It’s always a mistake to pay ransoms, according to the leadership of the GOP. As a matter of principle, we should never deal with terrorists. In addition, it just encourages more hostage taking. Democrats who make deals for hostages are just unprincipled wimps who don’t have the guts to stand up for what’s right.
Of course, Bibi makes deals for hostages. Is the GOP outraged? Have you heard, say, Tom Cotton talk about what wimps the Israelis are?
Silence. That rule only applies to Democrats.
Vladimir Putin is meeting with his defense minister to talk about the war.
P: We need to start making some progress on the war. I have some ideas to bounce off you.
DM: OK. Shoot. Not literally, of course.
P: We could expand the draft and overwhelm the Ukrainians with our manpower advantage. We can’t possibly lose a war of attrition with them, and Russian lives are cheap.
DM: There would be a huge public outcry. Anyway, we don’t have enough ammunition for the troops we already have. What good would it do?
P: We can increase our ammunition purchases from Iran and North Korea.
DM: They’re pretty well tapped out, and they have their own issues to deal with.
P: We can request more aid from China.
DM: They have too much to lose by giving it to us.
P: We can open a new front by attacking Odesa.
DM: Our ships have to stay too far from shore to permit any kind of amphibious assault.
P: We can stop their grain shipments.
DM: We tried that. They created new trade routes and protected them. We can’t do anything more than what we’re doing now without putting the Black Sea fleet at risk.
P: We can use oil and gas as a weapon against NATO.
DM: That hasn’t worked, either. Europe has adapted. They have adequate stocks for the winter.
P: We can get more diplomatic support from the Third World, based on issues with food supplies.
DM: Food prices have stabilized. Some of those countries vaguely support us, but they won’t really do anything to help us.
P: We could bring Belarus into the war.
DM: Lukashenko will never agree to that. He relies on the military to stay in power. If he sends them outside the country, who is going to protect him from the public?
P: Well, we could open a new front from Belarus.
DM: We don’t have the resources to do that.
P: We can use disinformation to divide NATO.
DM: We’ve been doing that from the beginning, with minimal success.
P: Well, if all else fails, we can support Donald Trump. If he wins the 2024 election, all of our problems will be solved.
DM: That sounds like a plan to me.
So far, the GOP has had a good Gaza war. The right, with a few notable antisemitic exceptions, has been united in favor of Israel’s right to bounce the rubble; the left, on the other hand, is divided, mostly along generational lines. For the left, Gaza is a wedge issue, just as abortion is for the right. It represents a problem that needs to be fixed before the 2024 election.
And in time, it probably will be. Biden embraced the Israeli cause as long as it revolved around getting rid of Hamas, but the focus of the struggle is about to change to what happens next. Every indication we have suggests that Bibi sees an indefinite occupation as the least worst alternative. Biden isn’t going to agree with that, and his rhetoric about political initiatives is going to sound more and more pro-Palestinian. That will help unite the left, while the right will continue talking about bouncing the rubble and ignoring Arab opinion during the campaign.
In short, the generational issue on the left won’t go away, but it should be possible to put a patch on it.
Europeans would love to have the American economy. Inflation and unemployment are much lower here than in Europe. American voters, however, aren’t giving Biden any credit for this. Why?
Because, for American voters, the baseline isn’t Europe; it’s the economy of 2019, with both low unemployment and inflation rates. As far as they’re concerned, the pandemic was just a temporary obstacle that should have been in our rear view mirror over a year ago. They hate inflation, because they haven’t experienced it in 30 years. They blame Biden for all of this.
The fact that this makes no sense, and that Trump would only make things worse with his tariffs, doesn’t seem to matter right now. Will it in November? We’ll see.
People rarely notice the absence of something, so it may have escaped your attention that the war hasn’t widened yet. Why? For the reasons I set out a few days ago, and because Biden has wisely kept his responses in proportion to the actions from the Iranian proxies.
If Hezbollah or Iran were going to do something meaningful in retaliation, it surely would have happened by now. The absence of such escalation is good news for the whole world.
Now, if we can just get the Israelis to offer some reason for the poor people of Gaza to find hope for their future . . .
The Israeli right is fond of arguing that Iran and its proxies individually and collectively represent an existential threat to their country. Are they correct?
Hamas is just a terrorist group. It doesn’t have the manpower, the resources, or the expertise to destroy Israel. It accomplished about all it was capable of last month, and is currently paying the price for it. It is in no way an existential threat.
Hezbollah has professional soldiers and much better weapons than Hamas. It has its hands full operating a state within a state in Lebanon, however. It doesn’t have much of an offensive capability, and it doesn’t have an answer for Iron Dome. It will continue to represent a threat to Israel for the foreseeable future, as the cost of eliminating it through offensive action would be unacceptably high, but it is not an existential threat.
An Iran armed with nukes would appear to jeopardize Israel’s very existence. Thanks to the decision by Trump, spurred on by Netanyahu, to withdraw from the nuclear deal, the Iranians are closer to getting the bomb than ever before. Given that Israel is certainly covered under America’s nuclear umbrella, and probably has the ability to deliver a deadly second strike even after a reasonably successful first strike, for Iran to attack the Jewish state would be an act of suicide. The existential threat argument, therefore, doesn’t even apply to Iran.
But would Putin say that Iran is protected by Russia’s nuclear umbrella, and if he did, would his statement be credible? That would never have occurred prior to 2022, but it is a reasonable possibility now. It would put the ability of America and Israel to launch a retaliatory nuclear strike in question. Let’s hope we never find out.
If there is one thing on which all of the GOP presidential candidates can agree, it is the cure for inflation: drill, baby, drill! If we put an end to the onerous Biden restrictions on drilling, the price of gas will drop immediately, and the overall inflation rate will follow. It’s a sure winner!
Leaving aside the ghastly environmental consequences of this approach, here are the pertinent facts:
The bottom line here is that gas prices rise and fall for a variety of reasons that have little to do with Biden or any other president. It is stupid to either give him credit for falling prices or to blame him for price increases. That won’t stop the GOP from trying, of course.
The brutality of the Hamas attack on Israel persuaded Biden to tolerate a large number of Palestinian civilian casualties in Gaza City so long as the Israelis made reasonable efforts to segregate civilians from militants and provide them with humanitarian aid. The initial phase of the war is reaching its conclusion, however, and the agreement between America and Israel is probably going to end, based on the signals coming out of the Israeli government.
In light of world opinion and simple human decency, Biden needs to make it clear that America will provide neither material aid nor diplomatic cover for either an Israeli occupation of indefinite duration or a large-scale assault on the supposedly safe areas in the southern part of Gaza. As far as we’re concerned, the point of the invasion was not to annihilate the population nor to oppress it in perpetuity; it was to replace a group of terrorists with a regime that could co-exist with Israel and make Gaza flourish.
Nikki Haley isn’t just beating Ron DeSantis by being a better debater, although that obviously helps. Here are some of the other reasons:
The problem with tunnels is that they have to open at ground level somewhere. If the Israelis occupy all of Gaza City, they don’t have to fight in the tunnels; they just have to seal them. The militants will then die quietly and miserably. Nobody will even notice when they’re gone.
Of course, the problem with this tactic is that the hostages are in the tunnels, too. In a short period of time, I expect the focus of the occupation to turn from military action to negotiations over the hostages and the trapped militants. How many militants per hostage will be permitted to leave Gaza for Lebanon or some other friendly country? We’ll see.
Left-leaning antisemites think Israel is an oppressor nation and may even reject the legitimacy of its existence, but they typically don’t object to Jews in their own country. Christian nationalists love Jews, but only in Israel; to them, the existence of Israel is part of the Christian narrative. Right-wing antisemites, for their part, despise Jews regardless of where they live.
It’s not the same thing at all.
The great would-be emperor Xi
Took a plane to the land of the free.
He talked about peace;
Said that tensions should cease.
Will this help with the South China Sea?
Consider this scenario:
Haley is now Trump’s only remaining opponent. She has the anti-Trump lane to herself. Can she unite the 55-60 percent of the party that will at least consider an alternative to Trump, or is it too late for her?
I think it’s too late; he has too much momentum. My guess is that he wins the remaining primaries by a vote of about 55 to 45 percent. It would be fascinating to watch, however, and it might even force Trump to start debating, which would benefit everyone in the country except him.
You will recall that Trump’s purported concerns about NATO during his presidency revolved around the failure of our allies to spend enough money for defense. As he saw it, or said he saw it, America was paying disproportionately for the protection of the Europeans, who were using their savings to outcompete us on world markets.
Well, as a result of the decision by Trump’s buddy Putin to invade Ukraine, European defense budgets are going up significantly. The man on golf cart can no longer plausibly argue that the Europeans aren’t carrying their weight. What will he say now?
Of course, the spending argument is, was, and always will be a pretext. Trump really hates NATO because it stands in Putin’s way.
Lindsey Graham has once again made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. Trump is feeling good about all those recent polls, so he keeps Graham waiting for an hour and a half.
T: Linseed! Good to see you! How about those polls!
G: They do look good, Mr. President.
T: And I told you I would kick DeSanctus’ butt. I’m not sure you believed me.
G: He was a far worse candidate than I expected. He chased the wrong voters and chose positions on issues like abortion that either made no sense or were unpopular.
T: He thought the base would respect him if he just said he agreed with me on everything. He thought Jack Smith would deliver the election to him, and he wouldn’t have to fight for anything. He didn’t know Jack, in more ways than one.
G: But you still have to worry about the criminal trials.
T: Nothing to worry about. I’m so much smarter than those prosecutors, it would make your head spin. Besides, they’re making my case to the voters.
G: Why do you say that?
T: Instead of having to travel around the country and make speeches at rallies about what a victim I am, I get to do it on the stand. Every time I show up at a courtroom, it just proves how evil the deep state is, and how determined it is to get me. The base loves that. It rallies around me and sends me more money. It’s great!
G: Plus, the MSM covers your martyrdom instead of those speeches where you talk about putting Democrats in jail and creating concentration camps for illegal immigrants. That helps, too.
T: We’ll focus on that stuff later.
G: Aren’t you worried about being convicted? Some of the polls show that would matter to the voters.
T: I’m not just an average guy. I’m bulletproof. I’ve gotten out of plenty of tight legal spots before. My lawyers will always be able to find at least one Trump voter in the jury pool. Anyway, I can pardon myself after I win the election if the lawyers let me down.
G: You can’t pardon yourself for violations of state law.
T: My lawyers and my Supreme Court will take care of that.
G: Are you going to do any debates?
T: Not until the general. I have no reason to do them now.
G: Aren’t you concerned at all about Haley? What if she unites the part of the party that hates you? It’s about half of the voters, you know.
T: Republican voters are not going to choose a brown woman who took orders from me over the man who promises to be their retribution.
G: Are you serious about that retribution stuff? It makes you sound like a dictator.
T: You know me. I’m always telling jokes. Just like the ones about January 6.
(Graham leaves)