Month: October 2022

Wolf Blitzer of CNN – the news station of record, certainly in the United States, and probably the world (certainly the most ubiquitous one) – calmly and nonchalantly asking Senator Rand Paul in 2016 if Paul considers halting the assistance of the U.S. executive branch (without any Congressional involvement) and American munitions makers to Saudi Arabia to conduct its bombing of Yemen at the time, and which created a humanitarian catastrophe and major refugee crisis in Yemen, to be more important than the money and American jobs that would be lost at the plants of the munitions makers if Paul were to get his way and the assistance to S.A. were ended.

A completely repellent and morally vacant question, and one that, in the way it was asked, and the major platform on which it was asked, normalizes the perspective, makes it sound like a reasonable, counter-balancing concern. To restate the question less prettily; ‘Is it wise or practical that we stop raining down mayhem & death on all these largely innocent people in that foreign land,’ – and in support of a known completely authoritarian state which we should not be allied with in the first place – ‘is your moral concern, Senator Paul, more important than the loss of income to the munitions makers and the loss of American jobs if those munitions don’t get made and used?’

The query of a remorseless person of no empathy, a sociopath, perhaps. Or, possibly, just a vacuous shill doing what he was likely instructed to do: Pit Paul’s appeal to conscience (and to the demands of the Constitution that Congress is the entity delegated with war making authority, not the Executive Branch) against the financial interests of Americans, thus making Rand’s hill to climb a steeper one. Or both (to do that job a person would likely need a stunted conscience, I would assume).

People should get bombed so Americans can make profits and have jobs? That’s a real question? We should talk and argue and debate about the subtleties and nuances of that? Blitzer surely did his part, his job, to make that calculus appear legitimate and rational to anyone hearing it.

Just peak scumbaggery. His own and his betters. Amazing that Paul did not call him on the obscenity of the question. To be governed by such people and the system that puts them in place is unacceptable, to put it blandly. I don’t consent to any of it. No one should.