hello!

yeah I think I follow. So basically Israel is just viewed as such a crucial and intrinsic part of US strategy/power projection/dominance in ME, that it's simply not even thinkable to conceive for most of the system to be in conflict with it, even when it continues to veer into deeper and deeper levels of genocide and impunity. And perhaps the bureaucratic and temporal nature of administrations and US officials (moving in and out of office, new staffs, etc) allows for the humiliation to be less damaging than it would to a more directly strongman/authoritarian system, like say Putin and Russian Federation?

yes, that's correct. I don't mean to suggest there are actually pocket nukes in sweetgreens, and good US politicians are just "trying to save the world". I'm just trying to understand how they can allow Israel to humiliate them so much. I buy it that they might be willing to just take the PR L and look like dipshits in order to deflect the blame for the nastier stuff to the client state, but the uniformity and lockstepness of it, plus the very real loss of face it represents seems to run counter to what I understand to be typical neocon tendencies.

look, if you read my post, you'd note that I accept this position in my first paragraph. And I'm not interested in taking blame off of America--I'm just curious about an aspect of the behavior that never quite makes full sense to me. Regardless, I note that you're a staunch support of option a.

Is this fairly unprecedented? What I mean is sure many leaders in last 20 years have threatened conflict and stuff, but like directly posting on social media that they’ll utterly destroy a country and murder civilians as punishment if they don’t get what they want?

I’m sure Bush said some stuff in the 9/11 GWOT years and Russia does its veiled threat thing here and there, Iran talks vaguely of destroying great satans once and a while but this is like a specific threat of annihilation to a civilian population.

Like usually the threats are couched in metaphors, I guess, and this is clearly non-metaphorical.

Yeah this whole “give RFK secret service detail” made me wonder, are there just like cadres of reserve/on-call secret service protection details chillin in office cubicles ready to go out and take bullets for weirdos? I mean they must have some depth, but like wouldn’t it definitely mean some mild deduction to back for the existing details?