The assassination of Iranian major general Qassem Soleimani has once again put the United States and the Middle East into very unsteady and dangerous diplomatic territory. Democratic officials have lambasted the president for his reckless actions, while Republicans have attempted to replay the 2001 playbook, with Vice President Mike Pence going so far as to completely fabricate a connection between Soleimani and the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. Subsequently, because the conservative handbook these days also includes an attack on the Democratic Party for being political, they have attacked front running presidential candidates like Sen. Elizabeth Warren for being somehow unAmerican. The big attack Warren faced this past week was that after saying Soleimani was a “murderer,” she subsequently also called his death an assassination and questioned Donald Trump’s motivations for putting our country on the brink of war.
Since this is the kind of thing that makes hay these days in the traditional news media, Warren’s campaign has decided to get her on news shows in order to explain to the dull-witted that her statements about Soleimani and Trump are not mutually exclusive and can all be true if you take one single breath and think one tiny thought. Of course, taking a breath to think is not a strength of conservative pundits like one of the world’s most privileged people, Meghan McCain. You might remember McCain as the daughter of a well-known U.S. senator. She is on ABC’s The View because well, if America is about anything it’s about failing up for the children of the powerful.
After prefacing her question by condescendingly saying she believed Sen. Elizabeth Warren—whose brothers all served in the U.S. military—respected our country’s armed forces, McCain went through her Republican talking points and questioned Warren for “flip-flopping” on Soleimani. Besides the fact that having a foreign policy that doesn’t involve recklessly throwing our armed forces into certain danger might be a respectful stance to take for a leader, the concept that Meghan McCain—in defense of bone spurred Donald Trump—can tell anyone anything about respecting the military is just grotesque.
Warren has heard all of this, of course, and very quickly responded, mirroring McCain’s idiotic preamble in what might be called a pleasant bit of mockery, and then reminding McCain and idiots like her, that we are talking about serious stuff, and also that everything Warren said about the situation with Soleimani is true.
SEN. ELIZABETH WARREN: This isn’t a change. They’re true.
But, of course, the important thing to discuss here isn’t whether or not Meghan McCain’s reading comprehension level is higher than a 6-year-old’s, it’s about world war and our foreign policy in regards to a possibly emerging nuclear power.
SEN. WARREN: The question is what is the on response that the president of the United States should make, and what advances the interests of the United States of America. Think about Saddam Hussein. If you want to talk about a bad guy, right? However, going to war in Iraq was not in the interest of the United States. We lost thousands of American lives. It cost us here at home. It has cost us around the world. It has been a part of this cost in the Middle East, that has ended up with millions of people who have lost their lives, who have been injured, who’ve been displaced. The question for the president of the United States is to understand what's going on, have an overall strategy, and pick an appropriate response, and going back to Whoopi's question—
At this point, McCain is left with her only playing card: an ace that the Republican Party wrote on a napkin with a broken crayon.
MEGHAN MCCAIN: Is he a terrorist?
Of course Meghan McCain doesn’t care who is a terrorist or not, in her mind most everybody that lives in a different part of the world and has a darker complexion than her would probably fall into that category. She just wants to feel like she asked a question that sounds like it’s a gotcha question.
WARREN: He's part of a group that has been designated as a--
MCCAIN: --He's not a terrorist?
WARREN: Of course he is. He's part of a group that our federal government has designated as a terrorist. The question though, is what's the right response? And the response that Donald Trump has picked is the most incendiary, and has moved us to right to the edge of war, and that is not in our long-term interests.
It’s hard to be more useless than Meghan McCain, but Breitbart and Fox News are trying.