Nobody Told Trump Exactly What He Agreed To, Plus

Did you know our press suck? Plus music

A confusion of signs (Weldon Berger/Bad Crow Review)

Nobody Told Trump Exactly What He Agreed To

This is mostly outdated now because I never hit send, but whatever.

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Our enraged, deranged, free-range, genocidal—the latter of which most of our press have agreed to file under “bygones”—president seems to have been unaware of nine or ten points of the ten-point Iranian plan to which his designated homicidal, profiteering negotiators, the real estate and crypto grifters Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, agreed in order to avoid the threatened genocide and all that that implied for the future of the criminal regime.

The one point he does seem to have homed in on, the concept of tolls for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, he likes because he thinks that the U.S. he and his cronies can get a piece of the roughly $300 million a day that a return to normal shipping volume would see the Iranians sharing with Oman.

(Some accounts say Iran wants toll payments in crypto; others that they want the tolls, their own oil and that of other producers paid for in Chinese yuan as a condition for safe passage, in an attempt to dislodge the dollar as the world’s default petro-currency.)

One wag suggests that the toll deal was presented to the president as a cartoon with an outsize clip art oil tanker steaming through a pint-size Strait of Hormuz peppered with dollar signs and overseen by a picture of Trump in his Captain America guise.

In any event, his reaction to the press coverage of Iran’s proposals as described by Iran and Pakistan seems so genuinely outraged that he can’t have been told what the deal was. Also evident is that his emissaries, and the Israelis, are lying not just to him but to everybody else who might favor our description of what the deal entails over what the Iranians and Pakistanis agree it is.

This all bodes ill for the already prolifically-violated cease-fire. Can Trump convince himself, or can his aspirational handlers convince him, that he’ll personally benefit from the eventual deal enough that he doesn’t feel compelled to continue the hostilities in the hope of getting something better, and that he’s willing to rein in the Israelis?

Regarding the latter: Unlike Trump, who at this point is likely president for life—one can hope, anyway—Netanyahu’s continued political survival and his freedom depend on perpetual crisis. He has to gamble that Trump’s perception of him doesn’t change from role model to burden.

In that vein, Trump said yesterday that his pal has agreed to go “low key” on strikes against Iran and Lebanon, the latter of which both insist are permitted under the cease-fire agreement. This comes the day after Israel saturation-bombed parts of Beirut and other locations, killing hundreds of Lebanese and flattening residential neighborhoods in only a few minutes, and it obviously bodes ill for the longevity of the agreement whatever anyone genuinely believes it to be.

“Low key” doesn’t have a universally accepted definition; one has to think that in Trump’s view, it’s anything short of genocide, or at least anything short of terminally buggering the windfall he thinks he deserves and is in line to receive. To Americans, the ones in power anyway, human life doesn’t have the same value as in Iran and other non-western nations.

Despite his angst over the cease-fire terms and the Iranian refusal to go quietly into that good night, along with the American pope’s now-routine lambastings of Trump, Whisky Pete and the regime, Trump seems cheery enough. “Our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest,” he said yesterday on the fascist-forward social media platform he owns.

Did you know our press suck?

Speaking of media social and otherwise, our press have moved on from Trump’s genocidal rage because he didn’t act on it. Most of them didn’t acknowledge what he said as a threatened genocide, but most of them still don’t acknowledge the Israeli genocide in Gaza either so that’s not too surprising.

Still, you have to think that if Biden had threatened to exterminate all the brutes, reporters and editorial boards might have got a bit more exercised about it. But the New York Times, for instance, doesn’t directly connect Trump’s genocidal shrieking to what it delicately described as “new diplomatic tests” as the not-really-a-cease-fire totters into the weekend.

Some decades ago, Gary Trudeau depicted then-vice president Dan Quayle, once the most feeble spark in Congress, as a talking feather in the Doonesbury comic strip. It’s a matter of some hilarity that then-vice president Mike Pence, who had worn the same congressional crown for a few years before Louie Gohmert blew into town, consulted the erstwhile feather on the question of whether to assist Trump in pursuit of a coup. Quayle, instantly redeeming his entire executive branch career, said “of course not ya fucking dummy.”

JD Vance, like his boss a man with a black hole where his moral center should be, is smarter than either of those two vice-presidential clowns but not necessarily someone you’d want to sit across from when negotiating an agreement because, among other things, he’s an inveterate liar; again like his boss, he’ll say anything to anybody to get what he wants; and again like his boss, he’s perfectly willing to contradict himself from sentence to sentence.

But The Times completely elides the patent unreliability of the U.S. team, which along with Vance includes the bought-and-paid-for Saudi stooge Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff, a partner in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency scam who, like Kushner, has significant relationships with Iran’s regional foes. The reporters paint Iran as the unreliable narrator in the story, which generally hasn’t been the case since Trump v.1 tore up the nuclear deal (and Biden failed to resurrect it), and has been glaringly not the case since Kushner and Witkoff, on behalf of the Saudis and Israel, broke off talks in advance of what Times reporters still can’t bring themselves to call an illegal war of aggression.

This, despite the paper having reported on multiple occasions that U.S. intelligence agencies routinely, consistently report that Iran has not been trying to develop nuclear weapons for going on 30 years, since the late Ayatollah Khamenei proscribed the pursuit on religious grounds. More likely they’ve not been serious about it since overthrowing the U.S.-backed Shah, who actually was pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Which may in fact be why our governments never since trusted the Islamic regime on the issue.

In any event, the drumbeat of “Iran must never be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons” makes about as much sense as a “Weldon must never be allowed to write something without swearing” mantra does. We were never gonna fucking do it anyway.

So whatever tepid support this criminal war has enjoyed can be ascribed to the failure of more or less fact-based outlets like The Times to vociferously counter government claims or suggestions or hints that the Ayatollahs have or had or wanted to have a nuclear weapons program, and of course the reactionary media’s hysterical insistence, in lockstep with the GOP position, that they’ve been a few weeks or a few months away from building a nuke for 45 years now.

Times reporters obviously aren’t alone in promulgating vapid or counterfactual coverage of the U.S. regime and its escapades, but they are among the more important mainstream drivers of reporting on myriad regime-related issues. So it still matters when they fuck up.

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Shockingly, the three U.S. “negotiators” didn’t even last a full day before they gave up and left for home. Gene Weingarten, a former Washington Post columnist who runs an excellent newsletter, says he asked a friend why the US didn’t send an actual diplomat, in the person of Marco Polio, instead of the three clowns who went.

My friend said: “Rubio’s a clown, too.”

“Not as much, maybe?”

“The man is walking around in shoes that don’t fit him. He is literally a clown.”

Touché.

And speaking of the Post, here’s the headline they ran over the story about the dipshits walking away from the meetings: “Direct U.S.-Iran talks fail to reach resolution after lengthy negotiation.”

Lengthy negotiation! The situations aren’t exactly analogous, but my first thoughts went to Jimmy Carter’s Camp David Accords, which involved years of facilitating negotiations between the PLO and Israel, and George Mitchell’s years facilitating the British-Irish negotiations which led to the Good Friday accords.

And even though Kissinger’s Vietnam negotiations were mostly a years-long fraud aimed at prolonging the carpet-bombing of Vietnam and neighbors, they did ultimately conclude in an agreement—even if one that probably could have been reached in less than a day if the U.S. had been realistic about the outcome.

Anyway. 20 fucking hours. The Post still has some good reporters left, and they’re pushing the limits of the paper’s new role as state media, but they want to keep their jobs and they’re forced to treat the regime and their own editors as credible. So no mention of the massively-conflicted, non-diplomatic, lying scumbot component of the diplomatic mission, or the other one’s willingness to say and do basically anything that furthers his political ambitions.

And oh yeah, there’s the treatment of Trump’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz unless Iran opens it as just more unpredictable diplomacy. And everybody’s still good with calling bygones about the committed war crimes and the threatened genocide.

Well, we were already in the flailing failing empire chapters anyway. Those can last for decades, so most people of a certain age who sort of mourn the old asshole empire will be dead before it eventually falls.

Music

Not much today.

The Weather Station, “Mirror”

Nilüfer Yanya, “midnight sun”

Your Smith, “The Spot”

BIG SPECIAL, “DIG! & FOR THE BIRDS”

And that, Comrades in Irreality, is all I got. If you like it, please let me know and share it around. And as always, please consider subscribing if you’ve not already had that moment.

Be well, take care.