{"id":361805,"date":"2018-05-18T20:08:31","date_gmt":"2018-05-18T19:08:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-donald-vlad-and-bibi\/"},"modified":"2018-05-18T20:08:31","modified_gmt":"2018-05-18T19:08:31","slug":"the-donald-vlad-and-bibi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-donald-vlad-and-bibi\/","title":{"rendered":"The Donald, Vlad, and Bibi"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_102207\" style=\"width: 520px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-102207\" src=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/05\/Screen-Shot-2018-05-17-at-1.53.56-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"392\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo source U.S. Embassy Jerusalem | <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\">CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>As a general rule, it is pointless to rank world leaders or lesser political figures by measures that track their vileness or how much harm they inflict upon the world.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes, though, it can be enlightening to do precisely that \u2013 provided it is understood that what is being compared are not so much the character traits of deplorable individuals, but the political lines they advance in the circumstances they confront.<\/p>\n<p>One such time is now \u2013 as Donald Trump is doing his best to launch a \u201cstupid war\u201d against Iran.\u00a0 That expression was candidate Barack Obama\u2019s in 2008; he used it to describe the war George W. Bush and Dick Cheney launched against Iraq.<\/p>\n<p>Since at least 1945, the United States has only fought stupid wars.\u00a0 Some have been stupider than others, but, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, Democrats and Republicans have supported them all. \u00a0If Trump does get an Iran War going, count on bipartisan support for it too, though, for sheer stupidity, it would rival and perhaps even exceed the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon war against Vietnam.<\/p>\n<p>It is telling that, notwithstanding his characterization of the Bush-Cheney Iraq War, Obama, the least lethal of our twenty-first century presidents and also the least odious, kept it going for many years.<\/p>\n<p>It says a lot too that that Obama never had any problem with the Bush-Cheney Afghanistan War.\u00a0 Quite to the contrary, he actually revved that one up.\u00a0 It continues to this day,&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/05\/18\/the-donald-vlad-and-bibi\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Photo source U.S. Embassy Jerusalem | CC BY 2.0 As a general rule, it is pointless to rank world leaders or lesser political figures by measures that track their vileness or how much harm they inflict upon the world. Sometimes, though, it can be enlightening to do precisely that \u2013 provided it is understood that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-361805","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361805\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}