Oregon's 2nd congressional district: A problem of differentiation.

Five people have filed for the Democratic nomination for Oregon's 2nd congressional district.

Which one will emerge from the group?

Some of them are sharpening up their campaigns with new focus. For example:

Mary Doyle makes the blunt observation that the district's current congressman Cliff Bentz voted not to count Pennsylvania's electoral votes in 2020 and opposed the bipartisan infrastructure bill. She objects.

Peter Quince says "This war must end. Our president has entered us into a catastrophic war." He didn't need to say the Iran war. We know.

Patty Snow cites the fact that 70 percent of this congressional district's children rely on Medicaid for health care, but that Cliff Bentz voted in favor of the Reconciliation Bill, which would kick many of them off of it. 

At this point in their campaigns the candidates are looking at their draft Voters Pamphlet statements and deciding what to say. No one asked me for my advice, but here it is:

Be blunt. Be clear. Don't voice just anodyne sentiments.

--   Resist the temptation to say namby-pamby things that nearly everyone will agree with. If everyone would agree with your statement, don't say it. That is what you will be tempted to write. It only proves you are a blabbering politician filling space. 

--  Realize that almost no one knows you or will remember you or anything about you. You are a blur, flashing by voters' attention background. So try to give them something to remember you by.

--  Opposition and criticism is your friend. Disagreement defines your brand by showing what you are not. Orange juice isn't Coke or Pepsi, and it doesn't apologize for that or try to blunt the difference. 

--   Disappoint the "usual suspects" of Democratic interest groups by expressing your reservations about one of their positions. Pick one or more: labor unions, abortion advocates, environmental groups, trans-rights advocates, pro-immigration activists, NIMBY activists, gun opponents, health care activists, pro-Israel people, pro-Palestinian people, anti-war activists, wealth-tax activists. These interest groups understand themselves to be "the tip of the spear" in advocacy, extreme for the purpose of moving the policy goalposts. Go ahead and disappoint them and take their criticism and relish it. It will demonstrate that you have the courage of your convictions, which is more valuable than being perceived as a slave to orthodoxy. Plus, you might get noticed.

Who are these five candidates? All good people. Conscientious. All would represent Democrats well. I think the candidate who will emerge is the one who has a clear, sharp focus on something with some edge. Something mentally "sticky." Someone who says something where voters think, “Oh, that’s the one who said ______” Like Mamdani and the free bus rides. Or George McGovern and ending the Vietnam war.

Rebecca Mueller

From the beginning of her campaign website:

"I am Rebecca Mueller, and I am running to represent Oregon's 2nd US Congressional District.

My campaign is focusing on issues of healthcare, fair wages, environmental stewardship as well as thriving farming and small town economies; standing on values of human dignity, mutual respect, and the belief that hyper-partisan, professional politicians are not serving the interests of a balanced democracy.

We Are More Than This."

Patti Snow

From the beginning of her campaign website:

"From the attempt to squelch our right to Free Speech to the Repeal of Women’s Rights, the roll-back of Clean Air acts and changes to our Healthcare System that will leave millions without coverage, Cliff Bentz and Trump have ensured that we have plenty of battles to fight. All of these are important issues but there are several areas I consider my “North Star” priorities. These priorities include ensuring that hospitals in rural Oregon are kept open, that our school children and underprivileged citizens are fed, that the sick and elderly can afford healthcare and that our rights to live our lives according to our own beliefs are protected."

Dawn Rasmussen 

From the beginning of her campaign website:

"Oregonians are ready for decency, democracy, and down-to-earth leadership — values that have guided my life and will guide my work in Congress.

I’m not a career politician. I’m a working Oregonian who believes that Representative isn’t just a title — it’s a job description. It means showing up. Listening. Taking every voice — whether it agrees with me or not — seriously.

Oregon’s 2nd District deserves someone who represents people, not politics. That’s the kind of leadership I’m bringing to Washington."

Peter Quince 

 

From the beginning of his campaign website:

"Tikkun Olam

The North Star that guides me is Tikkun Olam, often translated as “Heal the World”. None of us can heal the entire world, but we can make better what’s within our reach and that, if all of us do that, we WILL heal the world.

Mission Statement

To restore representative government. Congress needs to reclaim the role assigned by our founding documents. I want to work to heal our democracy so these United States of America can again be a beacon of hope, prosperity, inclusiveness, and peace."

Mary Doyle

 

From the beginning of her campaign website:

"Leadership That Listens

For more than twenty years, I’ve worked in Oregon’s public schools; teaching, leading, and working directly with families. I’ve sat at kitchen tables, in classrooms, and in community meetings listening to real concerns about health care costs, water security, wildfires risks, and making ends meet.

Listening isn’t political for me, it’s personal.

That’s the leadership I’ll bring to Congress; grounded, accessible, and accountable to the people of Southern and Eastern Oregon."

 

Disclosure: I have made a campaign contribution to the one candidate in this group who made a serious request for a donation. 

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Deus ex machina

"Like a bolt out of the blue

Fate steps in and sees you through
When you wish upon a star
Your dreams come true.

   Disney, "When you wish upon a star," 1940

"When you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything."

   Donald Trump, Access Hollywood tape, made public, 2016

Deus ex machina ("god from the machine") is a plot device where an unsolvable, seemingly hopeless problem is abruptly resolved by an unexpected, unlikely occurrence.

We understand that the Deus ex machina device is implausible plotting. 

Herb Rothschild's guest post the day before yesterday recalled an incident that is burned into the consciousness of people on the political left about the hypocritical and disastrous decision of the U.S. to engineer a coup in Iran. In the 1950s the CIA and related organizations deposed Iran's elected government led by Mohammad Mosaddegh and replaced it with the pro-American Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Pahlavi made Iranian oil cheaply available to western oil companies. The Pahlavi dynasty wasn't organic to Iran nor a legitimate government. That was the original sin. The Pahlavi government was overthrown after 20 years by a government far worse than the one we deposed; our democratic hypocrisy backfired. That is the lesson the non-interventionist left learned 

There is another lesson that persists, though. It is that the U.S. has god-like machines at its disposal: air power, and special force teams that can do targeted assassinations and captures. We got Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan and Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi in Syria. So clean. So surgical. It would be a shame not to use so wonderful a machine. It would be like having the Covid vaccine and not taking it. Only foolish MAGA cultists would do that, right?  

Trump absorbed that lesson. We performed lightning strikes on boats off Venezuela, and no person, country, law, or norm could stop us. Trump was Zeus. The snatch and grab of Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores worked so well. Trump kept the existing authoritarian government in place, rejecting what would have been democratic government led by María Corina Machado, the Nobel Peace Prize winner. She would not have been compliant. The successor to Maduro holds power at Trump's pleasure. Perfect!

There is something unsatisfying in a narrative that requires a bolt out of the blue to resolve an intractable plot problem. If the cavalry is going to ride in and save the wagon train from attack, then it needs to be established that the cavalry was somehow summoned by the people they rescue. Superman or the Ghostbusters team cannot just show up with supernatural power. 

The world is re-discovering the limits of the bolt out of the blue. Iran's resistance to U.S. air power is organic. I am appalled by what I consider religious fanaticism that is widespread in the region, but it is present. They aren't being reasonable, from my point of view, but they are being who they are, and they are there, the combatants in Israel, Iran, and elsewhere. The comments written to the back-to-back guest posts of yesterday's by Michael Trigoboff and the prior day by Herb Rothschild make my point. Zionist Jews have asserted God's blessing on the region being theirs alone. Leave or die. Strong, fanatical words. Islamic voices have said Allah wants that same land for Muslims alone. Death to Jews. More fanaticism. 

Trump has kicked a hornets nest. This will not end neatly and quickly with a new, compliant, government in Iran. Such a government would not have legitimacy and would not reflect a plausible equilibrium of the centrifugal forces inside Iran. Is there any chance that a government that emerged after an assassination of President Trump by an Iranian drone would resolve into happy state in which the Iranian ayatollah picked a new U.S. government sworn to establish Sharia law in a disarmed United States? Of course not.

The sudden change that is possible is Trump abruptly announcing that the war has already succeeded, the greatest victory in history, a 100 percent removal of the Iranian threat, and that he is the world's best dealmaker. Bebe Netanyahu would protest that the U.S. is leaving the region with the job unfinished, but Trump will ignore him. It is TACO Trump. This is sudden, but it would not be a bolt from the blue. It would be Trump being Trump, making trouble as he has with tariffs, U.S alliances, and immigration control. He breaks things, and then moves on. That backstory is well established.

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Guest Post: Don't blame the U.S. and Israel. Blame Iran.

     "Nothing would improve the prospects of the people of Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Gaza, Yemen and Israel more than removing the Islamic regime in Tehran."

          Thomas Friedman, in today's New York Times

Maybe the U.S. and Israel aren't the bad guys. Maybe Iran is.

Yesterday's guest post by Herb Rothschild listed the policy and moral failures of the U.S. and Israel. I invited someone to respond and argue "that the policy and actions of the U.S. and Israel have been honest, above-board, and peace-seeking in this region."

Michael Trigoboff doesn't argue that the U.S. and Israel are good, but rather than their war against Iran is good because it is necessary. Iran is a danger to Israel, to the region, and to the USA. It is fanatical, brutal, and relentless in its desire to destroy The Great Satan (the U.S.) and The Little Satan (Israel.) They pray for our deaths.

Michael Trigoboff is a retired computer science professor at Portland Community College.

Trigoboff

Guest Post by Michael Trigoboff

A response to yesterday's post by Herb Rothschild:

Mr. Rothschild thinks that the United States has no reason to go to war against Iran. I wonder what he thinks incessant chants of “Death to America” are all about. I wonder why he thinks Iran is motivated to get nuclear weapons and who they might want to use them against.

Iran doesn’t just chant its wishes. Iran and its proxies killed over 200 US Marines in Beirut; they captured the CIA station chief in Lebanon, tortured him to death, and sent us a video of the torture; they supplied Iraqi insurgents with IEDs that killed and wounded thousands of our soldiers.

Iran is the foremost sponsor of Islamic terrorism in the world. It threatens all of our regional allies. Its proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, provided it with a strong deterrent against attack. Thanks to Israel's destruction of those proxies, that deterrent has evaporated. Iran’s currently weakened state provides a golden opportunity to take down one of our foremost enemies.

Israel made numerous offers to live in peace beside a Palestinian state. The Palestinian response was not just refusal, but refusal accompanied by terrorist violence. One such offer was made to the Palestinians in 2000 by President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Not only did the Palestinians refuse to negotiate about this offer, they accompanied their refusal with the Second Intifada, a wave of 140 vicious terrorist suicide bombings targeting school buses, pizzerias, and cafes. Israel had a strong peace movement, but after the Second Intifada it collapsed, because most Israelis saw that the only outcome acceptable to the Palestinians was the total destruction of Israel.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators often chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” That's the chant in English. In Arabic, they chant: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be Arab.” The Palestinians want a one-state solution; a state “from the river to the sea” completely free of Jews.

Iran’s ruling ayatollahs are not a normal regime that wants the best for its people. Their extreme Islamic ideology wants nothing less than the destruction first of Israel, then America. Their goal is Islamic rule over the entire world. Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Iranian regime, said this ultimate victory was worth it, even if Iran had to burn in the process. That same ideology was at play in Gaza, where Hamas spent its years of rule building nothing but tunnels so that it could hide under its civilians, turning them into human shields. The fate of those human shields mattered to Hamas only as a propaganda tool against Israel.

Obama’s “nuclear deal” with Iran was fatally flawed by its sunset clauses. By now those sunset clauses would have taken effect and Iran would be free to pursue nukes again. Allowing an Islamic death cult like the Iranian regime to get nuclear weapons is nothing short of criminal strategic negligence.

Israel had to destroy the Iranian proxies before it could go after the head of the snake. The United States is in the same position, but on a much larger strategic chessboard. Ninety percent of Iranian oil goes to China, which is how Iran gets around sanctions. China needs this oil to support its economy. By becoming a proxy of China and stepping onto that larger chessboard, the Iranian regime made a strategic, and hopefully fatal error.

The United States needs to deter China from attacking and taking over Taiwan. A credible threat to cut off China’s external oil supplies could do this. Just as Israel needed to take Hamas and Hezbollah off the chessboard before it could go after Iran, the United States needs the means to credibly threaten China’s external oil supply.

This could be the coherent strategy behind going after Venezuela first, and then Iran. We now control Venezuela’s oil exports. That oil is no longer going to Cuba, and we could stop it from going to China. If we gain that ability with Iranian oil as well, we may have what we need to deter an attack by China on Taiwan.

Both Mr. Rothschild and I are of Jewish heritage. When he thinks about who the good guys and the bad guys are, he might consider what his life would have been like had he been born in Iran instead of here in America.

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Maybe we aren't the good guys

The U.S. claims that Iran is the dangerous one. Really?

Today's guest post holds up a mirror to the U.S. and Israel:

     "How many other countries has Iran, that danger to the world, attacked militarily? None. Israel has invaded Lebanon and Syria and attacked Iraq and Iran. The U.S. has invaded Iraq and Syria and attacked Iran and Yemen."

Herb Rothschild was a professor of English at LSU. He has been a lifetime activist on behalf of peace, justice, and the environment. He is the author of The Bad Old Days, a memoir of his years as a civil rights activist in Louisiana. He was the founder of ashland.news, a now-thriving online newspaper for Ashland, Oregon.

Herb Rothschild

Guest Post by Herb Rothschild

Shortly after Trump let Netanyahu lead him by the nose again and attack Iran for the second time, he sent me an email saying that Iran wants to bring DEATH (he loves caps) to America. I’m not sure of that. I am sure that for many years America has wanted to bring death to Iran.

Our hostility dates from January 1979, when popular resistance forced the shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to flee. Before that, Iran was a close ally. Indeed, during the Nixon-Kissinger years, it was the anchor of our Middle East policy. We loaded it with weapons, and the U.S. embassy in Tehran was our largest in the world, staffed by more than 1000 Americans, mostly CIA agents and military advisors.

A main reason we liked the Pahlavis—the father, then the son—was that they allowed Western oil companies to exploit their nation’s vast resources at sweetheart prices. Most Iranians didn’t share our pleasure. When a politician named Mohammad Mosaddegh called for nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, there was an outpouring of popular support, and on April 28, 1951, the Iranian parliament voted to appoint Mossadegh prime minister.

Consequently, the British Secret Service and the CIA worked successfully to topple Mosaddegh and reinstall the shah, who subsequently ruled over a restless population through terror. SAVAK, the shah’s secret police, had been created in 1957 with assistance from the CIA and Israel’s Mossad. SAVAK became widely feared for surveillance, imprisonment, and torture. It even operated in the U.S. with CIA consent, spying on Iranian expats and students.

After the shah was overthrown, Carter foolishly allowed Kissinger to persuade him to allow the dying shah to enter the U.S. for medical treatment. Enraged, young Iranians occupied the U.S. embassy, which had continued as an outpost of U.S. spying. They held U.S. personnel hostage until January 1981. In response, the U.S. imposed the first of what were to become a series of economic sanctions.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, believing that its revolution had weakened Iran, invaded his neighbor on September 22, 1980. Thus began an eight-year war in which Iran suffered about 300,000 deaths and 500,000 wounded. During the war, the U.S. provided Iraqi forces with satellite imagery and battlefield intelligence to target Iranian troop concentrations. Iraq also received U.S. agricultural credits and trade, which helped finance its war effort.

It’s impossible to forgive someone whom you’ve injured. So, the U.S. has treated Iran as an enemy ever since the fall of the shah.

Stoking our animosity has been Iran’s support for armed groups trying to save the Palestinians from Israel’s ethnic cleansing. How can a nation (ours) that has furnished Israel the money and weapons with which Israel has been displacing and killing Palestinians since 1948—not even halting the flow of arms as Israel commits genocide in Gaza—tolerate another nation’s taking the opposite side? Isn’t the designation of terrorist states our sole prerogative?

And what a game the U.S. and Israel have played over Iran’s nuclear weapons program! In 2015, Iran signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with the U.S. and five other major powers. Accordingly, it gave up its efforts to develop nuclear weapons and placed its nuclear facilities under continuous monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Israel opposed the agreement, and the Israel lobby nearly succeeded in getting Congress to abrogate Obama’s decision to make the U.S. a party to it.

As soon as Trump took office in 2017, he pulled the U.S. out of the agreement and reimposed sanctions on Iran. Biden didn’t undo that damage. So, Iran restarted its nuclear weapons program, which then became a prime justification for the U.S. and Israel (both nuclear powers) to attack it.

How many other countries has Iran, that danger to the world, attacked militarily? None. Israel has invaded Lebanon and Syria and attacked Iraq and Iran. The U.S. has invaded Iraq and Syria and attacked Iran and Yemen. That’s just in the Middle East. If I were to list the other countries the U.S. has attacked and invaded in my lifetime, I would exceed the word limit Peter gave me.

Surely it’s time for us to rethink the designations of “good guys” and “bad guys” in the geopolitical narratives that we have been fed for so long. Or do we fear the moral obligation to resist that such honesty will impose on us?

 

[Note: In the interests of wholesome discussion of serious issues, I will happily consider potential guest post submissions which choose to argue that the policy and actions of the U.S. and Israel have been honest, above-board, and peace-seeking in this region.]

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Easy Sunday: The kids are all right.

Middle school students in Medford, Oregon, were suspended for cutting class to participate in an anti-ICE protest.

The protest is OK. The discipline is OK. 

I love it.

Rogue Valley Times news story

It is almost spring in Medford, with sunny and clear afternoons in the 60s. Early trees are budding. Young people are restless. 

Fifty years from now the students won't be reminiscing with former classmates about the problem sets in their algebra class. But many of them will remember the thrill of organizing a non-permitted, skip-school protest of the rough and misdirected policing by ICE. They will retain memories of the honking horns of cars on the street, and the trouble they got into.  

They will remember it better thanks to having gotten in trouble.

For some, the protest was learning how to pitch an independent idea to classmates and to organize them. Perhaps different leaders emerged than those from school-approved activities like student body elections and athletic teams. Students got direct experience with the school's justice system for behavior the school found transgressive no matter how worthy the students believed the cause to be. It will be a good topic of discussion among them. Was it fair or unfair? 

The event was not a simulation of life, a school project to prepare, get graded, and then discard. It wasn't a civics class about how a bill becomes law. It is a tiny bit of real life because it was outside of school and forbidden.

I am happy to see that this walkout protest was about protesting ICE. I suspect this protest will age well for them. Some of the people at risk of deportation will be their friends and the families of their friends. 

I take enough pleasure in seeing political engagement by young people that I would even feel OK if I learned that young people were protesting in support of Kristi Noem: "Bring her back! Bring her back!"  I would shudder, of course, about their choice of position, but I would appreciate their engagement with the broader world. 

People with political power -- people more or less my age -- don't give up their power willingly. Their power is torn from their aged hands by the next generation, who don't ask for permission. 

Like the tiny buds on plum tree branches at my farm, the protest is not a plan for beginning the next cycle. It is the beginning of the next cycle..

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For-Profit Medicine

The U.S. healthcare system costs more than the systems in peer countries. 

Our health outcomes are no better.

Today's guest post offers hopeful news.

In some arenas, the profit motive and competition drive down costs. This doesn't work in healthcare, where consumers interact with the system out of need, not choice, and where most payments are made by third parties. Our current system leads to vertical integration and monopoly pricing at every level.

U.S. Senators Elizabeth Warren (D - MA) and Josh Hawley (R- MO) have introduced a bill to change that.

Bruce Van Zee is a retired nephrologist. He lives in Medford, Oregon and calls himself a "Never Trumper." He began sharing his thoughts during this second Trump term in his new blog on Substack. He allowed me to republish his post from yesterday, a welcome bit of good news amidst news of the Iran war, "unconditional surrender," inflation, job losses, and the drip from the Epstein coverup. He would welcome new subscribers:  https://bvzcvz.substack.com

Van Zee

Guest Post by Bruce Van Zee

Break up Big Medicine Act

Some Hopeful News about For-Profit Medicine

Imagine being in the market for a home. You contact a realtor who agrees to show you some homes for sale. You find a home you like and submit an offer. The offer is accepted and your realtor then refers you to a mortgage bank, home inspector, and a title company. You are a bit surprised by the steep fees of the companies, but eventually, the deal is completed. Later you learn that the only homes the realtor showed you were ones that the conglomerate that owned the realtor’s firm had listed. The same Real Estate Conglomerate also owned the title company and the mortgage bank and the home inspector’s firm. You ruefully calculate by retrospectively comparing other non-conglomerate pricing that you paid way too much.

Thankfully, this dark scenario can’t happen under U.S. law because of legislation prohibiting these incestuous and monopolistic relationships. RESPA (Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act) and other antitrust regulations prohibit such self-dealing and require disclosure and freedom to seek other services outside of the conglomerate.

Unfortunately, such is not the case with mega for-profit health insurance companies. Currently, many for-profit insurance providers (UnitedHealth, Aetna, Cigna, Humana, Elevance) operate vertically integrated companies that not only offer health insurance, but often provide a provider network of physicians, pharmaceutical company and pharmacy benefit manager, and a medical device company that they own. So, if a person purchases one of these companies’ health insurance policies, they are often referred internally for all services. One can escape the network for other physicians or pharmaceuticals, but the costs are usually higher.

The problem is that there is a host of information showing that these companies are profiting off every step of the vertical referral chain and driving up health care costs. I previously posted data showing the cost overruns of Medicare Advantage over traditional Medicare (here and here). The WSJ also has an excellent expose on the rip-off of government and taxpayers by the mega for-profit health care companies (here). Among other strategies, the vertically integrated companies subverted federal guidelines designed to limit profitability of their insurance arm by taking additional pieces of profit out of the provider and pharmaceutical entities as well.

Well, help is on the way! In a rare bipartisan partnership, Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) have introduced the Breakup Big Medicine Act (here). This needed legislation would prevent vertical integration of health services and, if it becomes law, would require existing companies to divest of their vertical integration services within a year or face penalties. A company could not own both an insurance company and a physician network nor could they own a pharmaceutical chain or pharmaceutical benefit manager firm or medical supply company. Hospitals would still be allowed to have employed physicians. The legislation would be analogous to the Glass-Steagall act that regulated and separated commercial and investment banking, and to the RESPA act for realty. The hoped result would be to decrease overall costs and stimulate competition. But, given our lobby-driven system of legislation that gives disproportional power to monied interests, the chance of passage is meager.

There is a humorous You-Tube video with the satirical Dr. Glaucomflecken and Elizabeth Warren that is worth the few minutes to watch. It gets the point across:

YouTube: Click here

(courtesy of Dr. M. Matthews)

My own view is the bill is a step in the right direction. But as I’ve indicated earlier, if America wants to really effect health care reform and decrease costs while improving quality, we need a well thought out National Health Plan like virtually all other western developed nations. America has twice the cost and poorer outcomes compared to these other nations. Medicare -For-All is one avenue to get us there with the safeguards and reforms previously outlined (here) and (here).

Thanks for listening!

Our troops deserve better.

I wish for the well-being of our troops in the Middle East.

They deserve a better president.

Email I received yesterday:

Peter, I agree with Trump that Iran is a danger to the world.  Should Democrats be hedging their comments on the war? Maybe our actions there will turn Iran into a friendly nation. What should Democrats be thinking or saying about this war?

Most of my readers are old enough to remember when the U.S. decided to make war on Iraq. People who were early critics, including Barack Obama, looked wise in hindsight. People like Hillary Clinton who were on record in support of the Iraq war, looked foolish. Maybe Iraq did have weapons of mass destruction. People want to be on the right side of history before the history is written. 

My response to the inquiry:

I wish for the well-being of our troops in Iran because I am an American. Those troops are an extension of me and my country, and I am vicariously responsible, even if I did not vote for Trump. My generation of Americans was put into peril in Vietnam, and I empathized with their situation then and again now. The fact that the war was flawed in its purpose, and was continued for the cynical purpose of political advantage in the 1972 election, heightens the victimhood of Vietnam veterans and the nobility of their service. I don't blame the soldiers carrying out the war against Iran. Quite the opposite. I wish them well.

This war, done this way, by this president, is a mistake. Some things --heart surgery, for example -- need to be done carefully if they are to be done at all. If you plan to do the surgery with a chain saw, it is better not to do it. Trump is carrying out this war in a way unlikely to produce a good outcome. 

--  Trump is continuing his pattern of turning our republic into a serial dictatorship by defying Congress' power to declare war. The Constitution is collateral damage.

--  Trump sprung this on our allies and the countries in the region, putting their governments, their citizens, and their economies in peril. A good outcome in Iran will require the cooperation of many nations. Trump demonstrated that we are a presumptuous, careless, untrustworthy hegemon that will ignore their interests in favor of ours.

-- Trump makes outrageous and arrogant demands on Iran. Trump first urged an organic revolution by the people of Iran to establish a new peace-seeking government without having made any provision for such a revolution. He then backtracked and said that he should shape their government, a comment so presumptuous as to make any good outcome less possible:. 

  "They are wasting their time. Khamenei's son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment, like with Delcy [Rodríguez] in Venezuela."

He later told NBC news:

“We want them to have a good leader. We have some people who I think would do a good job.

--  Trump displays shocking ignorance of the historical, ethnic, and religious factors that would be part of any successful new government in Iran. For example, Trump urged the Kurdish ethnic minority in Iraq to revolt. Shanaz Ibrahim Ahmed, Iraq's Kurdish First Lady, responded:

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq - "In 1991, the Kurds were urged to rise up against the regime of Saddam Hussein, only to be abandoned when priorities changed. No one came to our defense when the regime deployed helicopter gunships and tanks to crush the uprising. Those memories remain vivid and etched in our minds.

Today, we commemorate that chapter as “Raparin” and we do not forget what it taught us.

More recently, we saw what happened in Northeast Syria, or Rojava. After all the promises that were made, after Syria’s Kurds stood on the front lines of the war against ISIS, we witnessed how they were treated.

Today, the Kurds of Iraq have finally tasted a measure of stability and dignity in life. Because of this, it is very difficult, indeed impossible, for Kurds to accept being treated as pawns by the world’s superpowers.

The experiences are there. The empty promises are there. Too often, the Kurds are remembered only when their strength or sacrifice is needed. For that reason, I appeal to all sides involved in this conflict. Leave the Kurds alone. We are not guns for hire."

Her tone displays what a bumbling troublemaker Trump is considered to be. She openly voiced contempt.

Trump established a brand that wins him support among his MAGA base, his damn-the-torpedoes, git-'er-done man of action. He doesn't wait for permission. He doesn't care about process. He alone can do it. Trump the singular hero.

His DOGE efforts with Elon Musk's symbolic chainsaw, his ICE department with careless and rough immigration enforcement, and his slap-dash Liberation Day tariffs are all part of a pattern. The Iran war is another iteration of sloppy execution.

Things might work out in Iran. I hope so. Nevertheless, a Democrat can condemn Trump for initiating a dangerous, poorly-planned war. Our troops deserve better. The country deserves better. 

I am confident that history would be kind to that position.

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