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I’m not so sure. This is no where near a priority issue for most Americans, “I can’t afford eggs and the immigrant I buy pizza from got shipped to a warehouse but thank god the regime changed in Iran.”
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More than anything else, conservatives love the feeling that they are winning. Over a rival sports team, over a political opponent, and especially over a foreign power. This is why MAGA won over the neocons so easily, the MAGA shtick is to claim to be always winning.
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Many conservatives voted for trump because they thought he wasn't a "war hawk", they don't want the US in wars around the world, they don't want their children sent off to die in foreign lands. So they voted for trump and then got "Department of War", and now a war in Iran, the last thing they wanted.
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This isn't a defense of the president or his policies but we don't know if this will be a (sustained) war or rather a week or two of airstrikes like the previous iteration and the Maduro thing.

> Many conservatives voted for trump because they thought he wasn't a "war hawk"

I doubt their honesty. Considering they blamed Biden for Russia invading Ukraine and October 7 with the galaxybrain reasoning of "It didn't happen while Trump was in office", I am convinced the isolationism thing is just an unserious talking point.

Even the Joe Rogan MAGAs should remember when they cried on social media about how they were about to be drafted after the Soleimani thing under Trump.

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> This is no where near a priority issue for most Americans

I don't think this means the GOP keeps the House. But Trump got a bump from Venezuela, particularly within his party.

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Schumer was brought into a briefing on Iran and clearly 'got his mind right' in there. I don't know who makes decisions in government, but it's not the people on camera. US elections are irrelevant to consequential matters, and we waste too much time thinking about them.
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I never understand how someone can look at Trump and the last year and think elections don’t matter or have consequences.
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I think this framing is bad, it's not that people don't think there are consequences it's that it's 50/50 on whether the consequences will be personally worse for them. There are few, maybe no upsides, to elections in the U.S. for the majority of the electorate.
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> US elections are irrelevant to consequential matters

This is nonsense. If you actually believe this, spend some time around your elected representatives and in Washington.

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Is our memory so short? Regime change in Iraq destabilized that region for 2 decades.
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>Delcy-style swaparoo,

I think IRGCs are much more robust and zealous than whatever Maduro had.

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Obviously. They would have kidnapped or assassinated leadership many decades ago otherwise. They have tried and failed many times. They're talking about trying to break the state though, which isn't something the US tried in Vz. This'll be much harder.
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Many folks said that if the supreme leader got killed then it's all over. I honestly skeptical since IRGC folks would take over and I think they are much more militant than the Supreme Leader.
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You are right to be skeptical. Khomeini died and now Khamenei is supreme leader. He too will have a successor if he dies (or is dead as Isreal clamed a moment ago). Iran has spent the last few weeks picking out successors four deep for each office. It's been the main news besides the "negotiations".
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somehow I dont think regime change is gonna happen before the midterms or even before 2028
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> I dont think regime change is gonna happen before the midterms

I agree. But to be fair, I would have said the same thing about Venezuela a year ago. Maybe the term should be a regime slip.

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We didn’t change the regime in Venezuela though right? Just decapitated it?

No one’s thinking America cant succeed at the killing partz. It’s what comes after that people are worried about.

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> We didn’t change the regime in Venezuela though right?

Practically speaking, we changed it. The foreign and energy policies we care about changed. The notion that you need to wholesale clean shop to qualify as regime change is misguided and counterproductive [1].

(On the other end of the spectrum, the fact that we kept the Japanese Emperor on his throne doesn't mean we didn't change the Japanese regime.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Ba%27athification

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I don't know if the same theory works in Iran though right, Iran is amidst economic collapse. It seems like the situation in Venezula with Maduro was tenable so when we decapitated the leader and got what we wanted it was ok that maybe most things didn't change. Is there a similar theory for Iran that's not soaked in hubris?
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> Is there a similar theory for Iran that's not soaked in hubris?

Lots of factions in Iran, including within the IRGC. Khamenei's bunker gets hit, oh no, new dude knives the competition and then makes a call to the White House.

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The U.S. is amidst economic collapse... hubris ...
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Delusional. With your line of thought Al-Qaeda got regime change in the US.
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I think he meant another regime not the Iranians.
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Trump could liberate every repressed country in the world and it would not impact in the slightest the cold hard fact that neither I nor most the people I know will ever vote R again.
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I really hope the US electorate never forgives the Republican Party for the damage it’s done to this country, but I suspect that people’s memories will be short.
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If the US public was inclined to “never forgive” those kind of offenses (or even to really fully reject them even once they no longer had dominant support) then the Democratic Party would have been destroyed for its role as the party of slavery and insurrection instead of surviving long enough to reject the bigotry that motivated those stances only to have the Republican Party immediately pick it up.
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If you are admitting that you voted R in 2024, and only now you won't vote R, that really doesn't fix anything. Your bar is set so insanely low that you will vote R on someone who is slightly better than Trump.

As a life long D voter, I am personally going to vote R every election now because I want US to sink into the ground so low that people like you experience actual pain and suffering.

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Stop it. You're not helping. This kind of thing is really counterproductive. Welcome your comrade with open arm. Give him time to warm up. Don't be an absolutist.
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You took a presumption and ran with it into baseless vitriol
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They leveraged special operations forces in Venezuela. Iran has two US carrier groups on their front door; this operation is not going to be as precise as the one against Maduro.
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