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Trump’s Hypocrisy on Religious Freedom

Like many in todays Republican Party and the MAGA universe, the Felon, his regime and the sycophants that surround him claim to be champions of "religious freedom."  The reality, however, demonstrates that this so-called support for "religious freedom" translates into special rights for right wing "Christians" and the demonization of those who do not subscribe to the Christofascists' agenda and beliefs, particularly Muslims. Also on the lists of targets are transgender Americans, members of the LGBT community and other religious minorities. Indeed, Project 2025 is a blueprint for increasing the rights of "conservative Christians" and bolstering white privilege.  It also plots ending same sex marriage, restricting voting rights and erasing separation of church and state as it pushes a de facto official religion based on Christofascist dogma.  The religious freedom of others, be they non-believers, atheists, liberal Christians and religious minorities, especially Muslims, are either trampled upon or erased.  A main editorial in the New York Times looks at the hypocrisy of the Felon and Republicans who bloviate about religious freedom, but despise the rights of others. Here are highlights:

The Trump administration holds itself up as a defender of religious freedom. It has created a Religious Liberty Commission, increased funding for faith-based schools and changed vaccine policies to allow more religious exemptions. It ordered a Christmas Day missile attack in Nigeria on what President Trump described as a terrorist group that was killing Christians. The administration has punished universities in the name of preventing antisemitism. “I’ve done more for religion than any other president,” the president claimed at the National Prayer Breakfast this year.

Yet there is an exception to this effort. Mr. Trump and his Republican Party appear uninterested in protecting the religious rights of Muslims. Instead, they are often hostile to Islam.

Their words are odious. As a presidential candidate, Mr. Trump called for a “Muslim ban” on entry to the United States, and a version of it remains in effect. “I think Islam hates us,” he has said. Several other Republican politicians have made similar statements in recent months.

“Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult,” Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama posted on social media. Representative Brandon Gill of Texas wrote, “Islam is incompatible with our culture and our governing system.” Representative Randy Fine of Florida called for “radical deportations of all mainstream Muslim legal and illegal immigrants and citizenship revocations wherever possible.” Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee — who has said that Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York should be expelled from the country — this month wrote that “Muslims don’t belong in American society.”

Of the Somali diaspora in the United States, the president said: “They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country.” He referred to them as “low-I.Q. people.” He described Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Somali American, as “garbage” and said the United States should stop “taking in garbage.” He has directed similar ire at Afghan refugees, and his administration has smeared pro-Palestinian activists as terrorists.

The statements are particularly alarming when viewed in the context of Mr. Trump’s tendency to behave as an aspiring autocrat. Autocrats have a history of targeting vulnerable minority groups to justify their moves.

Recent events in Minnesota show how the scapegoating of a minority group can mushroom into broader violence. The Trump administration chose the state for an immigration crackdown last year, citing a government fraud scandal centered in the large Somali community there. The president unfairly maligned the full community for the scandal. The resulting crackdown led to the brutalization of many residents, both Muslim and not, immigrant and citizen, and to the killing of two protesters, Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Irrational fear of Shariah — a set of principles, based on the Quran, that guide life for Muslims, much as biblical precepts guide Christians and Jews — is another way in which anti-Muslim hate is translating into policy. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas recently signed a law that would prevent what he called “Shariah compounds,” supposedly communities that are open only to Muslims and that subject their residents to religious law.

These efforts are based on ludicrously false pretenses. Extreme versions of Shariah are a problem in some countries, including Afghanistan and Iran, but they are not a threat in the United States. American Muslims are not attempting to impose Shariah principles on others. As Mustafa Akyol of the Cato Institute has noted, the recent proposals mimic anti-Catholic and anti-Mormon laws enacted in previous centuries. They are based on lies and are intended to scapegoat.

The millions of Americans who practice Islam are just as American as anyone else. They pay taxes, own businesses and serve in the armed forces. Many have been here for generations. Others upended their lives to move here, in some cases because of this country’s constitutional protection of religious freedom.

The surge of anti-Muslim hate has caused many of them to feel threatened in their own country. Some feel anxious about entering a mosque or wearing obvious signs of their faith. In Texas and other places where political leaders have spread hate, the fears can be acute.

Mr. Trump’s disparagement of Muslims is part of a broader pattern of bigotry by him. He has targeted Latinos and trans Americans, too. While he criticizes universities for tolerating antisemitism, he and other Republicans have allied themselves with some of the worst peddlers of anti-Jewish hate. Since he entered politics more than a decade ago, with a campaign kickoff speech full of anti-Mexican sentiments, a wide variety of hate crimes have surged, according to F.B.I. data.

In an editorial last year decrying the surge of antisemitism, we emphasized that not all accusations of discrimination are legitimate. . . . . A fundamental American principle is that people should be judged by their behavior, not their identity. Mr. Trump and too many other Republicans are instead besmirching an entire faith even as they claim to protect religious freedom.

Mr. Trump is prosecuting a war against Iran, which identifies as an Islamic republic and has an overwhelmingly Muslim population. His planning for that war has been reckless, and his explanations of its aims have been contradictory. Combined with the surge of anti-Muslim bigotry from Republicans, the attack on Iran has the potential to look like a war against Islam. Certainly, the bigotry weakens America’s position in the world, especially with heavily Muslim countries, including American partners like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates.

The attacks against Islam and Muslims from Mr. Trump and other Republicans are shameful. They are filled with lies. They deserve denunciation from all Americans, regardless of politics or religion.

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The Felon Is Lying About the Iran War

The Felon has been a pathological liar for decades going all the way back to his five draft deferments for "bone spurs" in order to avoid serving in the military during the Vietnam War. His political rise relied on lies claiming Barack Obama was not born in the USA and have continued nonstop ever since. Indeed, during his first term the Washington Post (before Jeff Bezos sold out to the Felon) calculated some thirty thousand lies. Now, with the USA at war in Iran the endless lies are even more dangerous as the Felon on the one hand claims he is about to "wind down" the war and on the other more ships, including amphibious  assault ships, and troops are being moved to the region and some sources suggest that ground troops may land in Iran. Sadly, the Felon's lies are similar to those told about the Vietnam War and the second Iraq War where false pretenses were used for justifying going to war and  the truth about the military situation was hidden. The result of the lies were that many thousands lost their lives ultimately for nothing - or at least not the goals originally claimed - and billions of dollars in taxpayer money was squandered. While the Felon lives in his own fantasy world, one would hope that the military leadership would be aware of America's unfortunate history and strive to avoid repeating the past. Unfortunately, the Felon's "secretary of war" seemingly sees all of this as a live video game and is invoking god as justification for both the war and the killing of Iranian civilians.  A main editorial in the New York Times looks at the ongoing lies:

From his first announcement of the attack on Iran on Feb. 28, [the Felon] President Trump has issued a stream of falsehoods about the war. He has said Iran wants to engage in negotiations, though its government shows no sign of it. He has claimed that the United States “destroyed 100% of Iran’s Military capability” when Tehran continues to inflict damage throughout the region. He has said the war is almost complete even as he calls in reinforcements from around the globe.

Lying is standard behavior for [the Felon] Mr. Trump, of course. His political career began with a lie about Barack Obama’s birthplace, and he has lied about his business, his wealth, his inauguration crowd size, his defeat in the 2020 election and so much more. A CNN tally of Mr. Trump’s falsehoods during one part of his first term found that he averaged eight false claims per day. Many people are so accustomed to his lies that they hardly notice them anymore.

Yet lying about war is uniquely corrosive. When a president signals that the truth does not matter in wartime, he encourages his cabinet and his generals to mislead the country and one another about how the war is going. He creates a culture in which deadly mistakes and even war crimes can become more common. He makes it harder to win by hiding the realities of conflict and by making allies wary of joining the fight. Ultimately, he undermines American values and interests.

There is a reasonable debate to have about the wisdom of this war. Iran’s murderous government does indeed present a threat — to its own people, to its region and to global stability. Mr. Trump could make a fact-based argument for confronting the regime now, . . . We are skeptical, but we acknowledge that there is a case to be made.

[The Felon] Mr. Trump is not making it. Instead, he has lied about the reasons for the war and about its progress, in an apparent attempt to disguise his poor planning and the war’s questionable basis.

The president was only a few minutes into his Feb. 28 announcement of the start of the conflict when he offered an obviously contradictory rationale for it. He repeated his claim that American attacks last June “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program while also citing that program as a reason to go to war. The claim of obliteration is false: Iran retains about 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium, potentially enough for 10 warheads.

The lies have continued since then. Days later, Mr. Trump said the U.S. military had a “virtually unlimited supply” of high-end munitions. The Pentagon nevertheless has had to withdraw weapons from South Korea to sustain its efforts in the Middle East. He has also asserted that “nobody” believed Iran would retaliate by attacking Arab countries. . . . . In truth, some experts had warned of precisely this scenario.

In another instance, Mr. Trump has used false information to continue his alarming penchant to portray people who contradict him as un-American. Last weekend, he posted an allegation that “Iran, working in close coordination with the Fake News Media” had spread fake videos of an American aircraft burning in the ocean. The White House has offered no examples of American media outlets having done so.

A shocking falsehood came on March 7, when Mr. Trump claimed in his typically offhand way that a strike on an elementary school in the town of Minab during the first hours of the war “was done by Iran.” The attack killed at least 175 people, most of them children. The U.S. military has conducted an investigation and preliminarily concluded that an American missile mistakenly hit the school. The military deserves credit for its honesty. The commander in chief, however, still has not retracted his statement.

This pattern is an echo of the wars in Vietnam and Iraq, when small lies grew into a bigger ones, such as the covered-up massacres in My Lai and Haditha. The consequences of those untruths were long-lasting. Americans’ faith in government never recovered from the deceptions of Vietnam. And the second Iraq war, which George W. Bush’s administration sold on the grounds of fictitious weapons of mass destruction, represents the start of our cynical modern political era. Since that war began in 2003, every Gallup poll asking about the country’s direction has shown that most Americans are dissatisfied with it.

Lies about war also make it harder to achieve victory: The more one spreads falsehoods, the less one feels obliged to face reality. In retrospect, Americans understand that their leaders’ refusal to confront the truth in Iraq and Vietnam led to strategic errors. The pattern is repeating. . . . The global economy is now dealing with the consequences of his overconfidence.

He may yet learn a more personal lesson about lying in war. Lyndon Johnson and George W. Bush will forever be remembered as having misled Americans about U.S. military action. They learned that falsehoods can boomerang on the leaders who tell them.

Starting a war is the most serious action that a political leader can take. It ends lives and can change history. The decisions that guide war must be based in reality, and presidents owe American service members and their families the truth about why they are being asked to fight. Whatever short-term gain Mr. Trump thinks he is getting by lying about the war in Iran is far exceeded by the cost, for him, the country and the world.

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The Felon Has Only Himself to Blame

Currently the Strait of Hormuz remains closed to shipping other than Iranian tankers, Goldman Sachs is prediction that oil prices will remain high through 2027, and short of landing ground troops on Iranian soil there may be no way to realistically reopen the Strait.  All of this was predictable and, indeed, the Felon was specifically warned that what we are now experiencing could come to pass. He, in his typical hubris filled and delusional way, ignored the warnings and now is flailing around looking for a magical fix.  His regime has requested $200 billion in additional military spending and some congressional Republicans are balking and are no doubt worried what $5.00/gallon gas prices through the 2026 mid-term elections will do to their prospects of holding control of the Senate much less the House of Representatives.  Meanwhile, the Felon's demands that America's erstwhile allies - all of which have been insulted, denigrated, threatened and hit with the Felon's insane tariffs - aid the USA in reopening the Strait of Hormuz have been ignored or rejected. Now, Israel and Iran are taking turns targeting oil and gas facilities across the Persian Gulf region and further stoking increases in oil prices even as the America stock exchanges are down significantly.  Whose fault is all of this? The Felon's, of course, along with his unqualified "Secretary of War" who seems to see the military operation as a live video game.  A lengthy column in the New York Times looks at the mess the Felon has created:

[The Felon] President Trump has created the conditions for another quagmire in the Middle East, and the question is whether American military excellence can rescue him from his own impulsiveness and incompetence.

Here is the present situation, in a nutshell: The United States and Israel have established absolute air dominance over the nation of Iran. In a few short days, our combined forces have destroyed Iran’s ability to protect its own airspace, have killed much of Iran’s senior military and civilian leadership, and have sunk much of Iran’s navy.

At the same time, the United States and Israel are damaging Iran’s nuclear program from the air, and they are destroying Iran’s ability to manufacture and deploy ballistic missiles. They are also attacking the internal security forces that maintain the Iranian regime’s hold on the population.

The intention of the air campaign is clear: to destroy the regime’s capacity to harm its neighbors while also creating the conditions for a revolution on the ground. If that’s the extent of the military mission, the military is accomplishing it with remarkable efficiency. Iran is being badly battered. Even if the war ended today, it would take years for the Iranian military to fully recover from the losses it has suffered so far.

While Iran’s drones and missiles have inflicted damage on American forces and our allies, that damage is far less than what the U.S. and Israel have inflicted on Iran.

So why, then, is Trump lashing out at American allies? Why was he “shocked” that Iran struck Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait in response to American attacks?

Perhaps the answer lies in a Wall Street Journal report from last Friday. According to The Journal, Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned Trump that Iran might attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz and Trump shrugged off the threat and launched the attack anyway.

“He told his team that Tehran would likely capitulate before closing the strait,” The Journal wrote, “and even if Iran tried, the U.S. military could handle it.”

But Iran did not capitulate. There is no real sign the regime is in danger of falling. Instead, it has effectively closed the strait, and it’s reportedly done so without choking off its own oil exports. In other words, while other nations can’t ship oil through the strait, Iran still is.

Iran may not be able to seriously damage Israel with its missiles (though a few missiles have gotten through Israel’s defenses and killed Israeli civilians), and it may not be able to sink American ships, but it can still potentially plunge the world economy into a state of crisis. It could well emerge from the conflict with its regime intact (and perhaps even more hard-line) and its power over the world economy undiminished.

In a recent post, the Institute for the Study of War described the problem well: “A weakened regime that remains in power after this war would be able to disrupt shipping whenever and for however long it pleases with little effort if its current, relatively limited, strike campaign on shipping proves sufficient to cause the U.S. and Israel to surrender.” “A failure to demonstrate the will and ability to deny Iran the ability to disrupt traffic,” it wrote, “will make it enormously harder to deter Iran from future disruptions.”

That’s the logic that leads to a quagmire. If America declares victory now, when the Iranian regime is still in power and the strait is closed, then Iran perversely can claim that it won. It took a huge punch, absorbed the blow, and still forced America to climb down. It employed its ultimate weapon — closing the strait — and America had no effective answer.

Commit to opening the strait (and keeping it open) by force, and the U.S. may well find itself in yet another open-ended, costly conflict with at least some American soldiers on Iranian soil. This would be war on our enemy’s terms and terrain, with the potential of slowly but surely inflicting casualties and costs on the American military until we grow tired of the conflict and leave.

Trump’s recklessness has left the United States with few good options. Indeed, the dilemma America now faces is a perfect illustration of why Trump should have taken his case for war to the Congress and the American people before he fired the first missile.

I’ve had friends ask me, “Well, if he didn’t think Congress would approve, what do you expect him to do? Sit on his hands?” The answer is simple: The Constitution doesn’t give the president the power to disregard Congress. So, no, don’t go to war if you can’t get Congress to approve.

And if a Republican president can’t get a Republican Congress to support his war, perhaps that provides even more reason to doubt the wisdom of the conflict.

Had he not alienated key allies through economic warfare and threats to seize Greenland, it could have been easier to assemble, in advance, an allied force to protect the Strait of Hormuz.

Instead, Trump launched a major war on his own initiative while announcing competing and potentially contradictory war aims. Is the goal regime change? Unconditional surrender? Or is it much narrower — the destruction of Iran’s missile and drone forces, sinking its navy, stopping its nuclear program and destroying its ability to wage war through its proxy forces, including Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and the kaleidoscope of allied militias in Syria and Iraq.

The Iranian regime, by contrast, has a single, simple theory of victory: Survive. If the regime is still standing at the end of the conflict, then Iran lives to fight again. And if it survives at least in part through closing the Strait of Hormuz, then it knows exactly how to fight again.

Even when wars are carefully planned, with allies brought on board and a majority of the public in support, they are still highly volatile and unpredictable.

My great concern is that Trump has created the conditions for failure. He has taken our well-supplied, well-trained and well-led troops and has deployed them on a mission that lacks clear public support (especially compared to previous American wars), lacks clearly defined objectives, and may not ultimately be achievable without a large-scale escalation.

And now, dismayed that the war has not resulted in the regime’s immediate capitulation or destruction, he’s flailing about, once again threatening the viability of NATO if our allies don’t come and bail him out from a war they did not start and did not ask for.

As an American, I want our forces to succeed, once they are committed. I want to see the military open the Strait of Hormuz as quickly and painlessly as possible. I want to see the Iranian regime collapse and replaced by a democracy. That regime is loathsome. It’s an enemy of the United States. It deserves to fall. If it does, I will cheer its demise.

At the same time, however, my patriotism can’t blind me to reality. This is not how our democracy should go to war. Trump is not the right man to lead our nation into battle. People I respect applaud Trump for his courage in taking on Iran. But I don’t see courage. I see recklessness. I see thoughtlessness.

I see a man who plunged a nation into a conflict without fully comprehending the risks. I see a man full of hubris after achieving success in much more limited military engagements. And he’s now counting on two of the world’s most competent militaries to essentially bail him out.

Trump has only himself to blame. He led America into an unconstitutional war. And now he’s compounding that sin by proving to be every bit as reckless a commander as he is a president.