Trump kills ISIS leader with his (tiny) bare hands!
The U.S. military, apparently with considerable assistance from the Russian and Turkish governments that recently sat down to divvy up the territory which used to belong to the Kurds, before Donald Trump abandoned them to mass slaughter, has found and killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Needless to say, Trump is telling the world that he personally did this, and taking full credit for it.
This is the same Trump who last year criticized the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, on the grounds that it “should have” been accomplished sooner — as if he knew a damn thing about military operations or military intelligence.
This is the same Trump who mocked the bin Laden raid’s strategist, a U.S. admiral, by calling him a “Hillary Clinton fan” — as though he himself hadn’t been a huge Clinton fan and backer for years, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, public praise and political endorsements, and a much-ballyhooed wedding invitation.
Trump, in his official White House boast, placed great emphasis on the idea that al-Baghdadi died screaming and whimpering, thereby highlighting his cowardice in the face of a stronger opponent and personal risk — as though Trump himself had not spent the past three years in effect screaming and whimpering, or alternately groveling on his knees, before every global thug who demanded anything of him, invariably in exchange for nothing but a televised handshake.
Is it a good thing that al-Baghdadi is dead? Of course. Was it a good thing that Osama bin Laden was killed? Of course. Which progressive authoritarian puppet happened to be president at the time is of little consequence. There is no U.S. president who, faced with the same conditions and military information, would not have okayed such a mission. Nor is there any potential president who would not do so. Hillary Clinton would have done it. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would do it. Bernie Sanders would do it. And please don’t object that the socialists AOC and Bernie would have ended U.S. military engagement in the Middle East and would therefore have lost this opportunity. First of all, isn’t such a disengagement exactly what Donald Trump has been promising and boastfully advocating for years, right up to last week? Secondly, isn’t a president, once in office, inevitably hampered by practical difficulties which make such an immediate disengagement an unrealizable pipe dream? Thirdly, what president would not find the political optics of an occasional glory moment, such as the killing of a major terrorist, too great an opportunity for ego-gratification to pass up?
Those phony situation room photos are awfully impressive to the weak-minded masses, are they not? A bunch of people not involved in the action watch an event unfold on TV, and then distribute pictures of themselves watching TV as though they were the heroes on the screen. And their tribal dupes think, “Wow, doesn’t our leader look brave and powerful?” No, he looks like a guy posing for a picture while watching television.
