As I write this, Fox News has reported, White House Swipes at Netanyahu With Tweet of Iran Bomb Diagram. I’m sure that Friday afternoon’s panel discussion on the Republican propaganda network will be filled with outrage. After all: how dare the President of the United States make fun of the King of the Republican Party, Benjamin Netanyahu (who recently unseated Vladimir Putin, who is now just the authoritarian man-crush of the party)?

The story starts back in 2012, when Netanyahu came to the United Nations to talk about the threat of Iran getting a nuclear bomb. And as proof, he apparently got his four year old grandson to make a drawing of a bomb that looks like something out of a Looney Tunes cartoon. And there he is in the picture drawing a red line on it as if to say, “Danger, Will Robinson!” It was when he claimed that the summer of 2013 was absolutely, positively the last chance the world had to stop Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. Of course, I recently discussed just how seriously we should take his pronouncements, Netanyahu’s Long History of Being Wrong. But hey, a cartoon bomb. A red line. These things must be taken seriously! Of course, the Obama administration wasn’t too happy at the time.

So it isn’t surprising that now that the Iran nuclear framework is in place and a deal looks like it is going to come to pass (as long as the Democrats don’t destroy it), the Obama administration would take to a little payback. And what payback it is! They tweeted out the following image that is quite brilliant:

Zack Beauchamp at Vox has noted that, The White House’s Netanyahu-Trolling Cartoon Is Pretty Misleading. But that headline itself is misleading. It just refers to the fact that this simple cartoon doesn’t correctly summarize the agreement. But he admits:

And let’s not forget: the point of the cartoon is to be simplistic. It is a parody of Netanyahu’s ridiculous “argument” that his cartoon bomb picture somehow proved that Iran was on the verge of having a nuclear weapon. What the administration has produced is far more nuanced and accurate than that.

To me, the most important part of the image is the pair of scissors. If we take Netanyahu’s image as reality (and we shouldn’t), then this deal snips off that lit fuse. No one is claiming that this deal will stop Iran from ever getting a nuclear weapon. But it will slow any such efforts. So that’s a good thing, right? Well, apparently not — at least for Netanyahu. And that’s interesting coming from the leader of the only country in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons — and lots of them.

Troll on, White House! Troll on!

Ed Kilgore wrote kind of a boring post about why it is that the Washington press made a bigger deal of Rand Paul’s predictable announcement that he was running for president than they did about Ted Cruz’s equally predictable announcement that he was running. Not mentioned is just the feeling that Cruz is such a loon that he can’t win. I always think that argument is terrifying, because people said much the same thing about Ronald Reagan. I would never count Cruz out. But the media thinks he’s a nonstarter (they are probably right), and so they don’t much care that he’s running for president. But Kilgore focuses on what is probably the bigger issue.

Kilgore wrote, Libertarianism With a Human Face. He quotes David Frum correctly noting that libertarianism appeals to mainstream media because it is “socially permissive, fiscally cautious.” This is the core of my indictment of the supposedly liberal media. Even in Eric Alterman’s classic What Liberal Media? he notes that the claim that the media are liberally biased on social issues is largely true. It isn’t that they go out of their way to be biased, it is just that everyone they know — including conservatives — are socially liberal. The Koch Brothers don’t actually care about same sex marriage and reproductive rights.

This is why I devalue social issues. The policies that the vast majority of people care about are bread-and-butter issue. Abortion and marriage are things that happen rarely in people’s lives. But they have to eat each day; they have to pay the rent each month. So the fact that the rich have managed, over the last last 70 years to make the whole political debate in this country to be about non-bread-and-butter issue is really an amazing defeat for democracy. Regardless of whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in power, the rich still win.

And it is doubtless the case that the greatest weapon that the rich have in their fight against democracy is the media who often discount the thoughts of the social conservatives, even while they serve up a constant diet of neoliberal policies designed to vilify the government and argue in favor of privatizing all services. If there is one thing in American media coverage that isn’t even questioned, it is that charter schools are a great thing and “school choice” is just common sense. And as all of this is taken for granted, never do we discuss the egregiously unequal way that we fund education.

And why is that? It is because the major media players who bring us their “objective news” are upper middle and upper class reporters and editors. They may not think of themselves as elites, but they are precisely the kind of people who Anand Giridharadas had in mind when he said:

But of course these media figures think they totally know what’s going on. And that’s a big part of the problem. The way that American politics is now divided, they can look at their socially liberal and economically conservative viewpoints and think that they are just telling it like it is. But what they are really doing is what the privileged have been doing for thousands of years: they are seeing what is good for them as being what is generally good. So of course they think that Rand Paul has a real chance to become president. They are his constituency.

See Also

Serious Centrist Saletan’s Selfishness
The People Don’t Care About Gridlock
Professional vs Regular Moderates
The “Moderate” Voter and the Selfish Pundit

This most recent case of John T Booker Jr is just amazing in being like pretty much every other FBI arrest of a home grown terrorist: it starts and ends with the FBI. John Eligon at The New York Times managed to report on the whole thing as though he were totally unaware of the FBI’s history regarding these things, Two Kansas Men Charged in Suicide Attack Plot at Fort Riley. Actually, there is just one man: Booker. The other is a friend who allegedly knew what Booker was up to. But this case is even more sad than usual. Booker, who is just 20 years old, is clearly mentally ill.

Early last year, he began making very public statements about wanting to commit Jihad. The FBI was well aware of this and had created a five-page report on him date 20 March 2014. He had signed up for the army, but apparently the FBI put an end to that. On 26 March 2014, he checked himself into a mental hospital. On 1 April 2014, Jana Winter at Fox News reported, FBI, Military Hunt Ex-Army Recruit Suspected of Plotting “Fort Hood-Inspired Jihad.” But the FBI didn’t think it was too big a deal because Booker had neither car nor guns. What he did have, however, was a death wish.

So in October 2014, the FBI sent an undercover agent to talk to Booker, who was, as he had been for years, still talking about Jihad. But just as impotent as ever, the FBI decided to set him up with what he needed to carry out his fantasy suicide plot. So without a hint of irony, Eligon reported, “Mr Booker agreed to let the informants make the car bomb and planned to drive it onto the base to detonate it, killing himself in the process, the complaint said.” So really, the extent of Booker’s involvement was his suicide.

The first indications of Booker’s behavior come around a year and a half ago — about the time of his 18th birthday. This also happens to be around the time that psychosis tends to start in people. Booker was very clearly a young man who needed psychiatric help. When he went to get help, the authorities seemed to have determined that he was not a threat to himself or anyone else and so he was released. But looking at his statements, I don’t see a young man who is really engaged or violent. I just see a young man who is suicidal. For example, “I am going to wage jihad and hopes that i die. I want to be with my lord so bad that I cry but I will miss you guys I am not going to lie. I wish I could give you guys more but I am just a guy who is so very poor. I am telling you I am so broke that my pockets are soreJ I cannot wait to go to the Prophet Muhammad’s(S) door and prank Isa bin Maryan and party so hard that it will rock Jannah to its core.”

But there was one government agency that cared about Booker: the FBI. They were there to listen to him and pretend to make his dreams a reality. The FBI did what actual Jihadists do in Palestine: find depressed or otherwise disaffected young people and get them to perform evil acts as they commit suicide. We should be better than this. John T Booker Jr deserved to get the help that he needed, not to be used as a pawn for the FBI to justify its budget. And US media should be wise to this game that the FBI plays. The New York Times headline should have been, “FBI Foils Another of Its Own Terror Plots.” And they might write another article, “Mental Healthcare Still Not Easily Available.”