Jebs Odds Dont Improve As Benny Sets Up A Side-Step

Many have reacted strongly to the fear-mongering speech of Mr. Netanyahu to the US congress, but has it smoothed the foreign policy waters for Jeb Bush?

We humans just love our fear. Part of the thrill of gambling, for instance, is the risk, or fear, of loss weighed against the (typically distinctly lower) chance of gain. The reality of fear usually makes itself known to us when we’re young, the rising terror felt by a child momentarily unable to find their mother in a large store, for instance, but nearly as early we’re introduced to the concept of fear as an entertainment, as a recreation.

Clown Clapped In Congress
• Fear mongering Israeli PM visits US
• Opposes deal on nuclear Iran
• Jebs job just got easier in White House run

It might start off harmlessly enough, the ghost train at the funfair or Halloween perhaps, moves on through teenage years of practical jokes and illicitly watched horror movies, all the way through our lives until we find ourselves in our mid-forties on an outward-bound weekend of ziplines, bungee jumps and white water rafting. In a controlled environment there’s nothing we like better than a good scare, but we never forget the difference between that and the real thing.

The artificiality that pervades our more modern recreations, especially cinema and television, do somewhat betray the genre made so frightening by writers like Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and even Stephen King, but thankfully this wonderful tradition of scare stories and the purveying of fear has not disappeared or been diluted by the thoughtless executive nitwits in Hollywood and media boardrooms, it has, in fact been promoted.

It is rather unfortunate that our relationship with the reality of fear is not as much fun as the one we have with the artificial kind. Indeed fear is a prime motivating force in the human species, however much we’ve developed and evolved, however much we might scoff at irrational fears, deep down inside we are still all motivated out of fear from time to time as our requirement for self preservation takes its cue from our central nervous system, and because of that, politicians have found it useful.

Fear Used As a Political Tool By One

Perhaps gambling news of his visit wouldn’t get through to the White House, the Israeli Prime Minister Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu made a speech to the US congress this week, having been invited not by the government of the country, but by the Republican party. This slap in the face to the administration just another of the now childish, and manifestly racist, attacks on the Obama administration from a right-wing in America who is seeing it’s grip on power and sanity slip away as people wise up to their crap.

The speech Mr. Netanyahu made was on Iran and the threat Iran posed to Israel, to the Middle East and to the World as a whole. They were the epitome of dangerous evil, indeed after listening to Mr. Netanyahu’s speech, people right across America were blaming the Iranians for just how tight pickle-jar lids can be sometimes. Worse still, the Israeli Prime Minister told America, the Iranians were still trying to build a nuclear weapon, something they were on the verge of achieving.

It was, to put it bluntly, Netanyahu Plays The Classics, he ran through all the same accusations, half-truths and alarmist silly nonsense he always does about Iran, stoking the fear of a nuclear armed Iran and purposely forgetting that in Iran they’re pretty nervous about a nuclear armed Israel. Israel has long had nuclear weapons and won’t let anyone inspect them. The Iranians have been offered a deal by the US that would prevent them getting a military nuclear capability and include a lot of inspections.

Iran has not yet responded to this offer, and indeed could well refuse it, at which point the damage done to Israeli-US relations by Mr. Netanyahu’s electioneering will have been for nothing, and right now, that relationship is at an all time low. The Republican reaction was rapturous, the Democrat reaction less so, and the President himself dismissed the entire speech as containing nothing new nor having any alternative viable solutions, but then the speech was never going to have those.

Godwin’s Law

Mr. Netanyahu’s preferred solution is somewhat obvious having compared the current nation of Iran to the Third Reich under Hitler in his speech. This not only proves that Godwin’s Law doesn’t just apply on the internet, but also that Netanyahu and his shaky right-wing coalition prefer a military solution to Iran and are hinting, by using the podium of the US congress, that they’ll be able to get American troops to do the dying in the conflict they so desperately want but can’t fight alone.

Those in the US gambling laws of human nature won’t be effected by this sort of fear mongering have short memories, and with a Republican congress ready to oppose Obama even opening a window to let some fresh air in (because the fresh air hasn’t been FDA approved and might steal their freedoms™ ) this speech has been of tactical use in the US election build up too. Foreign policy discussions just got a whole lot easier for Republicans.

With the Republican front-as-yet-non-runner Jeb Bush, foreign policy is going to play a key part in his election race, Jeb himself spending most of his time trying to distance himself from brother’s misguided overseas adventures. With the Nuclear Iran topic now set up by Netanyahu as the simple go-to division between the Republican view and that of the administration (and by dint of that all Democrats) they can pretty much side step all but the most direct questions on other more difficult topics.

Jeb Bush has said he’s his own man, but when his party is calling in the horror-clowns to set up a simple game of avoid the issue, you have to wonder just how foolish you’d have to be, as someone who likes to bet on sports in US, to put money on Jeb being able to actually push a cigarette paper between his policies and those of the rest of his family. Bet365 will give you 7/2 on Jeb to get the White House, but I suspect America is more afraid of another Bush presidency than it is of a nuclear Iran so put some on Hillary instead at just 11/10.