Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
What's up? What's up, everybody? Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem. I'm rolling solo this episode, but if you're missing Robbie the Fire Bernstein, you can catch both of us this weekend in Pittsburgh. Really looking forward to going out there. I haven't been out to Pittsburgh in years, and it's a great American city, so I'm very much looking forward to that.
Tickets are selling fast, so these shows are going to sell out. If you want to get tickets, go grab them right now. ComicDaveSmith.com.
uh has all the ticket links and then it has all my stops um for the rest of the year we got a bunch of stuff coming up i know i got um uh gigs in connecticut uh boston um uh again the boston shows will sell out so if you want to go to those grab tickets now uh boston then we got rosemont and chicago a bunch of stuff coming up comic dave smith.com i should also remind you before we get into um today's show that my uh my amazing wife's children's book is uh which is killing
it right now is doing really well. Healthy Hibernation is available to buy and is available in paperback now as well. You can get that at Amazon. It's called Healthy Hibernation. It's just a very, very sweet children's book. It's about developing healthy eating habits in little kids, but it's done in a very fun and kind of... very digestible, no pun intended, way for little ones.
So anyway, my wife lives in the world of sweet things and children, which I do too for some of my day. But then the other part of my day, I live in the world of unnecessary, undeclared wars that are bankrupting the country. And so that's, you know, a little bit of a darker topic.
But anyway, if you need to switch things up, I know a lot of you guys have kids or have family members or friends who have kids. So yeah, if you could grab a copy. I'm really, really grateful to everybody who has. It's really a passion project and it means a lot to me. It means a lot to her. Okay, so... Let's get into the show today because we got a good one.
Obviously, as everybody knows, the U.S. Israeli-led war against Iran is still raging on. The hawks were out celebrating that the Ayatollah got taken out on day one. And what's followed since that is four days of Iranian response attacks, clearly indicating that the regime has not been changed, despite what Secretary of War Pete Hegseth told you. But yesterday, something very interesting happened.
And, you know, I saw a bunch of people on Twitter were saying like, well, Dave's got his show set for tomorrow. And you were not wrong. I certainly do. So. know there's an old saying uh an old proverb i believe you would call it um that you guys have probably heard before where they say uh some version of the first casualty of war is always the truth
And it's a saying that has persisted, I think, for... I believe it's traced back to ancient Rome or something like that, or Greece. I'm not sure. But I believe it's been a saying for thousands of years. And there's a reason why that... That is the case because wars are almost always sold off lies. In fact, it might be the case that they're always sold off lies, but certainly almost always.
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Chapter 2: What recent events have led to the U.S. involvement in the Iran conflict?
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Once again, knickknack.com slash Dave, promo code Dave for 20% off. All right, let's get back into the show. everybody going into this is really important to make this point that like they are actually, however, this war ends up turning out. I mean, look, as we titled the episode yesterday, it's already a disaster. It's a disaster right now. The latest numbers are that, um,
I saw it was reported over 550 Iranians dead. Haven't been able to get good numbers on the Israeli casualties thus far. Just like five Americans have died, not counting the, I think it was three and like a dozen wounded in Austin in that blowback terrorist attack. So, however this goes from here, all of these political leaders, Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and J.D.
Vance and Pete Hegseth and all of them, they are in many ways more guilty and responsible than George W. Bush and those guys. because these, unlike George W. Bush, he at least had the excuse, as dumb as it was, that 9-11 changed everything. Yes, we used to have these views.
George W. Bush, if you remember in the year 2000, for those of you guys who are old enough to remember, he ran on a humble foreign policy. No nation building, no policing of the world. The military should only be used to fight and win defensive wars, is what George W. Bush, the candidate, said.
But as he was leading the country into 20 year catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, he said 9-11 changed everything. This is different now. We got attacked and the attack came out of Afghanistan and it was aided by Saddam Hussein. OK, well, the first one was true. The second one was a lie. But regardless, he at least had something to say. These guys have nothing. They have nothing.
No major thing has changed. We haven't been attacked. We don't live in a new world, and they can't even pretend we live in a new world. They're just saying, oh, Israel. Israel was going to do it anyway, and therefore we had no choice. Just for more on this before we really break this down, let's go to Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House. He also had some comments on this yesterday.
To me, the most critical point is that this was a defensive measure, a defensive operation. And why is that? I took some notes, and this is not classified, so I'll tell you what I think is important. Israel was determined to act in their own defense here, with or without American support. Why? Because Israel faced what they deemed to be an existential threat.
Iran was building missiles at a rapid clip, to the point where our allies in the region could not keep up. As you know, Iran has long vowed to take out Israel, wipe it off the map, and they have long seen that as a critical threat to their very existence.
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Chapter 3: How does the saying 'the first casualty of war is truth' apply to current conflicts?
Because Israel was determined to act with or without the U.S., our Commander in Chief and the administration and the officials I just named had a very difficult decision to make. They had to evaluate the threats to the U.S., to our troops, to our installations, to our assets in the region and beyond.
And they determined, because of the exquisite intelligence that we had, that if Israel fired upon Iran and took action against Iran to take out the missiles, then they would have immediately retaliated against US personnel and assets. We have troops in harm's way, and we have many Americans in the region, and that was of great concern.
If we had waited for all of those eventualities to take place, the consequences of inaction on our part would have been, could have been devastating.
We don't know at what magnitude, but you can assume because it is common sense that if Iran had begun to fire all of their missile arsenal, short and mid-range missiles at our personnel and our assets and our installations, we would have suffered staggering losses. And if we had waited to respond before acting first, then those losses would have been far greater than if we had done what we did.
Okay, so there'd be even more Americans dead. So here you have, okay, just to be clear, we have the Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and the Speaker of the House confirming that this is the reason we went to war with Iran. We went to war with Iran because Israel had decided that they were going to attack Iran.
And we had solid intelligence that the Iranian response was not only going to be to send rockets and missiles back at Israel, but it would also be to target our bases, our soldiers. And we would have had a lot more of them dead. So yeah, we got, you know, a couple planes shot down and a few Americans dead and a dozen or two injured, but it would have been worse than this.
This is the answer they're giving. Now, of course, the major problem with this answer
that it just leads to many more questions than it does answers and in fact this is kind of right at the heart of the political dynamic in america over the last two plus years really really um i mean this is something that people like me and scott horton and our camp of you know libertarian non-interventionists have been talking about for much longer than that but
The American people broadly have really been talking and thinking about this since October 7th of 2023. And the thing is, it's like this. Like this is the reason it is the heart of the reason why the American people are essentially forced to speculate about what exactly the level of Israeli control over United States politics is.
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Chapter 4: What did Marco Rubio reveal about the motivations for the Iran war?
is what everyone who was against this was warning about. And they still did it because the option was do it or fucking cut off Israel. And obviously that's not an option. You know, this war is very, very unpopular right now. The latest polling that I've looked at is about 25%. About 25% of Americans support this war. Democrats and liberals, leftists, obviously completely oppose it.
Independents completely oppose it. Young people completely oppose it. Probably the only group of people who support the war are MAGA, Trump supporters. And there really is no question. And by the way, when I say they support its slim majority, it's like 55%, 54%, something like that. A slight majority of Trump supporters support this war.
By the way, that's a really bad number for it to be at the very beginning of a war when it hasn't even been that costly or that bloody yet. you know like that's really bad you barely have majority support just for like comparison the uh afghanistan was enormously popular amongst every demographic just about um i think every demographic
mean whatever maybe you could come up with one that didn't but like it was enormously popular and even though the war in iraq um not as popular as afghanistan but it had like more than super majority support of the american people something like 70 plus percent of people supported it when that war first started um this one is starting with 25 support
And for the one demographic, Trump supporters who have a slight majority who are supporting this war, look, they are supporting it for one reason and one reason only. And that's because Donald Trump launched it. And that's just a fact. You know, it's one of the most frustrating things about the Trump base is that there is this percentage.
And honestly, I think those numbers right there could almost like tell you the whole thing. There is a percentage. It's about 54% of Donald Trump's base who just support him, just support whatever he does. Now, look, I mean, hey, there's another 45% there who are not saying they support it. Of that number, I think it's like 30-something percent that say they're not sure.
Then there's a smaller percentage who outright oppose the thing. But, you know, this is something that obviously I've talked about a lot because it's something that I think about quite a lot. It's a real interesting dynamic of politics today. But for, you know, Even in Donald Trump's first term, in the first four years that Donald Trump was president from 2017 to 2000 to January 2021.
So in his first four years, if you remember, the culture never like the pendulum didn't swing. You know, if you really in Obama's second term was when you had like the rise of woke ism. And then when Donald Trump got elected, it's not like the cultural pendulum swung back and we got like wokeism receded. Wokeism went through the roof in Donald Trump's first term.
It was really in Biden's term that the pendulum started swinging back. But essentially what had happened was that like the left, you know, I shouldn't even say the left, the progressive democratic establishment had political control of the country and total control of the culture for that entire time.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of the U.S. supporting Israel in the Iran conflict?
Because holy fucking shit, dude. Like, it's amazing. And by the way, there were a sliver, not nearly enough, but there were some leftists who recognized this at the time who went, yo, what are you doing, man? Because you're just handing the easiest of talking points to the other side. Because this is fucking insane.
If you were a leftist who really cared about climate change and really cared about universal healthcare, then the worst thing in the world for you is a fucking tranny giving an 11-year-old a lap dance. Like, my God, what are you doing? And then all of your people are defending that and acting like you're weird for objecting to it.
Like, I'm saying from the perspective of a leftist, this is the worst thing in the world that could happen to you. And ironically, right, this is one of these, like, kind of counterintuitive things about politics. But ironically...
If you're a right winger, if you can get past the horrible nature of that event, if you're a right winger, in a way, it's the best thing for you because you could go, look how fucking crazy these people are and you can win that argument.
OK, well, in the same sense, if you're a right winger and you're defending any of this bullshit, this is the best thing in the world for a fucking leftist or a liberal. You're just handing them the whole entire game. People really have trouble with this in politics. They really have trouble with dealing with second order effects.
You know, as the wisdom of Rosie Perez in White Men Can't Jump, sometimes when you win, you really lose. And sometimes when you lose, you really win. I can't really do a Rosie Perez. I'll work on that. But that's what you guys have done here. I mean, just
taken a moment where you had for the first time in my life all the energy all the opportunity all the wind at your back and handed it right back over to the worst elements This is the best thing that's ever happened for the prospects of an AOC presidency has been Donald Trump launch in this war on behalf of Israel. And I understand, by the way, I know. I know that she doesn't really oppose it.
I know that Chuck Schumer doesn't really oppose it. I know any of them. But again, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't really matter. It just matters that Trump did it and they can say they're against it. You just hand them the argument. Let's before we wrap this up, let's play the J.D.
Vance clip, because I did think that this was something that because we had on the last show played a clip of J.D. Vance from after the 12 day war. But this is a more recent clip of of the vice president. Let's listen to this one, because, by the way, this the reason sorry, just say the reason I'm going into this now is because this is directly tied off of my point.
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