Bouvard on Carlson's Anti-Israel GOP Narrative

Proposing that Iran be allowed to have (be given?) a nuclear weapon is especially bizarre now, so Tucker Carlson can't be making a real proposal. He's simply maintaining the web of commonplaces and narratives that reinforce the anti-Israel first faction in the GOP.

@slooperbia50068 Why "without"?

@slooperbia50068 I suppose we’re understanding “devilish” in different ways.

@slooperbia50068 Devil-like.

@slooperbia50068 OK, I'll grant he's too clownish for that.

@slooperbia50068 I'm missing something here.

@slooperbia50068 Good luck, I suppose.

@slooperbia50068 Maybe you can guess at why.

@slooperbia50068 It depends on how important the question is, and how much I have to say about it. There's a wide range.

@slooperbia50068 Comvince the other of its importance or change tack, maybe coming back to the original point after framing its importance in a new way.

@slooperbia50068 I'm not sure this is what you're getting at but I think the Epstein fixation has been relegated to a side issue, with only some fairly marginal figures treating it as the key to everything.

@slooperbia50068 I think it's mostly played out. It's now a fringe issue.

@slooperbia50068 We've been through this.

@slooperbia50068 Accounts that are straightforwardly pro-Trump were recently posting an interview with Michael Tracey, who is extremely dismissive of the entire affair. They see there's nothing to it and it just sabotages Trump.

@slooperbia50068 I think it will. There are so many things going on. There will be some hard-core Epstein obsessives, but I don't think they'll have any effect. Thomas Massie is getting ridiculed and scorned for his singleminded focus on it.

@slooperbia50068 You're exaggerating but also leaving out its main attraction to certain conspiracy theorists--the assertion that Epstein was working for Mossad to blackmail and control American politicians on behalf of Israel.

@slooperbia50068 There has always been an internal critique of that prurience, issuing occasionally in bouts of libertinism and sex cults.

@slooperbia50068 The underage component is important because it raises the specter of blackmail more effectively but, strictly speaking, honeypots can be of any age.

@slooperbia50068 That might be the preference because it enhances the scandal.

@slooperbia50068 Yes, Puritanism has always been a very strong, maybe dominant strain in American culture. A critique of it would have to propose a different way of articulating sexual relations in such a way as to fit the rest of the culture. It's hard to "plan" something like that.

@slooperbia50068 I don't know. Probably, since most spy agencies probably do so. I know that's how they caught Vanunu, but that didn't have anything to do with blackmail.

@slooperbia50068 Sounds fine to me.

@slooperbia50068 You shape the legal order, but that's a long, arduous and uncertain process.

@slooperbia50068 Fantasy may be harmless but one could say it merely complements prurience or repression.

@slooperbia50068 CH?

@slooperbia50068 I don't think in those (Freudian) terms myself.

@slooperbia50068 Many people seem to share such feelings--these things are enormously popular.

@slooperbia50068 It's a project.

@slooperbia50068 As much as possible because "our loins" lead each of us in different direction and a political focus needs to filter that out.