One of the very big reasons that you should be reading Politizoom is that we don’t fall for the usual Trump trope. We are free to simply hammer on obvious patterns.
Fine.
But the mainstream media – for reasons passing immediate understanding – has to at least pretend to fall for it all. Perhaps they’re so ingrained in covering things “neutrally” that they fail to see the real neutral position. Trump’s latest foray into possible war, making the decision always two weeks down the road, is a punt. Unless he plans to bomb Iran in the next three days, throwing people off on some deranged plan, he has once again done the obvious. Put it all off indefinitely. And it seems as though MSNBC’s Jen Psaki is the only one able to call the media out (Along with us). As she noted in a recent monologue. From a report in MSNBC.com:
“A number of the nation’s largest newspapers made an age-old mistake today,” Psaki said on Thursday’s show, before flashing images of headlines from various outlets, including The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. “They took the words of the Trump administration at face value and spit them right back out to the American public — without context, without much of anything.”
The “very important context that is completely missing,” Psaki said, is that we’ve heard this exact phrase from Trump before:
Remember “infrastructure week”? How about healthcare? It was always two weeks down the road. It all sounds good if you actually believe him, which only the media appears to so do. It is all a means to cover for inaction:
“It’s a bit maddening that this tactic can still spark headlines … because it’s not new,” she added. “He did the exact same thing throughout his first term in office.”
“One likely possibility is that Trump doesn’t want to have to make a decision about this at all,” Psaki said. “He just wants to keep punting it down the road. He doesn’t mind the speculation, the attention, but he doesn’t want to actually commit to a decision — and it’s not hard to see why.”
No one should want war with Iran, but if one is going to demand “unconditional surrender” and then say that a decision will be made in “two weeks,” it is probably best to at least drop a bomb or two on some decision, some time – ideally backing off tax cuts.
It is all so ironic. The one thing that Trump did with dispatch – creating the COVID vaccine – is now the biggest accomplishment from which he runs. He won’t try anything similar. Thank god in this particular case. But the media cannot see it for what it so obviously is.
So give Psaki and us some love. If you want a group that won’t fall for his usual, well – we, and she – are here to serve.
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Yes, “two weeks” in trump-speak is sometime in the future, if ever. Funny the media hasn’t picked up on this, because it probably means the chances of going to go to war with Iran are about as likely as his healthcare plan being realized.
Following on Leavitt’s two weeks proclamation, Netanyahu said that Israel is now in it for as long as it takes, which in Bibi-talk means weeks or months, or even years, like Gaza. Short of putting boots on the ground in Iran, they will go it alone, hoping the US can continue to top-off the money and munitions they’re rapidly burning through.
The question I have is, how long can the US continue to supply this stuff? It’s very expensive and there’s a debt ceiling on the table in Congress, sorta. Or is the orange extortionist going to demand Iran pay back the US in oil when the conflict is over?
I don’t have anything worthy to say about the media except “told ya so”. The not anything worthy, is I heart Jen Psaki.