Catalonia On My Mind

With a major earthquake in Mexico, a devastating hurricane in the Caribbean and, of course, "Rocket Man" at the UN, it is hard to pay attention to what is happening in Spain.

But trust me, something interesting is taking place.

Catalonia, the richest region in the country, has been clamoring for independence for some time now. A framework for more autonomy was worked out in 2006 and it was agreed upon by both Catalan and Spanish authorities.

That agreement was struck down by the Constitutional Court in 2010 fuelling independence calls.

Most observers believe that Catalans are not very serious about full independence. They just want to get a bigger share out of the national budget and/or some acknowledgement that they contribute disproportionately to the union.

The regional government decided to hold a second referendum (the first one in 2014 was non-binding) with the proviso that if pro-independent proposition passes, they would declare it within 48 hours.

It sounds ominous but in reality polls indicated that this was fairly unlikely.

Yet Spanish government reacted with very heavy-handed and brutal tactics.

They started with police raiding printing companies to confiscate ballots.

Armed police in Spain have raided several print works and newspaper offices in Catalonia in recent days in a hunt for voting papers, ballot boxes and leaflets to be used in an Oct. 1 independence referendum which Madrid vehemently opposes. 

They also passed measure to control the regional government's spending to block any referendum related expenditure.

And earlier this week Madrid summoned over 700 Catalan mayors for questioning over their support for the vote. 

Catalonia's president Carles Puigdemont is facing criminal charges.

Moreover,

On Friday, police confiscated 100,000 campaign leaflets in a raid in Catalonia, the Interior Ministry said, without saying where. Catalonia’s top court issued a warning on Friday to seven newspapers, many of them online, not to publish campaign notices for the referendum, a court spokesman said on Saturday.

The police conducted searched in various media outlets and confiscated documents and equipment. They seized up to 10 million ballots. And the Guardia Civil blocked the official referendum Web site (which you can see here if you are not in Spain)

When this was met with protests in Catalonia, Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy massively escalated the crisis.

Spanish police have detained 14 Catalan officials and raided regional government ministries involved in organising an independence vote declared illegal by Spain's government. 

Tensions were already high before Josep Maria Jové, number two in the Catalan vice-presidency, and others were held.

The police (which included the beloved Mossos d‘Esquadra) raided forty ministries and offices and arrested important political figures.

Several ministries in Barcelona were raided on Wednesday, including the economy, foreign affairs, telecoms, social affairs and presidency buildings. Among those detained were officials from the economy ministry, run by Catalan Vice-President Oriol Junqueras, as well as figures from other departments.

So what happened after this crackdown?

Well, the 700+ mayors who were questioned by the police defied Madrid's orders:

The mayors met with Catalonia’s regional head Carles Puigdemont in a show of defiance, following Spanish prosecutors warning earlier this week that officials engaging in any preparations for the vote could be charged with civil disobedience, abuse of office and misuse of public funds.

(...)

Meeting in downtown Barcelona in front of hundreds of flag waving pro-independence protesters, the mayors gave speeches in which they promised continued support for the referendum amid chants of “we will vote” and “independence.” 

The soccer club Barcelona, one of the most important global brands in sports, threw its weight behind the Catalonian government and the referendum.

The centre of Barcelona soon became a sea of Catalan flags and the city's renowned football club threw its weight behind the protests, condemning any act that threatened freedom of speech and self-determination.

The puzzling question is this: Why did Rajoy hugely overreact to a referendum that was likely to come back with a No result?

Before the crackdown, there was strong evidence that most Catalans were happy with a regional autonomy arrangement. And the population was trending away from independence.

Just 2.2 million voters out of a potential 5.4 million turned out for the 2014 ballot. (...)
Then in 2015 a coalition of separatist parties won regional elections. Between them, Junts pel Si (Together for Yes), with the support of a radical left-wing party, the CUP, won 48% of the vote.

More worryingly for the secessionists, a public survey commissioned by the Catalan government in July suggested 49% of Catalans opposed independence, while 41% were in favour. 

Turnout at the annual Catalan national day event in Barcelona on 11 September was impressive - around a million people according to local police - but in 2014 it was estimated at 1.8 million. 

Now with Catalan officials under arrest and a brutal oppression reminiscent of the Franco era, a prolonged and violent confrontation is inevitable.

My guess is that Rajoy, the guy who shepherded unpopular austerity measures is doing it for personal political reasons.

He is aware that his party will never get much of the vote in Catalonia (they got 8.5 percent in 2015). So alienating Catalan electorate is not a big deal for him. On the other hand, cracking down on Catalan independence is likely to make him popular elsewhere in the country.

The political theatre is also taking away from the devastation his austerity measures brought to Spain.

In other words, this is what Erdogan or Duterte has been doing and what I predicted Trump will soon be doing.

The problem is that with this escalation he ensured that, next time a referendum is held, Catalans will vote for independence. And in between, there will be more protests, social unrest and violence.

He essentially reversed the current trend.

It is not a winning hand for Rajoy since, at some point, the EU will have to break its rather surprising silence and sanction the Spanish government. It is hard to criticize the illiberal democracies of the East without saying anything about similar tactics in Spain.

Then what?

My guess is that this will have momentous consequences for both Spain and the EU.

The Soviet Officer Who Saved the World

The word hero is bandied around all the time.

It is the cheapest and most meaningless praise of our time.

And you realize that especially when you encounter a real hero.

This is a story I did not know and I thought it was really unfair that the world was largely uninformed about the actions of one remarkable man.

On 26 September 1983 Stanislav Petrov "was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more."

This was a little over three weeks after the Soviet Air Force shut down the Korean Airline Flight 007 killing all 269 passengers and crew on board.

The incident was met with global indignation and brouhaha and the relations between the US and Soviet Union were very tense. We are talking about the Reagan Administration with an actor fronting a bellicose military firmly in charge.

Petrov was dubious from the beginning. He thought it made no sense to launch a nuclear attack with only five ballistic missiles since the US knew that the Soviets would retaliate with massive force.

Fire and fury in The Orange Man's words.

But, as any military personnel will tell you, it was not up to him to decide whether the attack was real and what to do about it. He was obligated to report the incident right away.

However, Petrov realized that if he called it in, there was no way his superiors would demure and investigate the matter further. With only two minutes at their disposal, they would have pressed the proverbial button.

That, in turn, would have triggered an even bigger assault by combined Nato forces and life, as we know it, would have ceased to exist on our lovely Blue Planet.

Now, a hero is someone who acts selflessly in addressing such an extraordinary dilemma. If Petrov was wrong he would have caused immense casualties in his own country. If he called it in, he would have destroyed the planet.

The man assume the responsibility of doing nothing and risk everything, including his life and the life of his loved ones.

It turned out Petrov made the right call it was an equipment malfunction.

Almost anybody else, including, as I recently mentioned, the US officer who carries the nuclear football, would have made the opposite call and informed his superiors.

And the rest would have been history. With no one left to record it.

The Soviet army did not punish him, nor did they reward him. They appreciated what he did, but rewarding him would have made hem look bad as the idiots behind the shaky early warning system.

In the end, Petrov retired early as after the incident he suffered a major nervous breakdown.

As he later put it, this was the only time such an event occurred during the Cold War and it happened to him.

And we are all glad that it was him and not someone who mindlessly obeyed orders.

Remarkably, this  is how this real life hero saw what he did.

Petrov has said he does not know that he should regard himself as a hero for what he did that day. In an interview for the film The Man Who Saved the World, Petrov says, "All that happened didn't matter to me — it was my job. I was simply doing my job, and I was the right person at the right time, that's all. My late wife for 10 years knew nothing about it. 'So what did you do?' she asked me. 'Nothing. I did nothing.

He died quietly this last May.

No one in the West knew of his passing until this week.

Because we were too busy admiring our heros.

Netanyahu's Corruption Cases: Is He On His Way Out?

As impeachment, obstruction of justice and conflict of interest are daily preoccupations in Trump Presidency, few people pay attention to what his happening to his old buddy Bibi Netanyahu.

The other walking conflict of interest.

Netanyahu is facing four separate corruption investigations and on top of all that, Israel's top prosecutor has just announced that he is thinking of charging his wife Sara Netanyahu with fraud and breach of trust.

Prosecutors say Sara Netanyahu and a senior official, Ezra Seidoff, claimed costs for food prepared externally and for hiring private chefs, between September 2010 and March 2013, whilst covering up the fact that the residence also employed a cook. State funding for both is not allowed. 

"In this way, hundreds of meals from restaurants and chefs were fraudulently received in the order of 359,000 shekels," a statement from the attorney general's office said.

359,000 shekels is about $100,000 but Haaretz puts the figure at 400,000 shekels or $111,850.

If Avichai Mandelblit, a Netanyahu appointee,  proceeds with the charges it will be a serious blow for Bibi. But far worse are the four dossiers about him.

Let's take a look.

Case 1000

For years, Israeli billionaire movie producer Arnon Milchan (the owner of New Regency Films) lavished Bibi and Sara Netanyahu with expensive gifts like cigars, champagne and even jewellry.

Rex/Shutterstock

The estimated value of these gifts from a friend, as Netanyahu describes them—and which Milchan reportedly told police “made him feel sick”—amounted to a hundred and eighty thousand dollars.

Netanyahu always maintained that these were just friendly gestures and no quid pro quo was ever expected or provided.

Until recently, it looked like the only advantage these gifts got Milchan was this:

Netanyahu successfully lobbied Secretary of State John Kerry for the renewal of Milchan’s American visa, which allowed Milchan to avoid paying millions of dollars in Israeli taxes.

At the end of August, police uncovered a very significant Netanyahu intervention that benefitted Milchan immensely.

The police have prima facie evidence according to which Netanyahu used all his weight to convince British Jewish billionaire Len Blavatnik to acquire shares in Israeli Channel 10. A significant portion of those shares were held by Milchan in an investment gone bad, in which he stood to lose tens of millions of dollars. When Blavatnik acceded to Netanyahu’s request and acquired the channel, which he still controls, it redeemed Milchan's failed investment. The acquisition by Blavatnik was worth a fortune to Milchan.

That's definitely a major quo for a pile of expensive quid.

And Milchan is cooperating with the police.

Case 2000

This one involves Netanyahu negotiating with one media mogul for positive coverage for his government in exchange for limiting the circulation of another paper.

Image Flash 90

The police have tapes of Netanyahu negotiating with Yedioth publisher Arnon Mozes, in an apparent effort to skew the daily's coverage in favor of the prime minister. In exchange Netanyahu would supposedly help restore Yedioth’s status to the top of Israel's media industry by spearheading legislation that would hamstring Israel Hayom, the free newspaper owned by American casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson. 

Or, alternatively, perhaps the premier would convince his friend Adelson to restrict the freebie’s distribution.

Netanyahu even gave a list of Yedioth journalists he wanted sidelined.

But when the tapes became public, he claimed that he was not serious about his offer and he was just saying those thing to please Mozes. The problem with his denial is that:

According to a recent Channel Two report broadcast, Adelson told Israeli police investigators that Netanyahu had tried to persuade him to withdraw plans for weekend supplements at Israel Hayom. That would indicate that Netanyahu was indeed intent upon reaching a deal with Mozes.

As a result, Netanyahu has recently been named a suspect in the case.

Even worse for him, there is now a witness willing to point a finger at him.

You see, the conversation was accidentally uncovered when police seized his former chief of staff Ari Harow's telephone. Harow was the point man in the negotiations with Mozes.

He has now agreed to testify against his former boss to avoid jail time in another case.

Case 3000

This one is the most serious and consequential file as it involves bribery and corruption in the military procurement process.

Israel has a small fleet of Dolphin class submarines that are capable of firing cruise missiles with nuclear warheads. There are six of them. In 2015, Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) recommended that one of them should be retired in 2019 and a new one should be purchased.

Later on, the head of the National Security Council discovered that Netanyahu ordered three more subs from Germany at a cost of one and a half billion dollars.

The then Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon conducted a review to ensure that the Prime Minister was not given misleading information, like IDF needing and requesting not one but four submarines. Nobody had produced such a memo.

A few months later, Ya'alon's office was informed that Netanyahu was going to sign the four-submarine deal during a state visit to Germany. Except no one knew that this deal was on the agenda.

“The issue was examined in the chief of staff’s office, in the Navy headquarters and in the Planning Directorate,” Yediot Ahronot’s Alex Fishman wrote, last November. “No one in each of these three offices had a clue about the new submarine deal.”

When Ya'alon confronted Netanyahu about no such request coming from the IDF, Bibi told him that it was only a Memorandum of Understanding that he was going to sign. The subtext being, there is nothing serious, no need to get worked up.

But within a couple of months, Netanyahu forced Ya'alon to resign as Minister of Defense, ostensibly on the basis of other disagreements, replacing him with extreme right winger Avigdor Lieberman.

At some point, the initial bidding process prepared by the Ministry of Defense was scrapped and the contract for four subs was awarded to ThyssenKrupp.

Photo: EPA, Yaron Brenner

ThyssenKrupp is represented in Israel by Miki Ganor and his commission for the deal was about $45 million.

Ganor's lawyer is Netanyahu's cousin, confidant and personal lawyer David Shimron. In fact, Jerusalem Post called him Netanyahu's right hand man.

And according to Ganor, Shimron was to receive 20 percent of Ganor's cut, which works out to $9 million. 

It turns out the decision for a no-bid procurement was made by Netanyahu with Shimron's pushing. Shimron left a paper trail.

Channel 10 reported that, in July of 2014, the Defense Ministry’s legal adviser had sent an e-mail to the Defense Ministry’s director-general saying that David Shimron, the lawyer representing the German firm’s agent, had called him. Shimron wanted to know, the e-mail said, if “we are halting the bidding process in order to negotiate with his client, as was requested of us by the Prime Minister.”

The problem for Shimron is that Miki Ganor decided to turn state's witness recently. He is providing the police with names of officers he bribed and of other people who pushed the contract through the administration.

As a result, David Shimron was placed under house arrest, though he was subsequently granted permission to go on a trip to the US.

The whole episode has proved to be very damaging for IDF's reputation.

The submarine affair now threatens the Israeli defense establishment and is lifting the veil over the Israeli defense acquisition process itself, which is worth tens of billions of dollars. Netanyahu's former chief of staff David Sharan was arrested Sept. 3 on suspicion of accepting bribes. (Sharan had also served as senior aide to Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz.) Others arrested were Brig. Gen. (res.) Shai Brosh, the former commander of Shayetet 13, Israel’s esteemed naval commando unit, and former minister Eliezer Sandberg, who is close to the Netanyahus.

Netanyahu says that he has no clue about his cousin and adviser Shimron's involvement in the case. Since the whole deal was handled at every turn by the Prime Minister's Office this is rather hard to believe.

Moreover,

Shimron’s law partner Isaac Molho, Netanyahu’s envoy on all sorts of secret diplomatic and other missions, may also be involved in Case 3000. One report says Molho represented the premier in talks with the Germans regarding a sensitive issue that may could have had something to do with the subs. If so, Molho represented the PM while his law partner represented the Germans’ agent. Under these circumstances, it is hard to buy Netanyahu’s claim that he didn’t know of Shimron’s involvement in the deal.

There is also this:

If Netanyahu did know about Shimron’s involvement with the submarines, he will face criminal charges in this affair as well. If he didn’t know, it could cause a lot of people to wonder if such as person is sufficiently competent to lead the country. The submarine and naval vessel deal is viewed as a strategic transaction involving Israeli national security, and as such, it was administered and led by the prime minister himself. Responsibility for the deal was placed on his shoulders alone. “I didn’t know” is an excuse that could extricate Netanyahu from criminal charges, but not from the public’s blame.

Case 4000

This is a fairly recent case and its relevance is in the fact that, as one scandal too many, it made defending Netanyahu very difficult.

The Bezeq affair, which is named after Israel's giant telco, erupted in July with State Comptroller Jospeh Shapira's report. He alleged that, Netanyahu, who was also Minister of Communication at some point, did not disclose that he was very good friends with Bezeq's owner Shaul Elovitch. As Minister he made many decisions that affected Bezeq and that's conflict of interest.

When Ha'aretz disclosed that Netanyahu was given positive coverage in Walla web portal which is owned by Bezeq, Netanyahu was prevented from handling matters concerning Bezeq.

The Director General of the Communications ministry was Avi Berger. Berger was trying to enact a broadband reform that would have negatively affect Bezeq's monopoly. So Netanyahu got rid of him and appointed Shlomo Filber as his replacement.

The [Shapira] report found that Shlomo Filber, director general of the Communications Ministry and a former top aide to Netanyahu, had been providing Bezeq with confidential documents and other information from which the company stood to benefit. 

Filber was sent to house arrest.

What Happens Now?

Avichai Mandelblit' recent announcement about Sara Netanyahu is a sign that the noose around the Prime Minister's neck is tightening.

Up to a few months ago, people thought that the Attorney General, a Netanyahu ally, would never go after him.

Avichai Mandelblit, the Attorney General, was appointed by Netanyahu. As Ruth Margalit noted last month, there is evidence that Mandelblit sat on compromising evidence for months. “When the thrust of the allegations is so powerful, they cannot ignore them,” Arad said. “But they can delay, control, and spin.”

Now he is actively investigating all these corruption cases.

The same aboutface is also true for the friendly media.

However, the real surprise comes from Israel Hayom, which for years has all but explicitly celebrated its strong ties with Netanyahu but now seems to concede as well that a metaphorical noose is tightening around Netanyahu’s neck.

Hayut Photo credit: Flash 90/ Channel 2 News

All of this came to fruition at a particularly bad time for Netanyahu.

His Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked (HaBayit HaYehudi) lost her fight to stop the appointment of Esther Hayut as Supreme Court's Chief Justice.

Daughter of Holocaust survivors, Hayut is a fiercely independent and brilliant jurist who is hated by all religious and right wing parties in Israel.

Her handling of the appeal of these corruption cases could prove to be critical for Netanyahu.

In any event, whatever happens next, this point is worth remembering.

Netanyahu has no intention of vacating his seat willingly, however, and will fight for it with all the means at his disposal. One of his political rivals in the Likud told Al-Monitor on the condition of anonymity, “Netanyahu won’t hesitate to burn down the house over its inhabitants. His personal [political] survival is more important to him than the public good.”

And, like his good buddy Donald Trump, this could involve a nice little war.

Perhaps an excursion into Syria? 

And why not?

All it takes is a permission from Putin. Trump's other buddy.

We live in scary times.

How Mueller Is Cornering Trump

New York Times recently ran a piece indicating that Robert Mueller asked for and received an early draft of the James Comey firing letter.

At the time, the draft (penned by Stephen Miller, the ironic white supremacist) was blocked by White House Counsel who asked Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to produce a different text.

The insinuation was that the original draft could be used to show that Trump was guilty of obstruction of justice.

I disagree. I think Mueller's move is a classic misdirection.

As I mentioned before, obstruction of justice charges or impeachment are a logical impossibility with a Congress controlled by the GOP. They would never throw one of their own under the bus and they would never go against Trump's core constituency.

As the song goes, without them, they are nothing.

What Mueller is doing is to obscure his real target, which is money laundering for Russian oligarchs through real estate deals.

And he is moving carefully yet deliberately and he is blocking all potential exit points before Trump realizes he is cornered.

The look on his face in that recent photo tells you what you need to know about his intentions.

Let's start with his first move.

After putting together a team which specializes in financial fraud and criminal accounting, he ordered a pre-dawn raid to the home of Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager to collect evidence.

What kind of evidence?

Squeezing the Perp

Well, Manafort is an interesting guy. He has all sorts of connections to Russian oligarchs. This is how Politico summarized them.

But let me remind you the highlights.

Manafort had to resign from Trump's campaign when the New York Times revealed that

Ukrainian investigators were looking into a “secret ledger” that listed $12.7 million in cash payments earmarked for Manafort by the party of the deposed former Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

While the Ukrainian prosecutors subsequently found no evidence of foul play, such large sums on a secret ledger didn't leave a positive impression.

So, no one was surprised when it was reported that Manafort "owed as much as $17 million to companies controlled by a Russian oligarch and a Ukrainian businessman with political ties to Moscow."

And the debt was owed to well connected people.

Manafort—who retroactively registered as a foreign agent last month for his lobbying work—owed $7.8 million to a company connected to Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch with close ties to Vladimir Putin. Manafort also owed a separate sum of $9.9 million to a Cyprus company linked to Ivan Fursin, a Party of Regions member of the Ukrainian Parliament, through a Delaware-based LLC that he previously used to purchase real estate in New York City, the Times reports.

Manafort was also present in Donald Jr.'s infamous meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer who promised to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Also in attendance was "Irakly “Ike” Kaveladze, [who] had once been accused by congressional investigators of participating in a $1.4 billion money laundering scheme to funnel money from Eastern Europe through U.S. banks."

Given this background, if you were Mueller, you would expect some skeletons in Paul Manafort's closet. And he must have found some, as the search warrant for the raid was approved by a federal judge who agreed that there was probable cause.

Normally, as a prosecutor, you squeeze the perp (I am fully versed in Law and Order lingo) and they give you the higher ups.

Except in this case, Manafort knows (and Trump has already inquired to find out) that the President can pardon him no matter what. In essence, he is unsqueezable, if there is such a word.

To counter that, Mueller approached New York's Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to include him in the Manafort dossier, as there are some New York City real estate deals and lobbying done from the city.

This has two advantages.

One, Schneiderman hates Trump with a passion as the President attacked him on Twitter using derogatory terms like "hack" and "lightweight." He is the one who forced Trump to settle the Trump University case for $25 million. And he can do more.

The New York prosecutor’s office also is looking into some of Trump’s business transactions and could potentially share those records with Mueller’s team, one of these people said. 

But the real reason why Mueller got Schneiderman to investigate Manafort is this:

It also could potentially provide Mueller with additional leverage to get Manafort to cooperate in the larger investigation into Trump’s campaign, as Trump does not have pardon power over state crimes.

In order words, Manafort has now become eminently squeezable.

Former federal prosecutors tell The Daily Beast one of Manafort’s biggest legal liabilities could be to what’s called a “check the box” prosecution. Federal law requires that people who have money in foreign bank accounts check a box on their tax returns disclosing that. And there’s speculation that Manafort may have neglected to check that box, which would be a felony.

If you are looking into Manafort's tax returns for possible crimes, why wouldn't you look into his former bosses returns?

In fact, Mueller can do that using Manafort's case.

Enter the IRS.

IRS Criminal Investigations Unit

If there was any doubt that Mueller's focus was on financial shenanigans, his decision to get the IRS' Criminal Investigation unit (CI) involved should set things straight.

Special counsel Bob Mueller has teamed up with the IRS. According to sources familiar with his investigation into alleged Russian election interference, his probe has enlisted the help of agents from the IRS’ Criminal Investigations unit.

Now these are folks who take financial crime seriously and besides tax evasion, their specialty is money laundering.

This unit—known as CI—is one of the federal government’s most tight-knit, specialized, and secretive investigative entities. Its 2,500 agents focus exclusively on financial crime, including tax evasion and money laundering. 

Apparently they hold Mueller in high esteem and the feeling is reciprocal.

“They view them with the highest regard,” Sheil said. “IRS special agents are the very best in the business of conducting financial investigations. They will quickly tell you that it took an accountant to nab Al Capone, and it’s true.”

So now Mueller has Trump's tax returns and he has the CI unit working overtime to follow the money trail. Besides the enormous threat that represents, it also puts a significant financial burden on the targets of the investigation.

The Daily Beast previously reported that targets of Mueller’s probe—including Manafort—are facing financial strain because of the probe, and that Manafort recently parted ways with the law firm WilmerHale in part because of his financial troubles.

In other words, it does not look good for Trump.

But there is one other escape hatch for him.

Justice Department's Tax Division

 You see,

As special counsel, Mueller is subject to the same rules as U.S. Attorneys. That means that if he wants to bring charges against Trump associates related to violations of tax law, he will need approval from the Justice Department’s elite Tax Division.

If there was a guy, like Jeff Sessions, appointed by Trump with his interests at heart, he might have stopped Mueller or dilute his findings or do something, anything.

Except, like almost 80 percent of federal senior positions, Team Trump neglected to appoint anyone to that post. It is being helmed by career bureaucrats.

And it is too late to do anything about it as it requires Senate confirmation and it is a sure bet that the Democrats would block a pro-Trump candidate until after the conclusion of the Mueller investigation.

Is it kismet or irony?

You decide.