Good Morning Kids. Wow, has it really been eight years since the Morning Report debuted? A lot has happened to me professionally and personally and what a ride it has been for all of us. First and foremost, my thanks and appreciation to Ace for giving me the opportunity to host this forum, to my fellow co-bloggers for their help and support and most crucially to all of you fantastic commenters whose combination of snark, erudition and knowledge make the Morning Report, IMHO, the best daily forum and news aggregation site out there.
I cannot begin to thank all of you for your support and for being here and making this place what it is.
So, let's start off with a literal bang! While given the fact that we can control the weather, is it really any surprise that Israel could pull off one of the most daring, retaliatory strikes in history. If only it could have prevented the events of 10/7 in the first place, but the IDF and the Israeli people are going to have to sort that out for themselves as to who and what is to blame for that equally massive failure. In any case, given who and what is running this country – Kamalorama Hussein Obama-Harris, is this item really surprising:
Israel did not take responsibility for the pager attack that crippled Hezbollah’s comms and took out a chunk of their officer corps. It certainly did not go ahead and describe how it was done for the media. That’s tradecraft. And you don’t reveal it.
But the New York Times had a report detailing how it happened that same evening. I won’t link to it as it carries the byline of fake news fabulist Sheera Frenkel who had previously carried water for Hamas and lied that the Islamic terror group had not kidnapped and killed three Israeli teens.
The report is described as being based on briefings received by American officials.
The material leaked to the Times comes from “American and other officials briefed on the operation” and the “American and other officials spoke on the condition of anonymity given the sensitive nature of the operation.”
. . .Under Obama, leaks of Israeli operations were standard procedure. But if this was Biden-Harris admin policy, it doesn’t just hurt Israel, it hurts America. The leak undermines claims that we didn’t know about it beforehand. And encourages Hezbollah to target our people as the weaker link in the Oct 7 war. Some officials in this junta clearly don’t care, but they could also find themselves in the line of fire.
Ryan Wesley Routh, the 58-year-old man who is suspected of an assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump, had connections in Iran that are leading some security experts to question if there was Iranian involvement. A New York Times reporter who had interviewed Routh last year wrote on Sunday that Routh was working to recruit former Afghan special operations soldiers who had fled to Iran to go fight in Ukraine. . . The reporter, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, wrote that when he was writing an article on volunteer fighters in Ukraine last year, his former Afghan colleague and friend Najim Rahim had put him in touch with Routh, who he had learned about from a source of his in Iran, a former Afghan special operations soldier. A number of U.S.-trained Afghan special operations forces had fled to Iran after the disastrous Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Since those forces were trained by U.S. special operations forces, the Afghan commandos’ escape into Iran potentially delivered “closely guarded secrets on U.S. special operators” to Iran, according to Foreign Policy.
Whether the Iranian connection is merely incidental, there's also this connection worth noting:
A Pakistani national with ties to Iran pleaded not guilty on Monday to charges related to an Iranian plot to assassinate former President Donald Trump.
A federal judge in Brooklyn ordered Asif Merchant detained pending trial at the Monday hearing in which Merchant pleaded not guilty to charges of attempting to commit an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries and taking part in a murder-for-hire plot, according to ABC News.
Merchant pleaded not guilty the same day that another man suspected of targeting Trump for assassination appeared in a federal court in West Palm Beach, Florida. That man, who was arrested shortly after allegedly fleeing from a sniper spot at Trump International Golf Course, was arraigned on charges of possessing a firearm as a convicted felon and possessing a firearm with an obliterated serial number.
So, if I even attempt to connect the dots of Routh and Merchant to Iran that would light up the switchboards in the non-existent wink-wink Nina Jankowicz Merrick Garland Ministry of Truth, nein? Forget the fact that the junta in power and the generationally-embedded anti-American ticks in Foggy Bottom have been trying to replace Israel with Iran as the top dog in the Middle East going back at least as far back as Obama, if not before. Considering what's happening in Springfield Ohio and Obama's culinary proclivities, maybe the word dog is inadvisable in this context.
Meh, who needs Iranian, or Pakistani cutouts when you have a slew of psycho trannies running around, armed to the teeth and hopped up on hatred for enemies the media brainwash them into believing are targeting them.
And speaking of Ministry of Truth:
Democrat Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said in 2022 that there is “no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” “Yeah, years ago, it was the little things, telling people to vote the day after the election, and we kind of brushed them off. Now we know it’s intimidation at the ballot box,” responded Walz. “It’s undermining the idea that mail-in ballots aren’t legal. I think we need to push back on this. There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy. Tell the truth, where the voting places are, who can vote, who’s able to be there.”It remains unclear if Walz was speaking about censorship on social media or actual government regulations on individuals spreading misinformation.
The problem is who gets to determine what is and what is not the truth. Well, even a cursory look at human history and tragically even American history will inform you of exactly who gets to be the arbiter.
Well, eight years has been a good long run. And while my doctors are optimistic that I have a very good shot at beating the odds of my cancer returning in the next 10 years or perhaps longer, they told me that I likely could die of something totally unrelated. Probably in prison for writing this column after being denied medical treatment, or food and water.
So here's to another eight years. Meh, it was probably wading through the madness on a daily basis to write this that gave me a brain tumor in the first place!
God bless you all, and have a great day.
NOTE: The opinions expressed in the links may or may not reflect my own. I include them because of their relevance to the discussion of a particular issue.
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