Our Shiny Next War, The Democrats’ Shiny Next Win
By Thomas Neuburger
Today, before the U.S. midterm election decides our course, I want to offer two thoughts. Here at God’s Spies we try to look at what matters in the large scheme. These thoughts are both consequential; they consider what could decide the next decade or more.
The world sits on the brink of a nuclear war, or at best, on the brink of a war that will hand us the Next Great Depression. We’re not yet over the line — Iran has stated it won’t pre-emptively strike — but we’re standing ready to cross it. (We here means Trump and all the secret supporters of his war on Iran.) Missiles could launch this week. One man will decide.
The Democratic Party is about to catch the car in its more-than-fortunate teeth. The problem with catching the car — what to do next?
More below.
Our Shiny Next War
It’s close to certain that Trump will strike Iran hard, a big kinetic attack, in just a few days. He wavers and brags (he always wavers and brags), but Netanyahu needs this attack and Trump has Bibi and many of own close advisers — Pentagon chief Peter Hegseth, CENTCOM chief Bradley Cooper, State Secretary Rubio and CIA head John Ratcliffe — perched in his shell-like ear. You can picture people like Miriam Adelson perched in his shell-like as well.
Tucker Carlson makes the point:
“Bibi calls Trump about [a nuclear strike] every day,” says an informed observer.
Carlson, if nothing else, is well sourced. (See below for Carlson’s full quote; it’s a very good read.)
This may not occur, of course. Trump may not come to his senses, but still, his “I alone matter” approach to life may, after tomorrow, kick out a response that doesn’t mean millions will die. We’ll see. But I can’t stress enough how much the connected many are saying “it’s close.”
For the full Tucker Carlson piece that’s making the rounds, see below. With one exception (marked by me in the text), it’s a very good take.
The Democrats’ Shiny Next Win
It’s almost certain that Democrats will rule the next Congress. The vote is tomorrow. We’ll know in a just few days how much they will win.
That’s a blessing, of course, for many, but also a curse. How they use power will define them for years to come. Not just in 2028, which should be a too-easy win, but for years beyond that.
Put simply: Dem leaders have waged total war against their party’s left flank since 2015 at least, in a way and to a degree that has cost them both votes and power in office. And they seem not to care.
One could argue in fact, and I do, that Kamala Harris lost because too many voters abandoned the Party in disgust for far too many reasons — Gaza, Iran, Biden’s blind ego, the Party’s willful compliance, and lurking in the background, the Party’s subservient approach to Israel’s wants.
All this is much worse this time. While popular disgust with the current administration is amazingly high, Democrats may not reverse much that he’s done. Most prominent Democrats want war with Iran, and most support Israel’s killing; they just want it all off-stage, a war that no one sees, murders that most can ignore.
So the risk: Dems sweep in 2026 and their leaders prove yet again that their prominent feature is still just “We’re not Donald Trump.”
David Sirota outlines that problem quite well. His title: “Haley Stevens’ Betrayal Is A Warning: Corporate Dems Are MAGA’s Enablers”. The piece may be paywalled. You can read his remarks below. He writes:
a positive anti-MAGA election would not be the end of anything. It would only be the beginning of a much longer battle.
Indeed. You may engage in that fight, and good if you do. But many more may be done — it’s been just too long a road.
War and Israel
To take just one arena, Iran, here’s TrackAIPAC’s list of endorsed Senate candidates. (TrackAIPAC is a group that records how Israel money flows to our public officials.)
Three of the four would be new if they win tomorrow. The rest, fan favorites all, are too close to Israel to get a thumbs up. That doesn’t mean they won’t win, these favorites, but they might disappoint, might continue the disaster, just in a much softer-key. The outcome of this war will decide the world economy, and Israel wants this war.
To take one example, click here and search for Sherrod Brown. His total Israel take is $1.7 million. So who will he listen to when Iran makes the next move to drive us out of their yard?
As to the House, of its 435 members, zero have freed themselves of Israeli cash, and both House Speaker Jeffries and Dem Senate leader Schumer have taken a hell of a lot. What do you think that means for the war we’re now in?
And note, this doesn’t begin to touch domestic policy, Medicare for All and so on, which still serves mainly the rich. I swear, Democrats could rule for a full generation if they just FDR-ed themselves.
Do they have that kind of “bites the hand that feeds them” still in their soul? We'll know in the next two years, and I worry about that.
Tucker Carlson on Nuclear War
[Link]
Under pressure from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Trump administration may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran. The target would be Pickax Mountain in central Iran, where Israeli intelligence claims the Iranian government has restarted its nuclear enrichment program. No conventional weapon in the American arsenal can penetrate 300 feet of solid granite to destroy the tunnels where enrichment is supposedly taking place. The only military option is a nuclear strike. Netanyahu has been pushing hard for one. “Bibi calls Trump about it every day,” says an informed observer.
Netanyahu is cornered and desperate. After last week’s election results, he can’t form a government unless Trump intervenes directly in Israeli politics and brokers a deal with other parties that gives Netanyahu 61 seats in the Knesset. Otherwise, he is out as prime minister and on his way to ignominy, investigations and possibly jail. Netanyahu must stay close to Trump. He needs this war.
To that end, he’s applied maximum pressure to his closest allies in the administration, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper. Both oppose a negotiated settlement to the war they’ve so grievously mismanaged; both are pushing to restart major combat operations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA director John Ratcliffe are also following Netanyahu’s lead, as are leaders of the Democratic Party. In a recent meeting on the subject, former president Barack Obama said he opposes the current Iran peace deal being drafted in Doha.
The rest of America’s longtime allies in the Middle East are terrified by the prospect of more war. On September 27th, Netanyahu flew secretly to Abu Dhabi to enlist the UAE in his lobbying effort for a final attack on Iran. The Emiratis refused. After eight months of conflict, Gulf economies are teetering. So are global energy and fertilizer markets. They won’t recover soon. Globally, there are a total of about 850 supertankers used to transport oil from producers to the rest of the world. In October alone, 11 of them were badly damaged in Hormuz. At this pace, a global depression is imminent. A nuclear strike would radically accelerate the destruction. Fallout from a ground explosion at Pickax Mountain would contaminate the Persian Gulf, poisoning the water supply for 100 million people.
And those are just some of the immediate consequences for the region. The rest of the world is every bit as exposed. No country other than the United States has ever used a nuclear weapon in war. Some would like to. An American nuclear attack on Iran would set a new precedent. The Russians have already told at least two other governments that an American nuclear strike on Iran would free them to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Pakistan and India would be tempted to do the same against each other, as would North Korea against Seoul. After the first nuclear strike, World War Three is inevitable. That war would be short and final.
We’ve been sleepwalking toward this moment for months. Since February, the administration has quietly rewritten America’s nuclear doctrine to make first use of so-called “battlefield nukes” easier and therefore more likely. No one in Washington in either party seems bothered by this. Now we’re on the brink of it.
Close observers say Trump is likely to decide by next weekend whether or not to use nuclear weapons. That would be November 7, six days from now. To his credit, he’s hesitating. At the moment, Trump is listening to his vice president, JD Vance, and to his envoy and friend Steve Witkoff, both of whom argue a deal with Iran can be made.
They’re right, though it won’t be simple. The Iranians are famously frustrating to negotiate with under any circumstances [This slam is unmerited, in my opinion; for many observers, Iran has been stunningly patient], and elements of that government have become more radical since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his family were killed in February. After decades of isolation, even relatively moderate Iranian leaders seem confused by how decisions are made in the West. (There is a widespread belief in Tehran, for example, that the United States government controls Israel.) But overall, people who have spoken to decision-makers in Iran say there is consensus there that more war is bad for everyone and a deal is worth making.
One group that hasn’t been consulted so far is the global population — the hundreds of millions of people who will be killed along with their children if Trump is pushed by Netanyahu into launching a nuclear strike next week. Now would be the time for them to speak up.
David Sirota on Corporate Dems
[Link; possibly paywalled]
Haley Stevens’ Betrayal Is A Warning: Corporate Dems Are MAGA’s Enablers
Today, the central premise of [my earlier] prediction came true, as corporate Democrats’ most high-profile Michigan voice — the candidate hand-picked by Chuck Schumer and the Democratic establishment — launched a final last-minute attempt to sabotage El-Sayed’s campaign. That’s right: Two days before the general election, El-Sayed’s primary opponent, Democratic U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, announced her endorsement of Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers.
Stevens’ endorsement comes days after Trump campaigned in Michigan for Rogers, and Trump is now lauding her. Her gambit is the culmination of a postprimary guerrilla campaign on social media by corporate Democrats like Neera Tanden. They have aimed to undermine El-Sayed with guilt-by-association tactics scandalizing some of his supporters. They are doing this because El-Sayed is running on an agenda that they loathe: anti-corruption, anti-oligarch, anti-war, anti-genocide, pro-Medicare-For-All, and critical of U.S. support for Israel’s far-right regime.
Corporate Democrats’ campaign to undermine El-Sayed had already been successful at one level: As Zohreen Shah reported for The Lever this weekend, even before Stevens’ endorsement of Rogers, many of Stevens’ donors have already flipped to support him.
As I suggested a few months ago, this faction fears El-Sayed not just because his win could help pass the policies they and their donors abhor, but also because he will destroy their relevance. Specifically, his victory would incinerate their arguments about electability that get them platformed in corporate media as alleged political “experts.”
Indeed, if he is victorious, he will prove that the anti-oligarch politics corporate Democrats loathe can win in one of America’s most politically significant swing states. And he isn’t alone: Corporate Democrats are similarly shaken by populists rejecting their neoliberal formula and instead using anti-oligarchy to compete to try to win back red states like Texas, Nebraska, and Florida that corporate Democrats long ago lost to Republicans. ...
[Haley Stevens] is walking the path of a generations-long line of rotating villains, from Joe Lieberman to Zell Miller to Kyrsten Sinema to Joe Manchin to Jon Fetterman. And though Stevens may do damage to El-Sayed’s campaign in these last 48 hours — which threatens to throw the entire U.S. Senate to the Republicans — her gambit also has a silver lining: It has fully outed her corporate Democratic faction’s real agenda and its real priorities.
Knowing that ahead of the midterms helps make clear that a positive anti-MAGA election would not be the end of anything. It would only be the beginning of a much longer battle.
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