By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Occasionally entertainment and politics intersect, often hitting a false note. You never want your screenplay to be, as they say in Hollywood, “on the nose.” You have to step sideways away from ordinary news and address some dimension of the human condition to make art. But […]
US Media outraged by Russia, won’t Notice Israeli plot on UK Parliament
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment)- – Washington is obsessed by the story put out by US intelligence agencies that Russia tried to interfere in the US presidential election. But for reasons of self-preservation, the blockbuster story just hitting the headlines that an Israeli operative was plotting to get up scandals to unseat British members […]
Reflections by a Middle Easterner on the Electoral College as a Remnant of Elite Tribalism
By Hsain Ilahiane | (Informed Comment) | – – The Founding Fathers wrote the electoral college in the United States Constitution. In late summer 2004, I became a naturalized United States citizen in Des Moines, Iowa. The following November election day, with my voting card in hand, sure-footed and full of excitement, I walked over […]
Those Times the NSA Hacked America’s Allies
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The hysteria about Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee servers and the phishing scam run on Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, is short on evidence and high in self-righteousness. Much of the report issued Friday was old boilerplate about […]
Circus of Liars: How Trump & GOP are Twisted into Pretzels over Putin Hack
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Donald J. Trump has picked another fight with the elders of his own Republican Party, over whether Russia engaged in hacking aimed at influencing the US election. Trump has maintained that it is impossible to trace hacking attempts, that it isn’t clear who was behind them, […]
Top 4 Ways Bush even more Outrageously Dissed the Intelligence Community
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Philip Mudd, former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency counter-terrorist center and FBI National Security Branch, has been on CNN maintaining that there was a big difference between how the intelligence agencies were treated by the Bush administration and how the PEOTUS is treating them. […]
Rebuking Fundamentalists, Funeral for Palestinian-Israeli Istanbul Victim draws Thousands
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – One of the thirty-nine victims of the Daesh (ISIL, ISIS) shooting at the Reina nightclub in Istanbul, Layan Nasser, 19, was buried on Tuesday in her home town, Tira, in central Israel. Roughly a fifth of Israeli citizens are of Palestinian heritage, the majority of them […]
Iran confident Trump’s bond with Putin will Benefit it, too
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Iran’s pundits are confident that the country is sitting in the catbird seat. They are elated over the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad proving victorious, with Russian help in Aleppo. They are exulting in their newly strengthened ties with Moscow. They believe that the Obama administration’s […]
Preparing for the Normalization of a Neofascist White House
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – It is 2017, and shortly the White House will be inhabited by an unscrupulous, corrupt narcissist who has shamelessly mobilized the Neo-Nazi fringe of the Republican Party to get into power. Despite all the cries of ‘no’ to normalization on the left, Trump will be normalized […]
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