No country would believe an offer of peace

Last night I went to the grand Fisher Theater to see the musical The Outsiders. I was interested because last year it won a Tony Award for Best Musical along with Best Direction of a Musical, Best Lighting in a Musical (projections on part of the scenery helped that), and Best Sound Design in a Musical, plus eight other nominations, including Best Actor and Best Featured Actor. All fine recommendations. I hadn’t read the book or seen the earlier movie or play (before the musical was created) because I thought it might be quite violent. And it is. When I, without knowing much of the story, described the show to my friend and debate partner he suggested it might be similar to West Side Story and its source material Romeo and Juliet. Turns out he was right, though there are notable differences. The story is set in Tulsa in 1967. Ponyboy is the main character. He is 14 and lives with his brothers Darrel and Sodapop. Their parents had recently died. The first song Ponyboy sings notes that he knows nobody who has moved away from Tulsa. Darrel, maybe as old as 20, was good enough in football he thought he had a chance of escaping but now feels burdened with trying to be both brother and father. Yes, there are two rival groups of teens. Ponyboy is a Greaser, kids from families whose work involves (automobile) grease. His best friends are Johnny and Two-Bit. Also prominent in the group is Dallas, the only black member and the only one to be in jail, well, county lock-up. The other group is the Socs (spelled that way in the program but pronounced “soshes”), the kids of socialites. As in WSS there are turf battles that go too far. At the drive in theater Ponyboy meets Cherry, a Socs girl. She is claimed by Bob, the leader of the Socs boys. She senses that Ponyboy is different from the other boys that strive for status. Ponyboy is reading Great Expectations by Dickens and identifies with orphaned Pip, though has a few things to say to Dickens. He can also recite a Robert Frost poem. This might be a spoiler: A big difference between WSS and this story is while Cherry and Ponyboy become friends, they do not fall in love. Even so, she’s the one recognizes the battles between the Greasers and Socs. two groups of boys that don’t know what to do with their testosterone, is a “Hopeless War.” This is an excellent show, deserving of its awards. Ponyboy, Johnny, Dallas, and all the others are shown as both good and bad, though they are caught in a bad situation (mostly based on poverty). The songs are good and touching, though I don’t remember any of them. I rate it highly perhaps for the same reasons I consider WSS a favorite musical (though Jonathan Clay, Zach Chance, and Justin Levine are not at the level of Leonard Bernstein). I do have one complaint. There is an overuse on strobe lights in key scenes. As WSS has the Rumble, there is a big fight between the two groups. They way it was staged I got lost in who was doing what to who with not clear winner until one side rejoices in their victory later. This fight takes place in a rainstorm. At first I thought the rain was projected on to the scenery, but at times the actors looked wet, as did the stage, though that was hard to tell from the front of the balcony, where I was sitting. Then the stage looked dry in the next scene. But when the show was done a large tire full of water (important for a key scene) was dumped onto the stage and a bunch of industrial blowers were brought out to presumably dry the stage. The book is by S. E. Hinton, which I was surprised to learn is Susan Eloise. The Outsiders is her first novel and she wrote it while in high school in Tulsa. Her reason for writing was that she was dissatisfied with the stories written about youth, saying in a quote in the program that teens want it real and too many books talked down to them. Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community and an independent pundit described a disturbing look into the start of the Iran war. He cautions this is not proven but certainly demands investigation and hearings under oath before Congress. A major player in this scenario is Jared Kushner, a top representative in several of his father-in-law’s attempts at diplomacy. He’s also the guy I’ve been calling the Pandemic Prince for his attempts to profit from the pandemic during the first nasty guy term. He also knows Netanyahu well. His partner is Steve Witkoff, a guy with credible evidence of having financial ties to Russia and who had just been to Israel. Here’s my summary of the scenario. Round 3 of nuclear talks between the US and Iran concluded in Geneva on February 27. The Omani foreign minister, the mediator, said a deal was within reach and Iran had fully agreed to the US demands to not make a nuclear bomb. Round 4 had been scheduled to work out the details. On the morning of February 28 members of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council were in their offices. They’re the ones to make the big nuclear decisions. In their offices is where they were naturally expected to be to discuss the outline of the agreement made the day before. That expected location is where the first bombs struck. Here’s the speculation: Were the negotiations a ruse? A deliberate double-cross? Were they designed to keep Iran from expecting strikes? Were they structured to give the Council something they need to discuss in a known place so they could be targeted?

The man who briefed Kushner’s partner (Witkoff) before those talks — Netanyahu — is the same man who said on the night the bombs fell that “this coalition of forces allows us to do what I have yearned to do for 40 years.” He wasn’t even remotely subdued or reluctant about the possibility of the Middle East going up in flames, perhaps even igniting World War III. He was, instead, triumphant that he finally got an American president to do something he’d been unsuccessfully pushing for decades.

If Iran was “negotiated” into a kill box, no government would ever again assume American good faith. American credibility would be damaged, long after the nasty guy and his minions leave the scene. The negotiation process would be poisoned. No country would believe an offer of peace, no matter how genuine it is.

Congress has the constitutional power and the institutional obligation to call Kushner and Witkoff before investigative committees and ask them directly: What did you know about Israeli targeting plans during the Geneva talks? When did you know it? What were you instructed to accomplish or delay? Did you communicate with Netanyahu’s government during the negotiations themselves?

We can’t assume Kushner and Witkoff are guilty. We can “demand answers, loudly, now, before the war makes the asking impossible.” Dan K of the Kos community asks an important question: Why have billionaires put “a man with no understanding of economics in charge of our economy?” To attempt an answer Dan K quoted an article Paul Krugman wrote for his Substack. Krugman wrote:

There is, however, something that is still puzzling me: To a large extent billionaires bought themselves a government friendly to their interests. Trump and company have granted many items on the tech broligarchy wish list, from tax breaks to deregulation to promotion of crypto and unregulated AI. But why the abject incompetence? Couldn’t billionaires find political allies who wouldn’t plunge the country into a potentially disastrous and historically unpopular war without considering the risks?

Krugman supplied two answers:

One is that no competent allies weren’t available. Money buys a lot of influence, but to actually take over the U.S. government requires more than money — it requires politicians who are utterly corrupt... and corruption and incompetence go hand in hand.

In the nasty guy’s first term competent people kept him from doing his worst. To prevent that from happening in his second term he surrounded himself with incompetent loyalists.

My second answer is that the vast wealth of tech billionaires has made many of them unconcerned with the little people’s lives — and deeply unpatriotic.

Dan K brought up the concept of noblesse oblige, that with great wealth and power comes great responsibility. The robber barons of the US gilded age may have been nasty to workers, but they knew they had to live in the society they were making and keeping it secure was worthwhile. The current tech bros reject that understanding. They feel they can isolate themselves from the world and their wealth will provide all they need. So if they get the tax breaks and other goodies to keep making tons of money they don’t care what else the nasty guy does. Krugman again:

So if you want to understand how this country has degenerated to such a state, how we can be spending nearly $2 billion a day attacking Iran without a clear endgame in sight, while children go without healthcare, nursing homes are understaffed because their workers have been deported, home electricity bills skyrocket due to data centers, consider who benefits and who isn’t hurt. This is a billionaire’s war, waged at everyone else’s expense.

More from my backlog of pundit roundups for Kos... From Saturday a week ago, Greg Dworkin quoted Catherine Rampell of The Bulwark discussing a lot of commodities that are affected by the nasty guy’s attack on Iran and their response of closing the Strait of Hormuz. At the top of the list is oil and the petroleum products made from it. There is also liquefied natural gas, aluminum, and fertilizer, the last in demand as the northern hemisphere spring planting season begins. That will lead to higher food prices over the year. Many producers of these commodities are having to shut down because they have no place to put their output. Restarting these facilities could take up to a year. Nick Judin tweeted:

Unlike every evil, craven, idiotic decision Trump's made in office, the Iran War is finally the act he can't immediately retreat from. Every one of his catastrophic failures (DOGE, liberation day, siege of Minneapolis, regime change in Venezuela, etc.) he survived by abandoning.

Ishaan Tharoor of the New Yorker explained why the Strait of Hormuz was closed:

For the remnants of the Iranian regime—and, especially, the hard-line members of the Revolutionary Guard, who control much of the state’s weaponry—the strategy is clear. They hope to raise the stakes of the war so much that U.S. allies pressure President Donald Trump to change course. “We had no choice but to escalate and start a big fire so everyone would see,” an Iranian regime insider told the Financial Times. “When our red lines were crossed in violation of all international laws, we could no longer adhere to the rules of the game.”

Another way to put it: We may be going down, but we’re going to inflict as much pain on the rest of the world as we can in the meantime. Conspiratorial Templates tweeted:

What level of chess is it when you neglect to fill up your strategic oil reserves before starting a war that shuts down oil production worldwide, so you have to buy oil at an inflated price from your enemy who then uses those funds to back the enemy you just needlessly attacked?

Way down in the comments is a cartoon by Bishtoons. A man says:

So, you’re telling me that more than 100 children were killed in a school in Iran when it was bombed ... by two nations of the Board of Peace?

In the comments of Monday’s roundup is one by rugbymom:

What's unbelievable to me: We refer back continuously to major attacks *on* the US, from Pearl Harbor to 9/11. Yet we somehow imagine that other countries will just absorb our attacks on them, forgive and forget, and cozy up to the US. (Sure, Japan and Germany did after WWII -- but only because the US poured in relief and reconstruction money, and those countries took responsibility for their actions and their leaders were soundly punished.) Not only Iran, but the Gulf monarchies that were Trump’s most loyal allies, will never ever forget this -- and that's assuming that somehow it stops before the planet is utterly destroyed. So far, no signs of any off-ramp or stopping point, a President who is eager to pour in ground troops and/or use nuclear weapons, an Israeli President intent on genocide, and no way to stop either of them.

In Tuesday’s roundup Chitown Kev quoted Adam Serwer of The Atlantic described an epidemic of “gullicism” – gullibility and cynicism – in America.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that “a mixture of gullibility and cynicism is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements.” She argued that “the whole hierarchical structure of totalitarian movements, from naïve fellow-travelers to party members, elite formations, the intimate circle around the Leader, and the Leader himself, could be described in terms of a curiously varying mixture of gullibility and cynicism.” All are ruled by “the central unchanging ideological fiction of the movement.” The naive fellow travelers need to be gullible enough to believe these fictions and cynical enough to refuse correction. The inner circle need only be cynical enough to sell them.

In the comments Dr. Art Garfunky tweeted the front page of the Tehran Times (English edition) that shows portraits of all of the students killed in the Iran school that was bombed. In Wednesday’s roundup Dworkin quoted Dana Dubois of Blue Amp. My summary: Dubois is breaking up with ChatGPT because they can’t tolerate to keep paying the oligarchs that created it. Aaron Rupar tweeted a quote from Sen. Chris Murphy:

I Just came from a two hour, closed door classified briefing on the war. It just confirmed to me it's totally incoherent. We are not gonna be able to achieve any of our stated objectives ... this is a disaster of epic proportions, a 10 day debacle

In the comments Political Cartoon Gallery posted a cartoon by Matt, who is from England. A man has come back from a gas station mini-mart and tells his wife, “It’s worse than I feared. Their tins of travel mints are stuck in the Strait of Hormuz.” In Thursday’s roundup Kev quoted Perry Bacon of The New Republic on three reasons why this military action is worse than nearly all others. The important parts:

There is no clear reason for the U.S. to be attacking Iran right now. This war not only didn’t have the approval of Congress or the American public, but it happened despite explicit opposition from them. This is not a minor skirmish.

In the comments is one by Rambler797 with a link to the article:

Jonathan Lamire, Atlantic. Trump Isn’t Even Trying to Sell This War. Why sell? He got in his quick hit. Mission accomplished, right? An object lesson in why it is better to have someone with impulse control as president.

The Wolfpack posted a meme of the Republican Agenda. I’m giving just the main points. Each has a few to a lot of subpoints for implementation.

Keep ’em poor Keep ’em sick Keep ’em stupid Control the women

Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted late night commentary:

"We are now on day eleven of Jabba the Pizza Hutt's war on Iran. Trump said yesterday that the war could end 'very soon,' which would be encouraging had he not told us he'd end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Ironically, the war he started to distract us could be more damaging to him than the Trump-Epstein files. And that would mean he'd have to come up with another distraction from the war. And if you do need that, Mr. President, I’ve got a good one: release the unreleased Trump-Epstein files." —Jimmy Kimmel "President Trump said yesterday that, while he is spending the day at his Miami golf club, there are 'many important meetings and phone calls taking place.' Hey, man, we're totally fine if you just play golf. Every time you 'have a meeting' we have to change something on a map." —Seth Meyers

Bill also reminds us that tomorrow, March 14, is Pi Day, best celebrated at 1:59. It’s our most irrational holiday.