Wag the Dog

Hüsker Dü said:
apple.news

Trump beats the drums of war for direct action in Venezuela — The Washington Post

The Trump administration has surged warships, fighter jets and troops to the Caribbean for drug interdiction. Many see the ultimate goal as toppling Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
apple.news apple.news
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Drug interdiction. Keeping drugs and illegals off American soil. Promises made. Promise kept. So now that means he's starting a war?!
These drugs and the illegals bringing them onto US soil would both find a new home here. But you're cool with that right?!
Right.
 
pewpew said:
Drug interdiction. Keeping drugs and illegals off American soil. Promises made. Promise kept. So now that means he's starting a war?!
These drugs and the illegals bringing them onto US soil would both find a new home here. But you're cool with that right?!
Right.
Click to expand...
My nephew Dave was murdered by these drugs. This is not satire. I spoke to his dad the day after and let me just say that I think Trump and my brother talked because the President is doing what my brother wanted. Du Du is delusional and a jerk. Hakeem is saying that Trump is playing the biggest pay to play game ever. Well, when they & them had power, they paid out trillions. Now the shoe is on the other foot. Pay for play only works for those with the controls of the money. Dumb dumbs lost and with that, all the power. Now these losers are all in a hissy because they can't make money off drugs or human trafficking. No more money....
 
For years, the Epstein files were the nuclear weapon.

“Release the list.”
“Who’s on the flights?”
“No one is above the law.”

It wasn’t background noise.

It was the moral line.
The corruption apocalypse.
The promise that the swamp would finally be drained.

Then the documents started surfacing.

And the national emergency… moved.

From files
to Greenland
to trans sports saturation
to wall-to-wall ICE raids
to drug boats
to the next five-alarm fire.

It’s not subtle.

It’s not organic.

It’s Wag the Dog — the term popularized by the 1997 political satire film about manufacturing a crisis to distract from a presidential scandal.

When scrutiny threatens power, escalate something louder.

You don’t suppress the dangerous story.

You bury it under spectacle.

Because attention is finite.

And outrage is movable.

Look at the rhythm.

Epstein getting too hot?
Flood the zone with Venezuelan drug boats.

Headlines secured?
Pivot hard to ICE raids.

Immigration coverage starts generating sympathy instead of fury?
Raise the temperature somewhere else.

Iran.
China.
Cuba.
An external adversary.

Not because those issues are imaginary.

Because they’re useful.

Because they’re loud.

Because they force the entire national conversation to change.

This is the part that matters.

The right doesn’t just shift the narrative to keep its own voters aligned.

It shifts the narrative to exhaust everyone.

Cable panels pivot.
The left scrambles to respond.
Social feeds erupt.

We never finish the previous conversation.

And finishing the previous conversation would rarely go in their favor.

So it cannot be allowed to finish.

Now zoom back to Epstein.

A billionaire sex trafficker with global connections.
A mysterious death in federal custody.
A convicted accomplice moved to a luxury prison.
Flight logs involving powerful figures.
Allegations of blackmail.
Sealed documents.

If even a fraction implicates elected officials, it’s generational corruption.

And yet the right-wing media ecosystem never let its audience sit with that long enough for moral gravity to take hold.

Instead?

Escalation.

We’ve seen this before.

After January 6th, when attention could have stayed on fake electors and coordinated efforts to overturn certified results…

The focus pivoted to the “unfair treatment” of rioters.

Grandmothers.
Tourists.
Political prisoners.

From systemic subversion
to grievance theater.

Wag the dog.

Here’s the experiment.

If Barack Obama had multiple photos with Epstein…
If Hillary Clinton had publicly praised him…
If sealed filings mentioned a Democratic president in proximity to that network…

Would conservative media be talking about trans women in sports?

Or would there be a permanent Epstein countdown clock?

You know the answer.

This isn’t about declaring guilt.

It’s about proportionality.

There are photographs of Trump with Epstein.
There are public quotes.
There are longstanding allegations — never fully investigated, never exhaustively cleared.

Yet we hear the argument that if there were things in the files that truly implicated Trump, they'd be leaking out. But the allegations don't even get investigated so they remain allegations, which do leak out.

And instead of relentless scrutiny…

We got migration.

From files
to culture war
to immigration
to whatever spikes next.

The deal-breaker for MAGA never arrives if attention never settles.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth.

The MAGA mind is heavily inoculated against counter-arguments. Facts bounce. Context bounces. Institutions are suspect by default.

But pattern recognition is harder to block.

When someone on the right sees the sequence — scandal approaches, outrage spikes elsewhere, spotlight shifts — it creates cognitive dissonance.

Because just like you and me, once they see it…

They can’t unsee it.

And that’s where the erosion begins.

Not a dramatic conversion.
Not a viral moment.

Just a crack.

Then another.

Because if the bonfire keeps changing direction every time scrutiny gets too close to power…

Eventually, even loyal viewers start asking why.

Relentless messaging that the left is destroying America.
Relentless insistence that you are the only one awake.
Relentless activation of the protector instinct.

And whenever accountability drifts too near the center?

Wag the dog.

Start another fire.

Keep it burning at full throttle.

Exhaust everyone.

Because exhausted people don’t finish arguments.

They move on.

Watch what disappears the next time a new national emergency explodes across your screen.

It probably wasn’t resolved.

It was replaced.

__________

Mike McCready
 
We won't forget!

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From The Guardian today --

…. parents had just dropped their children off for class on Saturday morning when they found themselves racing back to school gates, as bombs began to fall across the country in a joint US-Israel attack.

At one elementary school, according to Iran’s state-controlled media, they arrived to find devastation. At least 100 children had been killed in the strike on Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ school in Minab, southern Iran, the Mizan news agency reported, with dozens more unaccounted for.
In one video circulating on social media, purportedly showing the immediate aftermath of the strike, smoke rises from the burnt-out walls, and debris lies spread across the road. Hundreds of onlookers gathered at the site, some in obvious distress. Screams can be heard in the background.

The report of the bombing, its death toll and the video’s source could not immediately be independently verified by the Guardian. Persian factchecking service Factnameh was able to cross-reference the video with other photographs of the school site, and concluded that the video was authentic. Reuters said it had also verified the footage as being from the school.

Hossein Kermanpour, spokesperson for Iran’s health ministry, said in a post to X that the bombing of the school was “the most bitter news” of the conflict so far. “God knows how many more children’s bodies they will pull from under the rubble.”

The school appears to be adjacent to a Revolutionary Guards barracks. If the death toll is confirmed, the school bombing would be the largest mass casualty event of the US-led attack so far.
 
From Fox News this morning --

Three U.S. service members were killed and five others were seriously wounded as part of Operation Epic Fury, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) said Sunday morning.

In addition, several others sustained minor shrapnel injuries and concussions and are in the process of being returned to duty, CENTCOM announced.

"The situation is fluid, so out of respect for the families, we will withhold additional information, including the identities of our fallen warriors, until 24 hours after next of kin have been notified," CENTCOM said.
 
Let me see if I understand the point of this war -- we killed an old, diseased conspiracy nut killing his citizens in the streets and running his country into the ground in the hopes that the cowards in his government who now hold the new power will somehow correct the country's ills. Did I get that right?
 
Found on FB --

Jonathan Larsen reports on Substack:

A combat-unit commander told non-commissioned officers at a briefing Monday that the Iran war is part of God’s plan and that Pres. Donald Trump was “anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to Earth,” according to a complaint by a non-commissioned officer.

From Saturday morning through Monday night, more than 110 similar complaints about commanders in every branch of the military had been logged by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF).

The complaints came from more than 40 different units spread across at least 30 military installations, the MRFF told me Monday night.
The MRFF is keeping the complainants anonymous to prevent retribution by the Defense Department. The Pentagon did not immediately respond to my request for comment.
 
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