DL Open Thread: Fri., Jan. 3, 2019

State Rethug ‘Leaders’ Under Fire–From R State Chair.  Kudos, I guess, to Jane Brady.  But she’s wrong when she says that this is not what her party stands for. Hate and resentment are pretty much all they stand for these days. An excerpt for those w/o a subscription:

Brady issued a statement on Thursday saying that Jordan’s words were “hurtful and anti-Semitic,” and Rowe used “homophobic language.” She said the Delaware Republican Party does not “condone any statements that demean or show disrespect to others.”

Those words? Now bear in mind that this is the Sussex County Rethug Vice Chair:

“Many Jews ‘In Name Only’ lend themselves to be in the hoaks (sic) of the pure made up story of impeachment that the Democrats have woven,” reads Jordan’s Facebook post, which was emailed to Delaware Online/The News Journal in a screenshot from the House Republican Caucus. “Fortunately for us the people that believe that God gave us a brain to think for ourselves can see through the madness these left socialist believers had concocted against a President … God please have mercy on them, some of the Jewish people are doing today as it was in the times of the Old Testament, go against God’s will even after He had mercy on them.”

Your thoughts?

Smoking Air Quotes: Rethugs Will Suppress Votes Thanks To Lifting Of Consent Decree.  A consent decree that was forced on the Rethugs due to proven suppression of minority votes.

Oh Boy, Looks Like We’ve Really Stepped In It In Mideast Confrontation.  US Drone Strike kills key Irani Commander. Wag the dog, anybody?  This is when we could really use a president that, you know, knows something. An excerpt:

In killing General Suleimani, Mr. Trump took an action that Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama had rejected, fearing it would lead to war between the United States and Iran.

While many Republicans said that the president had been justified in the attack, Mr. Trump’s most significant use of military force to date, critics of his Iran policy called the strike a reckless unilateral escalation that could have drastic and unforeseen consequences that could ripple violently throughout the Middle East.

“Soleimani was an enemy of the United States. That’s not a question,” Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote on Twitter, using an alternate spelling of the Iranian’s name. “The question is this – as reports suggest, did America just assassinate, without any congressional authorization, the second most powerful person in Iran, knowingly setting off a potential massive regional war?”

Here’s Trump’s response.

Here’s how the Atlantic sees it:

Of the most feared terrorist leaders the United States has hunted and killed this century—from Osama bin Laden to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—no death ever had the significance of the one America just dealt. The killing of Iran’s Quds Force commander, Qassem Soleimani, in a U.S. strike yesterday in Baghdad wasn’t just the targeted assassination of a state military leader. It marked a dangerous new chapter in a roiling region Soleimani has helped shape for more than a decade, and moved the U.S. and Iran’s cycle of proxy violence and sabotage closer to outright war.

Trump Clearly Ordered Hold On Ukraine Aid.  Gee, I wonder if the assassination was in part designed to take attention away from this most smoking of smoking guns.  This is a really big story that I pray doesn’t get lost in the shuffle of a prospective new war. 

Julian Castro Drops Out Of Presidential Race.  The last thing I expected under the new rules was that a bunch of white men (and one white woman) would be dominating the field at this point. Depressing.

What do you want to talk about?