Good morning. It is June 23rd. It is a suffocatingly hot morning in New York City due to get even hotter tomorrow. So we'll try to knock this out fast and get the noisy air conditioner running again. But here we are starting a new week of your indignity morning podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

Tomorrow is primary election day in New York City, after the early voting period wrapped up yesterday and the newest poll from Emerson college finds Westchester resident and disgraced ex governor, Andrew Cuomo, leading assembly member Zoran Mamdani in head to head preference polling by a narrower margin than ever at 35 % to 32 % and Mamdani for the first time coming out ahead of Cuomo in a simulation of ranked choice voting, picking up enough alternate votes from other candidates supporters to come out ahead 52 % to 48%, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3.4%. So who knows? But the Emerson College release about the poll says, “voters who have already cast their ballots during New York City's early voting period break for Mamdani, who holds a 10 point lead over Cuomo, 41% to 31%. In contrast, among those who plan to vote on election day or have not yet voted at the time of the survey, Cuomo leads with 36%, followed by Mamdani at 31%.” 

In anecdotal evidence about where the race may stand, it looks as if the consortium of billionaires pouring money into Cuomo's campaign may have just about run out of things they can spend that money on. Yesterday, they were down to hiring a small plane to fly around trailing a banner reading, “Save NYC from global intifada, reject Mamdani.” A message that's only really intelligible to people who are already fully steeped in the Islamophobic Cuomo campaign lore, delivered in the most non-penetrating way possible. The plane was apparently flying over the Hudson, but even here on the West side, the only way I knew about it was somebody posting it to social media with the photos zoomed in so that the banner was even readable. Maybe Cuomo will win anyway, but so far the gap between default name recognition and voter enthusiasm does not seem to be narrowing. 

In much more horrifying developments in airborne Islamophobic political stunts, the front of this morning's New York Times has a giant full width two-line headline, “U.S., CLAIMING ‘SEVERE DAMAGE,’ WARNS IRAN NOT TO STRIKE BACK.” Two-column subhead, “Tehran ‘Reserves All Options’ After Attack at Nuclear Sites.” There's a four-column satellite photo annotated of the Forto nuclear site with the apparent damage done to it by Donald Trump's decision to launch an unprovoked attack against Iran, in the name of destroying a nuclear program that not even his own intelligence officials would say represented any sort of urgent threat to the United States. Maybe the most striking and depressing feature of the headline and story package is the use of the term “United States” or “U.S.” in the headline. The lead is the United States on Sunday warned Iran not to retaliate after a series of surgical strikes by American B-2 bombers and missiles caused what American officials described as severe damage to Iran's nuclear operations.” What does it mean that the “United States” said such a thing? The story continues. “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said at a news conference on Sunday morning that any retaliation will be met with force far greater than what was witnessed the previous night.” That is the voice of the United States, a bumbling TV host with an apparently uncontrolled drinking problem is, in the most meaningful sense, the USA. Then there's the use of the word “surgical.” You have to get to the second column of the story before it says “also unknown is the extent to which the Iranian nuclear operations were damaged by the American bombing. President Trump immediately claimed success, adding that three nuclear facilities had been ‘completely and totally obliterated.’ Other leaders in the Trump administration and in American and Israeli military intelligence described the destruction in more measured terms. In an interview on Meet the Press on Sunday, Vice President JD Vance said, ‘we destroyed the Iranian nuclear program.’ Then he appeared to hedge, stating that the program had been ‘substantially delayed.’ An initial analysis by the Israeli military,” the Times continues, “found the heavily fortified nuclear site at Forto had sustained serious damage but was not destroyed, according to two Israeli officials with knowledge of the matter." Vance saying that the Iranian nuclear program has been “delayed” is a really telling choice of spin. As the anti-proliferation expert Jeffrey Lewis posted on Blue Sky, the point of comparison here would be how much the Iranian pursuit of a nuclear bomb was slowed by the Obama administration's nuclear agreement with Iran, which the first Trump administration decided to destroy. “We hold diplomacy,” Lewis wrote, “to much higher standards than bombing. The same people who endlessly complained about the JCPOA,” that's the Obama agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, “sunsetting, are now happy to delay Iran's bomb by much less.” That has been the generalizable attitude toward war and diplomacy for the entire post-Cold War era at least, the people who want to blow things up and kill people are perpetually allowed to package themselves as pragmatists and realists, even when they're doing something as manifestly idiotic as trying to overthrow the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan simultaneously with no real strategy for how to hold either country or transition to a new regime.

Military violence is axiomatically assumed to produce whatever ultimate results the United States is supposed to be aiming for, despite its basically unbroken record of not doing that and in fact accomplishing the opposite. 

On that theme, inside the paper, down at the bottom of page A9, the headline is, “Location of Iran's uranium is unknown, U.S. officials say. Satellite photographs of the primary target,” the Times writes, “the Fordo uranium enrichment plant that Iran built under a mountain, showed several holes where a dozen 3000 pound massive ordinance penetrators, one of the largest conventional bombs in the US arsenal, punched deep holes in the rock. The Israeli military's initial analysis concluded that the site, the target of American and Israeli military planners for more than 26 years, sustained serious damage but had not been destroyed. But,” the story continues, “there was also evidence, according to two Israeli officials with knowledge of the intelligence, that Iran had moved equipment and uranium from the site in recent days. And there was growing evidence that the Iranians, attuned to Mr. Trump's repeated threats to take military action, had removed 400 kilograms, or roughly 880 pounds, of uranium enriched to 60 % purity. That is just below the 90 % that is usually used in nuclear weapons.” The longer, online version of the story goes on to say, “if Iran is truly pursuing a nuclear weapon, which it officially denies, it is taking more time than any nuclear armed nation in history. The United States developed the Manhattan Project in four years or so, developing the bombs dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war in the Pacific. The Soviet Union conducted its first test in 1949, only four years later. India, Pakistan, and Israel all sped the process. The Iranians,” the story says, “have been at it for more than 20 years.” Still later on, it says, “History also suggests that diplomacy has usually been more effective than sabotage or military attacks in providing assurances that a country does not pursue atomic weapons. More than 15 years ago, the joint U.S.- Israeli attack on Natanz, using a sophisticated cyber weapon, caused about a fifth of the country’s 5,000 or so centrifuges to blow up.”

“But the Iranians not only rebuilt, they installed more sophisticated equipment. Before Israel’s attack this month, they had roughly 19,000 centrifuges in operation. It was only when the Obama administration struck the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran,” the Times writes, “that the United States got a fuller picture of its capabilities thanks to the work of inspectors. And those inspections were choked off and many security cameras disabled after Mr. Trump declared the nuclear accord a ‘disaster’ and withdrew from it.” 

But even examining the attack on Iran as a misguided or ineffective piece of military strategy still seems to fall into a grave category error. Too late for the print edition, but online, the Times has a five-byline story narrating the process by which Donald Trump chose to send the bombers, and it essentially is not a story about military strategy at all. It was simply a child-minded and senescent president balancing his whims against the lobbying of his advisors and largely what he saw on television before deciding to do what seemed like the biggest most drastic and most satisfying thing. “,” the Times writes “with administration officials Trump allies and advisors Pentagon officials and others familiar with the events show how during this period different factions of mr. Trump's allies jockeyed to win over a president who was listing in all directions over whether to choose war, diplomacy, or some combination.” The story details how Trump's constant posting and talking about possibly launching an attack would give Iran advance warning if he actually did it, leading them to launch a false westbound bomber attack to provide at least some distraction from the actual eastbound mission. The story recounts how after Israel's airstrikes against Iran, Trump began hailing the operation as “excellent” and “very successful” and hinting that he had much more to do with it than people realized. “Later that day,” the Times writes, “Mr. Trump asked an ally how the Israeli strikes were ‘playing.’ He said that everyone was telling him he needed to get more involved, including potentially dropping 30,000 pound GBU-57 bombs on Fordo, the Iranian uranium enrichment facility buried underneath a mountain south of Tehran.” The story
goes on to say, “the president was closely monitoring Fox News, which was airing wall-to-wall praise of Israel's military operation and featuring guests urging Mr. Trump to get more involved. Several Trump advisors lamented the fact that Tucker Carlson was no longer on Fox, which meant that Mr. Trump was not hearing much of the other side of the debate.” Further along, amplifying the earlier bit about the effects of Trump's posting on military planning, the Times writes, “the president,” said one military official, “was the biggest threat to OPSEC, or operational security, that the planning faced.” The story then goes on to describe how once it became clear that the president was irreversibly excited about the chance to drop bombs on Iran, his handlers and advisors turned their focus, the Times writes, “on trying to ensure the American war did not spiral into an expansive regime change war. After the bombing, JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio stressed,” the Times writes, “that a regime change in Tehran, which could mean a protracted US engagement, was not the goal. But,” the story continues, “Mr. Trump, whose operation was the subject of praise in news coverage, not just from allies, but some of his critics, had already moved on, hinting in a truth social post that his goals could be shifting. ‘It's not politically correct to use the term regime change,’ he wrote, ‘but if the current Iranian regime is unable to make Iran great again, why wouldn't there be a regime change?’” Three question marks. That is the President of the United States. That is how we go to war now. Just throw the 25th Amendment, about incapacity, onto the bonfire with the rest of the now void provisions of the Constitution. That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Continue sending those along if you are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again tomorrow, Election Day. Don't rank Cuomo.