Opinion

I had spent almost a week getting there, and I remember thinking, Well, I finally made it to the war in Iraq! We had invaded the country about six months previously, and now the United States Army, backed up by the full might of the American government, was going to find Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. We were going to prevent any other terrorist attacks on the homeland. We were going to finally put things right in the Middle East. We had spent months moving more than 150,000 troops and all the materiel necessary to support them into Iraq. There was no way we were going to fuck things up. This time we would get it right.

It's become a cliché to point out that there's an old "tweet for every occasion" by Donald Trump. But that doesn't capture the degree to which he was obsessed with the idea that Barack Obama would launch a war of choice against Iran in order to bolster his chances of being re-elected in 2012, or to distract the American public from various alleged domestic failures.

It’s much more than a massive escalation of war tensions in the Middle East that Donald Trump achieved in ordering the single rocket attack that killed Qassim Suleimani.

Trump’s hit on Iran’s powerful military mastermind Qassim Suleimani may have just closed the door on future U.S. monitoring of other high-level Iranians and their efforts to build nuclear weapons.

Donald Trump ordered a missile strike that killed one of Iran’s top generals in Baghdad. Qassem Soleimani was no ordinary commander. He was the most elite of Tehran’s military elite. He was said to be in line to be the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader. His death sent oil markets reeling. It opened the door to open war with Iran.

This week, former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich — who is serving a 14-year sentence in federal prison on corruption charges — has been mercilessly ridiculed on social media for an op-ed slamming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats for impeaching President Donald Trump. In his op-ed (which was published by the right-wing website Newsmax), Blagojevich even went so far as to compare Trump to President Abraham Lincoln and argued that Pelosi would have impeached Lincoln had she been around in the 19^th Century. Journalist Dana Milbank, in his Washington Post column, humorously weighs in on Blagojevich’s op-ed and asserts that in Blagojevich, Trump might have found someone who is equally clueless about U.S. history.

President Donald J. Trump dined on meatloaf and ice cream as news broke that the U.S. struck and killed Iranian Gen. Qasem Suleimani in Iraq. We’ve now learned that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, among others, joined the president at his Mar-a-Lago club while the world digested the possibility of a potential impetus to World War III.

It’s official now, the sabers are out and swinging.

The US government has killed Iranian general Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds Force, the elite wing of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards, in an air strike that took place in the early hours of January 3.

We host a roundtable discussion on the U.S. assassination of Iranian commander Major General Qassem Soleimani, who has long been one of the most powerful figures in Iran. He was the leader of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force — Iran’s powerful foreign military force, similar to a combination of the CIA and U.S. Special Forces. Iran called Soleimani’s assassination an act of “international terrorism.” “It was probably the best, the fastest, the quickest way to have a unifying rallying cry for the Iranian political establishment,” notes Iranian journalist Negar Mortazavi. We are also joined by historian Ervand Abrahamian, author of “The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots of Modern U.S.-Iranian Relations,” and Phyllis Bennis, fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of “Understanding the US-Iran Crisis: A Primer.”

It has long been an article of faith (no pun intended) among some on the left that the culture war was simply a cynical tool of the conservative movement to fool the rubes into voting against their economic interests. In this reading, right-wing leaders had no intention of ever following through on culture-war issues. They would string the voters along forever, promising to deliver on abortion or gay rights or guns but never really getting the job done, the assumption being that they could keep the conservative base's intensity at full throttle if those voters believed they were on the cusp of getting their agenda passed. Meanwhile, as the marks were distracted by endless culture-war skirmishes, the big money conservatives would pass laws that benefited themselves and harmed their own voters.

Boeing recently fired CEO Dennis Muilenburg in order “to restore confidence in the Company moving forward as it works to repair relationships with regulators, customers, and all other stakeholders.”

Roberts’ thoughtful rhetoric often bolsters his centrist reputation, but in assessing how he manages President Trump’s Senate trial, it will be important to keep in mind that despite appearances, Roberts is a reliable Republican flack who, without failure, pursues partisan advantage. Even if Roberts presides over the trial in an even-handed manner, his consistent record of advancing partisan interests at the expense of democracy should inform evaluations of his performance.