn't doing much for Fishback's campaign -- except among young Republican voters:

According to a February poll from the University of North Florida, Florida Representative Byron Donalds leads in the general electorate at 31%, compared to Fishback’s 6%. Half of voters are still undecided.

But Donalds’ 5 to 1 lead completely flips among young voters, where Fishback leads 4 to 1. He is backed by 32% of 18-to-34-year-olds, while just 8% support Donalds.

Instead of incessantly accusing Democrats of being out of step with normal, decent people, why don't more Democrats talk about the edgelord bigotry of an increasing number of Republicans? Why not portray them as the party of abnormal freaks?

The Wall Street Journal might not breathlessly transcribe every word these Democrats say, but they'd at least be attacking their political opponents, which you'd think would be Politics 101.

THE NUTJOB WHO SUPPRESSED SOME DEMOCRATIC VOTES IN TEXAS, INCOMPETENTLY

There was chaos in Dallas County, Texas, in yesterday's primary, and it's understandable that many people think it was part of a targeted long-term effort to prevent Democratic victories in November. But I don't think that's what happened.

We know what happened. First,

Confusion over new voting rules in Texas’s Dallas and Williamson counties caused Democratic voters to be turned away from polling sites Tuesday as the state’s primary election unfolded.

The confusion prompted a judge in Dallas to extend poll hours for the Democratic primary — but that judge’s order was quickly put on hold by the Texas Supreme Court following a request from Republican state Attorney General Ken Paxton.

And we know why it happened:

According to Texas procedure, if a county’s primary is not held jointly — meaning, if Republicans and Democrats do not agree to hold the election together — then the county’s residents are required to vote in their assigned precincts. Last year, Republicans in Dallas County said they would not hold their primary jointly with Democrats. But many voters, accustomed to joint primaries, assumed they could vote at alternate voting sites and were turned away.

The standard procedure is that voters can vote in any precinct in their county. They could do this during early voting -- but not yesterday in those two counties.

Dallas County is a stronghold for Jasmine Crockett, who was trailing last night and said she wouldn't accept the results until provisional ballots cast in those counties were counted. She has since conceded the race because there don't appear to be enough outstanding ballots for her to make up James Talarico's statewide lead, which currently exceeds 150,000 votes.

One alarmed Substacker writes:

This Was the Point

I need you to think about why you’d do this in a Democratic primary.

You don’t suppress votes in a primary to win the primary. Republicans aren’t on the Democratic ballot....

But here’s what you do gain: you weaken whoever comes out of it. You damage the eventual nominee. You shape the field. You get a test run for your playbook.

But why would Republicans want to "shape the field" this way? The conventional wisdom is that Talarico -- white, religious, and genial -- is a stronger general election candidate than Crockett, a Black woman who's an outspoken progressive. Why would Republicans want to suppress her votes if they think he's a stronger candidate?

There's another explanation for what happened that makes more sense:

In Dallas County, propelled by election conspiracy theories about the security of ballot-counting machines, Republicans made the change in hope of hand-counting their ballots — a process that election experts want can lead to errors and delayed results. Dallas Republicans ultimately abandoned their plans to count ballots by hand because of the high costs. But the plan for people to vote at the precinct level went forward.

Maybe Republicans wanted to sow chaos, particularly among Black voters, in the hope that those voters would resent Talarico and refuse to rally around him in the general election. But that seems like a risky move when some polling suggested that Crockett might win the primary, and when the GOP assumed that she'd be easier to beat. Also, it was clear that this was done by Texas Republicans, not Talarico. (In his victory speech last night, Talarico called for all the votes to be counted and described what took place as "voter suppression.")

The person responsible for the decision to separate the primaries in Dallas County was the chair of the county Republican Party, Allen West. I used to write about him frequently. He's been a nutjob culture warrior longer than Donald Trump.

West had a checkered military career:

West served in the U.S. Army but was “stripped of his command” in 2003 after he pleaded “guilty to assaulting an Iraqi detainee during interrogation,” according to The Boston Globe. Gen. James Mattis, President Donald Trump’s former secretary of defense, reportedly criticized West as a “commander who has lost his moral balance or has watched too many Hollywood movies.”

West became a right-wing commentator, then won a House seat in Florida in 2010, as part of the Tea Party backlash to Barack Obama's presidency. He served one term. He became much better known for his rhetoric:

West ... became a YouTube sensation by criticizing “this tyrannical government” and crying out: “if you’re here to stand up to get your musket, to fix your bayonet, and to charge into the ranks, you are my brother and sister in this fight.” He said that the country was engaging in “class warfare” between “a producing class and an entitlement class,” which is composed of Obama supporters....

West encouraged his supporters to use violence in suppressing the votes of opponents, saying, “You've got to make the fellow scared to come out of his house.”

He maintains that it is “unfortunate” that gays and lesbians are serving in the military, and compares homosexuality to adultery....

On immigration, he claims that ... Muslim terrorists are coming through the border with Mexico. West’s first decision as Representative-elect was to choose as his chief of staff right-wing radio talk show host Joyce Kaufman, who called for illegal immigrants to be “hung on the central square.”

KIaufman also said:

I am convinced that the most important thing the Founding Fathers did to ensure me my First Amendment rights was they gave me a Second Amendment.

And if ballots don't work, bullets will.

She stepped aside before West was sworn in.

More:

West ... called President Barack Obama an “Islamist” and “disgusting racist"; said the “Democrat Party is an anti-Semitic party”; and falsely accused dozens of congressional Democrats of being “members of the Communist Party.” He claimed that Islam “is not a religion” and “we need to have individuals stand up and say that,” and his Facebook page posted (and later removed) an image that claimed [President Donald] Trump had chosen [General James] Mattis as his defense secretary to “exterminate Muslims.” He also questioned the “loyalties” of Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), a Purple Heart recipient, and said feminists are “neutering American men and bringing us to the point of this incredible weakness.”

And there was this in 2013:

In a June 5 fundraising email, West claimed that Attorney General Holder was a “bigger threat to our Republic” than terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, a former deputy of Osama bin Laden, who took control of al Qaeda after bin Laden's death. West also used a quote from the ancient philosopher Cicero to imply that Holder was guilty of treason.

The June 7 edition of Fox & Friends gave West a platform to expand on his smear. West answered co-host Brian Kilmeade's question about why he claimed Holder was as dangerous as al-Zawahiri by pointing to Cicero's claim that a nation “cannot survive treason from within” and "[a] murderer is less to fear, the traitor is the plague." West charged Holder with having “the arrogance of officialdom,” and claimed that “When the rule makers are not adhering to the rule of law, then the very foundations of this great nation will start to crumble.”

So, yeah, that paranoid nutjob made the decision in Dallas County. It might have been a carefully designed ratfuck, but to me it just seems like chaos born of paranoia.

THE IRAN WAR IS A MONEY SUCK AND DEMOCRATS SHOULD NEVER STOP TALKING ABOUT THAT

Greg Sargent has a strong opinion about what Democrats should be doing right now:

While some Democrats have gotten this right, more of them need to say forthrightly that this war is patently illegal and that Trump’s chief stated rationale for it—that Iran posed “imminent threats” to the United States—is utter nonsense.

“Democrats need to strongly make the point that there was no imminent threat and that this war is a violation of the Constitution—and illegal,” Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, told me. “Absent congressional approval, this is an illegal war.”

I think it's worth saying that the war is illegal, but I don't think it changes very many minds. It's a message that reinforces the anger of educated liberals who understand how our government works and what a president can or can't lawfully do, but the vast majority of Americans don't understand the legal constraints on a president and don't care. When asked, they'll tell pollsters that, yes, Congress should be consulted on war, but a refusal to consult Congress won't become a top issue for most of them.

I think this is a stronger Democratic argument:

That's from iran-cost-ticker.com. I don't know who's behind it. I don't know if it's accurate. But it's an effort to provide a running total of the cost of the war, in the manner of the National Debt Clock. The dollar cost escalates rapidly.

Paul Krugman has more data:

On Sunday, according to the U.S. military, Kuwaiti forces shot down three U.S. F-15s in a “friendly fire” incident.

... A new F-15 costs U.S. taxpayers $97 million. So that’s almost $300 million lost in seconds. And we should think about what could have been done with that money other than launch a war without a clear plan or an exit strategy....

One of the reasons to be disturbed by this war is the extraordinary amount of money the U.S. government is either laying out now or will have to lay out in the future to replace the spent munitions....

Linda Bilmes of Harvard’s Kennedy School estimates that Trump’s largely unsuccessful bombing campaign last year against the Iran-backed Islamist Houthis in Yemen — a far softer target than Iran itself — cost between $2.76 billion and $4.95 billion. Operation Midnight Hammer, Trump’s one-day strike against suspected Iranian nuclear facilities, cost between $2.04 billion and $2.26 billion....

The current war is being waged not only with massive bombing but also with the use of large numbers of expensive interceptors to defend U.S. bases and U.S. allies against Iranian drones and missiles. So in just a few days we have surely incurred billions of dollars in cost. And if this war continues for an extended period, the costs could easily rise to the twenty to thirty billion dollar range.

... if we compare the cost of this war to what we spend to help needy Americans, then it’s clear that this war is extremely expensive compared with other ways we could have spent the funds. Put it this way: SNAP — the Supplemental Nutritional Food Assistance Program, formerly food stamps — spends an average of about $2,400 a year per recipient. CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program administered under Medicaid, provides comprehensive health care for about $3,000 per child.

So just replacing those three jets shot down over Kuwait — each of them, remember, with a price tag of $97 million — will cost about as much as providing 125,000 Americans with crucial food aid or providing healthcare to 100,000 American children. And the war might very well end up costing 100 times as much as the price of those jets.

I'm not sure Democrats should get into the weeds the way Krugman does. Reciting a string of numbers and per-capita costs isn't compelling rhetoric. If I were a Democratic officeholder or candidate, I'd just start with the topline number -- trhe cost of the war so far -- and say, "What are we getting for this? How does this help you in your day-to-day lives? What else could be done with this tax money taken from your pocket?"

Democrats have a rare opportunity. Ordinarily, it's easy to score political points by complaining about the high cost of whatever the government does, except in matters of defense and policing. As a rule, normies don't even bother comparing those huge costs to the often much lower costs of programs that serve other human needs, because they accept the premise that we need to spend whatever it takes to keep ourselves safe.

But this is an exception to the rule. It's a war that, unlike most U.S. wars, is unpopular at the outset. Apart from Republicans, no one wants this war. No one knows why it's being fought. Most Americans think it will make America less safe.

So Democrats should bring up the cost of this pointless war at every possible opportunity. Bring up the total cost. Bring up the daily cost. Ask how all that expense is making America safer. Ask how much we're all going to shell out before it's all over, if that day ever comes.