Overblown
Now there’s a headline –
Pompeo dismisses Khashoggi as ‘activist’ whose murder was overblown by media
Overblown. Really. It’s no big deal for state agents to murder an activist inside an embassy by carving him up like so much roast chicken. I did not know that.
In a new book, former secretary of state Mike Pompeo derides the idea that Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post contributing columnist who was brutally murdered in 2018, was a journalist. Pompeo sympathizes instead with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia who was found to have ordered Khashoggi’s assassination, and defends at length the United States’ relationship with Saudi Arabia.
In “Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love,” published Tuesday, Pompeo said Khashoggi did not deserve to die and called his killing “outrageous, unacceptable, horrific.” However, he then goes on for several more pages mocking the “disproportionate global uproar” over Khashoggi’s death, arguing that Khashoggi was an “activist,” not a journalist, whose death was “hammered” out of proportion by an overly sympathetic media.
You know what’s disproportionate? The fact that Mike Pompeo was once a secretary of state. That’s out of all proportion to his talents and learning and character.
“Just as the media spent years trying to drive a wedge between me and President Trump, they spent the ensuing weeks trying to fracture America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia,” Pompeo wrote. “The progressive Left hates MBS, in spite of the fact that he is leading the greatest cultural reform in the kingdom’s history. He will prove to be one of the most important leaders of his time, a truly historic figure on the world stage.”
Oh is this one of those “woke” things? Is it “woke” to think Saudi Arabia is a monstrous murderous theocratic prison? Do the good patriotic Republicans think it’s cool that women have no rights in Saudi Arabia, that Raif Badawi is still not allowed to leave to be reunited with his wife and children, that domestic servants from Kenya and Vietnam are treated like vermin there?
Pompeo, who is reportedly exploring a 2024 presidential run, also pushed the claim in his book that Khashoggi was “cozy with the terrorist-supporting Muslim Brotherhood,” a charge that both Khashoggi’s family — and Khashoggi himself, when he was alive — denied repeatedly.
Stupid man. Saudi Arabia has far more in common with the Muslim Brotherhood than Khashoggi did.
In a statement Tuesday, Fred Ryan, publisher and CEO of The Washington Post, said it was “shocking and disappointing” to see Pompeo’s book “so outrageously misrepresent” Khashoggi’s life and work.
Well, it’s like this: Pompeo is a very bad man.
“He got the trains to run on time.”
I am really struggling with the worst angels of my nature not to turn that around, but I really wouldn’t wish such a brutal death on Pompeo even though he is a VBM. I can briefly contemplate a better world in which Khashoggi lived and the Saudi’s slaughtered Pompeo though, right?
Holy. Fuck. That is one of the most vile things I have ever read. I think it should be impossible to blow out of proportion the murderous dismemberment, by state officials, of absolutely anyone. Both the state, and its agents, are to be condemned utterly. That Pompeo thinks sucking up to the Saudi government is the correct position on this is utterly evil. Not just mistaken: evil. His willingness to “let this one slide” makes him little better than complicit in the act itself. If there were no other choices, I think I’d rather have Trump serve a second term than let this asshole serve one.
Have to admit this is a new low for the Trump cabal. But I fear we are in for another four years…or permanently. A toxic macho God and disenfranchisement and a good part of American culture means that Sinclair Lewis’ prediction may come true? Throw in climate change and the creepy conquest of rural America by the cartels in league with small town elites….Ugh
Evidently not, liar.
He belongs to the school of magic conjuration with words, in which the ability to form the letters and syllables somehow casts a spell on reality to make the words true. Under that theory, nothing that bad people say is ever a lie; it can’t be, because they invoked the proper formula.
Language doesn’t work that way. We can see, right in front of our eyes, that MP thinks K did deserve it, it’s fully “acceptable,” and even justified. MP is neither outraged nor horrified. Alliance with brutality, money, and oil is far more important than some troublemaker. MP and others of his ilk dream of being able to torture and kill their enemies with impunity, just like MBS. Pesky democracy gets in their way.
They make me shiver.
Is there a subtitle?
“Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love,”
(Even if it Kills the America I Hate)