So in case you missed it, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is the hand-behind-the-throne in Saudi Arabia who is pushing crazy into reforms. Women driving. Movie theaters. Dogs and cats, lying together. He's also a thug.
A thug that kidnapped Lebanon's prime minister and locked up a large percentage of the royal family to shake them down for cash.
One of MBS's critics is Jamal Khashoggi, who was banned from writing in Saudi Arabia, so he scooted off to Washington where he was writing for the Washington Post. That's where things get shitty:
Turkey is alleging that the Saudis flew in a 15-person hit squad, murdered Khashoggi, chopped him up into little bits and flew him out of the country in boxes. Which, hey, Saudis gonna Saud. But the fact that he was a resident of the US has the congresscritters all riled up:
We must demand immediate answers from the Saudi government.
- Adam Schiff
- Tim Kaine
- Marco Rubio
It is imperative that we find out what happened to Mr. Khashoggi and the Saudi government give a clear answer as to their conduct and information on his whereabouts.
- Lindsay Graham
Now - complicating matters are that our relationship with Turkey is kinda shitty ATM and, well, ever since the Shah fell our foreign arms sales have looked kinda like this:
Yeppers. Over 10% of our arms exports.
And granted: Saudi Arabia is really shitty from a geopolitical standpoint. And granted: MBS is doing stuff to make it a less shitty place (so long as you aren't Yemeni).
But if MBS feels okay murdering a WaPo columnist as he's going for a marriage license, it's gonna cause a lot of performative soul-searching that might even actually change some shit.
Hold onto your butts.
... all the same pundits and political weasels who demean, disparage, and attempt to destroy American journalists reporting on congress and potus ...
It may be that brown foreign journalists are the only non-white-old-men that Congress actually recognizes as having human rights.
What a weird world we live in.