\n<\/p>\n
\u201cHeartbreaking:<\/span> The worst person you know just made a great point.\u201d<\/p>\n Has there ever been a more perfect moment for this old meme<\/a>?\u00a0<\/p>\n On Tuesday, talk show host and worst person Tucker Carlson challenged<\/a> fellow worst person Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz over the latter\u2019s dangerous support for further U.S. military action against Iran.<\/p>\n In a now-viral video clip, Carlson asked Cruz the simple question of how many people live in Iran. Cruz could not answer.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t know the population of the country you seek to topple?\u201d Carlson asked. \u201cHow could you not know that?\u201d<\/p>\n Cruz responded, \u201cI don\u2019t sit around memorizing population tables.\u201d<\/p>\n After a couple more questions, whereupon Cruz began visibly squirming, Carlson delivered his coup de gr\u00e2ce.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t know anything about Iran!\u201d Carlson said, both men raising their voices. \u201cYou\u2019re a senator who is calling for the overthrow of the government and you don\u2019t know anything about the country!\u201d<\/p>\n It was a thing to behold, but also evokes another classic meme<\/a>: You do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Tucker Carlson, the host of arguably the most racist<\/a> show in cable news history.\u00a0<\/p>\n He was simply doing what so many establishment reporters have failed to do: He asked whether a top U.S. politician pushing for an unprovoked Manichean forever war knew basically anything about the people he was seeking to subject to American hellfire.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is not a credit to Carlson. It\u2019s a failure of the mainstream media.<\/p>\n You would think<\/span> news organizations would have learned their lessons long ago \u2014 but that doesn\u2019t mean this is a precise replay of past media failures in matters of imperial war waging.<\/p>\n Comparisons to the Iraq War are everywhere, but hawkish mainstream media coverage didn\u2019t play out the same way in 2003. Then, mainstream <\/a>U.S. news outlets<\/a> settled on a near-total consensus<\/a> affirming the likely existence of nonexistent<\/a> \u201cweapons of mass destruction\u201d to justify an illegal war<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Mainstream coverage today has at the very least reiterated<\/a> the statements<\/a> of the United States\u2019 own intelligence agencies <\/a>and the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency, among others, that, despite their concerns about Iran\u2019s amassing of enriched uranium, there is no compelling evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.\u00a0<\/p>\n Any responsible news story would stress that, under international law, Israel\u2019s strikes were almost certainly illegal. Claims of self-defense to warrant a so-called \u201cpreemptive strike<\/a>\u201d are extremely narrow<\/a>. There must be proof of \u201cimminence,\u201d of which there is not.\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n It was \u201cThe Daily Show,\u201d of all places, that bothered to pull together a supercut<\/a> showing that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been warning of Iran\u2019s \u201cimminent\u201d militarization of their nuclear supplies for 30 years.<\/p>\n \u201cIran: Weeks away from having nuclear weapons since 1995,\u201d the comedy news show posted on X.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIran doesn\u2019t have nuclear weapons, Israel does,\u201d said<\/a> Zeteo\u2019s Mehdi Hasan in a recent social media video, lambasting the media\u2019s continued insistence on treating Israel\u2019s acts of aggression as a victim\u2019s attempts at defense. \u201cIt\u2019s a nuclear double standard.\u201d The only country in the Middle East with a militarized nuclear arsenal is Israel<\/a>, which has an estimated 90 to 400 warheads that it refuses to publicly acknowledge. Israel is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.\u00a0<\/p>\n Meanwhile, some of the very same media hawks who most vociferously pushed lies to license the Iraq War are bolstering another illegal war of aggression against Iran, and using the same racist clash-of-civilizations logic.<\/p>\n Popular historian Niall Ferguson<\/a>, an apologist for colonialism who declared<\/a> himself \u201ca fully paid-up member of the neoimperialist gang\u201d after the launch of Iraq War in 2003, wrote<\/a> with two co-authors in the Free Press this week that Israel\u2019s attacks on Iran were a \u201cblow for the good guys in Cold War II.\u201d One of the the New York Times\u2019 prominent resident hawks, Bret Stephens, wrote<\/a> a column last week praising Israel\u2019s \u201ccourage\u201d for doing \u201cwhat needed to be done,\u201d given, of course, \u201cthe millenarian mind-set of some of Iran\u2019s theocratic leaders.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n