Elaine Chao, #Trump's Transportation Sec, has also received $ from the Iranian org. on US terrorist list for 15 yrs. pic.twitter.com/e4zPJhOOFX
— Bahman Kalbasi (@BahmanKalbasi) November 29, 2016
… Joining Trump faves Giuliani and Bolton, apparently. I know almost nothing of the MKO, but I do remember the Unification Church (aka ‘Moonies’) spending a supercarrier of money courting various GOP machers during the Reagan Administration — with results somewhere between the farcical and the sinister, depending on your paranoia levels. (Figures that the Bush Crime Family would be the main U.S. beneficiary, of course.)
Getting sucked into Iran’s internal politics seems a lot more dangerous — not least because Trump’s potential cabinet picks have nowhere near the level of political experience of the foreign policy people around Reagan (and back in the 1980s, who could’ve imagined that phrase being written in earnest truth?).
Anybody with more knowledge want to predict whether these “approaches” have the potential for genuine danger? Or is it just more would-be “global leaders” throwing their money down another Trump/GOP rathole?
Trump's pick for Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao called for "regime change" in #Iran last year during a MKO cult gathering in pairs. pic.twitter.com/pcwYVryLl0
— Sadegh Ghorbani (@GhorbaniSadegh) November 29, 2016
(Last word is a typo for ‘Paris’, I think.)
@lrozen I see, but it really looks like that MKO has a say in Trump transition team! Giuliani, Bolton, Gingrich, Townsend…
— Sadegh Ghorbani (@GhorbaniSadegh) November 29, 2016
rikyrah
We gonna discuss Ferret Head trying to get around the FEDERAL LAW that the Secretary of Defense being a civilian?
Adam L Silverman
Its the MEK, which is the acronym for the Mujahadeen e Khalq. Here’s a backgrounder:
http://www.cfr.org/iran/mujahadeen-e-khalq-mek/p9158
Adam L Silverman
The MEK are basically nuts. They don’t have a lot of power left other than money. And they’ve been renting former elected and appointed officials in the US, and a few other places, to lobby on their behalf. This includes Democrats like Governor Dean. They apparently pay well, but I’m not sure what they’re really going to do in terms of influencing US Iran policy. I’m not sure that the people that want to see the P5+1 Agreement with Iran overturned really need any prodding.
mkro
So, what is the over / under on # of months before we enter into war with Iran ?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@rikyrah: given the alternatives, and how much crazy he already has in his circle (Flynn, McFarlane, just to stick to FP– the list of possibilities for DHS is pretty scary too), I’m okay with Mattis.
hilzoy
They have been doing this (i.e., throwing money at US politicians) for years now, and it’s not just Republicans. E.g., Howard Dean took their money. See here (from now):
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/giuliani-mek-terrorist-group-money-bolton-iran-214479
or here (2013):
http://inthesetimes.com/article/15315/congress_members_attend_mek_iranian_confabtl
or here (2012):
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/sep/21/iran-mek-group-removed-us-terrorism-list
Just a vile group.
Mary G
This dickhead.
Mother Jones: Darrell Issa is Suing His Defeated Opponent for Libel
The article has a picture of Issa with a giant painting of Ronald Reagan. He really was Trump before Trump. Applegate has already announced for 2018. The margin is down to less than 2,000 votes for 2016. We can make that up, You will be sick of me harping about this, but sorry not sorry.
Mary G
@Mary G: This, also too:
John Revolta
Fasten yer seat belts, kiddies………….
Major Major Major Major
@John Revolta: and what are we going to do exactly? It’s not like we can justify an invasion without completely faked doomsday scenarios backed up by a media-complicit 25/8 propaganda system we are fucked.
Mnemosyne
Apropos of nothing, I ended up buying an Ancestry DNA kit over Thanksgiving weekend because it was only $69 (plus tax and shipping). Now I have to register it, work up a good loogie, and mail it in.
Cacti
Turns out Jeff Sessions doesn’t just dislike people of color.
He also has a hate-on for disabled school children.
It’s gonna be a long 4-years.
clay
Hmmm…. In the brief portion of his rally that I watched before I came to my senses, Trump declared that he was against the US being involved in regime change. Now, I know full well his words don’t mean shit… but he seems pretty consistent about being an isolationist.
Cacti
@Mnemosyne:
I did one last year, and was genuinely surprised to learn I was 2% Iberian and 2% Italian.
Major Major Major Major
@Cacti: you know who else hated the disabled.
clay
@Mary G: Geez… You know who should sue her opponent for libel? Hillary Clinton, that’s who. So much of what Trump said about her was so verifiably false that I think she’d have a pretty solid case.
John Revolta
@Major Major Major Major: Iran: most dangerous country in the world or most dangerous country in history?
Hkedi [Kang T. Q.]
@mkro: I’d say two possible over/under numbers. Either 20 or 44, to extract maximum political hay from either the mid-terms or the next presidental election. It worked for Bush in the short term.
cokane
criticizing the Moonies as crazy is a weird form of mainstream religious privilege. They’re all bullshit from the outside
Brachiator
@Major Major Major Major:
A foreign policy based on lies and belligerence creates instability, and adds to the possibility of horrible errors.
Trump seems to be taken with his Defense nominee’s supposed nickname Mad Dog, cause you know a Mad Dog is tough. But this guy doesn’t seem to be as much of a dope as the other nominees.
But I fear that Trump would be misled into letting Israel attack Iran. The US could stay out of it even though they had instigated the action.
Steve in the ATL
Got home from the airport a little after midnight. Had to take care of the dogs, then repair the washing machine. Then my wife dumped a pile of tangled necklaces on the table and said she had to have one of them for her luncheon/roast on Friday. Anyway, that’s the long winded answer to your question “why are you drinking Malbec at 2:30 am?” Good thing I’ve been on the west coast all week so I could stay awake this late. Well, that and the Colombian bam bam.
James Powell
The US will not and likely cannot “stay out of” anything that happens in the Middle East. The US has been deeply involved in nearly everything that his happening there for the last 50 years or so. And when I say “deeply involved” I definitely to not mean “controlling events” or anything else that suggests success.
Steve in the ATL
@Cacti:
And then you got kicked out of your country club for being too ethnic?
Cacti
@Steve in the ATL:
Shhhhhh!
They haven’t heard.
Steve in the ATL
@Cacti: that certainly explains your handicap.
Matt McIrvin
@Cacti: My sister took one from, I think, 23AndMe, and the one surprise was a few-percent match for Jewish ancestry. Apparently on my mother’s side, because my dad took the same test and got none of that. It did reveal that the usual white-family legends of Native American ancestry were, as is often the case, probably bogus.
Of course, what these tests really show is just that you’ve got some partial genetic match for whatever individuals they’ve got in their database of that group, which is not quite the same thing as saying what fraction of your ancestry is of that group. There’s a lot of genetic variation within groups which could confound things.
Adria McDowell (formerly LurkerExtraordinaire)
@Brachiator: I could swear Trump is the only one who calls Mattis “Mad Dog.” Mattis’ nickname is the Warrior Monk.
Trump is stupid.
daveNYC
@Brachiator: Iran is a bit easier to argue against than Iraq. Partly because it’s a much bigger and harder target (so the Pentagon probably won’t be super psyched about the idea), and partly because Iraq was a complete shit-show which means we can say that Trump doesn’t care about ISIS or Assad. Not that those are logically the best arguments against it, there’s plenty better, but they’re probably the ones that would get the most traction.
@rikyrah: This is actually something that congress can overrule. I think they did it for Marshal.
Ian
Between that totally F*ed wikipedia page and the tweeter talking about “pairs” I am not sure I trust any of the sources quoted. MEK (not MKO) is a terrorist organization that claims to have laid down arms but clearly has not.
Barney
I worry the MEK could be Iran’s Ahmed Chalabi (not that he wasn’t already “Iran’s”, in a sense) – the organisation that persuades a gullible American White House and hangers-on that they know the true feelings of Iranians, and have excellent human intelligence (“The Best. You won’t believe how good this intelligence is. You’ll get tired of receiving such great intelligence”), so that Trump’s know-nothings launch a Bay of Pigs style attempt to overthrow the regime. With Mattis widely described as a ‘hawk’ on Iran, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.
NotMax
Much more commonly known as MEK.
Some day (perhaps in a hundred years or so) truths will emerge about Camp Ashraf and the role of Bulgaria during the U.S. occupation, during which the entire contingent of Bulgarian forces was essentially exclusively assigned by the U.S. provisional command to work with MEK under the guise of patrol and protection.
Another Scott
@Mnemosyne: I did the 23-and-me version about a year ago. It’s interesting, but I wouldn’t take the results as gospel. It got my ear lobes wrong, and didn’t get that I’m almost certainly 25% Greek. Dunno if I’m just an outlier or what, but this stuff is still in its infancy.
Have fun!
Cheers,
Scott.
Botsplainer
@Another Scott:
Or somebody within two generations wasn’t up front about who a parent is, which is a lot more common than you think….
Another Scott
@Brachiator:
Indeed.
Trump is a bully and a coward who has shown he can be goaded on Twitter. He’ll be dealing with people who don’t respond well to empty threats, and who can see Trump’s all-too-evident flaws. International relations isn’t the same as negotiating for a restaurant in a hotel or bullying neighbors of a golf course… Once Trump is shown to the world to be an empty suit when it comes to doing what he has promised, the world will become an even more dangerous place. Look at what happened with Obama’s “red line” in Syria (even though the result with Kerry and Putin’s help was a great success). The people around Trump will try to Gulf of Tonkin-ize and Axis-of-Evil-ize anything into an excuse to do what they want, and he won’t have the smarts to try to stop them.
McConnell’s comments yesterday about the Iran Sanctions Act (or whatever the proper name is) that was passed the Senate 99:0 yesterday shows that he’s (still) fully on-board with the jingoistic bluster as well. Their insistence in continuing to demonize the Iranians is maddening and dangerous.
Maybe Trump won’t get us into a war with Iran, or give Bibi a green light to go ahead on his own, but these things shouldn’t even be possibilities. Politics has failed if war is the easy result.
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Botsplainer: Sure, that’s a possibility, but I don’t think that’s it. :-) My dad did the same test a few years earlier. I’ll have to find the time to do a detailed comparison of our numbers.
Cheers,
Scott.
Dadadadadadada
@clay: A certain other GOP “president” who handily lost the popular vote and yet managed to sneak into office on an electoral-college technicality also steadfastly claimed to be an isolationist opposed to American interference in foreign governance.
How did that turn out?
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So ISIS is in Syria, so the Trumpkins and the Commander in Cheat want to go after Iran. Yep, it’s Republican stupid time cause all Muslims look the same.
Also, this will put into conflict with Russia since Iran is a Russian client state.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Dadadadadadada: Bush at 911 which gave him that +15 in the polls. Trump won’t have that when they push for funding the Iran War. Also I think the Saudi’s will oppose – there are a lot of Iranian sleeper agents in Saudi Arabia and Iran is a client state of Trump bro Putin. And of course there is Trump himself, since it’s not like he can rename the Iran “Trumpenstan The Awesome” it’s hard to see him getting worked up about lobby congress for the funding.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
But here is something else that shows the Trumpotarate live in a logic free world of their own – here are all these Republicans being photographed with Muslim woman who is lobbying them and narry a peep. This is the kind of thing they are worked up about but because it’s Republicans they refuse to see it. It’s bit like Nazi leaders hanging out with Jews.
Chris
@Barney:
Yes, that’s about right. I was going to respond that the MEK was more like Iran’s contras – a group of fucking psychos with no support in their home country and limited support even in the expat community, which nevertheless gets to present itself in the American media as the liberators of Iran because it has enough contacts in Washington.
From what I’ve read today, though, their efforts over the years have concentrated less and less on terrorism and more on simply convincing American and other Western politicians to do their job for them. So yeah, they went from being the contras of Iran to the Ahmed Chalabis of Iran.
Additional fun fact: they’re Marxists. Marxist with a dash of islamist, IIRC. Of all the fucking people for the U.S. to want to support.
clay
@Dadadadadadada: Bush (if I recall correctly — it has been quite a while) opposed “nation building” during the 2000 campaign, but never presented himself as an isolationist… not in terms of using American power to influence foreign events and certainly not on trade.
Trump, as I noted, is an inconsistent, lying motherfucker…. but if there’s been one solid throughline during his campaign it’s that the U.S. needs to wall itself off from the outside world. And he doubled down on this last night. So it’s hard to see Trump trying to start a war with Iran, unless there’s some inciting incident in which case all bets are off.
Chris
@clay:
Bush didn’t like Clinton’s involvement in the world’s little-people-problems, like peacekeeping in Yugoslavia or getting involved in the Israel-Palestine peace process. His original plan was to pull back from, as you said, the “nation-building” crap and focus on great power relations again, with Russia and China. Specifically, he gave every sign of wanting to restart the arms race, with investment in missile defense systems and in a new generation of “bunker-busting” nukes.
The 9/11 attacks shifted his focus, but the contempt for nation-building stayed with him, as you saw with the absolute lack of any planning for postwar Iraq and the refusal to even acknowledge that it would be needed.
Another Scott
@Botsplainer: Also, too, I’ve got Greek feet. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
misterpuff
@Adria McDowell (formerly LurkerExtraordinaire): So, is he Obi Wan or Darth?
Starfish
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks, Adam.
Mnemosyne
@Another Scott:
Huh. I have feet that are very clearly Egyptian, but i don’t know of any non-European genetics.
Maybe this test will be interesting after all.
Ella in New Mexico
The MKO stuff recalls for me the days of “Iran-Contra”meddling in Central American affairs. Which–based on the lies and illegal behavior of our dear friends in the Reagan administration, the number of deaths of innocent civilians, the shit-ton of money we ended up throwing down a rabbit hole to fix things there and the current state of shitty affairs down south– was a spectacularly HUGE FAIL all the way around.
The MEK supported the overthrow of the Shah in the late 70’s, and we bombed the shit out of them during the Iraq war, but now, this Marxist organization that hates the Islamist leadership wants to overthrow them, blabs to our sucker neo-cons about “nuclear weapons” so they get their attention. History reveals them to be so dysfunctional that they have no credible allegiance to any one but their own small group of exiled cult members–who live on an abandoned US Military base in Iraq. ( And why were we training them in Nevada for fucking Christ’s sake?) But now “we support” them because they want to overthrow the Iranian government?
For all their talk about being the ones that are careful, responsible, and pragmatic, Republicans simply do not learn from history, not even in their own lifetimes.
Welcome to the 1980’s folks.
El Caganer
Didn’t Congress vote almost unanimously to extend sanctions on Iran? Heck of a job!
Ella in New Mexico
@Mnemosyne:
Like all vain humans, I’d love to know my pedigree, particularly because I just know , like every other white North American, that I’m really part Native American (snark). But every time one of those commercials comes on, I wonder a couple of things.
The Ancestry.com commercials just irritate me. I just don’t see what “Instead of being Italian, I’m actually Eastern European” does for anybody because lots of Italians ARE Eastern European. I always want to say to that guy “You are Italian, stupid!”.
I thought I learned in my Evolution classes that DNA for the purposes of determining ancestry can only describe wide geographical areas or significant morphologies related to race (dark skin, shovel-shaped teeth, etc.) So how does my DNA tell me what modern country it comes from any better than my great-Aunt Helen’s genealogy report she prepared to join the DAR? How can I say I’m Irish or Scottish or English, vs. having DNA from groups that invaded and conquered those geographical areas?
Second, the tiny little bit of DNA I apparently share with Alex Jones makes me wonder what the hell all these companies getting me to happily hand over my genetic material are really doing with the information. Is there some kind of nefarious scheme going on? Could it be tied to the push to vaccinate everyone–even people who are on hospice care and two days away from deaths door–to get the annual flu shot? (Seriously. Coma patient’s unable to give consent. People on life support but waiting for family to arrive to remove it are to be vaccinated at my hospital).
Eh, whatever. I’ll probably get one someday. Probably get one for my weird looking little dog, too. ;-)
Chris
@Ella in New Mexico:
Funny thing I’ve noticed as a dual citizen. The American half of my family is all about the family heritage, to the point that we’ve got coats of arms and that I can trace the (purported) trajectory of the family through three different European countries before their arrival in the U.S.
The French half of my family, by and large, couldn’t care less. Go one generation further back than my grandparents and things are already pretty fuzzy. Further than that, forget it.
I have no particularly strong thoughts either way – I find tracing heritage fun but not ultimately that meaningful.
smintheus
Several Democrats are in bed with the MEK, including Ed Rendell, and Hillary Clinton removed the MEK from the State Department’s terrorist list despite much internal opposition to rewarding this insane and violent cult with a veneer of respectability.