Opinion/Defense, National Security
By Jeff Childers, 6-22-25
Bonus! Trump stealth-bombs Iran’s nuke sites; Kari Lake guts VOA; sudden deaths reviewed; AWFL weeps in vaccine exile; DeSantis jails geoengineers; Paxton busts illegal voting; GOP towers over Dems.
Good morning, loyal C&C supporters, it’s Sunday! And it’s another stolen news cycle, with the circle begun in the 1970’s having now come fully around. Given the apocalyptic hot takes and the gravity of the moment, I’m sharing the first segment on the Iranian attacks with the full reader base. The remaining roundup and comments are reserved, as usual, for subscribers: President Trump sneakily bombs three Iranian nuclear sites in a stealthy, well-executed and complex military operation involving a breathtaking array of military branches; hints of a bigger picture emerge from the chaos and fog of war, and we connect a few dots; dark day for Democrats as Kari Lake fatally trims its Cold War-era propaganda machine; we revisit coverage of celebrity sudden and unexpected deaths at home, as another one bites the dust; another AWFL careerist mourns her lonely life in brutal intersection of purity spirals and vaccine arrogance; Governor DeSantis preserves Florida sunshine by setting jail sentences for geoengineers; FBI deputy director rounds up a terrific list of agency crimefighting; Texas AG Paxton begins crackdown on illegal alien voting in the Lone Star State; and GOP’s collective advantages become unavoidably noticeable, raising profound questions for Dems about the looming midterms.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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It was the biggest media cycle this year, with the New York Times running so many stories on the subject that it needed a sideways scroll bar. The lead story this morning was headlined, “Trump Claims Success After U.S. Bombs Key Iran Nuclear Sites.” The hot takes are off the charts— sizzling like an egg dropped on a Tehran sidewalk in July, and twice as slippery.
Back in November 1979, radical muslim revolutionaries stormed the US Embassy in Tehran and took 52 American diplomatic staff hostage. Feckless President Jimmy “Peanut” Carter (the worst president in history until Biden shuffled along), proved utterly useless, as the months and then years dropped off the calendar and the hostages slowly began to forget what Big Macs tasted like (instead of curried rice or whatever).
Apart from a single botched rescue attempt, involving US military helicopters that crashed into each other before the mission even started, Carter couldn’t move the hostage needle for all the legumes in Georgia.
“We don’t negotiate with terrorists,” Carter constantly droned, in his sickening parody of a real southern accent. Which led to one of the most delightful and left-triggering developments for Generation-X: the whimsical —or ‘bloodthirsty,’ depending on your party affiliation— parody song, Bomb Iran.
In 1980, as the endless crisis relentlessly drove into everyone’s nerves like a sadistic splinter, the satirical band Vince Vance & the Valiants, bless their jingoistic hearts, tapped into deeply held cultural frustrations when they released their surprise hit. The parody song set war-related lyrics to the tune of the Beach Boys’ 1963 hit “Barbara Ann.” Instead of “ba ba ba, ba Barbara Ann,” it became “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Bomb Iran…”
🎼 Went to a bar just the other night
Saw a big Imam, he was lookin’ for a fightHe said, “Hey punk, don’t you mess with me”
I said, “I got your homeland security”Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran! 🎼
And President Ronald Reagan surfed that wave of pent-up frustration right into the presidency in a landslide election, promising to make the song a reality, and ending a half century of Democrat control of government. Progressive historians have attempted to undermine Reagan’s skillful handling of the hostage crisis —they were all returned one day after Reagan was sworn in— by insisting he’d worked the whole thing out with the mullahs in advance.
Even if true —and there are plenty of reasons to doubt it— it would only underscore the point from yesterday’s post: politics are downstream from culture.
🚀 Late last night, American warplanes and submarines attacked three major nuclear sites in Iran. President Trump claimed the sites were “completely and totally obliterated.” The Iranians say it was nothing but a flesh wound. The attacks —widely predicted for days by independent analysts— have already produced incoming waves of rhetorical missiles based on wild speculation about warmongering, dark suggestions of constitutional violations, and doom-crying about what might happen next.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said it had not detected any increases in radiation outside the sites. (It also slammed the US bombings as “a brutal act that contradicts international laws, especially the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.”) The welcome news of non-radiation-leaks also suggested the Iranians had cleared the sites ahead of time, a noteworthy fact to which we’ll return momentarily.
“Senior Democrats and some Republican lawmakers,” the Times intoned, “condemned the move as unconstitutional and said that it could drag the United States into a broader war.” That might be an understatement. Pundits from all sides are tearing the President a new one on social media. Forever wars!
By and large, corporate media seems okay with it. For example, last night CNN’s Anderson Cooper hosted a retired General who said he was impressed with the complex operation:
Former President Carter set the bar for success pretty low. Last night, no bombers crashed into each other. The Iranians agree the bombs hit the targets. So. Everyone has a talking point.
🚀 The Democrats’ goofy constitutional complaints hinge on whether President Trump is starting a war without Congressional authorization. Maybe he is; but recent history from Democrat presidents leaves them with nothing to complain about. They’ve bombed Yugoslavia, Syria, Yemen, and actually directed a war in Ukraine using US weapons— all without Congressional approval. So— again.
The hard fact is, legally speaking, Congress did authorize the strikes, in its 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF), which was signed into law by President George W. Bush. During all the subsequent “war on terror” decades, including twelve full years of Democrat control, Congress could have, but never did, terminate the AUMF.
Personally, I think the AUMF should have terminated, or at least been severely pruned, twenty years ago, after the initial strikes on Iraq in Desert Storm. The point, though, is that Democrats have no grounds for whining now.
🚀 But there is, as always, potentially much more to this story. Trump may be tearing a page from Reagan’s historical playbook. I had to dig deep into foreign media, but I finally found the story I was looking for. Amwaj Media (Iraq/Iran) ran a story last night headlined, “Iran given advance notice as US insisted attack on nuclear sites is ‘one-off.’”
The satellite picture above shows a line of trucks picking stuff up from Iran’s Fordow nuclear site— the largest of yesterday’s three targets. The photo was taken two days ago— just after the most recent meeting between US and Iranian negotiators.
“A high-ranking Iranian political source,” Anwaj reported, “confirmed that the Trump administration on June 21 conveyed that it did not seek an all-out confrontation, and only intended to strike the Fordow, Isfahan and Natanz nuclear sites.” It added, “Importantly, the senior source also confirmed that the targeted sites were evacuated, with most of Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium kept in secure locations.”
If true — and no one disputes it — this raises the intriguing possibility that the strikes were more politically performative and less warlike than corporate media and the hot takes fear. In other words, this could very well be a paved path, an off-ramp, for making a broader peace deal politically possible.
The notion of a ‘trading strikes’ deal is not far-fetched. Trump did it before, during Trump 1.0. He even described the whole thing after the fact.
CLIP: Trump described pre-planned strike trades with Iran during Trump 1.0 (1:28).
In January, 2020, following the US assassination of Iran’s top general, Soleimani, Iran launched retaliatory ballistic missile attacks on U.S. military bases inside Iraq. But Iran informed the U.S. of these strikes in advance, and aimed outside the perimeters of U.S. forces, demonstrating careful managed escalation and coordination between the two governments.
Shortly after, the two sides declared an end to the conflict.
If today’s events follow the same pattern, Iran will retaliate with strikes that will show a forceful response without doing significant damage or creating mass casualties, and a larger escalation will be avoided. The timing fits. As I predicted Friday, Israel probably could not have held out for the two more weeks that Trump said he would take “to think about it.” It had to be now.
“The US told Iran that the American strikes on nuclear facilities were a one-off operation and were not intended to overthrow the Iranian government,” the Wall Street Journal reported late yesterday, further confirming the thesis.
Reagan ended the 1979 hostage crisis with a deal —allegedly brokered with the princes of Persia— something the Democrats, to their eternal reproach, could never pull off. Thus ended forty years of wandering in the conservative wilderness. Now Trump may be working a like wonder: defusing a nuclear crisis in the desert with a precision-engineered off-ramp, bunker-busting —not centrifuges— but an impossible political Gordian knot.
As always, my advice is: let’s wait out the hot takes and see what happens. It is too soon to trot out Chicken Little.
🚀 LOL. Headline from CNN, late last night:
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