The zombie election

Matthew Schwartz of NPR reported that the top Iranian scientist believed to help develop the country’s nuclear bomb program has been assassinated. Iranian officials believe Israel played a central role. Iran promised to retaliate. This act may turn American troops into targets in Iran and elsewhere in the Middle East. Schwartz quoted Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council, who tweeted that there is no down side for Israel right now. If Iran lashes out and sparks a broader conflict it sucks in the US. Netanyahu of Israel has long sought a US-Iran confrontation. Leah McElrath provides a bit of context. Netanyahu secretly flew to Saudi Arabia earlier this week to meet with the Crown Prince and US Sec. of State Mike Pompeo. McElrath included a quote of a tweet from Senator Chris Murphy:

Every time America or an ally assassinates a foreign leader outside a declaration of war, we normalize the tactic as a tool of statecraft. The risk is that the security benefit can be very short lived.

A couple days ago McElrath quoted a bit from Barak Ravid on Axios then commented on it:

“The Israeli govt instructed the IDF to undertake the preparations not because of any intelligence or assessment that Trump will order such a strike, but because senior Israeli officials anticipate ‘very sensitive period’ ahead of Biden's inauguration...” The Discard Phase. I actually don’t think Trump is particularly focused on Iran—mainly because Iran is allied with Russia. However, I do think he is itching to start a war and/or to use nuclear weapons while a) he still can and b) he is feeling a combination of powerlessness AND annihilatory rage. … It is a weakness of our system that a lame duck office holder is allowed unilateral control over our military and our nuclear arsenal especially.

The Discard Phase is when a malignant narcissist (as in the nasty guy) sours on a relationship and works to annihilate the one who rejected him. Ben Franklin tweeted in response to McElrath saying she didn’t think the nasty guy was focused on Iran because of Iran’s ties with Russia:

The Middle East is a special place where everyone is allied with everyone and simultaneously enemies with everyone at the same time. Nothing there makes sense in a traditional way.

Garry Kasparov tweeted:

Putin is in no hurry to acknowledge Biden’s victory because there’s no benefit. But showing loyalty to Trump, like a Godfather to a foot soldier, still bears fruit and likely will even after Jan 20. Easy to picture Putin inviting Trump to conferences in St Petersburg to join him in condemning the “hoax” of US democracy, the “warmongering” Biden and NATO, etc. They’ve been aligned on so many issues all along, so why not? Or the next step of Putin offering Trump a job, the way he hired Germany’s ex-chancellor Schroeder at Gazprom and as propagandist. Trump’s debts disappear and he barely has to change his message at all! Correct to worry about Trump’s demagoguery and attacks on US institutions at home, but he will also join the axis of nationalists and xenophobes like Le Pen, Farage, & AfD with the anti-EU, anti-NATO message Putin invests so much in.

Some good foreign relations news. Olga Lautman, who studies relations between Ukraine, Russia, and the US, tweeted:

Svetlana Tsikhanovskaya, exiled Belarusian and real winner of elections, received an invitation to meet w Biden according to an exclusive interview. Lukashenko's regime w Putin's help have launched a war on innocent Belarusians. The world must act.

Laura Clawson of Kos reported the nasty guy won’t concede the election, but yesterday he did say that if the Electoral College confirms Biden’s win he will leave the White House. He doesn’t want the drama of a president being dragged out the front door. However, he added that if the EC confirms Biden “they’ve made a big mistake.” And then he gave another rant on the rigged election. Since I read that I’ve heard (though haven’t found online sources) that the nasty guy has started piling up conditions. One of them is that Biden must “prove” he got 80 million votes. Yeah, this from a guy who has been unable to prove that Biden didn’t. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had set up guidelines saying if a region is hot with the coronavirus, a red zone, religious institutions should have no more than 10 people at a service. In an orange zone there should be no more than 24. There are currently no red zones in New York. Laura Clawson reported that somebody sued and the case went to the Supremes. This is the third such case. In the previous two Chief Justice Roberts sided with the then living Ruth Bader Ginsburg and other progressives to say local officials “should not be subject to second-guessing by an unelected federal judiciary, which lacks the background, competence and expertise to assess public health and is not accountable to the people.” But Ginsburg is gone and Barrett is there. This time they sided with the religious groups and against health officials. Clawson concluded:

That’s how it’s going to go: The Trump court puts the right of churches to hold large services above the right of everyone else to live safely. This court is going to be as bad as we thought. At the cost of lives. How apt that Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court career kicked off with a superspreader event and she dove right in with this case.

In response to the ruling Herb4Change tweeted:

Justice Barrett’s first 2 votes were to kill people.

So much for a pro-life stance. Greg Dworkin, in his pundit roundup of Kos, quoted an Associated Press article:

The 2020 presidential race is turning into the zombie election that Trump just won’t let die. Despite dozens of legal and procedural setbacks, his campaign keeps filing new challenges that have little hope of succeeding and making fresh, unfounded claims of fraud. But that’s the point. Trump’s strategy, his allies concede in private, wasn’t to change the outcome, but to create a host of phantom claims about the 2020 presidential race that would infect the nation with doubt and keep his base loyal, even though the winner — Biden — was clear and there has been no evidence of mass voter fraud.

And a quote from Miti Sathe and Will Levitt of Politio:

It was weak strategy, based on bad polling information and poor decisions from the national party that left Democratic candidates in swing districts—and candidates of color in particular—unable to hold their own in the face of a massive, and massively underestimated, Republican voter surge. The fact is: If you’re going to win a campaign, you’ve got to campaign, which means getting in front of voters and meeting them where they are. And that was the one thing that Democrats running for Congress could not do this year, upon orders from the party’s campaign arm in Washington.