Yup, very well put. The whole "freedom and democracy for the iranian people" speech is just there to keep up appearances, the goal has always been to turn Iran into Libya. Like i havent heard a single mention of Libya in mainstream media in decades.

It removes a country’s ability to resist resource extraction

i'd say resource extraction requires political stability, actually, since mining sites are big and difficult to defend and also immobile, so they can't just be moved out of the way when there's danger. and also the long transport lines for minerals are long and therefore difficult to protect.

You fuck off. I was putting myself in the rapist president's mindset. Not speaking from my own heart about the totality of the horror of the situation.

It literally is a distraction. And your outrage at that is exactly parent poster's point.

The Republican Apparatus (and Conservatives around the world, for that matter) have discovered that they can continuously manufacture new outrage to distract from the actual policies they care about.

With the Tea Party, a couple of decades ago, they mastered weaponized wedge issues to distract. (The "War on Terror" was a manufactured war, and that strategy goes back decades.) But they have since escalated to crimes against humanity.

And it's working. I haven't seen many headlines about ICE or Epstein recently because the average American is bored of hearing about it.

Meanwhile, they are enacting policies to further concentrate wealth and power amongst the 0.1%.