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president’s Iran tweets (Benjamin Wittes, Lawfare)
I want to say a few words in defense of Donald Trump’s tweets and statements [Friday] on the abortive military operation against Iran. This is admittedly contrarian. It is an argument I have never made before and frankly don’t expect to make again. It is also an almost comical example of damning with faint praise.
First, some important caveats. The president’s set of four tweets are only modestly more appropriate than his usual public statements; presidents shouldn’t ever be tweeting about their thinking concerning the launch of military operations at all. And his tweets about Iran over the last two days are a good example of why. Yesterday, he tweeted that “Iran made a very big mistake” in shooting down the drone—a comment that led many people to assume that retaliatory military action was imminent. In the tweets this morning, Trump’s account of U.S.-Iranian relations under both his administration and the Obama administration is reductionist, partisan, and in important respects, just silly. His facts are inherently suspect—because, well, all facts articulated by Trump are unreliable. And the quality of Trump’s argumentation is collegiate at best.
But all that said, collegiate-level argumentation is a dramatic breakthrough for a president whose more typical behavior has given rise to Dan Drezner’s famous Toddler-in-Chief thread. The president’s comments on the Iranian situation reflect thinking that is genuinely unusual for Trump, who normally articulates a kind of government by magic in which one can have it all and without costs. Here, by contrast, Trump is overtly acknowledging costs, nuance and complexity. The man who campaigned for president promising to commit war crimes is now acknowledging that brutality isn’t an objective but a negative and that restraint may be valuable. I cannot think of any previous set of statements in which Trump’s thinking seems so coherent and linear and logical—and also so complicated.

Marianne Williamson, longtime wacko, is now a dangerous wacko (Jay Michaelson, Daily Beast)
For decades, Williamson said that medicines don’t cure disease but positive thinking does. Now she’s taking her quackery to a new and dangerous level: the anti-vaxxer conspiracy.

Looking for anti-vaccine conspiracy theories? You can find them on HuffPost. (J. K. Trotter, Business Insider)
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