By Jeffrey Blehar
Tuesday, June 17, 2025
As you are no doubt aware, Israel is currently in the
midst of a days-long airstrike campaign against Iran’s nuclear and military
facilities. The ongoing series of attacks, carried out with the tacit support —
albeit not direct participation — of the United States, is aimed at destroying
Iran’s nuclear program in its entirety. (In recent weeks, the country had come
alarmingly close to the nuclear breakout point, where they would have amassed
sufficient quantities of enriched uranium to create a bomb.)
And if you thought I was going to have something
thoughtful to say about developments on the ground, long-term diplomatic
implications, or geostrategic considerations — if you thought I had anything
intelligent to offer at all, really — then buddy, you came to the wrong kind of
carnival. This is a freak show, not a symposium; we’re here to gawk at geeks.
(Leave the deep thoughts to Jim and Noah, anyway.)
And as soon as the first Israeli strikes were announced
on Thursday, the weirdos scuttled out from behind the woodwork and poured forth
over Twitter/X, chirruping angrily and helplessly about Israel, about Jews, and
about worldwide conspiracy theories to yoke America to the Zionists. Yes,
old-fashioned nuttery was once again out in the open, as all the most obvious
suspects ran rampant.
There was Candace Owens — a woman who swears she is not
an antisemite even as she “just asks questions” about the myth of Simon of Trent —
reverting perfectly to form upon hearing
the news: “Get ready, white American men! It’s time for you to go die for
Israel again.” There was Tucker Carlson’s favorite “historian,” Darryl “MartyrMade” Cooper, offering
prayerful words of consolation to his followers: “Don’t worry, friends: as
arrogant and invincible as he may seem, in the end the devil and all his
children are cast into the lake of fire.” (Remember, my friends: Cooper — who
also believes that Churchill was the villain of World War II and that Europe
would have been better off had Hitler won — insists that he is in no way an
antisemite.)
As if to top them all, purported comedian Dave Smith — last seen
sidekicking as a wild-eyed conspiracy theorist spouting accusations of
Israeli genocide in Gaza on Joe Rogan’s hyper-popular podcast — went one step
further. Referring to reports that Trump is fully supporting Israel’s action,
he called Trump a traitor
to his own movement:
If this is true, Trump is the
most impotent b**** of a leader imaginable. He’s allowing one side of a war,
who clearly wants to drag us in, to lie about our involvement while not
correcting the record.
Either way, Trump has betrayed
MAGA and every principle of America First. He is no longer worthy of any of our
support. He probably never was.
I am as worried about the potential outcome in the Middle
East as any sane man would be. (In particular, I would be very careful about
breezily calling for immediate “regime change” without further consideration of
what a post-mullah Iran, brought to heel by Israeli military action, would look
like.) But it does my heart good to see all the worst people absolutely
enraged, and in such repulsively sputtering ways, about Israel’s success to
date.
Alex Padilla, Forgotten Man
In tales of the overtaken-by-events, last Thursday,
California Senator Alex Padilla (D. — like you had to ask) was, for once, the
subject of national news when he got the bum’s rush out of a press conference held by
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in downtown Los Angeles. And if your
first thought was “Alex who?” then don’t worry, he clearly felt the need to identify himself as well: “Hands off!
Hands off! I’m a senator! Alex Padilla! I have! Questions! For the secretary!”
the shabbily dressed man huffed as he rushed forward without warning toward
Noem. Noem’s security detail, with admirable professionalism, wordlessly pushed
him back out of the room and into the hall, where they got him on the floor and
cuffed him.
It was the big PR moment Padilla was hoping for. He was a
martyr for the cause of the undocumented. The New York Times and other outlets wrote glowing
profiles. Cable news talking heads were running with the “scandal” — violating
the august dignity of a senator, and a Latino at that! — in lead segments at
the top of the hour. For once, everything was comin’ up Alex.
And then Israel began pounding Iran’s nuclear
infrastructure, a psychopath went on a politically motivated assassination
spree in Minnesota, and everybody instantly moved on, sweeping Padilla back
into the well-deserved
obscurity whence he came. ’Tis to laugh, especially at a moment when laughs
are hard to come by. Such a well-engineered publicity stunt, with such hard
work put in — Padilla made sure to have his staffers accompany him to film the
pre-planned “arrest” he was seeking — and all for naught.
He was putting the work in for a reason. Unless you live
in California — and quite possibly even if you do — this guy simply doesn’t
exist for you. “Generic (D.)” has to have a human embodiment, I guess,
especially since Gary Peters retired — again, who? — and Padilla fills
the role, in part because his name and affect are so unprepossessing. “Alex
Padilla” is to California Latinos as “Gary Peters” is to white union-loving
Michiganders. Alex Padilla currently sits at third on my own mental depth chart
of Padillas, behind surprisingly durable journeyman pitcher Vicente and failed dirty-bomber Jose.
My general wish is for an end to all idiotic political
publicity stunts — I apply this to catfighting congresswomen, overly online
celebrity candidates, and the president alike. But my specific warning is
that, in an era where everyone is on edge and political violence is swiftly
becoming part of our landscape, this sort of staged confrontation needs to end.
(We’re not at 1968 yet, but it’s easy enough to see where the path is
heading.) And in a week where a madman posed as a police officer in order
to murder a politician and her husband, simply announcing “I’m a senator” and
barging forward just isn’t going to cut it anymore.
Mike Madigan Hits the Hoosegow
We’re currently overrun with so much domestic and
international news that sometimes the local stuff falls by the wayside, but if
you’ll allow me a bit of gloating, I wish to inform you that Mike Madigan, the
former speaker of the Illinois House, has just been sentenced to seven and a half years in federal
prison. Granted, it’s likely that Madigan’s sentence will be reduced on appeal
and (if the old coot survives) he’ll gain early release for “good behavior” — a
phrase that could only ever apply to this man in the context of a carceral
term.
But the real shame is that it took this long to put him
away, long after it was too late to do Illinois any good. I wrote about Madigan
once already, back when he was first convicted, and briefly
explained his career:
Who is Michael Madigan, you
out-of-staters may be asking? The easy line you’ll read in all the write-ups is
that he was the “longest-serving state legislative leader in U.S. history” as
speaker of the Illinois House from 1983 to 2021. (He actually entered the
legislature in 1971, a year and a half before Joe Biden began his own career.)
But of course that is merely a euphemism for “the most infamously corrupt
state-level politician in modern American history”: His ridiculous longevity
was the product of equally ridiculous entrepreneurial sleaze. Madigan is no
less than the living embodiment of everything that has made Illinois politics
famous for all the wrong reasons — and mind you, I write from a state that sent
two consecutive governors from opposing parties to prison during the Aughts.
With Madigan’s sentencing, you can almost hear the groan
and clank as the last big gears spinning the legendary Chicago and Illinois
Democratic “machines” finally crack and break down. The Daleys are gone, the “Combine” is gone, and now Madigan is gone, to prison no
less. (I know jumpsuits are typically orange, but if ever a man deserved to get old-time
stripes, surely it’s Speaker Mike.)
The saddest thing of it all is that, after the wreckage
of the old Democratic order, Illinois hasn’t been left with anything better. We
are now governed by the improbably shaped JB Pritzker (who, with all the
imagination that a multibillion-dollar inheritance can buy, fancies himself a
2028 presidential contender). Here in Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson sports an
approval rating persistently under 10 percent after running an already damaged
and flagging city headlong into the ground. He’s become (even for the left) the emblem of everything wrong with
progressive big-city governance, an object lesson in what not to do. As for
this governor and mayor, there is zero reason to believe anyone more competent
will follow in their wake.
The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft
interred with their bones. I’m not sure how much good there ever was in Mike
Madigan to begin with, but his toxic legacy for the state of Illinois will live
on far longer than the remainder of his life.
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