Friday roundup

Stacey Abrams, the poster girl for delusion chic:

Speaking at the Center for American Progress’s Ideas Conference, Abrams said: "The notion of identity politics has been peddled for the past 10 years and it’s been used as a dog whistle to say we shouldn’t pay too much attention to the voices coming into progress. I would argue that identity politics is exactly who we are and exactly how we won."

Why is this guy still drawing a breath instead of suffering Hell's eternal torment? 

John Walker Lindh, the man convicted of helping the Taliban following the September 11 attacks, was just released from federal prison in Terre Haute.

Lindh’s case began in November of 2001 when he was fighting alongside the Taliban. The California native had converted to Islam as a teenager and eventually traveled overseas to fight alongside radical Islamists.

Not two months after 9/11, Lindh was captured in Afghanistan, detained and interviewed by a CIA officer, a former Marine named Mike Spann. Just hours later, Spann was killed in a prisoner uprising at the same facility. In the aftermath of that uprising, Lindh was brought back to the U.S. and charged with conspiring to kill Americans and engaging in terrorism.

A conviction could have meant life in prison. Instead, attorneys accepted a plea deal approved by President George W. Bush. Those charges were dropped and Lindh only pleaded guilty to serving in the Taliban army and carrying weapons while doing so. That resulted in a 20-year sentence. With good behavior, Lindh will be released on May 23 after serving 17 years.

AOC finds the ideological significance of cauliflower:

 In a stream-of-consciousness discussion of composting, the Green New Deal, and community gardens, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lamented cauliflower as symbol of colonialism.

“Looks like they’ve got composting going on, which is so awesome, too, because composting is really hard to do in a neighborhood like this. We just don’t have the pick ups and the ease of it that a lot of other communities have. So that’s really how you do it, right, that is such a core component of the Green New Deal, is having all of these projects make sense in a cultural context. And it’s an area that I — we get the most pushback on, because people say, like, why do you need to do that? That’s too hard. But when you really think about it, when someone says that it’s too hard to do a green space that grows yucca instead of, I don’t know, cauliflower or something, what you’re doing is that you’re taking a colonial approach to environmentalism, and that is why a lot of communities of color get resistant to certain environmentalist movements, because they come with the colonial lens on them. And it should be no surprise that sometimes a lot of these projects don’t work out occasionally because our communities are naturally attuned to live in an environmentally conscious way.”

Or, you know, the decision to grow cauliflower might be a reflection of what plants will grow best in a garden with that temperature range, soil types, and rainfall level. Some yucca varieties can handle a range of temperature and rainfall, some can’t. All of this information is a Google search away, and one can fairly wonder why a U.S. congresswoman is weighing in on what vegetables should be grown in citizens’ gardens.

I always wonder about these situations in which a nation nearly immediately sours on a leader it has just elected. Such is apparently the case in Brazil:

Earlier this month a procession of Brazil’s military cabinet ministers came to President Jair Bolsonaro with the same clear message: muzzle your far-right keyboard warriors or your government will implode.

Propelled to the presidency by a vociferous army of online ideologues, including his sons, Bolsonaro’s government comprises an uneasy mix of radicals, pragmatists and economic liberals. In his five months in office, Bolsonaro has done little to rein in the extremist fringe, even when they target Congress, the Supreme Court and members of his own administration. The former members of the armed forces, who make up a third of his cabinet and constitute the moderate faction, have endured particularly vicious abuse.

Since the retired generals’ intervention, the public mud-slinging has ebbed a little, but the sense of division and improvisation in government has not. Bolsonaro’s approval ratings are sliding fast, while prominent erstwhile supporters who hoped for clean, decisive government have recanted, and legislators are beginning to jump ship. Even in financial markets, which helped carry the retired paratrooper to office, hope is fizzling. The real earlier this week reached an 8-month low. The presidency did not respond to a request for comment.

"I’m amazed by how weak Bolsonaro is politically. The government has everything going for it but sabotages itself with controversy and insults," said Renato Nobile, a Bolsonaro voter and the CEO of Genial Advisory, which manages over 30 billion reais ($7.4 billion) in assets. “Many people want the military, Mourao is more skilled than Bolsonaro,” he said in reference to Vice-President Hamilton Mourao, a four-star general.

The saving grace of the Trump administration is the grownups on board. Sohrab Ahmar interviews one of them in the New York Post:

“White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran, in Echoes of Iraq War” screamed a New York Times headline.

“When you see that headline, it’s flashy, but it doesn’t begin to reflect the depth of the work that’s been done,” Pompeo says as we sit down for an interview at the plush Palace Hotel in Midtown.

Yes, the Pentagon updated a military contingency plan in case the Tehran regime escalated its attacks against US assets and interests in the Persian Gulf. But the plan was one of several options presented to the commander in chief. To go by that Times headline, and others like it, you would think Team Trump is driving America to war, willy-nilly; that Washington is the aggressor and Tehran the victim without agency.

Fact is, Iran has a “revolutionary, theocratic regime that is intent upon the destruction of the United States and Israel,” Pompeo tells me. “That’s the backdrop to all this.”

President Trump hasn’t boosted the risk of a confrontation by ratcheting up sanctions. “The risk is the same” as ever, and it comes from Iranian leaders who “have made the decision that they’re willing to contemplate attacks — kinetic, military attacks — against the United States.”

What’s new is that the United States under Trump will no longer entertain the fiction that Iran’s various militias and terror proxies are somehow independent of the regime.

Pompeo warns the Iranians: “Whether you subcontract, or you partner, or you train, or you equip, or you operate it, or you lead it, if you allow it to engage in attacks against Western interests — we’re not going to allow you to create public deniability. Because we’ll know full well what’s happening. That’s not going to stop us from attacking those who made the decisions to put Americans at risk.”

Theresa May resigns as UK Prime Minister. I realize that a move like Brexit is fraught with arcane considerations, but it seems to me that that just argues for the cleanest, most decisive break that can be accomplished, and she just spent a little too long in the realm of if-this-then-we-have-to-consider-that.  Stock up on popcorn for the Boris Johnson-Jeremy Corbin scramble to succeed her.

Great Sarah Hoyt essay at PJ Media on why the Left has to gin up alarm about "white supremacy."