Prominent Democrat lawyer David Boies, best known for representing Al Gore in Bush v. Gore after the contested 2000 election, riled many of his fellow Democrats by recently writing a Wall Street Journal op-ed, "Partisanship on Iran Is Dangerous for America," with the subtitle of "Trump is doing the right thing for the U.S., and we Democrats should judge the war on the merits."
Needless to say this set many liberals on edge, including a highly irked Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker. He doesn't tolerate dissent from the Democrat party line well. Earlier, Politico found an anonymous Democrat strategist to characterize Chotiner's book interview with former Biden press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre last October to “watching Mike Tyson fight a baby.”
Therefore when Chotiner later interviewed Boies he couldn't contain his derangement over the support of the Democrat lawyer for Trump on what he is doing in Iran as you can see in his Monday inquest, "Why David Boies Thinks We Should Support Trump’s Iran War."
His questions put to Boies in the interview came off as a highly partisan primal scream mix of the accusatory and the downright frustrated as you can see starting with the following question.
This war was started by a President who frequently seems unstable, who can’t lay out a clear reason for the war, and who makes vague threats against our allies. We have a Secretary of War who seems to delight in death and destruction. The White House X feed is putting out fascistic video edits of military attacks that delight in violence. How do you synthesize all that with the point you’re trying to make?
In response to this unhinged TDS, Boies calmly replied in an utterly reasonable manner as if ignoring the angry screeching of a small child:
Sure. I think you’ve got to begin by asking yourself, Do you believe that this war is necessary or not? And I think you’ve got to begin by asking yourself, first, Do you believe it’s acceptable for the Iranian regime to have nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver them? If you believe that, then the next question you have to ask yourself is: Could we have achieved that goal of eliminating the threat that Iran poses by some other means?
Apparently this answer by Boies did not placate Chotiner because he later followed up with yet more Orange Man Bad bluster:
It just seems like it’s not clear what he’s doing. His Administration has laid out a number of different reasons for the war. Sometimes it is about nuclear weapons. Sometimes not. And it seems like President Trump could keep this going for a very long time. It also seems like he could pull the plug at any minute and decide that the war is over. So it’s very hard to separate the means from the ends, since we don’t know what the ends are. And the means, in terms of civilian casualties and negative effects on the global economy, seem quite perilous.
Of course, it was almost inevitable that Chotiner would repeat the F-word in the course of this interrogation:
I mentioned the White House posting fascistic video edits of strikes on Iran and the things Pete Hegseth says about killing people. Something just feels wrong about egging them on.
Chotiner did not even wait for the results of an investigation into the bombing of a girls school in Iran before reaching the conclusion that he seems to want to be true:
There was an American strike that killed at least a hundred and seventy-five people, many of them Iranian schoolgirls. The U.S. government denied this for a long time. The President himself is still denying it. It doesn’t take someone supersmart to realize that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth do not care that much about the fact that an American strike killed a bunch of Iranian schoolgirls. I’m curious how you synthesize that with your larger feelings about the war.
Chotiner eventually descends into rude smart-alecky potshots about the one who apparently lives 24/7 in his head:
Sir, you’re a very, very smart guy. You don’t think Donald Trump actually cares about casualties, do you?
And if you think Chotiner merely suffered a brief episode of derangement, he later made clear that he is in fact a very angry liberal who cannot be reasoned with at all as you can see in this question:
I’m also thinking of Pete Hegseth gleefully talking about the Iranian warship that we sunk in the Indian Ocean. It does seem like they’re gleeful about death. And also, just knowing what I know about Donald Trump, it makes me wonder how much these things really hurt him emotionally.
So kudos to David Boies for putting country ahead of party, but it is obvious that one cannot reason with someone with the anger issues of Isaac Chotiner. In fact, the only thing that could make Chotiner even angrier than he already is would be if Iran concedes defeat in the near future due to Trump's actions. And giving Trump any credit for that would be sure to absolutely enrage him despite the world ending up as a much safer place.
