Breaking

Stephen Green just posted at Instapundit a claim the Iranian embassy in Copenhagen has taken down the current Iran flag and raised the sun and lion flag of the Shah's regime. There is video but it is unclear and could be faked.

Is it vandalism, a defection, or the start of something bigger, like regime change? As another posted at that same site, the key will be to see if it happens elsewhere and how broadly the change shows up.

This could be a hoax, could be a defection, could be vandalism by anti-regime Irani emigrants, or it could be, as the song says, "the start of something big."

Something like this happened in London and the Brit police arrested the protestor who made the switch.

As the "orange man" likes to say, "We'll see what happens."

Later ... It turns out the old flag was raised by a protestor who was arrested by Danish police. 

Aside, as I typed "Danish police" I got a mental image of a uniformed dude guarding sweet rolls in a bakery. Our language is funny that way.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

I write to wish COTTonLINE readers a happy St. Paddy's Day. Wear your green, avoid the green beer.

As I've probably mentioned before, my university decided spring break would always include St. Patrick's Day. They did this for a very good reason. 

Before this policy was instituted, with students on campus on March 17, the kids took it as a challenge to see how drunk they could get. If we had no deaths from alcohol poisoning, it wasn't from lack of trying.

Fearful of damage suits and bad publicity, the U concluded whatever students did when school wasn't in session wasn't their fault. There was going to be a weeklong spring break sometime anyway. Why not be sure that Get Drunk Day, as it became, occurred during spring break? And so it did.

My Scarpetta Review

We spent the last couple of nights binge watching the new Scarpetta on streaming. The other DrC has a good review of it on her website. 

I have a couple of things to add to what she wrote. I found the most interesting plot ‘gimmick’ was the nerd niece's dead wife brought back to life as an AI realtime onscreen voice and video presence. Her’s was by far the most charming role in the series, and very nearly its only sympathetic character. 

Everyone else was flawed enough to be off-putting, while all were competent-to-varying-degrees in their careers. I wonder if that is how Kidman experiences her off-screen life?

[Spoiler Alert] The series - nominally a whodunnit - violated one of that genre’s basic plot “rules.” It turned out the perp was someone whose only presence before the denouement was a one-line walk-on. There was no way for the viewer to have Holmes’ed it out.

I found the series shared a number of plotting flaws with Kidman’s earlier series, The Perfect Couple. My conclusion, she is a competent actress but I should avoid those of her future efforts in which she also has an off-camera role. These two examples of her notion of a good story left me irritated.

Iran's New Leader Gay?

The newly elected leader of Iran is Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the former Ayatollah recently killed in a bomb blast. It has been reported in several places that he was repeatedly treated for impotence in England.

The New York Post reports that President Trump has been briefed that although married with children, Mojtaba is gay. That was why his father preferred someone else as his successor. The White House was quite amused by this gossip. 

If this was alleged of the leader of any first world country, it would be mildly interesting. That it is alleged of the leader of a country in which homosexuality is a death penalty offense is massively ironic. NYP has some details about this supposed condition dating back to Mojtaba's childhood. 

Comments about karma are irresistible. Also ironic that in neighboring Afghanistan sex with pretty boys is very common for wealthy clan leaders. The bacha practice grossed out GI officers who had to liaise with the Afghan clans.

Huntington Smiles

Writing for the California Post, the new west coast edition of the New York Post, James Gagliano notes a disturbing pattern in recent unpleasant incidents here at home. He cites the attempted bombing of anti-Iran protests in NYC, the murder of an ROTC prof in Virginia, and the ramming/shooting attack of a synagogue in Michigan.

Note the common thread: All these attackers were either naturalized citizens or their offspring.

We steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that the terror threat within our borders is stoked from the outside, inspired by those who hate us and wish us dead.

Make no mistake — this is asymmetric warfare, and Iran is not its only driver.

The sooner we recognize that radical Islam has been at war with the West for far longer than anyone reading this has been alive, the sooner we can begin to better confront this threat.

Ah, there it is in that last sentence, the recognition of the thing most want desperately to forget. It’s the Long War - Samuel Huntington’s 1992 Clash of Civilizations. 

We in the West want to forget but they won’t let us, as 9/11 should have reminded. Intermittently hot and cold, it either began with the Crusades or continued with them.

It lives in the founding documents of Islam, and periodically flares up, as now. My mental model for it is quasi-medical. Islam treats Western culture as an irritating foreign object. 

Periodically it generates ‘antibodies’ and ‘white blood cells’ like the IRGC, ISIS, Hamas, al Qaeda, the Houthis and Hezbollah to attack and destroy the irritant (us, non-Islam). ‘Infection’ or ‘allergic reaction’ results, we then call it “war,” they’ve always been clear about that name.

Christianity and Islam are both Abrahamic schisms. That they went in different directions is no surprise, the first was founded by a preacher, the second by a soldier. We seek coexistence, they seek “Death to the Great Satan.” It’s “love thy neighbor” vs. “convert or die.”

Volunteers vs. Draftees

President Trump is discovering something President Putin has learned. Wars one fights with volunteer troops do not cause the same intense reaction at home as wars fought with drafted soldiers. There is an implicit understanding that volunteering for the military puts the volunteer in lethal harm’s way. 

Russians are not as crabby about the war in Ukraine as they were about that in Afghanistan. Seeing this Putin has gone to extreme lengths - big signing bonuses, get out of jail ‘cards’, etc. - to send only volunteers to the fight in Ukraine. Relatively few of the casualties have been people from the Moscow and St. Petersburg regions, where ethnic Russians predominate.

At this point in our history all of our military personnel are volunteers. Presidents are permitted to put them in harms way insofar as it is done judiciously, with care, and most important - successfully. 

Our losses to date in Iran do not yet equal the lives lost to violence on an average long weekend in Chicago, about which we shrug.

Detention a Win-Win

An archived article from The New Yorker discusses the Trump administration’s policy of detaining in custody those illegal immigrants who are up for deportation. As you might guess, the author doesn’t approve of this Stephen Miller-directed policy change.

The model is elegant in its simplicity. Being in the US as an illegal immigrant is preferable to life in one’s home country, but being in a US jail is likely not preferable to being sent home. That the incarceration is unpleasant is a feature, not a defect.

That simple truth encourages many so held to accept voluntary deportation as a “get out of jail free” card. The legal hassle is obviated and the desired end state is achieved thereby.

The Mixed Blessing of Hate

If the search engine is accurate, COTTonLINE has never once cited the work of New York Times columnist David French, in nearly 20 years of observing our nation’s geopolitical scene. The likely reason is that we’ve mostly disagreed with his views.

Today we remedy that shortcoming, citing this archived column (not behind NYT paywall). He writes with sadness about the degree of polarization in our political life, finding abundant hate on both sides. He correctly identifies Trump as a result of this hate, not its cause - an insight not original to French but accurate nevertheless.

He identifies the problem, sketches its magnitude and notes its uniqueness with some skill. What he does not do is map a path away from our current “hate-arama” To be fair to him, I am not at all certain such a path exists. 

One of the sometimes embarrassing aspects of human nature is the energizing aspects of hating enemies, real and imagined. In our “red in tooth and claw” history, it helped us to become the landside apex predator of this planet, a distinction very much still accurate. Carried over into politics it is obviously a mixed blessing.

We tease this trait with sports and school rivalries, and these sometimes boil over into on-field riots. Hate provides a boost in war-fighting situations, with which our history is replete. Politically, it is very likely helped by the increasingly multicultural nature of our decreasingly acculturated populace.

We have to hope the checks and balances built into our system by our prescient founders are up to the task of holding the polity together. And, as often noted, “hope” isn’t much of a plan.

Adding Kharg Island to the Shores of Tripoli

There is some talk the US may invade Iran's Kharg Island which is several miles off the coast and home to both military bases and Iran's primary oil shipment terminal. A shipborne Marine expeditionary force is en route and should be adequate to the task. 

Doing so would cripple the oil shipments which are Iran's primary source of foreign exchange. I imagine troops garrisoning the island would become targets for Iran's drone attacks. 

The plan could be to briefly imprison the island's Iranians, destroy the infrastructure, and leave after a couple of days before too many casualties accrue, while abandoning the prisoners in situ. This certainly fits within the parameters of our "no long, drawn-out wars" policy.

Schadenfreude

Here’s another quote from X, this one linked by Stephen Green posting at Instapundit. The author is Andrew Clark.

In 72 hours we went from:
Trump never expected the possibility of Hormuz closing,

To:
Trump was briefed Hormuz could close but riskily did it anyway,

To:
Trump bombed Kharg Island but it likely won’t force Iran to open the Strait.

To:
Iran opened the Strait.

Trump keeps exceeding media expectations. Imagine how frustrated they must feel, I’m loving the schadenfreude.

Someone Is Trying

Ed Driscoll, posting at Instapundit, links to a quote about the Trump foreign policy that is kinda wonderful. Exaggerated a bit? Sure, but kinda wonderful nonetheless. The author’s nom de X is Northern Barbarian, who writes:

You do get he's basically walking on water. Making every elected hack, bureaucrat and diplomat of the last 40 years or so look like dithering incompetent fools, when they weren't actively and despicably enabling said dictatorships, that is.

Could it all go wrong? Yeah. But for the first time since Ronald Reagan blew up the Soviet Union, someone's trying.

Oddly enough, Barack Obama was “trying” too, trying to turn Iran into an Islamic superpower. Fortunately, he failed because they flopped, even with his help and Valerie Jarrett's coaching. Electing as president someone who neither identified with, nor liked the US, turned out to be as dumb as it sounds when described accurately, as here. 

Saturday Snark

Iranian girls in 1974.

 Images courtesy of Power Line's The Week in Pictures

and its Comments section.

Images courtesy of Sarah Hoyt's

Miming While the World Burns.

An Organizational Immune Response

I just read a very interesting meditation on the sequential organizational response to someone pointing out an error in the organization’s work. Other than being a bit repetitious, it is excellent. 

Perhaps without intentionally doing so, it describes why over time organizations ossify and die. And why the people who compulsively point out errors may be just a bit autistic, if often in a good way.

The author ends up asking organizations to stop being defensive and correct noted errors. This may be a forlorn hope. He is, of course, pointing out a set of errors in how organizations respond to error correction, in the service of maintaining stability-at-all-costs.

Economic Exodus ... Continues

Victoria Taft, who does the weekly West Coast, Messed Coast column for PJ Media, has some interesting CA data. She writes:

Since Gavin Newsom's radical reign as governor began in 2019, an assortment of high-tech, founding Silicon Valley companies, retail outlets, and other companies have fled due to his and his party's greed. They include:

• McKesson
• Chevron
• In-N-Out Burger
• Tesla
• Charles Schwabe
• Palantir
• Toyota
• X
• Hewlett-Packard Enterprise
• Realtor.com
• SpaceX

She left out Yamaha, headed to GA. Many of these are really big firms. Driving big employers out of state is economic suicide. And yet ... CA Democrats persist.

Friday Snark

Images courtesy of Politico's

The Nation's Cartoonists on the Week in Politics.

Images courtesy of RealClearPolitics'

Cartoons of the Week.

The SAVE Dilemma

Two days ago we wrote about the SAVE act which aims to prevent non-citizens from voting, citizens from voting multiple times using false identities, and vote fraud generally. As we noted, most Americans favor the act's provisions, yet it hasn't passed thru Congress and ended up on the President's desk.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who favors SAVE, has said he hasn't the votes to pass it, and has been widely criticized for his comment. Writing for Hot Air, Duane Patterson does a good job of explaining why Thune is correct, concerning the "talking filibuster" ploy.

To pass it would require dumping the Senate's long-standing rule requiring a supermajority (60 votes) to shut off a filibuster. This the Republican majority could do with a simple 50+1 majority.

So why do quite a few senators refuse to take that step? Senators tend to be long-serving. Senators who are reelected even once serve during at least 3 presidential terms. They know it is likely they'll end up in the minority at some point and that the 60 vote rule is all that keeps a 'trifecta' administration* from going crazy and destroying the country, doing stuff like nationalizing all private property, or conversely banning abortions nationwide.

It seems Democrat senators are willing to act against majority opinion in this case because they know the issue isn't topmost in their voters' minds.

*My term for when one party has majorities in both houses of Congress and has the presidency.

Afterthought ... I'm certain it has occurred to many senators that one of the primary roles of the Senate is to keep US enacted policy in the middle of the ideological spectrum. To damp down extreme impulses that may temporarily electrify the populace.

The HOA Model

Richard Fernandez writes a column for PJ Media and blogs as wrechardthecat. Today he has an insight about Trump’s approach to foreign policy that I find useful and worth sharing with you.

Instead of invading hostile states with large ground forces, it has used a discontinuous series of actions to continuously nudge states in a preferred direction, rather like a tugboat pushing a ship rather than boarding it and seizing the helm. 

To use a construction industry metaphor, the Trump approach to regime change more closely resembles renovating and remodeling an old building rather than demolishing it and replacing it with a new structure.

We see this in Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran. We’ve tried nation-building and, since the World War II after-action clean-up ended, we haven’t been good at it. Trying something else makes perfect sense. 

Think of the new approach as “post-Pottery Barn,” we don’t quite break it, and don’t end up owning it. It more nearly resembles the action of a muscular HOA, coercing a misbehaving homeowner to stop being a neighborhood nuisance.

Consequential

Writing for the Brussels Signal, Canadian essayist Conrad Black notes that Trump has been taking down the few allies Russia and China have attracted. He concludes:

No one should underestimate the psychological and strategic importance of the disappearance as Russo-Chinese allies in the first half of this year of Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, on the heels of Syria. This is a seismic shift that has gone largely unnoticed and is not over.

Unnoticed only in the West, I might add. Be certain it has not escaped the attention of both Moscow and Beijing. Trump is altering the worldwide balance of power.

A man in a hurry, Trump bids fair to become the most consequential president since Ronald Reagan, perhaps even since Lyndon Johnson. Like Trump, both of those were also widely hated.

Defying the Popular Will

COTTonLINE readers obviously follow politics so you know polling shows the SAVE act now stuck in Congress has wide public support. Most Republicans, over two-thirds of Independents, and half of Democrats - something like two-thirds of all voters - favor requiring ID to vote and limiting voting to US citizens.

And yet Senate Democrats are refusing to vote for something everyone admits is widely popular. If you needed proof that our government is not always responsive to voter demands, you have it here. 

That refusal is rich fodder for conspiracy theorists, playing right into their hands. It is the Deep State in action, forced out from behind the bureaucratic 'curtain' behind which it normally operates.

What actually fuels the Democrats' stonewalling of SAVE is the "soft bigotry of low expectations" in action. They distrust the motivation of a large percentage of their voters. 

They fear many of their voters will be dissuaded by the minor effort of showing citizenship to register, making voting too much hassle to bother with. Actually their fears are probably baseless as their typical voter is no longer Joe Sixpack, more likely to be someone with blue hair and a B.A. in Non-binary Studies.

MAGA Not Split

Is the MAGA movement split over the attack on Iran? Power Line's John Hinderaker examines the evidence and concludes it is not. 

Recent polling shows strong unified support for our actions in Iran. Hinderaker has the polling numbers for you. 

I believe the opinion you read claiming such a split is wishful thinking on the part of left-leaning journalists and op-ed writers. These cite the viewers of Tucker Carlson and Candice Owens as their evidence. 

Those two are outliers on the right in much the same way that Sen. John Fetterman is an outlier on the left. I bet Fetterman has followers who are MAGA but who like that he agrees with their program. Who's to say Carlson and Owens don't have a bunch of lefties who follow them for the same reasons?

Polling Hinderaker cites implies strongly the "crossover followers" hypothesis could be true.