Politics is a dirty business. Blaming opponents is standard. But there comes a time when such finger-pointing is downright unpatriotic. Liberals crossed that line by trying to pin the downing of a Ukrainian passenger jet over Tehran on President Trump — a tragedy thousands of Iranian protesters blamed on the malicious ineptitude of their own leaders.
The blame-Trump talking point wasn’t limited to wacky corners of Twitter, mind you. Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) serves on the House Armed Services Committee and chairs its Military Personnel Subcommittee. So theoretically, she shouldn’t be a crazy person. Yet she was all over cable TV blaming Trump for Iran’s shoot-down of a Ukrainian passenger jet.
On Friday, Speier appeared on CNN claiming that the death of the plane’s 176 passengers “emanates from the death of Soleimani. … This all started from the time the president of the United States reneged on the nuclear deal that we had with Iran.”
As the song goes, Speier don’t know much about history — specifically, the Islamic Republic’s decades of aggression against America and the West, dating back to when “Trump” was just the name of a playboy property developer.
“Crossfire” was the Word of the Day among the American left to describe what had happened — even though there literally was no fire from the US side. In fact, the night the Ukrainian jet was downed, Iran had fired on bases housing US forces in Iraq.
Facts notwithstanding, CNN analyst Susan Hennessey tweeted: “176 completely innocent lives, killed in the crossfire of reckless escalation.” The Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum and NBC’s Heidi Przybyla also tweeted “crossfire” takes, while that paper’s faux-conservative columnist, Jennifer Rubin, made excuses for Tehran: “After all the rhetoric from Trump and especially from [Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo, I think any country would be jumpy.”
If rhetoric makes a country “jumpy” enough to down an airplane taking off from its own airport, the problem is that country’s leadership, not the US president. The plane was departing, not approaching, making the Iranian action quite a big oopsie.
Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, cleverly played to US liberals’ biases, blaming his country’s blunder on “US adventurism.” Vox writer Aaron Rupar and many other liberals instantly parroted the line.
The left’s “reckless” charge only applies to Trump. Lefty protesters raged against the president’s “reckless” killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Think pieces in Vox, The Washington Monthly and CNN, among others, all used the “r”-word to describe Trump targeting of this international terrorist.
But few used that same language to describe the actually reckless way Iran has behaved. Because liberals believe “Trump is bad,” many automatically end up on the “Iran-is-good” side to oppose the president. Soleimani was a terrorist with the blood of hundreds of Americans on his hands. He also plotted terror attacks against the US homeland: You don’t have to believe Trump — ask the Obama administration, which accused him of that in 2011.
Yet American media were downright solemn upon his death. Grabien Media put together a montage of media personalities describing him as “brave,” “a war hero,” “no ordinary general.” CNN’s Anderson Cooper compared him to Charles de Gaulle, who led the Free French against the Nazis in World War II.
It’s hard to imagine that Soleimani would have gotten the same unseemly gushing praise, or Iran the liberal apologetics, had it been Team Obama that had greased him.
There is a lot of room to be concerned about escalation with Iran without being insane about it. If you reach the point where you’re blaming Trump, and by extension America, for the Tehran regime accidentally firing at a passenger jet, it’s long past the time to rethink. Opposing war or the Trump presidency is one thing; making excuses for a leading state sponsor of terror is quite another.
Twitter: @Karol