By Denny Gulino
THE WHITE HOUSE (MaceNews) – Okay, bashing President Trump is thriving these days, a niche of success in a news business that is largely on life support, a tempting refuge even for reporters who try to preserve the neutrality that has long been the purists’ worthy ideal.
Does reflex criticism contaminate ordinary skepticism? Is a career Trump basher ever right in the eyes of Trump supporters?
The turmoil within the Trump supporting establishment, as Fox’s Tucker Carlson dissents from the adulation and says killing the Quds chief was a bad idea, is a case study in tortured loyalties. Google his name to see details.
While you’re Googling, you might check out an op-ed written by a Lake Forest College professor who seems to know what he’s talking about. Of course his credibility was instantly called into question when Al Jazeera, the news service that is not on the White House must-read list, published his opinions while not necessarily subscribing to them.
Yet the question of how will history portray the last few days will have many preliminary answers and his views will certainly not easily be dismissed.
The events that seemed to bring the Middle East if not the world to the brink of a real war were punctuated by what has disdainfully been dismissed as Iran’s big fireworks display Tuesday night. Whether the guided missiles were purposely misguided to avoid the loss of life and so avoid visits from U.S. B-52s may never be settled.
The events whiplashed markets in the short term, raised longer-term questions like that of the “legality” of killing Iran’s top general, or of threatening to bomb a country’s cultural treasures, and finally have provided another facet of the Trump administration for examination by 2020 voters as well as historians.
As this is being written here in the White House press room, there are reports of explosions in Iraq’s fortified Green Zone. No matter, no one thinks the Iran-Iraq-U.S. landscape will stay smoke-free for long.
Prof. Ahmad Sadri is of Iranian extraction. His profile says he has been the James P. Gorter Professor of Islamic orld Studies since 2007. He has a twin brother who is an Iranian sociologist.
In short, he writes that when Iranian theocrats were on the ropes Trump saved them by burying all the popular and intensifying expressions of domestic unrest beneath a tsunami of reflex patriotism.
“Then came a strong, bracing wind to fill the sails of the Iranian theocrats and lift them from their doldrums,” he wrote of the U.S. drone directed to take out the general. “Thanks to Trump’s bumbling cluelessness, the extremely unpopular supreme leader and his unsavoury lieutenants are now tearfully leading huge crowds of mourners. People once again are chanting “Death to America” like they mean it.”
Sadri’s not the only one writing that, of course. But he couches it in such a mass of detail that he infuses the views with the authenticity of someone very much enmeshed in Iran’s day-to-day realities.
That domestic unrest in Iran led to hundreds of demonstrators killed, 7,000 arrested and government officials, who silenced the Internet, bragging about their efficiency in quashing the counter revolution instead of bragging about how they were helping the man in the street.
So is it simply Trump bashing to raise questions about the prudence and wisdom of killing the Quds chief? Or is it part of the discussion and self-examination an American society must go through in figuring out the difference between right and wrong, between national interest and incoherent shots in the dark?
Contact this reporter: denny@macenews.com