Has America Become Self-Defeating?

Tuesday, July 14, 2026

Yesterday was a big news day, but not for the reasons most people think.  The resumption of serious military action against Iran is the biggest headline, but far from the biggest news.  Anybody with any sense saw it coming from the moment the “ceasefire” came into place.  It was good to hear the president’s aggressive tone in his interview with the host yesterday.  I need to pull on several strings to make the point I think emerged yesterday, so let’s dive in.

The host also interviewed Democratic presidential hopeful Rahm Emanuel yesterday.  The interview centered on a speech Emanuel gave in Tel Aviv last week that has proven quite controversial.  But towards the end they discuss Iran and Emanuel comments that he thinks the war is a major mistake.  His argument is something along the lines of “Given all the uprisings Iran has experienced in recent years and given the increasing intensity of them, let it tear itself apart – we do not need in the middle of that internal conflict.”

The first thought that ran through my mind is that he should turn that idea on his own fellow party members.  The DSA’s not so slow subsummation of  the Democratic Party is driven in no small part by the blinding, unreasonable and consuming hatred of Donald Trump.  So consuming is this hatred that Dems don’t see what is happening to their own party and as the subsummation occurs normal political discourse is turning into efforts at revolution.  But then “a prophet is without honor in his own land” and the man wants to be the Democratic nominee for president.

Secondly, let’s turn to a piece out of Jolly Old England in which the author, Peter Mullen, declares the Church of England as suicidal.     His argument is essentially the suicidal empathy one.  And the King seems to have put a exclamation point on the suicide note.

It would seem that sabotage is the most effective weapon against an overpowered opponent.  But then as I mentioned yesterday, C.S. Lewis knew that long ago when he cast himself in the role of a devilish tempter.

Which brings me to this piece that quotes the WWII Strategic Services Sabotage Manual for overcoming Nazi Germany and and notes how many of its simple ideas sound like normal operations by the EU.  It is sabotage by bureaucratic entanglement.  However, having just been through an environmental reporting cycle for some of my clients in the last couple of weeks, I could not help but note how strong the parallels with our own government are.

Which takes me back to the DSA takeover of the Democratic Party.  The hallmark of their efforts is offering free stuff via socialist/communist systems.  And yet, reflecting on my own visit to the Soviet Union back in the day, I could not help but recall how the true hallmark of that nation was not free stuff, but bureaucratic entanglement.  In point of fact, the greatest disaster that nation experienced – the “accident” at the Chernobyl nuclear power station – was a direct result of bureaucratic entanglement.

Rahm Emanuel would in fact be far better off using the rhetorical ammunition he aimed at President Trump’s Iranian policy at his own party.  In Iran, he ignores the tyrannical nature of the state and the strong counterforce it represents to the efforts to tear that state apart.  But in the US, where no such tyranny exists, revolutionary sabotage by means of bureaucratic entanglement could indeed tear the nation apart.  All while the free stuff never appears.

The DSA is a suicidal force in our body politic.  We can ill afford it.