Mourning Soleimani, from Hollywood to the Campus

UPDATE: COLIN KAEPERNICK Drone Strike On Iran ...U.S.A. IMPERIALISM AT ITS FINEST  

Colin wrote on Twitter, "There is nothing new about American terrorist attacks against Black and Brown people for the expansion of American imperialism." He didn't stop there.

Sort of a male Megan Rapinoe, eh? Watch for his appearance on CNN and Colbert shows.

National Review

The terror general’s postmortem fan club members are all denizens of the Left — media figures, celebrities, politicians, and academics.

McGowan

"Now that Qasem Soleimani’s mortal coil has reached room temperature, and he is enjoying the fruits of his martyrdom, sympathizers everywhere are mourning him and praising him. His postmortem fan-club members are all denizens of the Left — media figures, celebrities, politicians, and especially academics. Their somber, cliché-ridden eulogies range from stupid Twitter commentary to well-written articles, with praise for Soleimani, unalloyed contempt for Donald Trump, and dire predictions of retribution in the days ahead.

"In the stupid Twitter category, celebrities take the lead. Rose McGowan’s “Dear Iran” tweet got the ball rolling, with “Dear #Iran. The USA has disrespected your country, your flag, your people. 52% of us humbly apologize. We want peace with your nation. We are being held hostage by a terrorist regime. We do not know how to escape. Please do not kill us. #Soleimani". . . .
. . . "Meanwhile, exaggerations of Soleimani’s greatness and the depth of his intellect are common. Time magazine compared him to Cardinal Richelieu and Machiavelli. Prompted by Fareed Zakaria’s claim that Soleimani was “regarded in Iran as a completely heroic figure, personally very brave,” Anderson Cooper compared him to Charles de Gaulle. Rosanna Arquette compared Trump to Hitler for killing the great Soleimani." . .  .

Dems unhappy: Iran is not following the script

The Left, so committed to its script, is left trying to convince the American people that their villain (Solomeini) is a hero, and our hero (Donald J. Trump) is a villain.  Sadly for the Left, the American people are watching events play out in real time.

2020 Democrats risk backlash in trashing Trump’s Iran strike

Democrats have a poor track record in supporting those who stand up to the Mullahs.
2018: OBAMA ABANDONED IRANIANS WHEN THEY FOUGHT FOR FREEDOM—TRUMP MUST NOT DO THE SAME  . . . "The Obama administration, obsessed with rapprochement with Tehran, abandoned Green Movement protesters, but America recently sought support for Iran's spontaneous demonstrators at the U.N. Security Council. Russia, China, economically motivated traders and others chastised Washington for attacking internal Iranian matters." . . .

Other persecuted groups outside America see things differently:

Banned! Thousands Of Iranian Actors, Filmmakers On Secret Blacklist  "Thousands of Iranian filmmakers, actors, and other artists are on a secret government blacklist that bans them from working or having their work shown in public." . . .

BPR:  Remarkable video shows Iranian students avoid stepping on USA and Israeli flags out of respect   . . . "Amid all the tension between Iran and the United States, another incredible thing is taking place in the country — Iranians are refusing to accept America as the enemy.
"This was seen in a viral video of Iranians refusing to step on U.S. and Israel flags that have been painted on the ground at Shaheed Beheshti University.
"Journalist Mohammad Mozafari shared the video clip, tweeting: “The people do not disrespect the flag of USA and Israel. They say all over Iran: We are not the enemy of the USA and Israel. Our enemy is the people of the Islamic Republic of Iran' ” . . .

Capitol Hill mood shifted as lawmakers were briefed by the CIA on Suleimani’s planned attack on US personnel. Congressional mood was tense following the Iran missile strike before it was revealed no US soldiers were hit. Nancy Pelosi had her plastic surgeon put a worried look on her face  Comedian Argus Hamilton

 Parody, sarcasm, satire: Here's some parody from the parody site, The Babylon Bee:
Iran Declines To Sign Colin Kaepernick After Reviewing Workout Video

TEHRAN—Colin Kaepernick sent his workout video to Iran after learning they may have recently opened up a position but has yet to receive a phone call.Kaepernick condemned American attacks on Iranian terrorists last week, inciting rumors that he may have found a team interested in him in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But Iranian officials have dispelled the rumors, stating clearly and unequivocally that "we have no interest in signing Kaepernick at this time, but we wish him well in his future endeavors." "It's disappointing to see that Iran is as hateful as America," a downcast Kaepernick said in a press conference. "I expected to be welcomed as a hero over there, but apparently, they too are biased against people with dark skin." Kaepernick plans to protest Iran's hate by continuing to kneel during the American national anthem.Iran has clarified that they agree with Kaepernick ideologically, but they need someone who can throw.

Iran's only female Olympic medalist reportedly defects

Yahoo News  DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) -- Iran's only female Olympic medalist said she defected from the Islamic Republic in a blistering online letter that describes herself as “one of the millions of oppressed women in Iran.”

"Taekwondo athlete Kimia Alizadeh posted the letter on Instagram as Iran's semiofficial ISNA news agency said she had fled to the Netherlands. She criticized wearing the mandatory hijab headscarf and accused officials in Iran of sexism and mistreatment.

“Whatever they said, I wore," Alizadeh wrote in the letter posted Saturday. "Every sentence they ordered, I repeated."
"She described the decision to leave Iran as difficult, but necessary." . . .

How McConnell Outplayed Pelosi

Matthew Continetti

The Republican leader unified his caucus by relying on precedent.

"Mitch McConnell was clear when he addressed the Senate on December 18: Any impeachment trial of President Trump would follow the precedent established by the trial of President Clinton 20 years ago.
"Clinton’s trial was divided into pieces. The Senate agreed unanimously to begin with a briefing, opening arguments, questions from senators, and a vote to dismiss. Whether to hear witnesses or introduce additional evidence were questions decided later. “That was the unanimous bipartisan precedent from 1999,” McConnell said. “Put first things first, lay the bipartisan groundwork, and leave mid-trial questions to the middle of the trial.' ”
"The arrangement satisfied Chuck Schumer back when he was a recently elected junior senator from New York. Funny how times change. Now Senate minority leader, and looking to damage Republicans in a presidential election year, Schumer demanded that McConnell call witnesses and ask for additional documents at the outset of the proceedings. Pelosi followed his cues. After the House impeached Trump on December 18, she said she wouldn’t transmit the articles of impeachment until McConnell gave in to Schumer’s demands.
"McConnell refused. He continued to point to the (relative) bipartisanship of the Clinton era. “The Senate said, 100 to nothing, that was good enough for President Clinton,” he said on January 6. “So it ought to be good enough for President Trump. Fair is fair.” The following day, McConnell ridiculed the idea that Pelosi had “leverage” over the Senate: “Apparently this is their proposition: If the Senate does not agree to break with our own unanimous bipartisan precedent from 1999, and agree to let Speaker Pelosi hand-design a different procedure for this Senate trial, then they might never dump this mess in our lap.” Fine with him. The Senate has plenty of other things to do.
"The reliance on precedent is one of McConnell’s most effective strategies. In 2016 he invoked the “Biden rule” to prevent confirmation hearings for Judge Merrick Garland, President Obama’s nominee to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, until after the election. The following spring, when Senate Republicans voted to end the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, McConnell noted that former majority leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, had done the same for lower-court nominees in 2013." . . .

The Humpty Dumpty Fate of Post-Reagan Consensus

Conrad Black

The bipartisan political consensus of the 32 post-Reagan years has been unmasked, debunked, and overthrown. The political establishment will require a long time to reconstruct itself after this re-enactment of the fate of Humpty Dumpty.

"The predicted has happened in Iran and more quickly than had been expected. On the evening of the day on which the Iranian authorities managed to bungle the funeral of their late terrorist chief, Qasem Soleimani, at least 50 people were trampled to death in their grief, and the crisis over the supposed escalation of hostilities subsided. (At least, unlike during the funeral of the Iranian theocracy’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the coffin did not fly open, spilling the corpse on the mourners.)
"Nothing could be more obvious than the point made here and elsewhere, but particularly by President Trump, that Iran was in no position to do serious damage to the United States, and could not aspire to more than squalid and cowardly terrorist action against embassies and civilians and other relatively vulnerable targets, while the United States had already identified every significant military target in Iran and could obliterate them all within 30 minutes.
"These are military facts that no one sought to deny or could deny; the president had made it clear in his remarks and demonstrated in his actions that any attack on Americans would elicit a severe and disproportionate response.
"So the only possible scenario that justified the wails of alarm the floundering assortment of Democratic presidential candidates could muster to bring about the war they quickly foresaw was if the Iranian leadership were, like some of their operatives, on a suicide mission.
"Obviously, defanged, psychopathic, and primitive though they are, the Iranians are not so filled with a supernatural inferno of misplaced piety and fervor that they wish to precipitate themselves into eternity prematurely. Tuesday night’s launch of 12 missiles from Iran into Iraq apparently at Iraqi targets and which did not injure any Americans and was styled by the Iranian government information service as the regime’s response to the death of Soleimani, does not require an American military response and evinces a desire to de-escalate." . . .

It is indicative of the creeping irresolution of the Democratic Party that almost all of its spokespeople have embraced the disgraceful Obama-Iran agreement and have tried to petrify the country with fear that if anything other than Carter-Obama style appeasement of evil were engaged in, America would be plunged into an inexorable, sanguinary, and hopeless war.

Toon added by TD

Conrad Black has been one of Canada’s most prominent financiers for 40 years, and was one of the leading newspaper publishers in the world as owner of the British telegraph newspapers, the Fairfax newspapers in Australia, the Jerusalem Post, Chicago Sun-Times and scores of smaller newspapers in the U.S., and most of the daily newspapers in Canada. He is the author of authoritative biographies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, one-volume histories of the United States and Canada, and most recently of Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other. He is a member of the British House of Lords as Lord Black of Crossharbour.