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2019-11-24 Home Front: Politix
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While the Schiff show had America’s attention, real world news went unnoticed
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[NYPOST] "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America" is the title of a 1960s book by historian and librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin. Pseudo-events, he wrote, are staged solely to generate news media coverage. Real events involve independent actors and have unpredictable outcomes. Pseudo-events are shows.
It’s not difficult to say which category the House Democrats’ impeachment hearings belong in. It’s a classic pseudo-event stage-managed to prod sympathetic media into running predictable stories. Inconvenient questions from Republican members are blocked, and the name of the original "whistleblower" is concealed.
Yet on the front pages and cable news’ breaking-news bulletins, this pseudo-event is crowding out two genuine events of potentially world-shaking importance and uncertain outcome. President Trump is going to be impeached by the House and will not be removed from office by the Senate. But the potential for regime change ‐ or regime rigidification ‐ resulting from the prolonged rioting in Hong Kong and recent protests in Iran
Continued from Page 6
 ...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan, the abbreviation IRGC is a cognate form of Stürmabteilung (or SA), the term Supreme Guide is a cognate form of either Shah or Führer or maybe both, and they hate Jews Zionists Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol...
is hugely consequential and entirely unpredictable.
Foreign policy analysts classify nations as either upholders or disruptors of a world order. Since the end of the Cold War, the major disruptors have been China, Iran and Russia. Now the first two are facing vigorous protests and regime-change threats.
The nearly six months of protests in Hong Kong reflect a rejection of China’s increasingly authoritarian state, which, armed with artificial intelligence facial-recognition technology, threatens an Orwellian eradication of freedoms.
Will dictator-for-life Xi Jinping crack down violently in Hong Kong as Deng Xiaoping did in Tiananmen Square in 1989? Not clear. There would be costs internationally, but China is growing less dependent on exports to the United States and advanced countries.
As China is disengaging from America, Xi may be willing to endure a backlash from a violent crackdown in Hong Kong. How does America deal with a more hostile and less economically connected ‐ and potentially much more disruptive ‐ China?
Both houses of Congress passed unanimous resolutions backing protesters’ demands, but beyond that it’s not clear that anyone knows how to influence the regime’s behavior.
On Iran, former President Barack Obama
I inhaled. That was the point ...
signed a nuclear agreement with Iran that he hoped would lead to friendly cooperation in the Middle East ‐ hopes that were never fulfilled. Trump renounced the agreement and has squeezed the Iranian economy with results that may have sparked the current protests. They’re serious enough for the mullah regime to have largely shut down Iran’s isolated Internet.
Will they lead to regime change? Iran’s "green" protests in 2009, largely ignored by the B.O. regime, didn’t. These may not either. But history shows that peaceful protests can ‐ sometimes ‐ topple a tyrannical regime, even though it’s hard to predict just when.
Former President Ronald Reagan envisioned the fall of the Berlin Wall and former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan the collapse of the Soviet Union, but neither knew those things would happen in November 1989 and December 1991, respectively.
It’s possible that the regimes of post-Mao China and the mullahs’ Iran might collapse after 40 years of tyranny. Or, less happily and more likely, these regimes may sweep aside the protests and last for centuries, like so many Chinese dynasties and Persian monarchies. Real events have uncertain and possibly momentous outcomes.
Not so with the impeachment hearings. Witnesses are heard complaining that Trump subverted the "formal interagency policy process" and pressured ‐ "bribed" is the verb Democrats are now using ‐ Ukraine’s government for political gain.
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Posted by Fred 2019-11-24 00:00||
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Posted by Lex 2019-11-24 21:04||
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