Speaking of * [10 - 19]

Monday, August 5, 2024

Speaking of Which

I started working on this back on Thursday, the day after I posted Music Week and minor updates to last week's massive Speaking of Which (final: 263 links, 11360 words). For a while, it looked like I might actually wrap this up on Sunday evening, but didn't make it. Probably just as well, although the imminent Harris VP pick may upset some apple carts. Even if it happens (Tuesday morning, I now hear), consider it unknown to this post.

PS: Harris picks Tim Walz as VP ahead of multistate tour. For now, the best link is Perry Bacon Jr.: [08-06] Tim Walz is a bold, smart choice for Harris's running mate.

Last week I stayed clear of Israel's latest round of "targeted assassinations," most significantly that of Hamas diplomat Ismail Haniyeh (conveniently in Tehran; I imagine Mossad is already shopping movie rights to that story). Last week's lead story title ended "as US officials say a ceasefire deal is close." No one's saying that this week, as Haniyeh was Hamas's lead negotiator in those talks, which Netanyahu had managed to sideline for weeks, and now simply blew up. Rather, I devoted a large chunk of last week's post to Netanyahu's speech to Congress. Some key article cited there:

While we're at it, let's also reiterate:

This reminds me of Andrew Gillum on DeSantis: "I'm not calling Mr. DeSantis a racist, I'm simply saying the racists believe he's a racist." (Gillum also noted: "he's got neo-Nazis helping him run the state.") I have at least one article below on how Trump is deciding that some Jews are "good" (love Israel, support Trump) and "bad" (oppose Trump, hate Israel), and can easily find more, e.g.:

For deeper background, see:

I also did a Google search on trump on war with iran, but it mostly revealed past deeds, not current words. E.g.:

McGeorge Bundy once explained that the difference between presidents Kennedy and Johnson was that Kennedy wanted to be seen as smart, but Johnson wanted to be seen as tough. You can use the relative importance of smart and tough as a scale for weighing most presidents. We like to think of Obama as being on the smart side, but he picked many moments to prove he could be tough (like his first order to kill Somali pirates, his numerous drone strikes, his raid on Osama Bin Laden; on the other hand, he caved in every time he ran afoul of Netanyahu, which wasn't so smart, and betrayed a deficit worse than toughness: of courage). But Trump's idea of smart doesn't extend much beyond cheating on his taxes and paying off a porn star. And while he brags about being "a very stable genius," the quality he most wants to project to the world is how very tough he is (e.g., his boasts that were he still president, Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine, and Hamas wouldn't have attacked Israel).

While there isn't a lot of reason to think that Trump, in his rare moments of sober reflection, wants to blunder into war, his self-image, inflated ego, his lack of analytic skills, and his incapacity for empathy all make him susceptible to the suggests of the "tough guys" he likes to surround himself with. So sure, it's quite possible that Ben-Gvir has the measure of his man. You certainly have to admit that his cunning has him playing Netanyahu like a fiddle, amplifying his power enormously.

We will, of course, continue to hold Biden and Harris responsible for own their contributions to Israel's genocide and warmongering, but we should always be clear that Trump's malice, which pervades every pore of his campaign, is much more dangerous than Biden's indifferent cowardice, despicable as it is. As for Harris, all I can hope for is that she keeps her head down until she's in a position to do something about it. Then, by all means, she must, and failure there will be catastrophic, but until she has that power, mere speculation is unlikely to be helpful. There will always be more to do later.

Top story threads:

Israel:

Israel's long-standing policy of assassinating political opponents was brought to the fore last week with the murder of Ismail Haniyeh (head of the Hamas political bureau, and chief negotiator in the "ceasefire" talks Biden has promoted and Netanyahu has sabotaged at every turn). This immediately followed Israel's major escalation of bombing in Lebanon, which included the killing of a prominent Hezbollah commander. The calculation here is pretty obvious, even though it is rarely commented on. Israel is not merely killing for the hell of it, they want to provoke reprisals, which they can use to justify further killing. They are gambling that their targets cannot hurt them, or if they do land a lucky punch -- as Hamas did on October 7 -- they can escalate to previously unimaginable levels of mass destruction.

But Israel has one weakness: it depends on American support, both to replenish its supply of munitions and to prop up an economy that has never (well, not since 1950) been so extensively mobilized for war for so long. Netanyahu knows that he cannot sustain his genocidal war without American support, so he and his allies are pulling out all the stops to keep unthinking, uncritical support flowing. You see this in the flood of propaganda, including Netanyahu's obscene speech before Congress. You see this in the astounding money that's going into purging independent thought in American politics. But the real linchpin would be if he could maneuver the US into joining the war. He achieved a partial success in getting the Houthis to fire on Red Sea shipping, with the result that the US and UK have joined Saudi Arabia in bombing Yemen. But the real prize would be getting the US to go to war against Iran. Or at least Lebanon.

It helps here to understand that Israel doesn't actually care about Iran. The essential background here was explained by Trita Parsi in his 2007 book, Treacherous Alliance: The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran, and the United States. The key point here is that while the US soured on Iran with the 1980 hostage crisis, Israel remained close to Iran throughout the 1980s -- you might vaguely recall that Israel was the intermediary in the Iran-Contra scandal -- but only turned against Iran in the 1990s, after Saddam Hussein ceased to be a viable foreign threat. Israel switched to Iran because the Americans already hated Iran, which made them easy to play with a ridiculously inflated story of Iran's "nuclear program." Obama's negotiations with Iran were intended to allay Israel's fears, but Netanyahu rejected them because Israel never feared Iran: they only faked it to cater to American prejudices. When Trump killed the deal, he capitulated to Israel, allowing Netanyahu to dictate America's understanding of allies, enemies, and interests.

While Trump did this for the most craven of reasons, Biden followed blindly because his long experience with the Israel lobby had taught him that no alternative course was imaginable. Still, providing "arms, money, and [freely ignored] advice" was the easy part. Committing US troops to conventional war against an unconquerable nation like Iran would be a much more daunting order. Of course, Israel isn't insisting that the US actually invade Iran, like their fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq. They would be perfectly happy to see the US conduct an Israel-style assault, where massive bombing denies any responsibility for cleaning up the mess. Going back to WWII, the US is used to seeking definitive solutions that lead to peace, but Israel has always understood that each victory is just a prelude to the next war, which they must eternally prepare for. Peace for them is nothing but false hope and mass delusion, which is why their warrior caste breaks it at every opportunity.

Of course, America hasn't quite become a pawn in Israel's game. Biden has little appetite for war against Iran, or even against Lebanon -- although he also has little will to resist bombing Yemen and Syria, or to move aircraft carrier groups supposedly to deter attacks against Israel. Biden, in contrast to Trump, retains at least some sense of human decency, so he can't really endorse Israel's genocide, but he tries hard to not see it, either, so he readily parrots Israel's lies and clichés -- which so far is all that Netanyahu has needed.

But it would help to see the game he and his far-right allies are playing: they don't care about Iran, and they don't worry about foreign attack; they only care about the US and Europe as a meal ticket, and even there they don't care how unpopular they become, as long as those in power toe their line; what they do care about is grinding the Palestinians down to dust, to utter insignificance, not just in Gaza but everywhere they control; unlike some genociders, they are not obsessed with killing every last Palestinian, as they know that's not the only way to render them inconsequent, but they also have no qualms about killing indiscriminately, and see that as instrumental to their cause.

On some level, most Israelis must realize that they cannot keep killing and destroying indefinitely. True, no other army has the means and will power to stop them. And there's little chance that Israelis, who have grown up under a regime that has systematically inculcated the belief that Jews are eternal victims but in Israel have become invincible warriors, will develop a conscience and decide they've gone far enough (let alone too far). On the other hand, world opinion, even in the so-called western democracies that currently sustain Israel's military and economy, is turning against Israel's war, not just because most people find this killing and destruction abhorrent when done by anyone, but because we increasingly see it as rooted in inequality and hatred, in the fundamentally unjust belief that might makes right.

We see this most clearly in America, where our most reactionary political elements, including the neocons (who led us into the Israel-inspired Global War on Terror) and the Christian Zionists (with their dreams of Armageddon) are by far the most enthusiastic backers of Israeli genocide. Granted, there is still a significant rump faction of Democrats who are loyal to Israel, but their loyalty depends on misinformation and myths, not on a belief in violence. They do want to see a ceasefire and humanitarian relief, and generally accept that diversity, democracy, and equality are not just desirable but necessary. They just have trouble holding Israel to their otherwise general beliefs. But unlike the right-wingers, it should till be possible to reason with pro-Israel Democrats. One can make a strong case that Israel is harming itself by pursuing such extreme policies.

Note: The assassination of Hamas eminence Ismail Haniyeh has become a big enough story to warrant its own section, between this one (which is mostly limited to Israel's domestic politics and military operations) and the next one (which deals with US politics and support for Israel). As usual, there is another section following on Israeli propaganda and world opinion, especially around the genocide charge. The subdivisions are useful because there's so much material to cover, and it's nice to keep similar pieces together, but it's also difficult, in that many pieces lap over from one area to another. For instance, articles specifically on the US reaction to the Haniyeh assassination may be included in the US section. The assassinations and escalation in Lebanon hasn't yet mandated its own section, so pieces on that are mostly in the US section, as my view is that Israel's attacks on Lebanon (and Iran) are mostly attempts to lead US policy.

The Haniyeh assassination:

  • Fatima AbdulKarim/Mohammed R Mhawish: From Gaza to Ramallah, Haniyeh remembered as advocate of unity.

  • Nasim Ahmed: [08-01] Ismail Haniyeh: assassinated in Israel's war on peace and quest for endless occupation. Notes that "Western sources consistently portrayed Haniyeh as a moderate figure within Hamas."

    The political murder of Haniyeh fits a troubling pattern of Israeli behaviour. Political observers have long noted Israel's fear of what is often referred to as a Palestinian "peace offensive." Throughout its history as an occupation state, Israel has been accused of targeting moderate Palestinian leaders who show the potential for engaging in meaningful peace negotiations. This strategy, critics argue, is aimed at closing the door to peace and maintaining a state of perpetual conflict that serves Israel's long-term goal of establishing its illegal sovereignty over all of historic Palestine.

  • Ramzy Baroud: [07-31] It's both criminal and desperate; that's why Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh. He also notes: "Israel chose the time and place for Haniyeh's murder carefully." Israel has persistently attempted to link Hamas with Iran, which has never made a lot of sense, but the opportunity to kill him in Iran will leave an indelible impression, as well as serving as a major embarrassment to and provocation of Iran.

  • Juan Cole: [08-02] Turkey's Erdogan denounces killing of Haniyeh, blocks Israel at NATO, boycotts it, and threatens intervention.

  • David Hearst: Ismail Haniyeh killing: Netanyahu's only goal is to set the region on fire.

  • Fred Kaplan: [07-31] What Israel's killing of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders could mean for war in the region.

  • Qassam Muaddi: [07-31] Israel assassinates head of Hamas political bureau amid regional escalation: "Israel assassinated Hamas politburo head Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran after a series of mounting regional tensions that included unprecedented Israeli attacks on the 'Axis of Resistance,' including airstrikes on Beirut and Yemen."

  • Ashraf Nubani: [08-05] Killing Hamas leader: an act of Israeli desperation. I understand the impulse to write something defiant like this, but I don't sense the desperation. Israel saw an opportunity and, consistent with their principles, acted on it, with little regard for future consequences, because they really aren't worried about things like that.

  • Abdaljawad Omar: [07-31] The real reason Israel is assassinating Hamas and Hezbollah leaders, and why it won't stop the resistance: "Israel's assassination of Hamas and Hezbollah leaders doesn't aim to weaken the resistance. Its real motive is to restore the image of military and intelligence superiority in the eyes of the Israeli public." I think the author is overthinking this. Once Israel's leaders decided they could get away with killing everyone even remotely associated with Hamas, with no worries about killing other Palestinians, any opportunity to hit someone on their list was automatically greenlighted. The author desperately wants to think that the resistance is a factor Israel must reckon with, but Israelis don't care. If their attacks push more people to resist, they'll just kill more. Once the telos is genocide, resistance is just positive feedback.

  • Paul R Pillar: [08-01] Trigger happy Israel and its thirst for revenge: "The cross-border assassinations reflect a national rage playing out in Gaza's carnage -- and Netanyahu's desire to keep the war going forever."

  • Reuters: [07-31] Haniyeh was the pragmatic leader of Hamas.

  • Muhammad Sahimi: [07-31] Assassination of Hamas leader in Iran puts new president in a trap: "Depending on how Pezeshkian responds, it may force the US to get directly involved in defense of Israel." No mention that the trap was solely the work of Netanyahu until six paragraphs in:

    Dialogue between Iran and the United States is, however, the last thing that Israel, and particularly Benjamin Netanyahu, wants at this stage. If anything, Netanyahu would expand the war to Lebanon in hopes that Iran will react strongly and enter the war directly. Neither Hezbollah nor Iran wants a war with Israel at this stage, but no one should be under the illusion that if Israel begins a full-scale war with Lebanon and Hezbollah, Iran will sit it out.

  • Erika Solomon: [08-04] Hamas may emerge battered, but not beaten, from Israel's latest blows: "The assassination of two Hamas leaders may be a short-term setback, analysts say, not enough to prevent the group from emerging intact -- and possibly more radicalized." I have very little faith in articles like this, where reporters have very little access to primary sources, and everyone they do have access to has their own interests to promote. The line here, hardly surprising given where it's being published, is basically what Israel wants you to believe: that yes, we're inflicting serious short-term losses on Hamas, but no matter what we do, Palestinians will rebound to attack again, so Israel just has to keep fighting forever, beating them down (you know, "mowing the lawn"). Still, this argument depends on sleight of hand, confusing the idea of Hamas with its organization (which was never as monolithic as supposed), but also assuming that the dynamic remains extremely polarized (that Israel and Hamas can do nothing but fight until one or the other dies).

    I am reasonably certain that as long as Israel acts like Goliath, many Palestinians will want to resist, and will search for leverage they can use to assert their dignity and fight back. Hamas was one of many organizations that attempted to channel Palestinian desires for justice into effective political action. I think it's fair to say that it failed, repeatedly, but most definitively on or shortly after October 7, when in an act of desperation, the organization exploded like a suicide bomber. I suppose it's possible that there is still some sort of residual organization in Gaza, more likely as isolated cells than under any sort of unified command. Emigres like Haniyeh could continue to represent themselves as Hamas for diplomacy, but that just made them targets for Israel. No doubt there are others formerly associated with Hamas, some with their militia and many more mere civil employees of the Hamas-run de facto governance (now destroyed), and those people would continue to look for opportunities to resist, but they no longer constitute an effective force. Within a week or two, Israel could simply have declared victory over Hamas, and no one would have disputed them. That they didn't is because Hamas is their idea as much as it ever was a Palestinian idea. Hamas is Israel's ticket to genocide, so as long as they want to keep killing Palestinians -- and clearly they are nowhere near satiated yet -- they have to keep the idea of Hamas alive. Which is what they've done. And will continue to do, as long as you keep buying their hasbara.

  • Syeda Fizzah Shuja: [08-01] Haniyeh's assassination unleashes a new era of political violence.

  • Robert Wright: [08-02] The Haniyeh assassination will haunt Israel. Cites David Ignatius (below), quoting: "The Israelis are still stuck in a zero-sum game. But Israelis should ask themselves how well the hard-nosed, forever-war approach has worked in practice." They'd probably answer that they're still fighting, and killing more than they are losing, so it's working out just fine.

  • Middle East Monitor: [08-04] Massive rally in Istanbul to mourn Hamas leader Haniyeh, support Palestinians in Gaza.

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

Israel vs. world opinion:

  • Yousef Aljamal: [08-02] Israel is using starvation as a weapon of war. Where is the outrage? That's not the question I would ask. People who know about this are plenty outraged -- probably more than is good for their own health. The bigger problem is who doesn't know? And who doesn't care? The question of starvation was raised almost instantly, with the blockade of food imports and a bombing campaign directed at agricultural resources (especially greenhouses). Since then, we've seen some deaths reported, but it's not clear how they're being counted -- or if they're being counted. The broader issues of malnutriton are hard to quantify, let alone report.

  • Kribsoo Diallo: [08-03] African attitudes to, and solidarity with, Palestine: From the 1940s to Israel's genocide in Gaza: "Kribsoo Diallo reviews African perspectives on Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, the rise and fall of Zionist influence in Africa, and the state of African grassroots solidarity with Palestine."

  • Faris Giacaman: [07-30] Netanyahu's willing executioners: how ordinary Israelis became mass murderers: "After ten months of relentless genocidal war, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that both the Israeli state and society are partners in the genocide. The picture that emerges is a genocide from above and below." Obvious reference here to Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's 1996 book, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, which argued that the Nazi Judeocide was a reflection of widespread vitriolic anti-semitism among ordinary Germans, as opposed to the view that it was an aberration driven by fanatical Nazis, often operating in secret. I haven't read that book, but I've always been suspicious of its thesis, which just doesn't strike me as the way things work. Still, this seems like a fair question to ask of Israelis right now. I can't really tell: there is a lot of personal dislike of Netanyahu in Israel, but there doesn't seem to be much serious opposition to his war policy (which some would argue is a personal stay-out-of-jail strategy). While I recognize his war as flagrantly genocidal, Israeli propaganda takes great pains to deny and deflect, and therefore to shelter supporters from having to acknowledge the consequences of Israel's actions. If they knew better, would they care?

    But I will note that there are several reasons to think that Israelis are more popularly aligned with their government's genocidal policies than Germans were in the early 1940s: Israel is a much more open democracy, so those (except Palestinians) who oppose government policy can (generally) speak out and assemble to protest without fear of jail and torture; while the press in Israel has been fairly tightly controlled, there is still much more information available about the atrocities than was publically available in Germany; the Holocaust took place under cover of total war, toward the end of a long era of European imperialism, where racism was casually accepted and rarely challenged, whereas today most of us know better; in particular, we know much about the Nazi example, and about many other examples of systematically racist behavior, some also amounting to genocide. For an Israeli (and even more so if you're simply an ally of Israel) today, it's much harder to pretend you don't know what's going on, and/or that there's nothing you can do about it.

    By the way, some old pieces on Goldhagen's book:

  • Robert Kuttner: [08-02] Bibi's death wish:

    Is Netanyahu deliberately provoking a regional war that will be disastrous for Israel? Unless he is certifiably insane, his motive has to be to drag in the U.S., not as mediator but as more explicit military protector. And the strategy is working. . . .

    But Israel is certainly guilty of the most barbarous sort of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. And Israel's reckless killing of civilians in Gaza violates international law as well as human decency, whether or not it meets some legal test of genocide.

    If you need a primer on the daily humiliations inflicted on the Palestinian population, you owe it to yourself to read Nathan Thrall's book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama. Israel's actions in the occupied West Bank meet any test of apartheid, and Israel is behaving precisely like a colonial power.

    In some respects, the South African apartheid regime was more benign. They didn't kill Nelson Mandela, and in the end they released him in full recognition that he would be the country's next president. If only F.W. de Klerk, the last president under apartheid, who recognized the inevitability of Mandela and the end of white rule, were a role model for Netanyahu.

    This example is a reminder that if you want peace, you need strong and credible leadership on the other side, to sell the deal to people who have little if any reason to trust you. Israel could have done that with Arafat in 1993, but instead they undercut and marginalized him, even bolstering Hamas to weaken Fatah. They could have done that with Hamas when it won elections in 2007, but they rejected the results. Israelis like to complain that they've never had a "partner for peace," but the more serious problem is that Palestinians have never been allowed to choose their own leaders. It was the British who selected Hajj Amin Ali Husseini and his successors. Israel arranged for Jordan to rule the West Bank from 1948 until they were ready to take it over in 1967, and even later made sure it was Jordan and not the Palestinians running the Waqf. Israel brought in Arafat rather than deal with the Intifada leaders.

  • Craig Murray: [08-02] The Israeli nihilist state: "The apartheid state appears to have no objective other than violence and an urge for desolation."

  • Joseph Massad: [07-29] Why the West created a new dictionary for Israel and Palestine: "Seeking ideological uniformity on the issue, western officials and their media accomplices have long recognised the centrality of language to their political indoctrination project."

  • Nylah Iqbal Muhammad: [08-03] Understanding the connections between the Congo and Palestine genocides: "Friends of the Congo Executive Director Maurice Carney and Professor Eman Abdelhadi discuss the intersections between the genocides in the Congo and Palestine."

  • Zainab Nasser: [08-04] Living remotely: a Palestinian expatriate's struggle from Gaza to Beirut: "The sun rises over Beirut and the city stirs to life. For many, it's a new day filled with promise and potential, maybe hope or pain. But for me, a Gaza-born expatriate who spent 25 years in Gaza, each dawn brings a blend of hope and dread."

  • Corey Robin: [08-03] Two paths for Jewish politics: "In America, Jews pioneered a way of life that didn't rely on the whims of the powerful. Now it's under threat." Starts with a personal story:

    Having never thought that it wasn't, I flashed a puzzled smile and recalled an observation of the German writer Ludwig Börne: "Some reproach me with being a Jew, others pardon me, still others praise me for it. But all are thinking about it."

    Thirty-one years later, everyone's thinking about the Jews. Poll after poll asks them if they feel safe. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris lob insults about who's the greater antisemite. Congressional Republicans, who have all of two Jews in their caucus, deliver lectures on Jewish history to university leaders. . . . But as I learned that summer in Tennessee, and as we're seeing today, concern can be as revealing as contempt. Often the two go hand in hand.

    Consider the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which the House of Representatives recently passed by a vote of 320-91. The act purports to be a response to rising antisemitism in the United States. Yet the murder of Jews, synagogue shootings, and cries of "Jews will not replace us" are clearly not what the bill is designed to address. Nearly half of Republicans believe in the "great replacement theory," after all, and their leader draws from the same well.

    The bill will instead outfit the federal government with a new definition of antisemitism that would shield Israel from criticism and turn campus activism on behalf of Palestinians into acts of illegal discrimination. (Seven of the definition's eleven examples of antisemitism involve opposition to the State of Israel.) Right-wingers who vocally oppose the bill -- Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, Tucker Carlson, and Charlie Kirk -- have little problem with its Zionist agenda. They just worry that it will implicate those who believe the Jews are Christ killers.

  • Ilan Pappé: [08-01] To stop the century-long genocide in Palestine, uproot the source of all violence: Zionism. This led me to another historical piece worth perusing:

  • Rick Staggenborg: [07-31] Why do good people support genocide? "I met with a Zionist to discuss whether it was a 'plausible' case that Israel's tactics constituted genocide."

    At her request, I supplied links to the sources of my claims, including Israeli newspapers and mainstream press articles citing Israeli sources. She said little about the information I shared. Instead, she raised new arguments each time we met for why Israel had "no choice" but to continue its wholesale slaughter of the population of Gaza.

    I eventually realized that she was able to support the destruction of an entire people because she didn't want to confront the facts. I think she suspected that knowing the whole truth might undermine her deeply held beliefs about Israel and perhaps Zionism itself.

  • Kathleen Wallace: [08-02] How will our great grandchildren look back on this chapter? "What is going on in Palestine is, as they say, simply a laboratory for the rest of the world. To not take a stance on such horror is to sign your own death warrant." Not too far back, the author also wrote:

    • [06-07] Does America have narcissistic personality disorder? "As a way of feeling powerful, the worst narcissistic traits are often emulated, and I think this is what we are seeing in the MAGA movement." The author notes "nine basic criteria to diagnose the personality disorder," and finds the US "currently meets all of them."

      1. A grandiose sense of importance.
      2. A preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success and power.
      3. A belief that they are special in such a way that only other high-status peoples or institutions can understand them.
      4. A need for excessive admiration.
      5. A sense of entitlement.
      6. Interpersonally exploitative behavior.
      7. A lack of empathy.
      8. An envy of others or a belief that others are envious of him or her."
      9. Arrogant and haughty behaviors or attitudes.

    • 05-03] More than just protests for Palestine: existential hope for the world: "Americans have been told that Israel is their only true ally in that region of the world. But nobody wants to know how that situation came to be."

  • Robert Zaretsky: [08-05] Israel's use of torture is a travesty -- just like it was for the French in Algeria 70 years ago.

Election notes:

  • Karen Greenberg: [08-04] Will election 2024 traumatize us? Drawing on her experience with the Guantanamo prison program, the author asks the question, is our political system designed to resign us to a state of "learned helplessness," where we give up all hope?

    The goal was simple: to reduce that prisoner to a profound state of complete paralysis and disempowerment in which, having no hope of relief or escape, he would do whatever his captors wanted. Detainees would see that there was no way out but to answer their captors' questions, which, it turned out, often led them, in desperation and a state of learned helplessness, to confess to things they hadn't done, to confess to whatever their captors wanted to hear.

    Having studied and written about the nightmare of those prisoners and Guantánamo for so many years now, it's been supremely jarring to see the term "learned helplessness" re-emerge in connection to the current unnerving state of American politics and the 2024 presidential election. Yet, in many ways, it seems a strangely appropriate lens through which to view the world of Donald Trump and the rest of us. It was true, as many commented, that a sense of learned helplessness indisputably crept into the mindset of so many of us in this country -- at least prior to Joe Biden's decision not to pursue a second term as president.

    But with Biden's exit, the election feels far less gloomy right now. No matter how improbable election of Kamala Harris may have seemed before Biden dropped out, it now feels like we finally have a fighting chance, and with that comes a sense of euophria that has been sadly lacking from our lives since, well, practically forever.

  • Rebecca Jennings: [08-02] An influencer is running for Senate. Is she just the first of many? "Caroline Gleich's Utah Senate campaign is a sign of the blurring lines between digital creators and politicians." This doesn't strike me as so weird. She sounds like a good candidate.

  • Ed Kilgore: [07-31] What ever happened to RFK Jr.?

Trump:

Vance:

And other Republicans:

Harris:

Biden:

And other Democrats:

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Economic matters:

Ukraine War and Russia:

America's empire and the world:

Other stories:

Obituaries

Books

  • Usman Butt: [2023-07-09] Avi Shlaim's memoir Three Worlds: Mossad, Mizrahim, and the loss of Iraqi Jewry: "Avi Shlaim's memoir is an elucidating account of split worlds under duress. Deeply researched, Shlaim reveals the factors behind his leaving Iraq for Israel, and how the Israeli secret services stoked tensions to facilitate this exodus."

  • Louis Menand: [07-22] When yuppies ruled: "Defining a social type is a way of defining an era. What can the time of the young urban professionjal tell us about our own?" Refers to Tom McGrath: Triumph of the Yuppies: American the Eighties, and the Creation of an Unequal Nation.

  • Jordan Michael Smith: [08-02] The foreign policy mistake the US keeps repeating in the Middle East: "In 2024, the US faces some of the same challenges in the region that it did in 1954." Review of Fawaz A Gerges: What Really Went Wrong: The West and the Failure of Democracy in the Middle East, a title which alludes to Bernard Lewis's 2002 book, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response. I read the latter back when I was desperate to read anything on the Middle East, but it mostly just showed me how idiotic western orientalists can be. I haven't read any of Gerges's many books -- most appear to be primers on jihadism for his UK readers -- but he's been working long enough for the imperialist ardor to wear thin. So expect some insights, but also some aggravation. For instance, consider this pull quote:

    The real lesson of America's Cold War policies is that interfering in other countries should only be done when our most vital interests are at stake, we have competent leaders, and we can do more good than ill.

    On the surface, that seems sensible, but every clause melts into goop the moment you reflect on it. Rather than dissect it, let me suggest instead:

    1. Never interfere in other countries. If they are friendly, be friendly. If they are hostile, be wary. If they stink, take your business elsewhere. But don't think that you can or should change them. Ever.
    2. Only domestic interests are vital. Governments are responsible for taking care of their own people, within their own territory, and nothing more. Anyone who thinks "we" have an interest outside the country is wrong, and up to no good.
    3. It's ok to conduct international relations, as long as it's done in a fair and open manner, with mutual respect, not clouded by the projection of power or avarice.
    4. Competent leaders are good. I wish we had some. But no one can judge the competency or fitness of other people's leaders. So don't.
    5. It's impossible to calculate the balance of good and ill: the terms are poorly defined, hard to quantify, and especially hard to anticipate well into the future. The best one can do is to avoid ill at every opportunity. That should leave room for good.

    From WWII on, US interaction with the Middle East has produced one blunder after another, each couched in the notion that we have material interests in the region that need to be advanced or at least defended through alliances with groups that had their own independent and sometimes conflicting interests, and deveoped through ideologies that have only served to further muddy the picture, and to totally befuddle the minds in Washington who think they are in charge. It wasn't always like that. Pre-WWII US interaction was relatively benign: American missionaries established great universities in Beirut and Cairo, tactfully enough that they didn't get tagged as Crusaders; the US refused to join the Great War against the Ottoman Empire, and refused a mandate over post-war Turkey.

    Things started to change in the 1930s when American oil companies came to Saudi Arabia, but even there they made much more equitable arrangements with Aramco than the British did with their Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. The Eisenhower policies Gerges is so critical of were still rooted in past good will, even as it was rapidly being squandered to backstop British imperialism and the global oil monopoly, and ultimately to gratify Israel's every whim. One can imagine ways to unwind some of the worst effects, but there's little chance of that happening until you first realize that the entire project was rotten from the start.

  • Alexander Sorondo: [07-31] The short shelf-life of the White House tell-all: "Fly-on-the-wall West Wing books age like milk. Why do journalists and publishers bother?" Maybe they like milk? So few books stand the tes to time, it's almost silly to think that they should. One may question the value of "insider" stories, as compared to broader-based studies and deeper histories, but there's no reason they can't contribute something.

    Franklin Foer's book on Biden, The Last Politician, gets a mention, especially because something very significant (October 7) happened just a month after it came out. I'll admit I bought a copy, then didn't read it in a timely fashion, and at this point probably never will. But when I bought it, I thought there was a deficit of information on how Biden was operating around lots of issues -- especially on the Afghanistan retreat, which I thought he got a bum rap for, but with Biden it's hard to tell what's art and what's just klutziness.

    While it's always possible to publish too soon, books do take long enough to write that authors can get beyond first impressions and instincts. I rather doubt that Thomas Ricks meant to call his Iraq War book Fiasco, but by the time he finished, the title was obvious. Similarly, I thought Rajiv Chandrasekaran's reporting from Iraq was really shallow, but by the time he turned it into a book (Imperial Life in the Emerald City) he had a real story. The author here seems to prefer memoirs over journalism, but his examples (Bill Barr, James Comey, Anthony Scaramucci) aren't very persuasive.

Music (and other arts?)

Chatter

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Tuesday, July 30, 2024

Speaking of Which

Opened this file on Friday, July 26, early evening. Thought I might wrap this up Monday evening, but I had a very stressful day, got bummed out, and accomplished little. Hence, this week's piece has lapsed into Tuesday, but coverage of [07-30] will be spotty, at best.

One thing I did accomplish on Monday was to write a bit of code that I'm using here, and should save me a lot of trouble in the future. As I've been writing these posts, I've often wondered how much I had written. It then occurred to me that I could measure the post using two Linux shell commands:

fgrep 'href' FILENAME | wc -l
wc -w FILENAME

The former counts links (assuming there is no more than one link per line). The latter counts words. I usually omitted the wc options, since it's easy to visually pick out the number I wanted: the default counts lines, words, and characters. My first thought was to wrap those two commands into a shell script, then run it and append the answer to the web page. Then it occurred to me that I'm already reading the file to find a few directive lines (mostly used for the title and date), so I could count links and words as I go, then add a directive to print them out at (or near) the end. (Which gives me a bit of flexible control, as opposed to just automatically appending the stats to every page -- something I still may decide to do.)

At present, the link counts match the program output, but the word counts vary somewhat. Obviously, word counts depend on how you delimit words (e.g., is a "hyphenated-word" 1 or 2 words?). I used wc just because it was easy and close enough for my purposes. The new code also takes the easy route, using the PHP str_word_count() function, which at least initially produced larger word counts (e.g., 11616 vs. 8674, so in this case +25.6%). But rather than try to tune the PHP code to better match the wc results, I thought maybe I should aim for more useful results. I knew that a lot of the text in these particular files appeared in HTML tags and comments, which never appears as words on the web page, so I tried removing them -- using a regular expression replace:

preg_replace('/<[^>]*>/', ' ', LINE)

I then called the word count function both on the edited line and on the original one -- I was curious what the effect was, and wound up printing out both totals. I also eliminated the directive lines from the word count, since like markup they do not appear in the page, and I was already separating those lines out. For the page cited above, the word counts wound up at 7996 (tags stripped) and 11616 (total). I can imagine refining this further. The most obvious thing is I'm not checking for HTML entities right now, which are few (so have little practical effect), and are rather complicated (so would require much more complex code).

I don't doubt that my programming skills have atrophied over the score-plus years since my last full-time job, but it's always a good feeling to see that I still have some.

One more new formatting tic this week. I thought I'd like to have some way to draw extra attention to articles that seem especially important. What seemed like the simplest, most intuitive way was to change the • bullet to something that would stand out more, like this -- a bright red star.

I've applied this in a few places, and probably should in a few more. (This was a very late addition to the file.) I figured I could do this with CSS, but ran across the problem that once an element was selected for the star, any child elements also inherited the star. (There's a Sarah Jones example below, which is actually pretty unusual.) I haven't found a way in CSS to prevent or stop such inheritance, so resorted to another hack to undo it.

Top story threads:

Israel:

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

Netanyahu wangled an invitation to speak to a joint session of Congress, first lining up his right-wing allies to float the invite, then giving the Democratic leadership little choice but to join in. He may be massively unpopular in Israel, but when he appears in Washington, he can preen like he owns the place, as he essentially does. And his exhibition of power over Washington helps maintain his perch in Israel, where regardless of his many faults, he is widely seen as the one guy who can force presidents to kowtow. The whole spectacle was deeply embarrassing for all concerned. So while he got the ovations he expected, his message just underscores how deeply out of touch Israel is with world opinion. Mustafa Barghouti was absolutely right: "a disgusting speech in a session of shame to the U.S. Congress."

Other stories in this nexus:

  • Michael Arria: [07-25] The Shift: Biden's legacy is genocide. Biden's withdrawal elicited "sentimental tributes," but not from those who focused on his defense and support of genocide by Israel.

  • Dexter Filkins: [07-22] Will Hezbollah and Israel go to war? That's really up to Netanyahu, who is fully able to push Hezbollah's buttons to get whatever level of back-and-forth he wants -- thus far, enough to provide cover for the real wars against Palestinians both in Gaza and the West Bank, and to keep the Americans in line with their depiction of Iran the puppet master on many fronts. As last week showed, escalating the bombing of Lebanon is easy within those parameters. Launching a real ground war isn't so easy, with little to gain and a fair amount to lose.

  • Nicole Narea: [07-25] What Kamala Harris really thinks about Israel and Gaza: "Biden's approach to the war in Gaza has been divisive. Would Haris chart a new path?" I have a whole section for Harris, where I'll slot pieces on every other aspect of her campaign and politics, but for now I'd rather compartmentalize and keep her Israel stuff here, as a subset of the Washington-based group-think that lets American politicians and their cronies avoid having to think or care about the issue. I don't think anyone really knows what she thinks here, because the position she's in doesn't allow thinking, or doing for that matter.

    Maybe when she is president, she will be in a position to do, and therefore will need to think. But right now, all she really has to do is to avoid the pitfalls being laid out for her. (Having to meet with Netanyahu is just one such pitfall.) I'm not unsympathetic to people who regard Israel (or at least Gaza) as the biggest political issue of the moment, but through the election, I think they/we should give her a pass. I'm pretty sure that she's no worse than Biden, and undoubtedly a lot better than Trump. You don't have to endorse her (at least for this). You can even rag on Genocide Joe if you want. But this is just speculation, and probably not helpful at all. Of course, once she's elected, the gloves can come off. My hope, and that's really all it is, is that she'll listen better than Biden, and act more decisively. The time to talk specifically to her is when she's ready to listen and act.

  • Kelley Beaucar Vlahos: {07-24] Peter Thiel: 'I defer to Israel': "Video surfaces showing the Palantir tech giant strugglig to answer questions about client's use of AI-generated kill lists."

  • Brett Wilkins: [07-24] Ben-Gvir endorses Trump, says he's more likely to back war on Iran: "The Israeli security minister, who leads the far-right Jewish Power party, accused the Biden administration of thwarting Israel's victory against Hamas."

Israel vs. world opinion:

Election notes:

Trump:

Vance:

Trump's running mate, a Republican Senator from Ohio, one thing you can say for him is that he's gotten more press attention than any VP candidate since Sarah Palin, and probably more, since he's not just a turbocharged gaffe machine but has a more philosophical side that is also easy to chew over. I'm pretty sure that had Trump picked Doug Burgum or Elise Stefanik, this phase would be done by now.

  • Karyn Amira: [07-29] JD Vance's selection as Trump's running mate marks the end of Republican conservatism. Problem here is the author's definition of conservatism: "a philosophy that supports smaller and less-centralized government because consolidated power could be used to silence political competition and deny citizens their liberties." That's almost exactly wrong: conservatives believe in order defined by their preferred hierarchy, which is necessarily enforced by power in a state that they seek to control. That's precisely what Trump and Vance believe in.

    On the other hand, Amira's definition actually describes an obsolete version of liberalism, which has been cynically used by conservatives to oppose the modern democratic state. From the progressives in the early 1900s through the New Deal and Great Society, liberals came to realize that laissez-faire capitalism had ceased to expand "liberty and justice for all," and if left unchecked would revert to a new version of feudal aristocracy. So they came up with a very successful alternative, where the state, embodying the will of the popular majority, would organize and regulate countervailing institutions, their powers limited and regulated in the public interest.

    Needless to say, the would-be lords of neofeudal capitalism hated this, and fought to preserve and extend their superiority with every trick they could muster -- including adopting the time-tested rhetoric of classical liberalism, but redirected against the democratic state -- which they characterized not just as a revival of pharoahs and czars but as something more impersonal and nefarious, as totalitarianism -- and really against the people it represented.

    But while "small government" may have been useful rhetoric when the government was held by people conservatives reviled, have you ever seen conservatives once they control the state reduce its size and power? You might point to deregulation, but that's effectively a transfer of power from public to private hands. Similarly, tax cuts and credits are transfers of money from public to private hands. By debilitating public interest functions, conservatives seek to discredit the state as a means by which the people can help themselves. Conservatives may see the state, in the wrong hands, as a repressive force, but given power, they eagerly use that force for their own ends, especially against the people they see as enemies, which is most of us.

    Trump and Vance aren't the end of Republican conservatism. They're more like its apotheosis, grown powerful and arrogant enough they can quit pretending they're doing anyone any favors but themselves. Maybe they mark some kind of denouement for conservative naïveté, but few real world conservatives were ever so deluded.

  • Maureen Dowd: [07-27] JD Vance, purr-fectly dreadful.

  • Elizabeth Dwoskin/Cat Zakrzewski/Nitasha Tiku/Josh Dawsey: [07-28] Inside the powerful Peter Thiel network that anointed JD Vance: "A small influential network of right-wing techies orchestrated Vance's rise in Silicon Valley -- and then the GOP. Now the industry stands to gain if he wins the White House." There hasn't been a VP pick this explicitly tied to donor choice since the Koch Network (uh, Mitt Romney) picked Paul Ryan in 2012. And while Republicans are more likely to brag about their corruption, what are the odds that Harris's VP pick will be traceable to another megadonor? (I mean, beyond the default conspiracist pick: George Soros?)

  • Paul Elie: [07-24] J.D. Vance's radical religion.

  • Rebecca Jennings: [07-25] J.D. Vance didn't have sex with a couch. But he's still extremely weird. "The rumors were easy to believe, especially when the potential VP has such terrible ideas about sex."

  • Sarah Jones: [07-26] Dear J.D. Vance, childless cat ladies are people too. Emphasis added:

    "Normal people" see this bleak prospect for what it is, and they have rejected it repeatedly in the voting booth. That probably won't change. Vance's comments are weird, cruel, and, yes, creepy. They don't reflect the way most people think or live, even if they do have biological children. By attacking childlessness, the right cheapens parenthood, too. The act of having children is no longer about joy but conquest. I can't imagine anything sadder, though I am but a childless cat lady. Vance's worldview is poisonous to parents and children, too: Babies should be loved and wanted for their own sake, not because they're future nationalists or tradwives. The right offers a small and selfish vision that is authoritarian to its core. Their America belongs only to the righteous few, but my America belongs to everyone. I may never give birth, but I too have a stake in this country. We're all responsible for creating a future worth living in. It will belong to somebody's children, if not to ours.

    By the way, Jones also wrote:

    • [07-23] A woman can win, which probably belongs with the Harris articles, but is more about how Hillary Clinton's didn't win, and the precedent that doesn't really set.

    • [07-30] American freak show. I've thought of myself as weird much of my life, so I've learned to flip the insult and see weirdness as a more interesting attribute. And that's just one of many pejoratives that I've been prodded into reconsidering based on my experiences with the people they are and are not applied to. For instance, people who call themselves "patriots" because they support wars and who call people who don't support those wars "traitors" not only have a very shabby vocabulary, they're also, in my mind at least, making "patriots" appear to be horrible people, and "traitors" to be fundamentally decent ones. So I was initially reluctant to jump on the bandwagon that labels Trump, Vance, et al. as "weird." (I see Tim Walz getting credit here, but Seth Myers has been leaning in to this line of attack for several years now.) It just feels to me like we need some qualification, like in the song: "well I hear he's bad/ hmm, he's good-bad, but he's not evil." Surely, lots of people are simply "good-weird," but Trump and Vance are venturing into real "weird-evil" territory.

      Any formerly weird child can attest to how difficult it is to shrug off this label. What are you going to do, put your fingers in your ears and chant "I'm not weird, you're weird" until somebody eventually believes you? I was a little awkward in my day, and I know that's not how things work. You can refute the attack only by not being weird -- an idea that seems to elude many conservatives. They've left themselves few options. To address the attack, the bizarre right would have to reconstitute an entire movement, and that will take time and political will. Both are in short supply. Go on, then, and call the right weird, as long as it's part of a bigger argument. Progress ought to be normal, and it's worth fighting for, too.

      But I'm starting to appreciate the advantages of flipping scripts like this. And when you think about it, there's a lot of not just weird but very bizarre thought going on with the far-right these days. I mean, I'm 73, and my thinking has evolved a lot over the years, but I can still remember things that I learned as norms and rules when I was a child, like the 10 Commandments, the 7 Deadly Sins, the Boy Scouts' 12 laws, the Golden Rule, the maxim that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," and strategic bits of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, and much more that I never really rejected even though I eventually disposed of most of the dross and cant they were wrapped up in. And because I can remember, and still largely respect, those norms and rules, it's really easy to see just how far many right-wingers have strayed from principles they claim as exclusively their own, and how ridiculous they look when they do. In some ways, calling them "weird" is the kindest way you can point that out. Their weirdness may even be their one saving grace. It certainly won't be in their Project 2025.

  • Ezra Klein: [07-17] The economic theory behind J.D. Vance's populism: Interview with Oren Cass, who was Mitt Romney's domestic policy director in 2012, who since "evolved" and founded American Compass, a think tank catering to "populist" Republicans.

  • Paul Krugman:

  • Bradley Onishi: [07-27] J.D. Vance will be a more extremist Christian VP than Mike Pence: "The vice presidential pick's Catholicism hasn't received a lot of attention, but it's the key to the populist radicalism he wants to impose on America."

  • Andrew Prokop: [07-25] J.D. Vance has made it impossible for Trump to run away from Project 2025: "He wrote the forward for a new book by Project 2025's architect -- and has backed some of its most extreme ideas." The book is Kevin D Roberts: Dawn's Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, coming out on Sept. 24.

  • Corey Robin: [07-26] Like a diary, only far more masculine: Reading J.D. Vance's, from his blog days.

  • Robert Schlesinger: [07-29] J.D. Vance proves it: Trump hires the very worst people: Trump's new running mate will haunt him just like all of the fools and weasels from his first administration."

  • Alex Shephard: [07-26] Is J.D. Vance the worst vice presidential pick ever? Fair question, unless you know much about American history, in which case it's way too early to tell. It also depends on what you mean by "worst." John Tyler and Andrew Johnson probably helped their tickets win, but were really terrible presidents. Some others that didn't become president were also pretty notoriously bad, like Aaron Burr and John Calhoun (two terms, under two presidents who were polar opposites in every aspect except for their loathing of Calhoun). Then there was Spiro Agnew, the only VP ever forced to resign. And what about Dick Cheney? If memory serves, the only VP ever to finish his term with a single-digit approval index. Then there are the ones who never won anything. They tend to be easily forgotten, but tag reads "Palin Lite," in case you want a hint. So with competition like that, Vance hardly has a chance. But it's early days, and at least he's in the running.

  • Ed Simon: [07-17] J.D. Vance keeps selling his soul. He's got plenty of buyers.

    Mr. Vance is more a product of the Upper West Side and New Haven, Capitol Hill and Cambridge, than of the Appalachian hollers. "Hillbilly Elegy" owed much of its critical and commercial success to how it flattered its audience about their own meritocratic superiority over the people whom Mr. Vance was supposedly championing, and reaffirming some of the most pernicious stereotypes about the residents of Appalachia. "What separates the successful from the unsuccessful are the expectations that they had for their own lives," Mr. Vance wrote. In his telling, those who fell into poverty, unemployment or substance abuse hadn't dreamed big enough.

    He points to whole books written about Vance's book, like:

  • Matt Stieb: [07-27] J.D. Vance can't stop saying the dumbest things imaginable.

And other Republicans:

  • Emily Bazelon: [07-27] The right-wing dream of 'self-deportation': "Some conservatives have a grim proposal to make undocumented immigrants leave: exclude their children from schools." I hadn't heard of "self-deportation" until Mitt Romney adopted it as his anti-immigration platform in 2012. It is quite the euphemism. It basically means systematically treating immigrants (and, to be sure, anyone who looks or sounds like an immigrant) so cruelly they resign themselves to leaving on their own. Or it could just as well drive them to turn to crime, which expedites the regular deportation process.

  • Jenny Brown: [07-27] Project 2025's anti-union game plan.

    From there, the plan is to bulldoze the protections US workers have built up over one hundred years of determination, sacrifice, and unity.

    It's ugly: abolish overtime pay laws, outlaw public sector unions entirely, get rid of health and safety protections, eliminate the federal minimum wage, make it harder to receive unemployment, and put children back to work like in the 1920s.

    Hitting building trades workers, they would get rid of requirements for prevailing wage pay and project labor agreements in federal projects.

    There's more. They want to get rid of the Department of Education. Ban teaching women's history and African American history in schools -- lest we get ideas about how to change things! Ban abortion nationwide. (The AFL-CIO details the whole alarming list here.)

  • Patrick T Brown: [07-19] Pro-lifers helped bring Trump to power. Why has he abandoned us? Because you're losers? You don't think he ever actually cared about you, did you?

  • Thomas B Edsall: [07-24] What the Trump-Vance alliance means for the Republican Party. One thing that occurs to me here is that the more Republicans like Vance talk about supporting American workers, the more ground that opens up for Democrats to appeal to same, only with more realistic programs and greater credibility. It encourages them to lean left, rather than crawl scared toward the right (like so many have been doing since Reagan).

  • Jack Herrera: [07-28] Trump says he wants to deport millions. He'll have a hard time removing more people than Biden has. "Even as Trump slams the president for open borders, the Biden-Harris administration has kicked out far more immigrants than Trump ever managed."

  • Hassan Alu Kanu: [07-29] DEI and the GOP: "Hey Republicans, your racism is showing."

  • Julius Krein: [07-23] Republican populists are responding to something real. One could argue that -- although Krein isn't very clear here -- but not that they're offering realistic responses to real problems.

  • Robert Kuttner: [07-30] The left's fragile foundations: "Could a weaponized Trump IRS wreck the progressive infrastructure by attacking the entire nonprofit ecosystem?" This is a big and important article. "Defund the left" has long been a major Republican goal. One small bit:

    These vulnerabilities remain in place today. It has long galled the right that Planned Parenthood is a major recipient of government funds; of its budget of over $2 billion, about $700 million comes from government health service reimbursements and grants. While the Hyde Amendment prohibits federal funding of abortion, 17 states allow Medicaid funding of abortion through their state contributions to the mixed federal-state program. In addition, Planned Parenthood is a major recipient of federal Title X family-planning support of its clinics. As right-wing groups keep complaining, money is fungible and federal family-planning funds free other money to pay for abortions. Under Trump, the government did bar Planned Parenthood from the Title X program in 2019, but this was restored by Biden in 2021.

    The battle to defund the left would be far more sophisticated under a second Trump administration. The Heritage Foundation's detailed blueprint, Project 2025, systematically targets the entire range of agencies, and one of its tactics is to undermine agencies that help progressive organizations such as the NLRB and numerous others. With a second Trump presidency, the right's war against Planned Parenthood will only intensify.

  • Michael Lind: [07-20] Trump's transformation of the Republican Party is complete.

  • Calder McHugh: [07-27] Republicans keep trying to copy Trump's humor -- and voters keep cringing. Perhaps the material never was funny in the first place -- just the buffoon delivering it?

  • Pamela Paul: [07-25] The Republican Party's elite conundrum: Let me condense this a bit (all her words, but with less wandering):

    Donald Trump loves to show off how smart he is. [But] Trump is shrewd enough to know that Americans don't like a guy who acts smart. So if his fumbles are strategic, it's not entirely dumb. In MAGA world, glorified ignorance actually serves as a qualification for higher office, empowering more effective rage against 'the liberal elite' and 'the ruling class.' This puts those Republican politicians saddled with inconvenient Ivy League degrees in an awkward position, like the guy who shows up in a tux for a rodeo wedding. In order to say in office and on message, they must reject the very thing that propelled their own careers. After all, the Republican Party has turned ignorance into a point of pride.

    Of course, this is ultimately about Ron DeSantis (Yale, Harvard Law), Ted Cruz (Princeton, Harvard Law), Josh Hawley (Stanford, Yale Law), Tom Cotton (Harvard, Harvard), and now J.D. Vance (Ohio State, but finally Yale Law).

  • Charles P Pierce:

  • Tessa Stuart: [07-25] Trump allies sure are talking a lot about civil war: "The former president's supporters keep raising the idea there's violent conflict in America's future." When lies don't suffice, Republicans will try extortion: vote for us, or we'll [insert threat here, ranging from shut down the government to killing you].

Harris:

Biden:

  • Dean Baker:

    • [07-22] A tribute to President Biden.

    • [07-18] Adjusting the Washington Post's Biden-Trump scorecard.

    • [07-26] Bloomberg says things are almost as bad as 2019, when Trump was in the White House: "Seriously, they probably don't want readers to walk away with that impression, but that is the implication of the piece they did complaining about people working multiple jobs."

    • [07-29] The biggest success story the country doesn't know about: "Yes, inflation has been punishing. But there is a mountain of good news that media have barely reported. Here's the real record the Democrats can run on."

      Under Biden, the United States made a remarkable recovery from the pandemic recession. We have seen the longest run of below 4.0 percent unemployment in more than 70 years, even surpassing the long stretch during the 1960s boom. This period of low unemployment has led to rapid real wage growth at the lower end of the wage distribution, reversing much of the rise in wage inequality we have seen in the last four decades. It has been especially beneficial to the most disadvantaged groups in the labor market.

      The burst of inflation that accompanied this growth was mostly an outcome of the pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine. All other wealthy countries saw comparable rises in inflation. As of summer 2024, the rate of inflation in the United States has fallen back almost to the Fed's 2.0 percent target. Meanwhile, our growth has far surpassed that of our peers.

      Furthermore, the Biden administration really does deserve credit for this extraordinary boom. Much of what happens under a president's watch is beyond their control. However, the economic turnaround following the pandemic can be directly traced to Biden's recovery package, along with his infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, all of which have sustained growth even as the impact of the initial recovery package faded. While the CARES Act, pushed through when Trump was in office, provided essential support during the shutdown period, it was not sufficient to push through the recovery.

      One should also use every opportunity to stress that the CARES Act, at least everything that was good in it, was the result of leverage Democrats in Congress had. With the economy in free fall, Trump wanted something to save the stock market. That the act also helped unemployed workers, collapsing small businesses, and helped many stave off debt collection, was because Trump had to deal with Pelosi and Schumer. Without their help, Trump's own dismal record would have been that much worse.

  • Zachary D Carter: [07-24] You have no idea what Joe Biden for employment.

  • Elie Honig: [07-26] Let's knock off the 25th amendment talk.

  • Kerry Howley: [07-27] Exit ghost: "Watching Joe Biden say good-bye."

  • Umair Irfan: [07-23] Joe Biden's enormous, contradictory, and fragile climate legacy: "If elected, Trump could slow down Biden's progress, but the shift to clean energy is unstoppable."

  • Branko Marcetic:

    • [07-22] Joe Biden wanted this. This is a left view, but seems fair:

      There is a tendency, even among the Left, to overstate the extent of Biden's populism. This is, after all, a president who nickel-and-dimed Georgia voters on the $2,000 checks he had pledged, quickly abandoned his promise of a $15 minimum-wage increase that might have helped voters weather inflation, and refused to fight to keep transformative pandemic-era policies like Medicaid expansion and expanded unemployment insurance. However ambitious his Build Back Better legislation was, we sometimes talk about it as if it had actually become law, when the reality is it died -- and did so in large part because Biden considered getting a handshake with Republicans a higher priority.

      That his presidency became the unlikely vehicle for progressive economic populism tells us less about Biden himself than the state of the Left: a Left that, however disorganized and defeated, succeeded in dragging someone like Biden into adopting even a watered-down version of its political program. It did so not just through political pressure, but by changing the political landscape to such an extent that a man who had spent his life tacking right in the chase for political power came to realize there was a popular constituency for a left-populist agenda, and that it was worth his while politically, crucial to his legacy even, to give pursuing such a thing an honest-to-God shot.

    • [07-25] How Joe Biden became a steadfast Israel defender.

  • Nicole Narea: [07-24] So what does Joe Biden do now? "In an Oval Office speech, Biden said his farewells. But his job isn't done yet."

  • Noah Rawlings: [07-29] Build no small things: "A sampling of innovative projects made possible by the Biden legislative wins."

And other Democrats:

  • Lee Drutman: [07-28] The Democratic Party is (still) broken: "The sudden ascendance of Kamala Harris doesn't change the fact that the party suffers from deep, possibly fatal problems." I'm not sure how useful this analysis is. I don't doubt that the Democratic Party has structural problems, tied mostly to the need to raise huge amounts of money from interest groups that want favors not solutions, and the double standards that blame Democrats for all problems while excusing Republicans. But the Democrats do have one big advantage: in a two-party system, they're the only ones who are sane and conscientious and actually care about people, which should give them some advantages, wouldn't you think? However, the author seems to be wedded to a fantasy idea, explained in his book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.

  • Lulu Garcia-Navarro: [07-27] The Interview: Pete Buttigieg thinks the Trump fever could break.

  • Michael Podhorzer: [07-24] Democrats are poised to win. But only if they make the election about Trump. As I've been saying, all along.

  • Michael Tomasky: [07-25] The race the Democrats need to run now: "How the party can reshape this election so it isn't about Donald Trump's martyrdom." I dunno. I mean, there's something to be said for martyring Donald Trump. It's not that I don't think this has a place:

    That's all the more reason for Harris to make the race a contest between not only two people but two ideas of America, two extremely different visions of what the federal government can and will do to protect the rights of all Americans, especially vulnerable ones. That means talking about Trump's plans. But just as importantly, it means trying to make voters understand that the presidency is much larger than one person. It's an army of people with a set of beliefs who either will or will not protect abortion rights, defend workers' interests, insist upon the basic human dignity of migrants, fight for the human and civil rights of LGBTQ people, continue the fight against the effects of climate change, uphold civil liberties, and respect the principles of democracy.

    But anything that gets people to turn on Trump is fine with me.

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

In some ways, just another mid-summer week, but one with four days topping all-time heat records, and 104 (at least that's one count) active wildfires in the US.

Economic matters:

  • Jake Johnson: [07-25] Global 1% captured $42 trillion in new wealth over past decade.

  • Jean Yi: [07-24] The great telemarketing scam behind pro-police PACs. Before we got a phone system that announces caller IDs, we were plagued with 2-5 phone calls per week trying to shake us down for donations to help out our poor police. We probably still are, but simply don't answer any calls we don't recognize and welcome. We always figured these calls as scams, but this article makes it all much more clear. If any politicians wanted to do something that would immediately better the lives of most Americans, they would come up with a legal framework to destroy the entire telemarketing industry (and hopefully take junk texts and emails with it -- for now at least, I'm ok with advertisers buying stamps, which at least helps fund the post office, even though most of our mail goes straight to recycle).

Ukraine War and Russia:

America's empire and the world:

Other stories:

Obituaries

Books

Music (and other arts?)

Chatter

  • Dean Baker: [07-30] [in response to: X has SUSPENDED the White Dudes for Harris account (@dudes4harris) after it raised more than $4M for Kamala Harris.] Musk is using his control of X to make in-kind contributions to Trump in lieu of his pledge to contribute $45 million a month to a Trump super Pac

  • Ramesh Ponnuru: [07-31] Trump policing who's really black and who's a good Jew in the same week.

Local tags (these can be linked to directly): Netanyahu's speech, music.

Original count: 259 links, 11258 words (15482 total)

Current count: 264 links, 11362 words (15656 total)

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Wednesday, July 24, 2024

Speaking of Which

Big breaking news this week was the end of Joe Biden's campaign for a second term as president. This became public on Sunday, July 20. I started collecting bits for this post back on Thursday, July 18, and in the intervening days I collected a fair number of pieces on the arguments for Biden to withdraw. I've kept those pieces below (and may even add to them), while splitting the section on Biden, and adding one on Kamala Harris, who as Vice-President and as Biden's running mate is the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination.

Biden won all of the primaries, so an overwhelming majority of DNC voters were selected and pledged to Biden (and implicitly to Harris). Biden has endorsed Harris. And most of the people who put pressure on Biden to withdraw did so realizing that Harris would be his most obvious replacement. Opposition to Biden was almost never rooted in rejection of his policies or legacy. (Critics of Biden's deaf, blind and dumb support for Netanyahu's genocide may beg to differ, but they had little if any clout within the party powers who turned on Biden. Nor do Israel's supporters have any real reason to fear that Harris will turn on them.)

I originally meant to start this post with a bit from a letter I wrote back on Thursday [07-18], which summed up my views on Biden's candidacy at the time:

For what little it's worth, here's my nutshell take on Biden:

  1. If he can't get control of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza by early October, he's going to lose, no matter what else happens. For people who don't understand them, they're bad vibes, so why not blame the guy who was in position to do something about them. That may be unfair, but that's what uninformed voters do. And if you do understand them (which I think I do), Biden doesn't look so good either. He sees Ukraine as a test of resolve, and Israel as a test of loyalty, and those views are not just wrong, they kick in his most primitive instincts.

  2. Otherwise, the election will go to whichever side is most effective at making the election into a referendum on the other side. That should be easy when the other side is Trump, but it gets real hard when most media cycles focus on your age and/or decrepitude. That story is locked in, and isn't going away. When your "good news" is "Biden reads from teleprompter and doesn't fumble," you've lost.

  3. Even if Trump's negatives are so overwhelming that even Biden, incapacitated as he is, beats him (and surely it wouldn't be by enough to shut Trump up), do we really want four more years of this?

As of early Tuesday evening, I'm still preoccupied with trying to wrap up my jazz critics poll. I expect to mail that I will get that mailed in tonight, and hope that I may wrap this up as well, with the by-now-usual proviso that I may add more the next day, but certainly will have lots to return to next week.

As of late Wednesday evening, I figure I should call it a week. I still haven't gotten to everything, but I've deliberately skipped anything on the Netanyahu speech to Congress, and various other pieces of late-breaking news (including recent campaign rallies by Trump, which I overheard some of, and by Harris, which I gather was much more fun. If I do grab something more while working on Music Week, I'll flag it as usual. Otherwise, there's always next week.

One half-baked thought I will go ahead and throw out there is this: maybe this was the plan all along? I know it's hard to credit the Democratic Party insiders with devising much less executing such a clever plan. But if you wanted to get to where we are now, it's not that hard to imagine. If Biden hadn't run, Harris would have been his probable successor, but not without a bruising and potentially divisive primary fight. Biden's reelection campaign kept that from happening -- and to make extra sure, scotching the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary eliminated the two best opportunities potential opponents might gamble on. Biden wound up with an overwhelming majority of delegates locked in, and predisposed to Harris as his successor.

Biden's presumptive nomination also gave cover to Trump, who never had to face the age questions that dogged the slightly older Biden. Then Biden tanks the debate, which gives Trump a huge psychological boost, but drags out his withdrawal until after Trump's nomination becomes official. By the time he does announce, all the ducks are lined up for Harris, cemented by the record-breaking cash haul. No one will run against her, and all Democrats will unite behind her. It's not a very good example of democracy in action, but it's clean and final, and she enters the campaign against Trump with few wounds and very little baggage.

On the other hand, Trump, despite all the optimism he brought into the RNC just last week, has tons of debilitating baggage -- to which he's already added his "best people" VP pick, J.D. Vance. I've said all along that the winner will be the one who does the best job of making the election into an opportunity for the people to rid themselves of the other candidate. The odds of Trump being the one we most want to dispose of just went way up.

Make no mistake, there is something profoundly wrong with our democracy, and it goes way beyond gerrymanders and registration scheming. It mostly has to do with the obscene influence of money not just on who can run in elections and what they can campaign on, but also on what whoever manages to get elected can or cannot do with their post. This influence goes way back, and runs very deep, but it's pretty clear that it's gotten significantly worse over the last several decades, as income and wealth have become much more unequally distributed.

We are, of course, fortunate that not everyone with great sums of money wishes to harm most of us. It's mostly just Republicans who want to drive us to ruin, and who surely will if we allow them the power to do so. (The Supreme Court is one place where they already have that power, and it is already providing us with a steady stream of examples of how "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.") Rich Democrats may be every bit as self-interested and egocentric as rich Republicans, but at least they can see that government needs to work reasonably well for everyone, and not just for the rich at everyone else's expense. They understand things that Republicans have turned against: that life is not a zero-sum game (so you don't have to inflict losses in order to gain); that security is only possible if people sense that justice prevails; and that no matter how much wealth and power you gain, you still depend on other people who need to be able to trust you.

Perhaps you can and should trust rich Democrats in times of severe crisis, such as in this election. Today's Republican Party, with or without Trump, is threat enough. But know that those same rich Democrats don't trust you to make decisions they can support, which is why they hijacked the 2020 primaries to stop Sanders with Biden, and why they've micromanaged the 2024 process to give your nomination to Harris. And actually, I'm strangely OK with that.

Top story threads:

Israel:

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

Israel vs. world opinion:

Election notes:

  • Jeffrey St Clair: [07-19] Politics on the verge of nervous breakdown. This starts with the most detailed and credible account of the Trump rally shooting I've bothered to read, ranges wide enough to include a picture of Mussolini with a nose bandage after a 1926 assassination attempt, then moves on to Biden (pre-withdrawal), compares his tenure to that of Stalin and Brezhnev, doubles back to J.D. Vance, and winds up with a potpourri of scattered points, like:

    • As if to emphasize their indifference to the victims of the shooting, they're having an AR-15 giveaway at the GOP convention . . .

    • Days after a 20-year-old tried to nail Trump with an AR-15, a federal appeals court ruled that Minnesota's law requiring people to be at least 21 to carry a handgun in public is unconstitutional.

    • While the Democrats -- for some reason comprehensible only to Democrats -- have "paused" fundraising after the failed assassination attempt, a Trump-owned company is selling sneakers for $299 a pair with an image of his bloodied face after the rally shooting . . .

Republican National Convention:

Focus on the Convention here. Articles that focus on Trump and Vance, even at the convention, follow in their own sections.

Trump:

  • New York Times Opinion: Donald Trump's first term is a warning. This looks like they finally went back and reviewed their own reporting, and belatedly realized, oh my God, how could we just let all this happen?

    This week, Republicans have tried to rewrite the four years of Trump's presidency as a time of unparalleled peace, prosperity and tranquility: "the strongest economy in history," as Senator Katie Britt of Alabama put it. The difference between Trump and Biden? "President Trump honored the Constitution," said Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota. Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia offered Mr. Trump's first term as an example of "common-sense conservative leadership."

    The record of what Mr. Trump actually did in office bears little resemblance to that description. Under his leadership, the country lurched from one crisis to the next, from the migrant families separated at the border to the sudden spike in prices caused by his trade war with China to the reckless mismanagement of the Covid pandemic. And he showed, over and over, how little respect he has for the Constitution and those who take an oath to defend it.

    For Americans who may have forgotten that time, or pushed it from memory, we offer this timeline of his presidency. Mr. Trump's first term was a warning about what he will do with the power of his office -- unless American voters reject him.

    The timeline is mostly told through pictures, which are often shocking, and tweets, which are mostly stupid. One thing I was especially struck by was the prominence given to Trump's catering to the whims and desires of the right-wing in Israel, while still neglecting to point out their direct bearing on increasing hostilities and the ongoing genocide. Also seems to me like there's too much focus on Trump's national security lapses, which caters to the worst instincts of the so-called Security Democrats, when the real problem with Trump is not lack of vigilance but a general disinterest and even contempt for peace and real democracy.

    I expect this timeline will be recut into campaign commercials, fast and furious, driving home the point that Trump is nothing but trouble.

  • Anna Betts: [07-25] FBI director questions whether Trump was hit by bullet or shrapnel in shooting.

  • Jonathan Blitzer: [07-15] Inside the Trump plan for 2025: "A network of well-funded far-right activists is preparing for the former President's return to the White House."

  • Jonathan Chait:

    • [07-17] Trump invites China to invade Taiwan if he returns to office. Given all the credible charges you could lay at Trump, why bother with this bullshit? Trump has this dangerously stupid idea that if he can scare Taiwan, they'll pony up for more US arms and bribes for security. China's just the bogeyman in this scam. Chait has his own dangerously stupid idea here, which is that American deterrence is the only thing keeping China out of Taiwan. I'm not saying that Taiwan has nothing to worry about, but they do have more control over their own predicament than the ridiculous whims of presidents and pundits.

    • [07-19] Donald Trump cannot even pretend to change who he is.

  • John Ganz: [06-05] The shadow of the mob: "Trump's gangster Gemeinschaft."

  • Jay Caspian Kang: [07-19] Are we already moving on from the assassination attempt on Trump? "When an act of violence doesn't lend itself to a clear argument or a tidy story, we often choose not to think about it."

  • Ed Kilgore: [07-19] The old, ranting, rambling Trump was back at the Republican convention.

  • Eric Levitz: [07-19] The RNC clarified Trump's 2024 persona: Moderate authoritarian weirdo: "The Trump campaign is at once a savvy, disciplined operation and an illiberal narcissist's personality cult." Weirdo, sure, but considered in light of the whole package, weirdo loses all of its affectionate and amusing traits. "Moderate" is the word that hurts here, like a toenail cut into the quick. On some political policy scales, Trump may rate as more moderate than many other prominent Republicans (off the top of my head: Abbott, DeSantis, Cruz, Rubio, Cotton, Hawley, Vance, Gosar, Gaetz, Mike Lee, Nikki Haley, Liz Cheney), but every bit of his persona screams extremism -- he sees himself as a real fighter, as one real bad dude, and that's how he wants you to see him. That's the act he puts on, and that's what most of his fans are lapping up. Once you see that, the weirdo stuff falls into place, and should be viewed much more harshly: he's showing you that he doesn't care what others think, that he can be as weird as he wants, and there's nothing they can do about it.

  • Chris Lewis: [07-15] The dangerous authoritarian gunning to serve as Trump's grand vizier: "Russell Vought is rumored to be under consideration for chief of staff in a second Trump administration. This would be a disaster."

  • Nicole Narea: [07-17] Why tech titans are turning toward Trump: "Silicon Valley isn't right-wing, but its Trump supporters are getting louder."

  • Tom Nichols: A searing reminder that Trump is unwell: "His bizarre diatribe at the RNC shows why the pro-democracy coalition is so worried about beating him."

  • Matt Stieb:

  • Robert Tait: [07-25] Trump monetizes assassination attempt by using photo as book cover.

  • Maureen Tkacik: [07-18] The assassin amid the undesirables: "On the abiding despair of the failed Trump assassin's post-COVID, private equity-looted nursing home."

  • Li Zhou: [07-16] The Trump shooting points to shocking Secret Service security lapses.

Vance:

Trump picked Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate and potential vice-president, confirmed by the RNC, so he's very much in the news, and for this week at least, elicited quite a bit of response: much more than I suspect any of his competition would have generated.

  • Alex Abad-Santos: [07-19] The damsel-ification of Usha Vance: "What people project onto the would-be second lady fits a pattern of benevolent sexism about GOP wives."

  • Michael Arria: [07-16] The Shift: J.D. Vance's anti-Palestine record: "J.D. Vance is a strong supporter of Israel, and, like many U.S. Zionists, he attributes the allegiance to his Christianity."

  • Aaron Blake: [07-24] Could Republicans get buyer's remorse with J.D. Vance? "New polls show him to be unusually unpopular for a new VP pick. Here's how that compares historically, and what it could mean."

  • Ben Burgis: [07-16] On stochastic terrorism and speech as violence: Responding to Vance's tweet blaming Biden for the attempted shooting of Trump:

    In effect, conservatives like Vance are appropriating the idea, long put forward by some liberals, that overheated political rhetoric is itself a form of violence. The theory of "stochastic terrorism" holds that over-the-top rhetoric about a targeted individual or group has the effect of encouraging "lone-wolf" political violence -- that is to say, political violence carried out by individuals on their own initiative rather than terrorist organizations -- and that this makes the purveyors of the rhetoric responsible for the violence.

    Actually, the right is far more likely to employ verbal threats and agitation toward violence than the left is, largely because they're much more into violence as a tool of political power. It's hard not to believe that the atmosphere of malice they create has no relationship to occasional violent outbursts, but causality or even responsibility is hard to pin down. Burgis concludes, "let's not go down that road." But Vance is so imbued with the culture of violence that his own charge can just as easily be taken as encouragement for his "2nd amendment people" to take a shot at Biden. When Democrats criticize Trump, their obvious even if just implcit remedy is the ballot. But when Trump rails against "vermin," just what is he imploring his followers to do? And given that a couple of his follows have actually committed acts of criminal violence against his designated enemies, shouldn't we be alarmed at such speech?

  • Kevin T Dugan: [07-18] Why J.D. Vance wants a weak dollar. Is that a good idea? I'm not so sure it isn't. I've been bothered by trade deficits since the 1970s, when they mostly started to cover up the drop in domestic oil production. Since then, they've mostly worked to increase inequality both here and abroad.

  • Gil Duran: Where J.D. Vance gets his weird, terrifying techo-authoritarian ideas: "Yes, Peter Thiel was the senator's benefactor. But they're both inspired by an obscure software developer who has some truly frightening thoughts about reordering society."

  • Thom Hartmann:

  • John Ganz: [07-16] The meaning of JD Vance: "The politics of national despair incarnate."

    Vance himself, of course, is a winner in the cultural sweepstakes: his Hillbilly Elegy became a massive success, explaining the failures of the white poor. He made it okay to look down on them. After all, one of them said it was okay. Conservatives who reviled Trump's base turned to Vance as well as liberals who condescendingly wanted to "understand" them. It was really the same old conservative nonsense about "cultural pathology" applied to whites now instead of blacks -- a way to blame the poor for being poor, to "racialize" the white poor as the blacks had been; to find in them intrinsic moral weaknesses rather than just a lack of money and resources.

    But Vance always wanted to run with hares and hunt with the hounds. He wants to hold fast to the his wounded Scots-Irish machismo while simultaneously rising to heights of both American capitalism and cultural success. He took his background to be both an advantage and a handicap, a counter-snobbery that served him well as he entered the halls of power and wealth. Look back at the famous American Conservative interview that turned him into a sensation: ". . . the deeper I get into elite culture, the more I see value in this reverse snobbery. It's the great privilege of my life that I'm deep enough into the American elite that I can indulge a little anti-elitism. Like I said, it keeps you grounded, if nothing else! But it would have been incredibly destructive to indulge too much of it when I was 18." . . . Reverse snobbery, like all snobbery, comes from comparison, of a feeling of not living up, of wanting to best others. As Peter Thiel acolyte, he's familiar with René Girard's theories of envy and knows how that emotion gives rise to hate. Vance once said that Trump might be "America's Hitler" to a law school buddy. This is what that friend says now: "The through line between former J.D. and current J.D. is anger . . . The Trump turn can be understood as a lock-in on contempt as the answer to anger . . ." To people like that, Hitler, so to speak, has a point.

  • Jacob Heilbrunn: [07-17] With Vance selection, Trump doubles down on America first. One can readily fault Vance for lots of things, but calling him an "isolationist" -- "the heir to Charles Lindbergh, Pat Buchanan, and other GOP isolationists" -- is pretty flimsy.

  • Sarah Jones: [07-16] The billionaire and the bootlicker.

  • Ed Kilgore: [07-18] Who is J.D. Vance? His muddled RNC speech didn't tell us.

  • Paul Krugman: [07-18] J.D. Vance puts the con in conservatism. Well, it's always been there, but he takes it to especially extravagant lengths.

  • Eric Levitz: [07-17] J.D. Vance's GOP is for bosses, not workers: "Trump's 'populist' running mate won't change his party's class allegiances."

  • Nicholas Liu: [07-18] JD Vance wants to abandon Ukraine but bomb Mexico and Iran.

  • Ryan Mac/Theodore Schleifer: [07-17] How a network of tech billionaires helped J.D. Vance leap into power: "Mr. Vance spent less than five years in Silicon Valley's tech industry, but the connections he made with Peter Thiel and others became crucial to his political ascent."

  • Arwa Mahdawi: [07-20] Sorry, JD Vance, but being a 'childless cat lady' is actually not a bad thing.

  • Andrew Prokop: [07-17] J.D. Vance's radical plan to build a government of Trump loyalists: "Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people." Obviously, this isn't original with Vance. Republicans have been dreaming of this for years, and Trump did a fair amount of it during his first term -- especially in purging employees who think there might be something to fossil fuel-based climate change. It was part of Rick Scott's Senate plan, and is part of Project 2025.

  • Max Read: [2020-07-21] Peter Thiel's latest venture is the American government: This old article popped up, but should by now have spawned many updates. My view all along was that Trump was putting the VP slot up for bids -- in effect, he was shopping for the best dowry. Burgum made the short list because he has his own money. The rehabilitation of "Little Marco" also suggested that he brought some serious money into play -- every serious Republican candidate in 2016 had some kind of billionaire in the wings. (In 2012, Newt Gingrich griped that he couldn't compete, because he only had one billionaire, whereas Romney had four.) I don't know who was backing Rubio, but J.D. Vance was always a front for this guy, Peter Thiel.

  • Veronica Riccobene/Helen Santoro/Joel Warner: [07-16] J.D. Vance wants to crack down harder on abortion access.

  • Becca Rothfeld: [07-23] Hillbilly Elegy and J.D. Vance's art of having it both ways.

  • Martin Scotten: [07-22] JD Vance owes almost everything to Peter Thiel, a pro-Trump billionaire and "New Right" ideologue.

  • Ishaan Tharoor:

  • Benjamin Wallace-Wells: [07-15] Why Donald Trump picked J.D. Vance for Vice-President: "The Ohio senator is an attack dog for the former President, but he is also something more emergent and interesting: he is the fuse that Trump lit."

  • Robert Wright: [07-19] J.D. Vance, the tech oligarch's populist.

  • Simon van Zuylen-Wood: [07-24] Democrats might want to take J.D. Vance seriously: But isn't it so much more fun to take him as a joke? Does he really deserve anything else?

And other Republicans:

  • Dean Baker: [07-17] Decision 2024: Would people be willing to pay higher taxes to make Elon Musk richer?

    That is a question that should occur to people who read through the Republican Party's platform. Not only does the platform promise to extend the 2017 tax cuts, which will potentially put tens of billions of dollars in Elon Musk's pocket over the next decade, it also promises to "modernize the military."

    "Republicans will ensure our Military is the most modern, lethal and powerful Force in the World. We will invest in cutting-edge research and advanced technologies, including an Iron Dome Missile Defense Shield, support our Troops with higher pay, and get woke Leftwing Democrats fired as soon as possible."

    This looks to be hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars in additional spending over the next decade. Elon Musk, among others, is likely to be well-situated to get some of the contracts that will be involved in modernizing the military. . . .

    As far as how much Musk and other military contractors are likely to get out of an increase in spending, it is worth noting that excessive payments and outright fraud are already big problems with military contracting. However, the problem is likely to get considerably worse in a second Trump administration.

    There are a number of potential checks on fraud and abuse in place at present. These include the Defense Department's Inspector General, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and the Justice Department, which can investigate allegations of fraud.

    Donald Trump has said that he wants to remove these sorts of checks on his presidential power. They would all fit into his category of the "deep state." These people are likely the "woke Leftwing Democrats" who the platform promises to fire as soon as possible.

  • Zack Beauchamp: [07-19] It's Trump's party now. Mostly. "How the Trumpified GOP resembles Frankenstein's monster."

  • Tim Dickinson: [06-09] Meet Trump's new Christian kingpin: "Oil-rich Tim Dunn has changed Texas politics with fanatical zeal -- the national stage is next."

  • Abdallah Fayyad: [07-16] The crime wave is over but Republicans can't let go: "The GOP is still pretending that crime is spiraling out of control."

  • David Frum: This crew is totally beatable: "Democrats just need to believe they can do it."

  • Sarah Jones: [07-18] The GOP is still the party of the boss.

  • Christian Paz: [07-16] The clever politics of Republicans' anti-immigrant pitch: "The Republican National Convention featured plenty of angry rhetoric about immigration. It might find a receptive audience."

  • Nikki McCann Ramirez/Ryan Bort: [07-10] A guide to Project 2025, the right's terrifying plan to remake America.

Biden:

He announced he was withdrawing as the Democratic candidate for president in 2024 on Sunday, July 21, so the following links can be easily divided into before and after sections. More recent links first:

I had already collected a bunch of links before the withdrawal. While this should be a moot issue going forward, we shouldn't forget too readily what happened and why.

  • Intelligencer: [07-19] Pressure builds as more Democrats call on Biden to step aside: "Here are the latest developments on the efforts to get Joe to go." Following some earlier reports scattered about this section, he's getting the "live updates" treatment.

  • Russell Berman: 'I think it's happening': "The lone senator who has called on Biden to withdraw is growing confident that the president will leave the race."

  • Jonathan Chait: [07-18] The presidential nomination is becoming worthless for Joe Biden: "A devastating polling nugget shows what happens if he stays in."

  • David A Graham: [07-18] The end of Biden's candidacy approaches: "At the start of the day yesterday, it was conceivable that Joe Biden might manage to hold on to the Democratic nomination for president. But this morning, things seem to be slipping out of his grasp." He cites a number of reports of people who are close enough to Biden to have leverage but who still don't want to be seen with blood on their hands. There's also the all-important fear of "money drying up." The big selling point is fear of a Trump presidency, but if you're rich enough to splurge on politics, you don't have that much to fear. It's more a matter of hedging your bets.

  • Elie Honig: [07-19] The secret Biden tape that we shouldn't hear. That's special counsel Robert Hur's interview of Biden in conjunction with the "top secret" documents Biden found in his garage. At the time it was first disclosed, it was reported that the tape made Biden out like a doddering fool, so naturally Republicans in Congress set out to subpoena it.

  • Dhruv Khullar: [07-18] Doctors are increasingly worried about Biden: "Nine physicians weighed in on the President's health. Almost all were concerned that Biden's symptoms might go beyond a gradual, aging-related decline."

  • Eric Levitz: [07-18] Democrats are finally taking on Biden -- and giving the party a chance to win: "Pelosi, Schumer, and Obama have all signaled to Joe that it's time to go."

  • Nicole Narea: [07-18] Biden is betting on impossible promises to progressives: "Biden is trying to reinvigorate his candidacy by pushing progressive priorities." That might work better if the left had any real power in the Democratic Party, if Biden had the power to deliver, and if the promise didn't panic the corporate faction into dumping him.

  • Nia Prater: [07-18] The push to replace Biden is rapidly gaining momentum.

Harris:

  • Intelligencer Staff: [07-22] Kamala Harris is now the presumptive nominee: live updates: She cleared 2,579 delegates less than 36 hours after Biden dropped out and endorsed her.

  • Mariana Alfaro/Marianna Sotomayor: [07-24] House GOP leaders ask member to stop making racial attacks against Harris. Probably more where this came from:

  • Michael Arria: [07-22] Looking at Kamala Harris's record on Israel: "If elected president, many believe that Kamala Harris will continue Joe Biden's doomed policy in Gaza."

  • Karen Attiah: [07-24] The first clean-up job for Harris is Biden's horrible Gaza policy. I sympathize with the sentiment, but I don't see the political angle. The Biden administration needs to quietly shut the Gaza war down, with a stable ceasefire, with no Israeli troop presence in Gaza, and with some kind of international salvage/reconstruction effort, probably under the UN with some contingent of Arab volunteers. Harris should (and hopefully can) work behind the scenes to firm up the administration's resolve to do this, but also shouldn't be seen as getting her hands too dirty in the effort. She needs this, because if the war/genocide is still continuing in October, that's going to reflect very badly on Biden, and therefore (but probably somewhat less) on her. So yes, this is important. But advice like this -- Indigo Olivier: Kamala, denounce Netanyahu. Do it now. -- is neither likely to work on Israel, nor is it likely to gain her any voters.

  • Ryan Cooper: [07-23] What would President Harris do with Gaza?: "There are tentative signs that she would not indulge Israel's war as President Biden has done." This is pretty speculative. No one expects Harris to break with Israel, or even to rethink the fundamentals of the alliance, but it's possible to love Israel and still exercise some restraint to steer Israelis away from embarrassing themselves, as they have done ever since their defense against Hamas attacks turned into a campaign of genocide. Indeed, many Israelis -- not Netanyahu and his allies, who will take every atrocity they can get away with, but many of his wholeheartedly Zionist opponents -- expect the US to act as a brake on their own worst impulses. It is worth noting that when the Biden administration briefly held up supply of 2000 lb. bombs, Harris was disciplined enough to keep her messaging in line with the policy, while Biden waffled and gave up any pretense.

  • David Dayen: [07-23] Who is Kamala Harris? "The vice president has been a cautious political operator. Her vision for the future points in several directions."

  • Benjamin Hart: [07-24] Kamala Harris's biographer says she's always been underestimated. Interview with Dan Morain, author of Kamala's Way: An American Life.

  • Susan Milligan: [07-24] Sexism and racism only make Kamala Harris stronger.

  • Christian Paz: [07-18] Kamala Harris and the border: The myth and the facts.

  • Greg Sargent: [07-23] Fox News's awful new Kamala Harris smears hit nuclear levels of idiocy: "As right-wing media scramble for an effective attack on the vice president, a reporter who has closely examined Harris's career explains why her political identity is so hard to pin down."

  • Michael Scherer/Gerrit De Vynck/Maeve Reston: [07-23] Historic flood of cash pours into Harris campaign and allied groups: "Democrats reported raising more than $250 million since Biden announced he was leaving the presidential race and endorsed Harris."

  • Marc A Thiessen: [07-24] Harris is a gaffe-prone leftist. Why didn't anyone challenge her? "That would-be rivals are waiting for 2028 suggests they know our democracy will survive Trump." When I saw this title, I had to click on it, just to see who could be that dumb (although in retrospect I should have guessed). If you do bother to read this, you'll get a prevue of all the angles Republicans will use against Harris. If I knew nothing else, I'd take them as reason aplenty to vote for her. Still, I have to wonder whether the rest of the Republicans will even rise to Thiessen's level of sophistry. Consider this recent run of advice-giving columns:

  • Rebecca Traister: [07-24] The thrill of taking a huge risk on Kamala Harris: "The actual case for being unburdened by what has been." I think the author is really onto something here:

    None of us knows if we can do this. And we are about to do it anyway. And the combination of those truths helped me, in those vertiginous few minutes, to not feel panic but excitement. I felt excited about the future for the first time in years.

    More than that: I felt excited not in spite of my uncertainty, but because of it. I felt that our national political narrative was finally accurately mirroring our national reality: Everything is scary, we have never been here before, we don't know if we can do this, and precisely because these stakes are so high, we are at last going to act like it, by taking unprecedented, untested, underpolled, creative measures to change, grow, and fight at a pitch that meets the gravity of the urgent, existentially important task in front of us. No more clinging to the walls of the past for safety, no more adhering to models or traditions or assumptions that the autocratic opposition has shown itself willing to explode over the past two decades in its own efforts to win.

    Our aversion to uncertainty is part of how we got to this precipice. Too unwilling to take risks -- on people, ideas, and platforms, on the next generation of leadership -- Democrats have remained chained to the past.

    In some ways, Harris is the safe choice right now, but after Biden and Clinton, she doesn't feel like such a stale, stodgy compromise. She feels like a candidate who can fight back, who won't spend the next four months backpedaling and disclaiming. And why can't she win? Who really believes racist, sexist, red-baiting Republicans theses days? Just cowards who take their clues from the fear and shame of those being maligned? Traister addresses this here:

    There are certainly terrible things in store: the racism and sexism Harris will face, the monstrous and vengeful resistance to her rise, in which she will be accused of incompetence and radicalism and being an affirmative-action token and a barren cat lady and a welfare queen who has slept her way to the top, all according to the right's overfamiliar playbooks for how to discredit people they would rather not participate fully in this democracy and helped by a media happy to engage in double standards. We know there will be bad polls and gaffes. And those who feel scared about what is on the line, including possibly me, will be tempted to say, "I told you this would happen!" because in our moments of direst discomfort we take slim consolation in certainty, even when the certainty is about how awful we knew everything was going to be.

    But if we permitted that dismal comfort to guide us, we would not have any space to be shocked and inspired by how good some things can be: the giddy memes emerging from an improbably enthused online left, the cheerily halved "BIDEN/HARRIS" yard signs now reading simply "HARRIS." The $81 million in donations raised in 24 hours. The 58,000 volunteers who stepped up in less than two days to work phones and knock doors. The Sunday-night zoom call hosted by Win With Black Women and Jotaka Eaddy, which was scheduled to accommodate 1,000 women, that eventually had to make room for 44,000 participants, all within hours of Harris becoming the unofficial candidate. The next night, a call organized by Win With Black Men drew 53,000 registrants, well above its capacity, of whom 21,000 were ultimately able to attend.

And other Democrats:

Included here are pieces about the upcoming procedure for replacing Biden as presidential nominee, any candidates beyond Harris, and the upcoming convention.

Climate and environment:

Economic matters:

Ukraine War and Russia:

  • Blaise Malley: [07-19] Diplomacy Watch: Europe turns attention to GOP ticket: "Moscow, Kyiv, also react to eventuality of Trump returning to White House." This was written post-Vance, pre-Harris, so maybe the panic has subsided a bit. What hasn't changed is the war's stalemate, or more accurately, spiraling self-destruction.

America's empire and the world:

  • Wesley K Clark: [06-23] America is already great again: "Don't let doomsayers like Donald Trump fool you. On every meaningful metric of national strength, the United States under Joe Biden is a rising power -- and we have the economic means and necessary alliances to meet our gravest challenges." He's fighting bullshit with bullshit, which he wouldn't have to if he could just escape the "metric of national strength" Trump characterizes as greatness. I remember how Bill Moyers tried to convince LBJ to call his programs "the good society," but Johnson, ever the bullshit artist, insisted on "great" -- and got neither. Clark actually does a fair job of pointing out how the reforms Biden started, and further reforms that are broadly supported by the democratic wing of the Democratic Party, can make our lives better, can help the rest of the world, and put us in better alignment with peace and justice everywhere -- an analysis that could be much sharper with a bit less ego and arms hawking.

  • Tom Engelhardt: [07-18] Where did the American Century go? "The decline and fall of presidential America: are we now living in a defeat culture?"

  • Mike Lofgren: [06-23] Why can't America build enough weapons? That's really not the question we should be asking, but that anyone can bring it up should expose the hopeless trap we've locked ourselves into. "The debasement of the U.S. defense industrial base began, ironically, under Ronald Reagan, and won't be reversed until we abandon the free-market fundamentalism he introduced." This is a subject that merits a long screed, one I have no time or patience for now.

Other stories:

Adam Clark Estes: [07-11] Why I quit Spotify: Some things to think about, especially as "Spotify raised its prices in July for the second time in as many years." As I recall, in the announcement letter they touted all the extra podcast content the extra money will help them develop. (They develop things? I've never listened to a podcast there, so the all money they spent on Joe Rogan -- and on pissing off Neil Young and Joni Mitchell -- was wasted, as far as I'm concerned).

Bryan Walsh: [07-16] It's time to stop arguing over the population slowdown and start adapting to it: "The world population could peak in your lifetime."

Li Zhou: [07-19] The "largest IT outage in history," briefly explained: "Airlines, banks, and hospitals saw computer systems go down because of a CrowdStrike software glitch." Note that only Microsoft Windows users were affected ("Mac and Linux users were not affected").

Obituaries

John Otis: [07-24] Lewis Lapham, editor who revived Harper's magazine, dies at 89: "He turned Harper's into what he called a 'theater of ideas,' promoting emerging voices including David Foster Wallace, Christopher Hitchens and Fareed Zakaria." I only occasionally read Harper's (and later Lapham's Quarterly), but I've read a couple of his books, and thought he was a superb political essayist: Theater of War: In Which the Republican Beocmes an Empire (2003), and Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration (2006). I should do a complete book rundown, but for now I just ordered a copy of his 2017 book, Age of Folly: America Abandons Its Democracy.

Larry Rohter: [07-23] John Mayall, pioneer of British blues, is dead at 90: "He was best known not for his own playing or singing but for recruiting and polishing the talents of one gifted lead guitarist after another, starting with Eric Clapton."

Giovanni Russonello: [07-24] Toumain Diabaté, Malian master of the kora, is dead at 58: "He believed that music could transcend national borders set by colonialism and restore ancient ties, even as it embraced the changes of a globalizing society."

Alex Williams: [07-19] Happy Traum, mainstay of the folk music world, dies at 86: "A noted guitarist and banjo player, he emerged from the same Greenwich Village folk-revival scene as his friend and sometime collaborator Bob Dylan."

Books

Zack Beauchamp: [07-17] Why the far right is surging all over the world: "The 'reactionary spirit' and the roots of the US authoritarian moment." Excerpt from a book the author has been working on: The Reactionary Spirit: How America's Most Insidious Political Tradition Swept the World.

Doug Storm: [2022-09-16] A crash course in the works of H Bruce Franklin . . . with H Bruce Franklin. I just read the late cultural historian's memoir, Crash Course: From the Good War to the Forever War, which does a good job of recounting the path of post-WWII militarism from the red scare into Vietnam, as he discovered it in real time, and also recounted a much more militant anti-war movement than I was ever involved in. The book ends rather abruptly after Vietnam, making me wonder whether he planned a second one, or just figured his later life just wasn't that interesting. The interview covers the book, as well as other works, like

Music (and other arts?)

Ian Bogost: The mid-year best-of list is a travesty: "The worst idea of 2024 so far." And here I was thinking that the worst idea of 2024 was using AI to select bombing targets on Gaza. Or using drones for terror bombing around nuclear power plants in Ukraine. Or major political parties picking two doddering idiots to debate the very serious issues facing America and the world. The author seems to have reconciled himself to end-of-year lists: "These annual rundowns arrive during a period of reflection, when a full year's worth of human art and industry is about to recede into history." That's an odd turn of phrase: don't things turn into history the moment they happen? Whether they recede or not depends on whether they still have continuing import, or have (like most things) turned into passing fancies. Even so, one suspects that passing fancies are precisely what end-of-year lists are meant to recognize.

But it end-of-year lists are ok, what's so bad about mid-year lists? The time chunks are arbitrary. Smaller ones give us less material to cover, but you don't have to think back so far, and when it comes to music albums, it's not like we have a scarcity problem. My mid-year jazz critics poll (89 voters) identified 468 albums, vs. the full-year 2023 total of 760 (159 votes). It sounds like he's complaining about the novelty, but I've been tracking mid-year lists for a decade or more. They're still not nearly as common as end-of-year lists, but I've tracked about 35 so far this year, which includes a majority of the music publications that Album of the Year follows. As far as I know, nobody's taking the 6-month time chunk seriously enough to run a second-half list at end-of-year time, but I have seen movement toward shorter time periods, with quarterly and even monthly retrospectives.

Paul Schwartzman: [07-11] Who killed the Kennedys? The Rolling Stones won't tell you anymore. Songs evolve, sometimes as historical references slip from memory -- "On the Sunny Side of the Street" lives on, but increasingly likely to substitute for "rich as Rockefeller" -- and sometimes when casual terms fell out of fashion, as when Louis Armstrong changed "darkies" to "the folks."

Mid-year best-of lists:

Chatter

Zachary D Carter: [07-25][Response to Matt Stoller: "Democratic Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman gives $7 million to Harris, immediately demands she fire FTC Chair Lina Khan."]

  • Hoffman is a fool, these Silicon Valley gazillionaires don't actually believe in democracy.

  • The US economy is great, business is booming, the threat to growth is Jay Powel refusing to cut interest rates, not Lina Khan enforcing the law.

Nathan J Robinson: [07-25]

  • The core problem that Republicans have, and the reason they struggle to win the popular vote, is that they seem to despise the majority of people who live in this country.

  • We hate cat ladies, LGBTQ people, teachers, baristas, union members, immigrants, the underclass, "DEI," librarians, Hollywood, welfare moms, civil servants, professors, students, environmental activists, atheists, Muslims. Am I missing anyone from the list?

  • ok well your little cult should go form its own country where you don't have to live with anyone who doesn't share your theocratic morality

Rick Perlstein: [07-25]:

  • This video I made of a beautiful nature scene slowly defaced by the ugliest, most arrogant building this side of Pyongyang: I feel like it Says Something about Obama, and how history might judge him.

  • An arcadian fantasy, then the banal reality.

  • Terrible at building a bulwark against incipient fascism. That may become the salient metric, like for James Buchanan or Neville Chamberlain.

Tikun Olam: [07-25] [Responding to Ami Dar: "Former IDF Chiefs of Staff and Mossad directors (i.e. just a bunch of antisemitic leftist traitors) write the Congressional leadership: 'Netanyahu poses an existential threat to the State of Israel.'"]

  • It's amazing how generals and Shin Bet chiefs who performed horrible crimes during their careers, all of a sudden develop a moral conscience after they retire.

Actually, there's a movie about this phenomenon. It's called The Gatekeepers, directed by Dror Moreh, came out in 2012, featuring interviews with six former Shin Bet heads. These people rise in the ranks based on their drive to dominate Palestinians, then when they retire, they realize they've accomplished nothing, leaving nothing but blown opportunities in their wake. But by then they've been replaced by younger men eager to proove they can be even more aggressive.

Rick Perlstein: [07-25]

  • Wow, the story the wily old pol who says "my opponent fucks goats" so the guy has to deny it has been one-upped by a twitter troll. Vance is just . . . a total loser.

This links to Jordan Liles: [07-23] No, JD Vance did not say he had sex with couch cushions: "A false online ruor about former U.S. President Donald Trump's running mate, a latex glove and couch cuishions spawned a number of jokes and memes." I must have heard of Snopes (a "fact-checking website," originally set up in 1994 as the Urban Legends Reference Pages) before, but can't ever recall consulting it. It is possibly useful for debunking false rumors, but it also does a nice job of propagating them, and possibly even turning them into an art form. I can see this as scurrilous, but it can also be kind of funny. For instance, this page links to six more stories on Vance:

  • JD Vance had middle-class upbringing in 4-bedroom house in suburban Ohio?
  • JD Vance said women should stay in violent marriages?
  • Trump mistakenly referred to JD Vance as 'JD Wentworth'?
  • JD Vance once called Trump 'America's Hitler'?
  • JD Vance's last name means 'bedbug' in Yiddish?
  • JD Vance says parents should have bigger say in democracy than non-parents.

The links are laid out in a grid, reminding me of those "prove you're not a robot" matrixes, challenging you to pick which ones are true and which are false. I'm not interested in playing, but will note that four sound somewhat familiar, and only one strikes me as implausible.

PS: I also stumbled across this: "When I get that feeling I want sectional healing . . ."

Initial count: 209 links, 10413 words. Updated count [07-25]: 228 links, 11635 words.

Local tags (these can be linked to directly): music.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

Speaking of Which

I'm starting this introduction on Tuesday, already two days late, ignoring for now the new news pouring in, especially from the RNC. Due to my Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll project, I wasn't able to start until Saturday, at which point I started with the long introduction to the Biden section. After that, I scrounged up a few quick links to seemingly important stories. The alleged Trump shooting -- I'm not denying it, but I'm not fully buying it either -- had just happened, so I had to spin off a section on that. Monday the Cannon ruling on the Trump documents case came down, so I had to note that. If I find out that Hamas and Netanyahu agreed to a cease fire deal -- I've heard that, but as I'm writing this I haven't seen any confirmation -- I'll note that too. (But thus far I've been smart to ignore past rumors of impending agreement.)

A couple days ago, still with Biden very much on my mind, I thought I'd begin this introduction with a spur-of-the-moment tweet I posted:

Unsolicited advice to the ruling class: can someone point out to Biden that being president and running are two different full-time jobs. He should pick one, like the one we need someone to focus on and do well, right now. He could set a model we should add to the Constitution.

Looking it up now, I see that it only has 97 views, with 0 replies, forwards, or likes. It seems like views have been steadily declining, although the number of followers (640) is about double from a long plateau about a year ago.

One thing that stimulated my thought was when I saw several folks pushing a constitutional amendment to impose a maximum age limit on presidents. (Search doesn't reveal a lot of examples, but here's one.) I have no time to argue this here, but I've often worried about the accumulation of arbitrary power in the presidency -- especially war-making power, but there are other issues here -- and with in the development of a political personality cult (Reagan is the obvious example, with Trump even more so, but they at least remained aligned with their party, while Clinton and Obama used their office to direct their party to their own personal fortunes, a shift that worked to the detriment of other Democrats).

Banning self-succession (second consecutive terms) wouldn't fix all of the problems with the presidency, but it would help, especially in terms of democracy. I won't go into details here, but there should also be limits on nepotism (spouses, children, possibly more), and major campaign finance reforms. Whether you keep the two-term total limit is optional -- eliminating it may get rid of the often stupid "lame duck" argument. But I also suspect that people will have little appetite for returning a non-incumbent ex-president.

One more point: if presidents can't run again, maybe they'll actually put their political instincts aside and settle into actually doing their jobs. Trump is the obvious worst-case example: the first thing he did after inauguration in 2017 was to file as a candidate for 2020, and he returned to holding campaign rallies a month or two later. Given how temperamental his judgment was, we are probably lucky that he turned out to be so oblivious to actually doing the job, but that's hardly something we can count on saving us again. Even more competent presidents were repeatedly distracted by political duties -- ones they were, as a requirement for selection, more interested in, if not necessarily better at.

At this point, the essential skill sets of campaigners and administrators have diverged so radically that it's almost inconceivable that you could find one person for both jobs. I could imagine a constitutional change where whoever wins the presidency has to appoint someone else (or maybe a troika) to run the executive government, while being personally limited to symbolic public service, like the King of England, or the President of Israel. But the amendment I proposed above should be a much easier sell, especially given the mess we're in now.

Fortunately, we don't actually need the amendment this year. All we need is for Biden to drop out. As I explain below, there are lots of good reasons for him to do so. This is one more, and if he grasped it, would be a principled one.

About 10 PM Tuesday, time to call it quits for this week. I may pick up a few adds while I'm working on the similarly delayed Music Week, but I expect to be extremely busy on deadline day for the Mid-Year Jazz Critics Poll (up to 78 ballots as I write this). No doubt I'll have to do a lot of cross-checking next week to keep from repeating stories. But the big ones, rest assured, will return, pretty much as they are here, so what's below should give you a leg up on everyone else.

Top story threads:

Israel:

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

Israel vs. world opinion:

  • Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: [07-12] We must understand Israel as a settler-colonial state: I'd go a bit deeper and say we can only understand Israel if we start from acknowledging that it is primarily a settler-colonial state. I'm not saying this because I think "settler-colonial state" means we should automatically condemn Israel, and especially not to argue that the only solution is expulsion ("go back where you came from" just won't do here). But identifying it as such puts Israel into a conceptual framework that really helps explain the options and choices that Israeli political leaders made -- many of which do indeed deserve approbation -- as well as providing a framework to see some way of ending the conflict on terms that most people can find agreeable. I would add that among settler-colonial states, Israel is exceptionally frustrated, which is why it has turned into such a cauldron of interminable violence.

  • Marcy Newman: [07-13] The reluctant memoirist exposes the academy: "At a time when Palestine activism and free expression at U.S. universities are under attack, Steven Salaita's new memoir disabuses us of the notion that these universities are anything other than hedge funds with a campus."

  • James North: [07-10] Israel's leading paper says its own army deliberately killed Israelis on October 7. But in the US media: silence: "Israel ordered the 'Hannibal Directive' on October 7 by ordering the killing of captive Israeli soldiers and civilians. But the U.S. media continues to hide the truth."

  • Alice Rothchild: [07-14] The destruction of healthcare in Gaza and the scientific assessment of settler colonial violence: "The Jewish Voice for Peace Health Advisory Council held a distinguished panel of experts that addressed the settler colonial determinants of health in light of the Gaza genocide." Following up on these documents:

  • Philip Weiss: [07-14] Weekly Briefing: The 'NYT' justifies Israeli slaughter of civilians as necessary tactic: "The New York Times says Israel has been 'forced' to massacre Palestinian civilians because Hamas militants hide in bedrooms. The U.S. used such justifications for massacres in Vietnam."

Trump:

Well, this happened:

  • [Vox]: [07-14] Who shot Trump? What we know about the assassination attempt. [PS: This piece has been updated after I wrote the following, as more information was released, such as the identities of the people shot, including the alleged shooter.] "This is what happened at the Butler rally, as we understand it right now." As I understand it, shots were fired during a Trump rally. Trump dropped to the ground. When he appeared again, there was blood on his face. Secret Service surrounded him, and moved him off the platform. The people around him jerked when he did, but afterwards mostly looked confused. He tweeted later that he had been shot, nicked in the ear. (From his head angle at the time of the shot, it must have come from the far side -- not from the crowd, or from the gallery behind him.) Reports are that two people wound up dead -- one the alleged shooter, and another person, still unidentified, and two more people were injured. It's not clear where those people, including the shooter, were, or what the timing of were. One report says the shots came from an "AR-type" gun.

    I'll link to more pieces as I collect them. But knowing only what is in here (and having watched the video provided), my first reaction is that a real assassination attempt like this would be very hard to pull off, but would be very easy to fake (assuming you could imagine that anyone involved would be willing to do so, which with this particular crew isn't inconceivable; still, the risk of faking it and then getting exposed seems like it should be pretty extreme). No need to jump to that conclusion, but I'm pretty sure the "grassy knoll" squad is going to jump all over this story. More Vox pieces are collected in: Donald Trump targeted in assassination attempt.

  • Zack Beauchamp:

  • Constance Grady: [07-15] The pure media savvy of Trump's first pump photo, explained by an expert: "It's his brand now." The interview goes into the making of other iconic photos, as well as Trump's history of seizing on moments like this.

  • Jeet Heer:

  • Murtza Hussain: Will this make Trump more popular? "Assassination attempts targeting populist leaders have had a track record of boosting their popularity."

  • Sarah Jones: [07-15] God's strongman.

  • Ed Kilgore: [07-15] Trump assassination attempt makes 2024 election more bonkers than ever: "But will it cinch a victory for him?" Evidently, "many Republicans are already saying the bullets that nearly killed Donald Trump have clinched his return to the White House."

  • Natasha Lennard: The only kind of "political violence" all U.S. politicians oppose.

  • Eric Levitz:

  • Stephen Prager: [07-16] 'Political violence' is all around us: "Condemning 'political violence' rings hollow coming from politicians who are highly selective in the violence they deplore. We should oppose it consistently."

  • Aja Romano: [07-15] The Trump assassination attempt was a window into America's fractured reality. I'm not sure whether the subhed is a conclusion or just a premise: "The shooting wasn't staged, but conspiratorial thinking has become widespread in our paranoid age." You know, the latter truism doesn't prove "the shooting wasn't staged." It just suggests that we shouldn't jump to that conclusion.

  • Helen Santoro/Lucy Dean Stockton/David Sirota/Joel Warner: Pennsylvania GOP fought a ban on the gun used in Trump shooting.

  • Timothy Messer-Kruse: [07-15] The myth of the magic bullet: He doesn't weigh in on the Trump shooting, but takes on the more general idea, that a single bullet can change history for the better. I rather doubt his assertion that "there would still be a MAGA movement" without Trump, because no matter how much fuel of "white resentment" had accumulated, it still took a spark to set it off, and it's hard to find a leader with Trump's particular mix of ego and ignorance. But he is right when he says, "Trump is not a threat to democracy as much as he is a symbol of its deepening absence."

On Monday, Trump announced his pick for vice president: JD Vance:

  • Zack Beauchamp: [07-15] What J.D. Vance really believes: "The dark worldview of Trump's choice for vice president, explained."

    Vance has said that, had he been vice president in 2020, he would have carried out Trump's scheme for the vice president to overturn the election results. He has fundraised for January 6 rioters. He once called on the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into a Washington Post columnist who penned a critical piece about Trump. After last week's assassination attempt on Trump, he attempted to whitewash his radicalism by blaming the shooting on Democrats' rhetoric about democracy without an iota of evidence.

    This worldview translates into a very aggressive agenda for a second Trump presidency. In a podcast interview, Vance said that Trump should "fire every single mid-level bureaucrat" in the US government and "replace them with our people." If the courts attempt to stop this, Vance says, Trump should simply ignore the law.

    "You stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say the chief justice has made his ruling, now let him enforce it," he declares.

  • Aaron Blake: [07-15] The risk of J.D. Vance: "Trump went with the MAGA pick. But the 2022 election suggests that might not be the right electoral one."

  • Jonathan Chait: [07-15] J.D. Vance joins ticket with man he once called 'America's Hitler': "Apparently he meant it as a compliment."

  • Ben Jacobs: [07-15] J.D. Vance on his MAGA conversion: "Trump's man in Ohio once called him 'America's Hitler,' but there's an explanation."

  • Sarah Jones: [07-15] Hillbilly shapeshifter: "Re-reading J.D. Vance's memoir." This came out earlier this year, but gets an update for the moment.

  • Ed Kilgore: [07-15] J.D. Vance as VP means Trump picks MAGA over 'unity'. What does "unity" even mean? Trump has complete control. He doesn't need to compromise with anyone. One might ask why he would pick a double-crossing weasel, but Trump probably figure he's on top of that game. Maybe Kilgore is just trying to plug the Intelligencer liveblog: So much for 'national unity': RNC live updates. Republicans don't need "unity": they believe they're the only ones who count, so they already are "unity" -- now if they can just get rid of everyone else, they'll be set (and America will be great again, like it was when the other people didn't count).

  • Daniel Larison: [07-15] What will Vance do for Trump's foreign policy? "The Ohio senator's ideology is hard to nail down as he has vacillated between restraint and interventionism."

  • Steve M: [07-15] J.D. Vance probably hates you more than Trump does: "It is clear that Vance is an angry, nasty person whose contempt for the people he doesn't like is bone deep." Also:

    Now that Trump has chosen Vance, I expect Democrats to focus on the mean tweets Vance posted about Trump before he became a Trump fan. I don't see the point -- politicians (and non-politicians) change their minds about people all the time. Kamala Harris said harsh things about Joe Biden during the 2020 campaign. George H.W. Bush attacked Ronald Reagan's economic ideas in the 1980 campaign. I think it's more important for voters to know how much contempt Vance has for everyone who disagrees with him or does things he doesn't like. I have kids, so he hates me. Maybe he hates you too.

  • Veronica Riccobene/Helen Santoro/Joel Warner: J.D. Vance wants police to track people who have abortions.

  • Ross Rosenfeld: The scary message Trump sent by choosing J.D. Vance: "The Ohio senator is a sycophant who will never challenge or question his boss -- not even to defend American democracy."

Of course, the Trump news doesn't end there.

  • Sasha Abramsky: [07-14] A brief history of Trump and violence: "But that can't be allowed to erase the long, ugly history of Trump's dalliance with violence."

  • David Atkins: [07-08] Pay attention to Trump's every cruel and crazy syllable: "All eyes are on President Biden's words, but Trump is getting meaner and increasingly bonkers each day."

    Let's look at just a few recent examples.

    1. Trump wants to make poor migrants fight each other for sport.
    2. Trump wants to ban electric cars because someone in an electric boat might get eaten by a shark.
    3. Donald Trump wants to ban all vaccine mandates in schools, which would include polio, measlesl, etc.
    4. Trump wants to end meaningful elections in the United States.
    5. Trump thinks the end of Roe v Wade was "amazing" and brags that he was "able to kill Roe v. Wade.

  • Elizabeth Austin: [07-13] Trump's Democrats-support-infanticide trope is an infuriating lie: "Republicans like the soon-to-be GOP presidential nominee are mocking every woman who got that horrible call from the obstetrician and made the tragic decision to end a hopeless pregnancy."

  • Christopher Fettweis: [05-15] Trump's big idea: Deploy assassination teams to Mexico: "His plan to kill drug kingpins to solve the American opioid crisis will backfire dramatically."

  • Chris Lehman: [07 -11] Donald Trump's new strategy: act normal: "With the opposition in disarray, Trump and his campaign have begun exhibiting unusual restraint in hopes of expanding his support."

  • Clarence Lusane: [07-12] Who thinks Donald Trump is racist? "Other racists, that's who!"

  • Nicole Narea: [07-15] A right-wing judge just threw out a case against Trump in a brazen abuse of power: "The classified documents case against Trump hits another major setback before the 2024 election." Why?

    In her ruling, Cannon argued that because Smith had not been appointed a special counsel by the president and confirmed by the Senate, his appointment violated the Constitution's Appointments Clause. . . .

    Cannon's ruling, which relies on a stringent reading of the Constitution and represents a brazen break with precedent, has come under heavy criticism from legal scholars. Under her ruling, the appointment of prior special counsels would have also come into question, from Archibald Cox, who investigated the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation, to Robert Mueller, who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election.

    I'm sure there will be more on this next week. Well, for now, this one is worth quoting at length:

    • Steve M.: [07-15] The death of America is steady rot:

      We think we'll lose democracy and the rule of law suddenly if Donald Trump becomes president again. We think the edifice will be destroyed like the Twin Towers on 9/11: the planes hit the buildings, and without hours they collapsed in on themselves.

      But our system is like a house that's rotting room by room. The foundation has cracks. There are termites. The roof leaks. One room after another has become uninhabitable.

      We've lost the federal courts. The would-be murderers of America already have the federal bench they need to sustain the horrible America they want. A second Trump presidency won't really worsen the federal bench -- it will only fix it in place in its current form for several more decades. I'm 65, and I'll never live to see a federal bench that isn't an extremist Republican legislature in robes.

      Through gerrymandering, we lost democracy in many state legislatures years ago. In states like North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Texas, liberals and moderates add up to more than 45% of the electorate and have exactly none of the legislative power, because of gerrymandering. This happened long before Trump and there were no "Death of Democracy" front-page headlines.

      If Trump wins in November, he and the thugs of Project 2025 might take a wrecking ball to what's left of the house. But already several rooms are closed off. It's unsafe to live in them. And even if Trump loses, or wins and doesn't follow through with the worst ideas his backers have proposed, many rooms in the house will continue to rot.

      A lot of this rot can be traced back to Reagan in the 1980s, when a brief majority of Americans put sentiment and emotion over reason and practicality, and ceded power to the people Kurt Anderson called Evil Geniuses (subtitle: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History), and for that matter to the conspiracies -- to use a word we've systematically been trained to abjure -- of the 1970s that many others have written about (off the top of my head: Rick Perlstein, Jane Mayer, Max Blumenthal, Kim Phillips-Fein, Laura Kalman, Nancy McLean, Jeff Madrick). For sure, part of the blame lies with Democrats, like Carter and Clinton, who thought they could beat the Republicans at their own game, and some to with Democrats like Obama and Biden, who chose to play along rather than rouse the people to defend their rights against relentless Republican assault.

      M's point is absolutely right. Bad choices often take years, sometimes decades, to manifest themselves. To cite two examples where the elapsed time was too short to cloud causality, the distance from Reagan's deregulation of the S&L industry to its collapse was 6-8 years. The distance from Clinton's repeal of Carter-Glass and the deregulation of derivatives -- changes mostly championed by Republicans like Phil Gramm, but Clinton signed off on them -- was 8-10 years. Longer, more insidious time frames are even more common. I recall George Brockway tracing the financial madness circa 2000 back to an obscure banking law Republicans passed after their fluke congressional win in 1946 -- the same one that gave us Taft-Hartley, which had little effect on unionized auto, aircraft, steel, etc., workers through the 1960s but led to their collapse from the 1980s on. Similarly, there are blunders from the early Cold War that still haunt us (like the overthrow of Iran in 1953).

      We've been systematically starved of democracy for decades now: ever since campaigns became media circuses, increasingly in thrall to the sponsor class. Maybe now that the strangulation has become so obvious -- the only choice we've been allowed is between the two least popular, and quite arguably the two least competent, politicians in America -- we'll finally realize our need to struggle to breathe free. Or maybe we'll just fucking die. After all, we're about 90% buried already.

. . . And other Republicans:

  • Sasha Abramsky: [07-02] Will Arizona be MAGA's last stand? "Trump needs the state's votes to win. But after its highest court revived an 1864 law that bans abortions, all bets are off."

  • Hassan Ali Kanu: [07-11] No, Trump and GOP have not 'softened' on abortion, women's rights: "The language change in their platforms is nakedly dishonest bait and switch."

  • Sarah Jones: [07-14] The authoritarian plot: "At the National Conservatism conference, Republicans mix with racists ranting about 'post-white America.'"

  • Steve M: I have a couple more of his posts elsewhere, but let's go to town here:

    • [07-13] First thoughts on the shooting (updated): Starts with his own prediction tweet: "Every rank-and-file Republican voter believes this was an assassination attempt ordered by President Biden. Trump will soon start pouring gasoline on the flames by stating this as if it's fact." Update shows it's happening even ahead of Trump's provocation. He does have them well trained.

    • [07-13] Project 2025: the gaslighting is well underway.

    • [07-13] Fear the all-powerful left! "The fever dreams of the propaganda-addled crazies at the Heritage Foundation are hilarious."

    • [07-12] Are Biden's poll numbers impervious to bad news, like Trump's? I think the upshot here is that while people may not know what (or whom) to believe, they've become so wary of being lied to that they reject any news, probably from any source, leaving them impervious to change. If you're a journalist/pundit, you may think it's your job to adjust to new facts, but if you're not, it's just fucking noise, almost all of which can be discounted.

    • [07-11] New York Times editorial: Trump is bad -- but the Republican Party is awesome! That editorial was titled Trump is not fit to lead.

      Not a single Democrat is cited in this editorial. I understand that that's the point -- the ed board members, if you asked them about this, would say, "We're making the point that even Trump's fellow Republicans know he's unfit" (though no Republican in good standing dares to say that). But this is also a sign that the Times ed board agrees with the Republican Party's decades-long campaign to "other" Democrats. Our political culture accepts the GOP's assertion that Democrats aren't really Americans.

    • [07-10] Dear Democrats: You know people can hear you, right? (updated):

      It's been thirteen days since the June 27 debate. On each of those thirteen days, the top news story in America -- not just in the monomaniacal New York Times, but everywhere -- has been "Christ, That Joe Biden Is Really, Really Old. He Can't Possibly Win. He Has to Step Aside. Has He Done It Yet?" Other stories, including stories that could have been very damaging to Donald Trump, were fully or partly buried. And still Democrats can't muscle Biden out, persuade him to leave the race, or stop talking about it and get behind him. . . .

      I think Democrats believe it's okay for this to play out in public for two weeks -- two weeks of bad headlines for the man who now seems certain to be the nominee -- because of a fundamental misunderstanding of politics that hurts them in other areas as well. They think this is fine because they think voters pay attention to politics only in the last couple of months before an election. That's the reason most Democrats don't bother with messaging unless it's election season, while Republicans engage in messaging every day of every year.

      I'm not personally super bothered by the protracted process, but clearly this has given Trump and the Republicans a whole month of big PR wins, from the June 27 debate all the way through the end of the RNC, especially as, in response to the shooting incident, Democrats have wisely decided to pull their ads, and keep their powder dry. But if the election was next week, this would have been a total disaster for the Democracy. (Maybe not for the small-d concept, but that's what they called the Party back in Jackson's day, and that's what Will Rogers meant when he said he wasn't a member of an organized political party: he was a democrat.) But at some point soon-ish, they really have to get the act together and turn this mess around. I don't see how they can do that without first jettisoning Biden, who is the indelible personification of a much greater crisis in democratic faith.

    • [07-09] The press doesn't have a "bias toward coherence" -- it has a bias toward Republicans.

  • Shawn Musgrave: Trump's camp says it has nothing to do with Project 2025 manifesto -- aside from writing it.

  • Timothy Noah: The GOP platform perfectly reflects the lunacy of Trump's party: "I read it so you don't have to: It's an unconditional surrender to the cult of Trump, and its plan to reduce inflation is laughable."

  • Rick Perlstein: [07-10] Project 2025 . . . and 1921, and 1973, and 1981: "Terrifying blueprints for the next Republican presidency are a quadrennial tradition." Perlstein points out that aside from all the truly evil stuff you've possibly read about elsewhere, there is also a lot of confusion and in-fighting going on. For example:

    The section about Russia in the State Department chapter -- the author is an old hand of the High Reaganite wing of the Republican foreign-policy guild; a "globalist," if you will -- emphasizes that the Russia-Ukraine conflict "starkly divides conservatives," with one faction arguing for the "presence of NATO and U.S. troops if necessary," while the other "denies that U.S. Ukrainian support is in the national security interest of America at all."

    This misunderstanding is important. The silence, so far, on those parts, indicts us. These are great, big, blinking red "LOOK AT ME" advertisements of vulnerabilities within the conservative coalition. Wedge issues. Opportunities to split Republicans at their most vulnerable joints, much as when Richard Nixon cynically expanded affirmative action requirements for federal building projects, in order to seed resentment between blue-collar building trades Democrats and Black Democrats.

    And yes, there is plenty of blunt insanity, too. But, bottom line, this is a complicated document. "Conservatives in Disarray" is precisely the opposite message from that conveyed by all the coverage of Project 2025. But it is an important component of this complexity, and why this text should be picked apart, not panicked over, and studied both for the catastrophes it portends and the potential it provides.

  • Andrew Prokop: [07-13] Project 2025: The myths and the facts: "The sweeping conservative plan for Trump's second term is very real. Here's what it actually says."

  • Prem Thakker: GOP platform doesn't mention the word "climate" once -- even after hottest year on record.

Biden

Evidently Biden's age was already an issue in 2008, when Barack Obama picked him for Vice President. The thinking was that his age would balance off Obama's youth, that the position would cap off an already long and distinguished political career, and that he'd be too old to mount a serious run in 2016, leaving the field open for Hillary Clinton.

But when Clinton lost to Donald Trump -- let that sink in for a moment, folks -- Biden convinced himself that he could have done better, and set out to prove it in 2020. And he was a flop, his age dulling the charisma he never really had in the first place, but with Bernie Sanders a year older age wasn't so much an issue, and with Sanders winning, Biden became the only credible option to stop him, and the donor wing of the Democratic Party were desperate to do that.

After derailing Sanders, defeating Trump should have been the easy part, but somehow Biden managed to make even that look hard fraught. He won, but not decisively enough to lead Congress, or to squelch Trump's big lie about a rigged/stolen election. Trump has, if anything, loomed larger in American politics than Biden, even as president, could do. While that is testimony to several alarming tendencies in public opinion -- and media that both panders to and cashes in on controversy -- one cannot help but suspect that Biden's age is part of the problem.

At any rate, it's the part that people focus on once they realize that there is a problem that it could plausibly explain. They do that because it's tangible, something they have lots of experience with or at least observing. It's also something you can base expectations on, because it's inevitably progressive: if age seems to be a problem now, you can only expect it to get worse. Many Democrats, especially one who have closely bound their careers to Biden, have worked hard to hide evidence and deflect discussion of Biden's age -- even from Biden himself. But once you see it, as most people did in his June 27 debate with Trump, it's hard to revert to denialism. It's like the zit you never noticed, then found you can't avert your eyes from. Pretty soon you wind up with the Emperor's New Clothes.

As the following links will show, Democrats are divided: Biden and his closest allies still think that if they hold firm, he can ride the story cycle out, and by November refocus the campaign on beating back the immense threat of a Trump win; many others are skeptical and/or worried sick; a few actually see that replacing Biden with a younger, more dynamic, and hopefully much sharper candidate -- Harris seems to fill that bill, and is well-placed to step in, but there could be dozens of good options -- opens up an opportunity to not just eke out a win in November but deliver a crushing blow to Trump and his crony fascists.

As I've probably made clear over the last couple weeks, I'm skeptical, but also in the latter camp. I'm not really capable of the sort of despair that sees Biden, even as decrepit as he obviously is, losing to Trump -- despair in the future tense, as anticipation of a horrible turn of events, something very different from the sickening feeling when such events happen (as I remember all too well from November 2016). That part is just faith, still intact even if waiting to be shattered.

But my skepticism takes many forms. The one I'm most certain of is that if Biden remains in the race, he will commit a fair number of age-related gaffes and blunders, maybe including what wouldn't be his first fall, and that every time he does, his age will return as the paramount media obsession, shifting attention from the real and present threat of Trump. I don't know how many votes that will cost Biden, but it is a risk, and also a major opportunity cost. We need Democrats to win not just to stop Trump and shore up the somewhat liberal wing of the militarist oligarchy that Biden aligns with, but to actually address real problems, helping an overwhelming majority of Americans through very troubling times.

Another form of skepticism is suggested by my rather sour turn of phrase in that last line. I gravitated toward the new left in the late 1960s, and since then I've been as acutely critical of the Democratic Party as I've been of the Republicans, even as I've most often voted for Democrats, figuring them to be not just lesser evils but occasionally good for modest reforms. Either is reason enough to vote Democratic. (It's not like your vote is good for much else.) But if you're on the left (or anywhere else excluded from access to power), you might also consider voting a tactical choice: you're going to spend the next four years in opposition anyway, but which issues would you rather protest against? Biden, or any other Democrat with a chance, will leave you plenty to argue against.

One thing I can say about age is that it mellows you out. My critical analysis is as radical (in the sense I originally got from a 1966 book titled The New Radicals) as ever, but my appetite for conflict has really dimmed, and I'm willing to appreciate almost any tad of ameliorative reform. I chalk much of my personal change up to aging, and I suspect similar things happen to most people, including politicians like Biden. As I've noticed, Biden is the only president in my lifetime who turned out better than I expected (well, until Gaza, which is hard to excuse). Part of that is that he came in with really low expectations. Part of it may be that he's old enough to remember the pre-Carter, pre-Reagan, pre-Clinton Democrats -- even though he seemed totally simpatico with them, you know how old people lose recent memories before they lose formative ones? There's no one else like him in the Democratic Party these days. (Sanders is old enough, but never was that kind of Democrat. He was much better, which is why he remains so much sharper.) I do worry that whoever replaces Biden will be just another neoliberal shill. But even where Biden's heart is in the right place -- and, let's face it, it isn't always -- he's lost his ability to persuade, to lead, and to listen.

So my considered view is that we need to move him out, and start working on viable future. Even if Biden sticks and wins -- and I'll vote for him, despite thinking he really belongs in a Hague Court -- he's only going to get older, more decrepit, less credible, more embarrassing, and less effective as he struggles to hang on past his 86th birthday. And if he dies, resigns, or has to be removed, his replacement will enter with a much reduced mandate. Dump him now, elect his replacement, elect a Congress that's willing to do things, and the next four years will start looking up.

I guess that's more of an editorial than an introduction. I wrote it before collecting the following links:

  • Intelligencer: [07-09] Biden resistance appears to be waning in Congress: For a brief period, this publication seemed convinced that Biden is persevering in his fight to stay atop the Democratic Party ticket.

  • Sasha Abramsky: [07-10] An open letter to the president of the United States: "There are worse things in life than a comfortable retirement."

  • Michael Arria: [07-09] Biden was already a vulnerable candidate because of the genocide: "Biden was already plummeting in the polls before his disastrous presidential debate with Trump. The reason was his ongoing complicity in the Gaza genocide and the Uncommitted movement."

  • David Atkins: [07-11] I'm a DNC member and a public opinion professional. It's highly unlikely Biden can win: "Only one person can build on the administration's accomplishments, have unfettered access to funds and ballot lines, and do so without wasting precious time. Her name is Kamala Harris." Another long-time, major Biden apologist breaks ranks.

  • Rachel Bade/Eugene Daniels/Ryan Lizza: [07-11] Playbook: What Obama and Pelosi are doing about Biden. Report here is that George Clooney showed his op-ed to Obama before he ran it, and did not receive any objection. "Obama's team declined to comment." Pelosi seems to be maneuvering behind the scenes, but "out of respect for Biden and national security writ large" thought he should hang on through the NATO summit. Now (my thinking here), with the shooting, it would make sense to wait until after the RNC shuts down.

  • Joseph Contreras: [07-06] What Joe Biden could learn from Nelson Mandela about knowing when to quit: "Unlike the beleaguered U.S. president, the South African leader did not want to be an 81-year-old head of state and served only one term."

  • Keren Landman: [07-11] The controversy over Biden and Parkin's disease, explained.

  • Eric Levitz:

  • Andrew Prokop:

    • [07-09] Is it undemocratic to replace Biden on the ticket? "Biden says the primary voters picked him. Is there more to democracy than that?" What kind of democracy was that? Practically nobody ran against Biden in 2024 because the campaign finance system lets donors pick who can run, and they didn't dare cross Biden -- especially after Democrats canceled Iowa and New Hampshire, which historically have been wide open and have a history of upsets, and which Biden lost badly in 2020, in favor of running South Carolina first, the sourc of Biden's breakthrough win in 2020.

    • [07-11] What Biden's news conference did, and didn't, clear up: "The presser went fine. But the Democratic defections continued."

    • [07-14] Will Trump's shooting change everything? Or surprisingly little? "Two theories on the political impact of the Trump assassination attempt." The Trump campaign will try to spin this in to a big deal, blaming it all on the left and championing Trump as a life-risking fighter for true Americans, who want nothing more than to make their beleaguered nation great again. But it doesn't change the issues, or stakes, one iota.

    • [07-15] Did Trump's shooting save Biden's nomination? "Democratic defections have slowed, but Biden isn't out of the woods yet." Perhaps I should re-read this more carefully, but on first scan, absolutely nothing in this piece makes any sense to me.

  • Kaleigh Rogers: [07-12] Americans were worried about Biden's age long before the debate. Background from the poll-watchers at 538, who also produced:

  • Luke Savage: [07-12] The Biden problem has been years in the making: "As concerns mount over Biden, the Democratic Party reminds us this isn't a democracy."

  • Bill Scher:

    • [07-05] I've defended Biden for years. Now, I'm asking him to withdraw: "After waiting too long to reassure the public of his mental fitness, the president is sinking in the polls with little hope for recovery. But he can resign with grace and make history." Scher has long struck me as the most diehard Biden apologist in the Washington punditocracy, and indeed he was one of the few to have reserved hope after the debate (see: A wasted opportunity for Biden (but still time for redemption)). So this appears as a significant retreat. And he's followed with:

    • [07-09] How Kamala can win (without mini-primary madness).

    • [07-12] Wilson didn't resign. The world suffered. Biden need not repeat that mistake: "Wilson hid an incapacitating stroke from the public and fatally compromised his mission to establish a functional League of Nations. Once again, global peace and democracy precariously rely on a president reluctant to face a personal health crisis." Well, that's another whole can of worms, and while it's always fun to argue about Wilson, his case is really not relevant here. I will say that Wilson was a very complex but tragically flawed character, often invoked in arguments that reduce him to caricature. My own argument is that his failure to sell Americans on the League of Nations -- which was evident before his stroke took him out of action -- had no real bearing on the coming of WWII, but his failures at Versailles did (as Britain and France cast aside his anti-imperialism and insisted on punitive reparations over his better sense).

  • Jeffrey St. Clair:

    • [07-12] Running on empty: Very good coverage on Hurricane Beryl here, but this is mostly on Biden, starting with a Chris Hayes quote: "Biden is a decent man who has done nothing wrong. He has not got caught in a scandal -- he's just aging." To which St. Clair responds: "The real scandal is that liberals don't see arming a genocide as a scandal." I'm inclined to compartmentalize and see opposing Netanyahu's genocide in Gaza and opposing Trump in America as both critically important but separable matters, and I'm even willing to cut Biden some slack, as he is a potential solution to both -- although in the latter he's mostly proven hapless, in the former, which is something he could do something about on his own, he's drifted into criminal negligence. But clearly Hayes misspoke, and he, at least, should have known better. We've seen many attempts to use flattery to tempt Biden to quit (e.g., George Clooney, Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, David Remnick, Matthew Yglesias), but it hasn't worked, and it's hard to see why it would. This seems more like the time for brutal honesty. If you must, sugar-coat it as tough love, but save the huzzahs for after he does "the right thing."

    • [07-15] Big Boy Biden in his own words: He starts by quoting some of the praised heaped on Biden for his press conference performance, like Andrew Bates: "To answer the question on everyone's minds: No, Joe Biden does not have a doctorate in foreign affairs. He's just that fucking good." That leaves St. Clair wondering:

      After hearing these encomia, I had to check myself. This is Joe Biden they're talking about, right? The same Joe Biden who voted for the Iraq War, the most disastrous foreign policy debacle in US history? The same Joe Biden who backed the overthrow of Qaddafi, turning Libya into an anarchic war zone dominated by slave trading gangs? The same Joe Biden who provoked and now refuses to seek an end to a bloody, stalemated war in Ukraine? The same Joe Biden who has continued Trump's Cuban embargo and tariffs on China? The same Biden who has spent the last 3.5 years pandering to the bone-sawing Saudi regime he called a "pariah" state during his 2020 campaign? The same Biden who refused to renegotiate a nuclear agreement with Iran? The same Biden who has armed a genocide in Gaza that may end up claiming over 200,000 Palestinian lives? The same Biden who could barely string together two complete sentences a couple of weeks ago?

      Adding, "An unlikely transformation, IMHO." So then he reads the White House transcript, and quotes it liberally, although his best line is in his introduction: "Biden's answers reminded me of some of Samuel Beckett's later works exploring the thought patterns of a decaying mind."

  • Alexander Stille: We learned everything we needed to know about Biden in 1988: "His stubborn refusal to heed wise advice, and bottomless belief in his own greatness, were on display in his first campaign for president."

  • Michael Tomasky: [07-12] Democrats: "He was better than the debate" is not remotely good enough: "In Trump world, they're thinking landslide. Democrats need to act and talk Biden into stepping aside, and soon."

  • p>Cenk Uygur: [07-11] Biden will not be the nominee: "The Young Turks host has long predicted Biden's campaign would implode. He explains why it wasn't obvious to everyone, and predicts what will happen next." Nathan J Robinson interviews him.

And other Democrats:

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Economic matters:

Ukraine War and Russia:

America's empire and the world:

Other stories:

Zack Beauchamp: [07-10] What the world can learn from Indian liberalism: "The intellectual Pratap Bhanu Mehta explains how liberalism grew out of 3,000 years of Indian history."

Roger Kerson: [07-09] You think this year's presidential conventions will be crazy? 1924's fights over the Ku Klux Klan were wilder.

Katie Miles: [07-08] "She usually won." Remembering Jane McAlevey, 1964-2024. Also:

Initial count: 146 links, 9355 words. Updated count [07-16]: 193 links, 9436 words.

Local tags (these can be linked to directly): Biden.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Monday, July 8, 2024

Speaking of Which

Posting this a day late, only partly because I tried slipping in the Afterthoughts post. Late Monday night, and I'm dead tired, pretty sure I didn't complete my rounds, but at this point if I fail to post I'll just waste another day. Expect Music Week on Tuesday, plus some late additions here (and maybe on the Sunday-dated but Monday-posted Afterthoughts as well). On the other hand, my mid-year jazz critics poll needs some work too, and should probably be considered a more urgent priority.

Nice to see elections leaning left in UK, France, and Iran. That should probably be a bigger story.

A few more extras below, but the big one is the comment on Matthew Yglesias, reiterating the case that Democrats need to replace Biden. That's also the subject of a long addition to last week's Afterthoughts.

In Tuesday's Music Week, written after this post but before I'm adding this section, I mentioned a couple Biden-related pieces that appeared after closing this:

None of this even mentions the seemingly important (if true) Ben Jacobs: [07-09] How the Democratic movement to dump Biden went bust. Or Nia Prater: [07-09] Why is the Squad backing Biden so forcefully? As Yglesias explained in his piece, the calculation for Democratic politicians is different than the one for journalists and pundits. New York Magazine, which published a number of pieces extremely critical of Biden (probably all op. cit. through my links above) has gotten so into circling the wagons, they've gone into live blog mode: Biden resistance appears to be waning in Congress. On the other hand, Eric Levitz: [07-09] is back with another piece: The arguments for Biden 2024 keep getting worse.

I'll probably return to those next week, but they relate to recent chatter below.

Late adds from ex-twitter:

  • Zachary D Carter: [07-09] Ths issue is Biden's age, and he gets older every day. It's not a scandal you can wait out until another media cycle. It will be a dominant campaign issue every day of the week until November. [This was in response to:]

    • Clara Jeffery: [07-09] What happens when the next press conference or interview goes awry. Or the barrage of battering polls keeps growing? Or swing district Dems openly panic?

      There is no "put it behind us" moment that the Biden camp hopes for/hopes to persuade Dems there is.

  • Eric Levitz: [07-09] Running Biden at this point means taking on his liabilities AND Harris's without enjoying any of the benefits of putting her at the top of the ticket (e.g. having a nominee who is much younger and more eloquent than the GOP's). [This was in response to:]

    • Marc Caputo: Trump stepping up criticisms of Harris, saying Biden chose her as an "insurance policy" because she's such a bad replacement that Biden would never be forced to step down.

  • Aaron Rupar: [07-08] [Reply to a 4:19 clip of "Jon Stewart reacts to Joe Biden's defiance over calls to step aside" -- worth watching, less for the plan, which isn't how it's going to work, than but the jokes, which hit their targets, thus demonstrating that they are real.] Stewart ignores that:

    1. There was a whole ass Democratic primary election
    2. Kamala Harris is the VP and the only Biden alternative that makes sense
    3. A thunderdome convention would do anything but "unify" the party

    I'm glad he had a chance to vent though

    [The primary was a sham, where nobody but Biden had a chance, because no one else had the money to run. Replacement could be anyone the money people agree on, but Harris is the easy pick. And the Party will unify behind virtually anyone, as Biden has already proved. Stewart ends with a clip where Biden is asked if any other Democrats could beat Trump, and his reply is "about fifty of them."]

  • Ian Millhiser: [09-10] If you're concerned that the press is paying too much attention to Joe Biden's age, and not enough to Donald Trump's unfitness for the job of president, I know one very simple thing that Biden could do that would take his age off the table in the November election.

  • Zachary D Carter: [07-12] Every Biden appearance from now until November will be an evaluation of his acuity. Even if he does ok, he's trapped in a losing issue for the campaign, the same way talking about abortion hurts Trump regardless of where he positions himself. Hard to see how he flips the polls.

  • Rick Perlstein: [07-12] So many of his statements end with him trailing off, exasperated, with something like "never mind"--these placeholders he sticks in when his brain can't summon up further thought. I'm not even suggesting something clinical. I can only say it comes off SOUNDING incapacitated.

Nathan J Robinson tweeted: "Wild to me that people like Matt Yglesias and the Pod Save America guys are now more publicly critical of Biden than the Squad." Jacob Shell pointed out, as Yglesias did in his post: "It's professionally cheap for a pundit and professional expensive for a politician." But it's not just that: Biden's replacement is going to be hand-picked by a cabal of moneyed insiders, then forced on a convention of delegates pre-selected for their loyalty. That person, who may well be Harris, will re-energize the party, but also will consolidate centrist control, and by winning (especially if winning decisively) will make it harder for the left to compete in 2028. The Squad represent very safe Democratic seats. If Biden wins, he will owe them, and if he loses, they will survive and be better positioned to rescue the Party moving forward. I'm not saying they're putting cynical self-interest ahead of the Party any more than any other politician -- if you're in a swing district, dumping Biden may simply be a matter of survival. But not everyone's in the same boat, with the same options. And they do have one point that is absolutely correct: we need to fight Trump, not among ourselves. If I thought the Biden thing would blow over, I'd happily join them. But I really don't see it blowing over, so the only realistic option is for Biden to drop out, and let someone who's up to the task take over.

By the way, a lot of really dumb comments attached to Robinson's tweet, especially by people trying to factor Israel in (e.g., "The Squad can't risk Kamala becoming president because of her husband's ties to Israel"). Lots could be said about this, but I'll leave it at this shows a remarkable ability to compartmentalize issues and political choices, especially given how centrist Dems collaborated with AIPAC to exterminate the Squad.

Initial count: 139 links, 7096 words. Updated count [07-11]: 163 links, 9377 words. -->

Local tags (these can be linked to directly): on music.

Top story threads:

Israel:

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

  • Nicholas Kristof: [07-03] How Biden has gotten in the way of fighting starvation in Gaza.

  • Blaise Malley: [07-03] By the numbers: US Gaza pier prject appears sunk.

  • Robert A Pape: [06-21] Hamas is winning: He's some kind of counterterrorism guru, with books like Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005), and Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It (2010), following earlier tomes like Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, which was all the rage when it came out (1996). My wife wants me to listen to 11 minutes of his interview by Doug Henwood, but so far all I've found is this, with a link to an hour-long podcast that's supposed to be "wherever podcasts are" (like here?. I haven't read the article either, because it's paywalled behind a publication site that publishes crap like this:

    Pape's article title (and for that matter his book titles) suggest he has a very naive, very addled concept of winning. Granted, I'm starting from the default position that nobody can ever win at war, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves, most likely by failing to recognize most of the costs one will eventually have to pay. Pape may well agree with much of this -- he certainly understands that Israel's collective punishment of Gaza is raising more opposition, and more desperate opposition, than they're able to kill off. It's not just that the violence could -- and sooner or later probably will -- rebound against Israel. It's just peculiar to think of either Israel's immediate offensive gains or its likely eventual denouement as winning for everyone.

    And especially for Hamas, which I'm inclined to believe -- admittedly with little evidence to back me up -- is no longer a real force, just a spectre conjured up by Israel as an excuse to continue genocide. I'm not saying that when Israel sends troops into some enclave in Gaza, they're not going to get fire returned. Just not much, and not from a coherent military or political force. Admittedly, I don't have much data to go on, so Pape might be helpful in that regard. On the other hand, how can he know much more than what Israel tells him? And why should he or we believe any of that?

  • Brett Wilkins: [07-04] Senior Israeli lawmaker suggests nuclear attack on Iran: Avigdor Liberman, the guy who's not in Netanyahu's coalition because it isn't far-right enough for him. (Actually, it's probably just because he hates Netanyahu. While he has no other redeeming qualities, who can't sympathize with him on that?) Still, he's basically saying that the problem with Israel is that the government isn't stark-raving bonkers enough.

  • Sharon Zhang: [06-28] Biden releasing part of bombs shipment to Israel that was paused over Rafah raid: "The administration appears to have totally thrown away its 'red line' on Rafah, two months after the invasion."

Israel vs. world opinion:

  • Mohammad Jehad Ahmad: [07-07] Silenced at school: NYC public schools chancellor suppresses Palestinian voices: "New York City Public Schools has been suppressing Palestinian narratives and activism. NYC Educators for Palestine has attempted to meet with Chancellor David Banks for months, but he keeps dodging our meeting."

  • Akbar Shahid Ahmed: [07-02] 12 Biden administration reseignees blast 'intransigent' Gaza policy: "Joe Biden 'has prioritized politics over just and fair policymaking' on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, former government officials argued in their first joint statement since quitting."

  • Michael Arria: [07-04] The Shift: School's out, but attacks on student protesters continue.

  • Muhannad Ayyash: [07-06] A hollow Palestinian state: "Spain, Ireland, and Norway recently made headlines for recognizing the State of Palestine. But the only effective policy for any state recognizing Palestine is also the diplomatic and economic isolation of the Israeli state. There is no other way." I would phrase this somewhat differently. There is no legitimate and/or sovereign Palestinian state to recognize, so it's an empty gesture -- admittedly, one that disrespects Israel, and may be worth doing just for that, but is insufficient to effect any change in Israel, which after all is the only place change can meaningfully occur.

  • Helena Cobban:

  • Ayça Çubukçu: [05-01] Many speak for Palestine: "The solidarity movement doesn't hav e a single leader -- and doesn't need one."

  • Joseph Levine: [07-06] If you support Israel in the middle of a genocide, you're an awful person. I don't agree with this, but that's because I recognize that many basically good people subscribe to bad political opinions, mostly because they are misinformed and/or habitually focus on the wrong things (which makes them easily misled). I might even go so far as to say that there are no bad people: only people who believe bad things, often for bad reasons (like to dominate and demean other people). But it's almost always a mistake to reify bad politics into bad people -- only making sense when the politics totally consumes the person. This article led me to an older one worth noting:

    • Randa Abdel-Fattah: [2023-12-27] On Zionist feelings: "The feelings and fragility of Zionists are used as a rhetorical shield to deflect from the reality of Palestinian genocide. I refuse to provide reassurances to placate and soothe Zionist political anxieties." I'm more indulgent of Zionist feelings than most critics of Israel, and I have my reasons, but I also understand this viewpoint. Starts with a quote from Edward Said: "Since when does a militarily occupied people have the responsibility for a peace movement?" Since the more instinctive war movement has repeatedly failed against a massively more powerful oppressor? Fighting back, understandable and even inevitable, reduces you to their level, not that they don't respond by sinking even lower. A peace movement, on the other hand, gains moral high ground, and challenges them to do better. Admittedly, Israel has never taken that challenge. All they do is designed to provoke violence, because that's the level they want to fight on. And, to circle back around, those who want that don't just have bad politics but are fairly seen as bad people.

  • Mitchell Plitnick: [07-05] Liberal Zionists answer the Gaza genocide by appealing for 'nuance': "Liberal Zionists are trying to rehabilitate Israel's image among young U.S. Jews after the Gaza genocide by appealing for 'nuance' and sending them to indoctrination camps. But these attempts ring more hollow than ever." Hard to scan for something as elusive as "nuance" in an article like this. As near as I can tell, the subjects here (Liberal Zionists in America) insist on being taken as fundamentally decent liberals, while excusing their distinctly illiberal views of anyone critical of Israel, mostly by treating "Arab nationalism" and "Islamic fundamentalism" every bit as rigidly as their opponents generalize about Zionism and Colonialism. Of course, they're right that their thought can be more nuanced than others appreciate, but the same is true for the others, who they reject with blanket generalizations -- like the syllogism that: Hamas is evil and can only be stopped with death; Hamas is an intrinsic tendency for Palestinians; therefore we will only be safe when all Palestinians are killed. That, in a nutshell, is current Israeli policy. Adding "nuance" may help obscure the issue, but won't change it.

    Plitnick, along with Marc Lamont Hill, is co-author of the book Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics (2022), which goes deep into why many good people on the left in America have a blind spot for Israel. I don't know whether this addresses the second group of people, those who started with left/liberal sympathies but snapped hard to the right, often triggered by some crisis over Israel. The neocons, who rose to power under Clinton and GW Bush, provide some prime examples, but there are many more.

  • Richard Rubenstein: [07-02] Israel in Gaza: The Jewish break with Zionism: or, "Zionism as ethnic chauvinism."

  • Barnett R Rubin: [01-04] False Messiahs: "How Zionism's dreams of liberation became entangled with colonialism."

  • Philip Weiss: [07-07] Weekly Briefing: Normalizing genocide. The article itself briefly cites lots of other articles I've already cited. "Genocide" is such a hard, definitive term, so the idea is to break it up into smaller, softer, more ambiguous acts, spread out over time to lessen the shock, an aid to denial for those so inclined. But making it all seem normal is going to be a tall order. This article elicited a comment worth noting:

    The psychology of denial is important to understand: Jews tend to identify with Israel the way people identify with their families, says Joseph Levine. Well, many, many people eventually come to the realization that their father was an abusive drunk, their mother was manic-depressive and their siblings bullied them but they stuck around because admitting to themselves the real situation is just too painful -- I think that's the situation we're dealing with re Israel.

  • Omar Zahzah: [07-07] Why Big Tech's control of social media cannot stop anti-colonial resistance.

Election notes:

Joe Biden (post-debate):

  • Sasha Abramsky: [07-03] Running Biden against Trump is just plain irresponsible: "If American democracy is on the line, as Democrats have rightly insisted, why nominate someone who has trouble keeping up with his opponent." Or how about this: why nominate someone who is living proof that democracy is already lost?

  • Zachary D Carter: [06-10] Inflation is not destroying Joe Biden; "But something is!" Pre-debate piece I've been meaning to mention, but re-read it given what you know now.

  • Jonathan Chait:

    • [07-06] Biden's norm-shattering response to the post-debate crisis: "The problems are ethical, not just political." Chait cites two examples that while "not illegal" he finds ethically troubling: bringing convicted felon son Hunter in as one of his close family advisers (a circling of the family wagons that reminds Chait of Trump), and Biden's unwillingness to submit to cognitive screening. The thing is, you not only have to consider the literal merits, but how they will be spun, in a political media environment that quite frankly is not inclined to favor Biden.

    • [07-08] The Democrats who care more about their careers than beating Trump: "Biden bets his party doesn't have the guts to confront him." As long as you're talking politicians, that's probably a good bet, at least at first. But the people who decide who runs and who cannot are the big donors, and they'll still have careers either way. Politicians may be waiting for their signal. When they do, expect all the tails to wag.

  • George Clooney: [07-10] I love Joe Biden. But we need a new nominee. This matters, both as personal observation from someone who has access very few of us can match, and as the author is not a "low cost" pundit but a high value donor -- one of the people I often claim are actually pulling the strings. Also see the letters, at least the first one (another close witness). The third (terrified Harris will lose) and the fourth (he's just an actor, so who cares?) not so much.

  • Nate Cohn: [07-03] The debate hurt Biden, but the real shift has been happening for years. There's also this interview with Cohn:

    • Isaac Chotiner: [07-04] Nate Cohn explains how bad the latest polling is for Joe Biden. This is in in a nutshell:

      Joe Biden is a badly wounded candidate whom voters dislike, and who voters think isn't capable of handling the Presidency. And while Donald Trump isn't a political juggernaut by any stretch, and is maybe every bit as weak as he was four years ago, at least at the moment, Joe Biden does not have the broad appeal necessary to take advantage of it.

  • Matthew Cooper: [07-05] If Biden quits the race, he should resign the presidency: "Being a lame duck for seven months would be far worse for him -- and us -- than leaving office and propelling Vice President Harris to the Oval Office." Sorry, but this is really stupid. Running for president and being president are two very different things, and really demand different skill sets (not that there's any way we can fix that). Running for president demands that be able to engage with public and press, being articulate and decisive in difficult circumstances, every day between now and November. You'll need to convince voters that you will serve them, and will be able to continue to serve, clearly and coherently, for another four years. Nobody believes that Biden can or even should do that. That's a tall order, maybe even an impossible one, for anyone. Even in his prime, Biden never had those skills. He only got elected thanks to a series of fluke circumstances: first as the least objectionable compromise to stop Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination, and then as the only alternative to Trump. And while it may have seemed plausible that he could repeat given similar circumstances -- above all, a rematch with Trump -- some critical elements have changed beyond repair (like Biden having to own his own record, battered as he's been by four years of relentless Republican villification, with his own skills clearly diminished in his 80s).

    On the other hand, what's so hard about finishing his term? As president, he needs to attend a few meetings, ask questions, sign orders he has staff to prepare, do the occasional meet and greet. He doesn't have to give speeches or press conferences. He doesn't have to fly overseas. If, as reported, his sweet spot is 10-to-4, why can't that be his work day? And if he ever does have to answer that 3AM call to start WWIII -- you may recall that as Hillary Clinton's "commander-in-chief test" -- just wake him up and brief him. That's a situation smarter people would never allow to happen, but if he did, how much worse could he be than Clinton or any of his predecessors?

    As for being called a "lame duck," that's something that stupid people (or opportunists trying to dupe stupid people) are going to do anyway. Ignore them. (Actually, the 22nd Amendment should have banned consecutive terms. They didn't think of that because there was a long tradition of major presidents serving two -- and until FDR only two -- terms, and because in 1947-51 presidential election campaigns only took up a couple months, as opposed to the billionaire-funded multi-year marathons of late. They also had no idea all the crap journalists would spread about "lame ducks.")

    Let's assume that Biden has to withdraw from the nomination. As far as the country is concerned, there should be no problem with him finishing out the term he was elected to. But if he did so, Kamala Harris would become president. As she is most likely his replacement as nominee, would becoming president help or hurt her candidacy? I don't see how it would help. It would give her a bigger plane to campaign from, and offer a few nice photo-ops (world leaders and such, look presidential). But it would put a lot of demands on time she needs to campaign. And it would saddle her more closely with Biden's legacy, which despite some real accomplishments remains pretty unpopular. I also suspect that a Biden resignation wouldn't spin well: it will be taken as a disgrace, affirming all the charges against Biden, and tainting his legacy -- a legacy that Harris will need to burnish in order to win.

  • Chas Danner:

  • Arthur Delaney: [07-05] Reps. Seth Moulton, Mike Quigley latest Democrats to call on Joe Biden to quit race: "The dam hasn't broken, but there's a steady drip of statements from Democrats skeptical of Biden being the Democratic nominee."

  • Ed Kilgore: [07-08] Was Biden's debate worse than Access Hollywood? I suppose what he's trying to say is that candidates can win despite embarrassing incidents along the way. I don't know or care which was worse, but I can think of several reasons why this will cause Biden more trouble: Access Hollywood may have impugned Trump's character, but he didn't have much to lose in the first place; also it's an old story, not present, so something Trump might have matured out of (as opposed to something that only gets worse with age); and while most of us might prefer to have a president who's not an asshole, some people actually regard that as a plus. On the other hand, debating is supposed to be a core competency for presidential aspirants, and is suggestive of how a person might handle an unexpected crisis, as is almost certain to happen. Also, the debate was an explicit opportunity for Biden to show that years of suppositions and innuendos about Biden's mental agility, tied to his age, were wrong. Biden's performance would seem to have confirmed them -- with his ever-increasing age by far the most obvious cause. Perhaps worse still, this implied that Biden's past denials were also false, casting considerable doubt on his reliability and truthfulness.

    Trump recovered because the the DNC mail dumps changed the fickle media's story line, then came Comey's announcement that he was re-opening the Clinton email investigation, which itself might have faded had the Stormy Daniels story not been bought off. But henceforth, every time Biden debates, he will be haunted by this performance, and every time he doesn't debate, that too works against him. Either way, Biden is trapped. If he doesn't drop out, this is going to be very painful to watch.

  • Ezra Klein: [06-30] This isn't all Joe Biden's fault.

  • Paul Krugman: [07-08] Please, Mr. President, do the right thing.

  • Chris Lehman:

  • Eric Levitz:

    • [07-05] In an ABC interview, Biden charts a course for Dems' worst-case scenario: "The president appeared too frail to defeat Trump and too delusional to drop out."

      No interview or stump speech can erase these revelations. The news media will not stop scrutinizing the copious evidence of Biden's senescence. The Trump campaign will not forget that it now possesses a treasure trove of humiliating clips of Biden's brain freezes and devastating quotes from the president's allies. Given this climate and the candidate's limitations, it is not plausible that Biden can surge in the polls between now and November. . . .

      The Biden who spoke with ABC News Friday night was enfeebled, ineloquent, egotistical, and intransigent. He was a man who appeared both ready and willing to lead his party into the wilderness. Asked how he would feel if he stayed in the race and Trump were elected, Biden replied, "I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest job as I know I can do, that's what this is about."

      Wasn't that how Hillary Clinton felt after losing? I've never forgiven her for losing to Trump, and probably never will. Biden will be even worse, because doubts about him are so widely and deeply expressed, so far in advance of the actual vote.

    • [07-07] Biden is leading Democrats toward their worst-case scenario: Appears to be a slight edit of the previous article.

  • Daniel Marans: [07-06] Voters had issues with Biden's age long before the debate. That's why Democrats are worried.

  • Nicole Narea: [07-03] Forget four more years. Is Biden fit to serve now? Was he ever fit? What does that mean? Let's take care of the nomination first: that's the position that needs to be filled, with someone who can handle the immediate requirements and very probably continue to do so four years out. After that, if he can finish his term with dignity, shouldn't we show him that much respect? He'd certainly be under a lot less pressure and stress if he wasn't also running for a second term.

  • Olivia Nuzzi: [07-04] The conspiracy of silence to protect Joe Biden: "The president's mental decline was like a dark family secret for many elite supporters."

  • Evan Osnos: [07-06] Did Joe Biden's ABC interview stanch the bleeding or prolong it?

  • Tyler Pager: [06-30] Biden aides plotted debate strategy for months. Then it all collapsed. "The Biden team gambled on an early debate and prepared intensively at Camp David, but advisers could not prevent the candidate's stumbles onstage." Pager also reported on:

  • Nia Prater: [07-08] Read Biden's I'm-not-going-anywhere letter to House Democrats. Following up:

  • Andrew Prokop: [07-03] Leaks about Joe Biden are coming fast and furious: "The recent reports about the president's age and health, explained."

  • David Schultz: [07-03] Biden's abysmal debate.

  • Nate Silver:

  • Norman Solomon: [07-02] Who you gonna believe, Biden loyalists or your own eyes and ears?

  • Brian Stelter: [07-03] Did the media botch the Biden age story? "Asleep at the wheel? Complicit in a cover-up? The real story is far more complicated -- and more interesting." Or "Sorry, Ted Cruz, there are more than two options."

  • Michael Tomasky:

  • Benjamin Wallace-Wells: [07-08] Joe Biden is fighting back -- but not against Trump, really: Then what the hell is he good for?

  • Joan Walsh: Biden did not save his presidency on ABC: "An uneven interview with George Stephanapoulos was too little, too late -- and maybe a bit too churlish."

  • Matthew Yglesias: [07-08] I was wrong about Biden: I followed Yglesias closely for many years, but after he won that "neoliberal shill of the year" contest (I think it was 2019), quit Vox, started buckraking at Substack, and wrote that opportunisticaly Friedmanesque book (One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger), about the only time I read him these days is when he gets one of his Bloomberg columns syndicated (and they're rarely much good). He's a smart guy who knows a lot, but he's also a calculating bastard who's especially adept at spotting trends and triangulating them with an eye toward profit. So it's no surprise that he (unlike his Vox-cofounder Ezra Klein, another smart triangulator) bought the Biden second term plan hook, line and sinker, or that Biden's debate performance, for once in his life he's eating crow. Or maybe twice: he started out as a big Iraq war booster.

    But enough with shooting the messanger. Let's try reading the message. It's long, methodologically sound, meticulously thought out, and damning. For instance, consider some facts:

    Biden isn't doing press conferences. He's using teleprompters at fundraisers. The joint appearances with Bill Clinton or Barack Obama look like efforts to keep attention off the candidate. It's not just that he's avoiding hostile interviews or refusing to sit with the New York Times, he isn't even doing friendly-but-substantive shows with journalists like Ezra Klein or Chris Hayes. It was a while ago now that I talked to him, and though it went well, I haven't heard recent rumors of many other off-the-record columnist chats. The seemingly inexplicable decision to skip the Super Bowl interview is perfectly explicable once you see the duck. In a re-election year, a president needs to do two different full-time jobs simultaneously, and Biden was really struggling with that. Apparently foreign governments were sitting on some anecdotes that have now leaked, which I wouldn't have thought possible.

    But the biggest data point that I blew off was a recent and totally unambiguous one.

    Five days before the debate, someone who'd seen Biden recently at a fundraiser told me that he looked and sounded dramatically worse than the previous times they'd seen him -- as recently as six months ago -- and that they were now convinced Biden wouldn't be able to make it through a second term. I blew that warning off and assumed things would be fine at the debate.

    That goes a bit beyond the facts I wanted to show, but you can see where he's going. The next paragraph begins: "Now that Biden apologists like me are discredited in the eyes of the public," then segues into a good point we needn't dwell on here. The next section is more important: "The media climate is going to get worse." He offers some details, but if you at all understand how the media works, you can imagine the rest, and then best double it for what you're too decent to even imagine the media doing. [Insert shark metaphor here.]

    Yglesias moves on to a "What comes next?" section, where he reminds us what a calculating bastard he is:

    Columnists calling on Biden to step down provide, in my view, are a small boost to Trump's election odds and a minuscule increase in the odds that Biden actually steps aside. I think we have to say it anyway, because this is journalism and we owe a duty of truth to our audience. But in narrow cost-benefit terms, the public criticism of Biden has negative expected value.

    Elected officials have a different set of responsibilities. I've seen some people express frustration that Barack Obama came out with such a strong statement of support for Biden. But Obama slagging Biden in public would have been a boon to Trump and accomplished nothing. Same for Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and Nancy Pelosi and everyone else who matters. These are politicians, and they do not share journalists' obligations of candor.

    But what they do in private does matter, and I hope they do the right thing.

    The main thing I would add to this is that the election isn't until November (or, with early voting, mid-October?), so even if it takes until the Convention to replace Biden, there will still be plenty of time to unite behind the nominee and the ticket before anything real happens. Until then, it's just hot air (or maybe just tepid). The media cares, because they want you to think that every moment, every minute shift and sway, portends great importance, but that's just their business model. There are good reasons to replace Biden sooner rather than later -- it's painful to watch Biden and his cadres squirm, and we would be much happer spending the time exposing and deprecating Trump and the Republicans -- but it's a process, and that takes time. (I'm not even bothered by it not being a very democratic one, although it does mean that the elites who control this process will be held responsible should they fail.)

    Let me close here by quoting a reader comment:

    So long as Biden remains the nominee, we're going to keep getting hammered on age and mental decline.

    As soon as Harris is the nominee, we can hammer Trump on age and mental decline.

    I'd rather play the second game.

    Indeed, as long as Biden is the nominee, this is going to be one long, miserable election, where we're stuck playing defense, on grounds that aren't really defensible. Sure, we still might eek out a win, but best case is it's going to be close, which means that the administration will be hobbled for four more years, its leadership decrepit, while getting blamed for disasters that have been brewing for decades. On the other hand, replace Biden, and you reverse the tide, and go on the offense: throw the whole anti-Biden handbook (not just age and imbecility, but cronyism and corruption, egotism, vanity, the whole ball of wax) back at Trump, and go after all the Republican toadies fawning all over him. Wouldn't you rather kick some ass? We have time, but we won't have it forever.

Trump:

  • Margaret Hartmann: [07-08] What the Jeffrey Epstein documents reveal about Donald Trump.

  • Jeet Heer: [07-05] Why aren't we talking about Trump's fascism? "Joe Biden has created a distraction from the existential question that should define this election." I don't see this as a problem. Some people understand what fascism means, especially historically. Most of them are fascinated enough to debate the fine points, but all of them already have weighed Trump out on the F-scale, so there's no real need to engage them on the issue. (Most are opposed, even ones who dismiss the charge on technical grounds, and none are likely to view Trump more negatively if you make them better understand the case that Trump is a fascist.) A second group of people only understand that aside from a couple of known and long gone historical examples, "fascist" is a slur, mostly used by people on the left to attack people not on the left. To convince people that Trump is a fascist and therefore bad, you first have to teach them what fascism is and why it is bad, which is a lot of excess work, and will probably wind up making them think that you are a Marxist (which if you actually know this stuff, you probably are). There are lots of more straightforward ways to argue that Trump is bad than that he specifically is a fascist, so for those people the effort ranges from inefficient to counterproductive. Then there are the people who will accept your analysis and embrace it, deciding that fascist Trump is even cooler than regular Trump.

    Heer's article is a good example of why we shouldn't bother talking about Trump and fascism. Heer is part of that first group, so he not only likes to talk about fascism, he sees fascism as the prism that illuminates Trump's myriad evils. However, once he introduces the terminology, we forget what the article was meant to about -- that Biden's incompetence has become a distraction from the real issue, which is the very real disaster if Trump is elected -- and fixate on the single word (which as I just said, is either understood but redundant, or misunderstood and therefore irrelevant, so in either case ineffective). So Heer's article doesn't expose Biden's distraction but merely adds to it.

  • Nicholas Liu: [07-08] Trump runs from Project 2025, claims not to know what it's about: "The former president is trying to distance himself from a plan drafted by his own former aides."

  • Shawn Musgrave: Trump camp says it has nothing to do with Project 2025 manifesto -- aside from writing it.

  • Marc A Thiessen: How Trump can make NATO great again. No time to read this, but the fusion of author (aka "Torture Boy"), concept, and title blew my mind.

And other Republicans:

And other Democrats:

  • Sarah Jones: [07-03] A socialist's case for Kamala Harris: I'd tread carefully here. The decision on the Democratic ticket is going to be made by people who fear and hate socialists even more than Trump, and you don't want them to turn on Harris just because she's one of the less bad compromises available. She as much as admits this with her last line: "But if I can't get what I want this year, I'd rather settle for Harris."

  • Osita Nwanevu: [07-08] Democrats don't just need a new candidate. They need a reckoning. "Democrats will be impotent messengers on democracy as long as they remain beholden to the feudal culture this crisis has exposed." Right, but it isn't going to happen, certainly not this year. The Democratic left didn't challenge Biden this year, basically for three reasons: it's nearly impossible to reject an incumbent president running for a second term; their relationships with Biden were engaging enough that they saw him as a path for limited but meaningful reform, which they valued more than just taking losing stands on principle; and they are more afraid of Trump and the Republicans than ever. Conversely, Biden is running not because he's uniquely qualified to beat Trump, but because he was uniquely positioned to prevent an open Democratic primary that could have nominated a Democrat who might be more committed to the voters than to the donors. But now that cast is set. Even if the convention is thrown open, the people voting there are almost all beholden to Biden. So while Biden will not survive as the nominee, he and his big donors will pick his successor, and when they do, every Democrat who doesn't want to risk Trump will line up, bow, and cheer. The reckoning will have to wait, probably until crisis forces it.

  • Prem Thakker: Every Democrat other than Joe Biden is unburdened by what has been: "As voters look for another option, alternative Democratic leaders poll similarly or even better than Biden -- even without name recognition."

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Economic matters:

Ukraine War and Russia:

America's empire and the world:

Other stories:

Margot Roosevelt: [07-07] Jane F. McAlevey, who empowered workers across the globe, dies at 59: "An organizer and author, she believed that a union was only as strong as its members and trained thousands "to take over their unions and change them."

Books

Jedediah Britton-Purdy: [07-02] The Creed: "How did Americans come to worship the Constitution?" Review of Aziz Rana, The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them.

  • Aziz Rana: [05-30] Democracy was a decolonial project: "For generations of American radicals, the path to liberation required a new constitution, not forced removal." I ran across this essay slightly after finding the book review. While there is a common point, this goes in a different direction.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix/Astra Taylor: [07-02] For a solidarity state: "The state structures society. It can make us more prone to care for one another."

Sean Illing: [07-07] How the 1990s broke politics: "Inside the GOP's transition from the party of Reagan to the party of Trump." Interview with John Ganz, author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s.

Osita Nwanevu: [03-11] The divided president: "Who's in charge in the Biden White House?" This is a bit dated, a review of Franklin Foer, The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future. I bought the book at the time, figuring it might shed some light on some things (mostly involving foreign policy) that I didn't adequately understand), but never got around to it, and I'm in no hurry these days.

Marshall Steinbaum: X thread: "There's a little book I recommend to anyone who's trying to get a handle on what's going on in American politics this week." The book is Nancy McLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America. The book is mostly about economist James Buchanan, and how his and similar careers have been sponsored by right-wing networks, especially that of the Kochs. I read the book when it came out, and thought it was pretty good. Buchanan's early ties to the anti-desegregation movement were especially striking -- how easily we forget how reflexively racist many people were in the 1950s -- and the Koch funding was something I was rather familiar with. (I even received some myself, back when I typeset reprints of a couple Koch-sponsored reprints of Murray Rothbard books.) I'm less clear on Buchanan's economic theories, which seemed rather trivial. Maybe "stealth plan" was a bit of an oversell: much of it was public, and some of it barely qualified as a plan -- throwing money at something could just as well be seen as another of those "irritable mental gestures" Lionel Trilling saw in most "conservative thought." Still, this kicked up a flurry of protest over McLean's book, including some from people I generally respect (e.g., Rick Perlstein), so I took some notes:

Music, etc.

Nick Paumgarten: [07-01] Alan Braufman's loft-jazz séance.

Michael Tatum: [07-09] A downloader's diary (53): Much more than capsule reviews, major takes on Beyoncé, Nia Archives, Zawose Queens, Carly Pearce, Fox Green, and much more. Pearce and Fox Green also appear here:

Midyear Lists:

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Sunday, July 7, 2024

Speaking of Which: Afterthoughts

Back during my careerist, apolitical middle ages, I read a number of business/management books (also, more often, popular science, and sometimes science fiction -- those were the good ol' days), and one point that stuck with me was the observation that in and coming out of meetings, there are two kinds of people: those who give you their reactions immediately, and those who need a day or two to process and come up with better reactions. I quickly recognized that I'm one of the latter.

I'm pretty sure the book was Robert Townsend's Further Up the Organization, which I probably got more from than I did from The Communist Manifesto and Minima Moralia combined, although from Walter Benjamin's Illuminations and John Berger's Ways of Seeing would be close. Some major things I got from Townsend are the value of employee ownership, and a deep loathing for nepotism -- points that have repeatedly been reinforced by real-world experience. There's also a quote about the Ottoman Empire that I'd have to look up to do justice, but the gist is that when you lose your reputation for justice, you lose everything. That quote comes as close as anything to explaining why I spend so much time harping on how important it is that Israel and America have so thoroughly disgraced themselves in Gaza (and, sure, not just in Gaza).

Anyhow, before my digression, I just wanted to introduce this concept, which may or may not become a regular feature -- depends on how much free time I have, which if this week is any example is likely to be not much. It's been taking me so much time to round up my weekly Speaking of Which compendiums, often of late requiring an extra day (or two?), that I wind up just throwing them out, with no more than a quick, minimal spell check. Then I have to pivot for Music Week, which is mostly a matter of collecting bits I had written more leisurely (or carelessly) during the week, and that usually breaks the mood until Friday or so when I get going on the next Speaking of Which. Lately, Music Week day has given me a chance to fix the typos my wife always finds, and add a few items that slipped my net, but I never have the time and perspective I need to refine, clarify, and polish what I wrote in such haste.

That led me to the idea of doing a midweek "Afterthoughts" post, where I look back through the previous week's roundup with somewhat refreshed eyes, pick out a few salient items that I think could use more (by which I think I mean deeper) commentary. I could then add anchors and links to go back and forth between Speaking of Which and Afterthoughts. As I reread, I'll probably catch and fix a few mistakes, perhaps editing some particularly awkward passages. While Afterthoughts will offer the occasional link, I imagine that I'll add new ones I to the old file, or save them for the following week. That will entail keeping multiple files open (and raises the question of whether I should make the work-in-progress file visible).

Another digression (maybe I should invent some markup for these?): I have on occasion done that, and I'm usually rather pleased with what I find there. That gets me to imagining that someone could pull out a book's worth of particularly notable nuggets, but the only people who have given them a look so far have thrown up their hands in dismay (my wife and her publisher friends). When I do it myself, I'm tempted to edit, rarely for points but the writing can always be sharpened up. I've collected most of my post-2000 writings into book files, but they are pretty massive (the four political volumes up to 2020 total 2.86 million words; not collected there yet, Speaking of Which, since June 2021, would add another 800 thousand words).

Anyhow, that's the concept. Unfortunately, I wasted 2-3 days after coming up with the idea without actually doing the work. But I left a placeholder for this post when I opened the next Speaking of Which draft file, so I feel obliged to post something here. (It works this way for technical and historical reasons I won't bore you with, possibly because doing so might expose my inept design.) But as this is being written on Sunday, all I can hope for is make a quick pass and post tonight, with everything else delayed a day (or, perhaps like last week, more).

Zack Beauchamp: Sometimes I think I should write up an annotated list of books on Israel, but the number that I have read quickly becomes mind-boggling -- especially when you start thinking about the various angles and tangents. But this one cuts to the heart of the matter: not so much as to what happened -- which tends to be a long list of indictments -- as to what was going through Israeli when they acted as they did.

One imagines there could be a similar reading list for how Palestinians think, but they've had so few viable options that it really wouldn't tell us much. As Americans, we've been brought up to think that we have a large degree of freedom within which we can deliberately live our lives. Even here, much of that is illusion (or delusion), but Palestinians have never had any meaningful degree of political freedom: not under the Ottomans, or the British, or the Egyptian/Jordanian occupations of Gaza and the West Bank from 1948-67, or under Israel (in or out of the Green Line, with or without the gang rule of Fatah/Hamas), or for exiles in Lebanon, Syria, the Gulf, etc.

I dug out Ben Cramer's book a few weeks ago. I wanted to find a story I remembered him using -- one about teaching a dog to speak -- but so far it's escaped me. On the other hand, I have reread many passages, and I'm always struck by how easily he gets to unobvious but essential points. One of those is that of all the world's many problems, this conflict should be one of the easiest to solve -- pace Christgau, who throws up his hands in despair after declaring it "the cruelest and most gruesome international conflict of my adulthood." I pick my around that line, but Ben Cramer simply offers an answer: just start by showing Palestinians some respect, and see how they adjust. I have little doubt that they will, but that's because I'm aware that there are many more strands of thought among Palestinians beyond the only ones Israelis recognize: those who fight (like Hamas), and those who surrender (like Fatah, not that even they have so little self-respect that they can satisfy Israel).

I've read quite a bit on Israel over the years: enough that I can pull up a historical reference for almost any situation, so quickly that I frequently circle back instead of offering immediate reactions to atrocities that no understanding of historical context can excuse. But mostly I'm writing on the basis of models I've formed and refined over many years, that give me insight into things people say and do, and how they are perceived and reacted to. I suppose this started fifty years ago, when I was first smitten with philosophy, and through it psychology and sociology (and economics?).

It's been a long time since I ever attempted to articulate it, but I have been thinking more about stories and models lately: most people understand things through stories -- or so we're told by political and advertising consultants, who one suspects prefer them because they see them as ways to manipulate, and as such to compensate their clients and earn their premium. And, if you're interested in practical politics, that's often a game you have to play. Models are harder to sell, because they simply give you insight into how things actually work, and most importantly, that many of the things selfish people would pay for -- like riches, power, status, glamor, fame, notoriety -- come with hidden costs that make them worth much less than you'd like to think.

But read on. The models will come to you.

About last Thursday's debate: I collected a huge number of links, as most center-to-left pundits took the matter seriously and had an opinion to air (and often not just an axe to grind). I didn't bother much with right pundits, as what could they possibly say worth taking seriously? So while I started the post with a general idea of what was going on, and how it might play out, I was fine with letting this play out. And it did, pretty definitively. Biden is toast. He's lost all credibility as a candidate, and if the Democrat clique around him somehow manage to keep him as their candidate, they will lose all credibility and, as soon as possible, control of the party. Even if he sticks and wins, which given his opposition isn't impossible, he and they will get no credit for the feat. All they will get is condemnation for the risk they're running by sticking with a candidate who has clearly lost the faith and trust of his own voters.

That it isn't official yet is probably because the insiders haven't yet agreed on a succession plan. There's been very little reporting on this so far, because it's not the sort of thing inside power brokers dare brag about. But it's pretty obvious if you understand how things work. And what's happened is pretty simple. . . .

PS: Insert my model of US political parties here, then explain how the powers in the Democratic Party have used Biden as a prophylactic against the left. An open political process stood a chance of tilting the nomination toward someone on the left -- probably not Sanders, due to age, but someone would have moved in that direction. On the other hand, it would be very difficult for anyone to challenge an incumbent president, so running Biden essentially shut down the primary process, Now, even if Biden sensibly withdraws, the convention will be controlled by Biden's backers, ensuring that they will come up with a candidate favorable to their business interests. I wrote a version of this for tomorrow's post: e.g., the comments on Cooper and Yglesias.

I've been thinking along these lines for quite some time now. To reiterate:

  1. Both parties basically do two things: raise money, and compete for votes. Aside from unions, which faded significantly after 1980, that meant they had to appeal to the rich, and then take those resources and somehow fashion promises that would appeal to enough other people to win elections. Donors mostly want the same thing, which is to make more money, so both parties have to be credibly pro-business, but parties can appeal to different voters, and try to differentiate themselves accordingly (without offending their donors).

  2. The main differentiation between the two parties is over the issue of whether can and should take an active role in helping people (which, for the donors, includes businesses) or shouldn't even try, but rather should restrict itself to protecting property and repressing people's baser instincts and subversive ideas. You already know which parties match up with which descriptions. They both have problems reconciling donors and voters, and those problems are most acutely felt by party insiders.

  3. Parties are not like firms, where owners have clear control direct from the top, through a board and hired management. Nor are they democratic, like a union (although they could be, and that's something Democrats should consider). They're more like co-ops, which in theory belong to everyone but in practice are dominated by a few people who worm their way into positions where they control access to resources and information. They're often referred to as elites, but cadres would be a more appropriate term (I could also go with professional political operatives, to put a somewhat finer point on it). Cadres may seem like elites, but that's mostly because they wind up being operatives of the real elites: the donors. But while they are usually aligned with elite donors, like the managerial class, they have bureaucratic interests of their own, like self-preservation.

  4. The cadres struggle to balance the conflicting demands of donors and voters, leading to different strategies. Republicans flagrantly appeal to rich, then try to line up voters who will defer to the rich and overlook their own economic interests, expecting little or nothing from government. Democrats take a different tack, trying to woo voters with promises of better services, but they also have to find and keep donors willing to go along with their programs. Both strategies are dysfunctional, but that could fill up a book.

  5. One problem of special relevance here is that in their relentless supplication to donors, Republicans are corrupt in principle, while Democrats are corrupt in practice. Somehow the latter seems to bother people more than the former. Probably because to Democratic voters, corruption seems like betrayal, leading them to distrust their leaders. Republicans also see Democratic corruption as betrayal, because it benefits others, but accept their own corruption as serving their party and its ideals.

  6. In the 1970s, unions were declining, and business started pumping huge amount of cash into politics. That led to the Reagan 1980s, which in turn led to a desperate realignment within the Democratic Party, where success was often linked to becoming even more pro-business than the Republicans. That shift was led by Clinton, backed by middling Democrats like Biden, and picked up by Obama. Not only were they pro-business, they turned the Party into a platform for their own personal agendas, with no regard for developing bottom-up party strength. (Both Clinton and Obama came in with legislative majorities, then suffered massive mid-term losses, rebounding to win unproductive second terms without Democratic Congresses. The sole exception was in 2006, when Howard Dean -- who coined the term "democratic wing of the Democratic Party" -- built a party that won Congress, only to see Obama cashier him and lose everything.)

  7. Obama picked Biden as VP as a peace offering to Hillary Clinton, who was thus assured that she could run for president after Obama, without having to fight off his VP. She got her clear lane, raised massive money, and still lost, to one of the worst Republicans imaginable. She barely survived Bernie Sanders' challenge in the primaries, mostly by slim margins in states with strong Democratic machines. In 2020, after Sanders won the first two primaries, with Bloomberg so panicked by a possible Sanders win that he spent nearly a billion dollars on his own hapless candidacy, the Party cadres rallied all of their support behind Biden, and eeked out a win, mostly through terror of a second Trump term.

  8. Biden hadn't come remotely close in his previous presidential campaigns, was already considered too old to run in 2016, and was neither inspiring nor graceful in 2020, but managed a loudly disputed win in 2020. He had no business running for a second term, but Trump was running, and the rematch appealed to him. Moreover, as an incumbent, his renomination would be a lock, it would keep his donors happy, and for Party cadres, it would preclude another challenge from the left -- one that risked reorienting the Party from its donors to the people. Besides, the left wasn't all that unhappy with Biden (although Gaza risked becoming a sore point), so as long as he seemed capable, pretty much everyone was willing to go along. But mostly it was cadre fear of open primaries that drove his candidacy. The Democratic Party pledged to save democracy in 2024, but dared not indulge in it.

  9. I don't know who insisted on the debate, but it offered a sanity check as to Biden's competency. Most likely his donors wanted to see him in action, to reassure themselves he could do the job. In any case, he failed abysmally. The good news is that he could still be replaced. The bad news is that he's left the Party in control of cadres committed to him, because they have no other option. Hence the current stall, denial, misdirection, and dissembling, which assumes Democrats are even more gullible than Republicans (a tall order, given that they're still backing Trump). The worse news is that many Democrats are so terrified they're willing to stick with a plan that has repeatedly failed rather than risk change.

I don't mind advising patience, but the notion that Biden will still be the nominee in September, much less in November, is too horrible to contemplate. The measuer of this is not whether you would still vote for Biden over Trump in November. Of course you would, as would anyone who recognizes Trump for even a fraction of what he is. The question is how do you want to beat Trump? You want to beat him not just on how bad he is, but on how much better you are.

You need a candidate who can stand up to him, who can argue back, who can hit him so hard and so fast that he's the one who looks like a doddering, senescent idiot. And, let's face it, that candidate isn't Joe Biden. If we could get a fair vote on it, I'm pretty sure most Democrats would agree, and come up with someone better. But thanks to Biden and the cadres, only they get to decide this year. If they get it wrong, they will lose all credibility, and we'll have to rebuild the Democratic Party from scratch, as a union of voters. Meanwhile, we'll suffer for their hubris. And next time, we'll understand much better what we're fighting for.

Changes I made to the file:

  • Tareq S Hajjaj: missing link.
  • Hoda Osman: botched link tag.
  • Moved Prem Thakker under Blaise Malley's "craziest 'pro-Israel' budget amendments."
  • Zack Beauchamp: bold-faced book authors.
  • Andrew Prokop: typo.

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Sunday, June 30, 2024

Speaking of Which

After missing last week, I knew I had a lot to catch up on here. I also got interrupted several times. It took longer than expected to wrap up my piece on bassist William Parker (see: Celebrating bassist William Parker's lifetime of achievement). I had two other internet projects that required significant amounts of attention (one was an update to Carola Dibbell's website, announcing a new printing of her novel, The Only Ones; the other was setting up a framework for a Jazz Critics Mid-Year Poll, which still needs more work). We also had trips to the ER and various doctors (including a veterinarian). So no chance of getting done on Sunday night. I'm not really done on Monday, either, but I'm dead tired and more than a little disgusted, so this will have to do for now.

That will, in turn, push Music Week back until Tuesday, which is just as well.

Before I really got started, the debate happened -- I couldn't be bothered to watch, my wife got disgusted and switched to a Steve Martin movie -- and I haven't (yet, as of noon 06-28) read any reviews, but I wanted to grab these tweets before they vanish:

Rick Perlstein: The main argument on the left was that he was a bad president. That was incorrect.

Tim Price: The left is going to be in big trouble for being right too early again.

Another scrap picked up on the fly from fleeting social media:

Greg Magarian: [06-27] Democratic Party establishment, relentlessly, for eight months: "You stupid kids need to stop criticizing Biden! If we get four more years of Trump, it's all your fault!"

Democratic Party establishment, tomorrow morning, set your clock by it: "You stupid kids need to fix this! If we get four more years of Trump, it's all your fault!"

Because of course it's never their fault.

In a comment, Magarian added:

I don't know the best process for replacing Biden. There's no playbook for this. The biggest question is whether the party should essentially try to crown Harris, either by having Biden resign the presidency or by having him stay and endorse her. But this is kind of the point of my post: the onus here shouldn't be on Biden's critics. The party is supposed to exist to win elections. They're royally screwing this one up. I want to know what they're going to do.

Initial count: 290 links, 11720 words. Updated count [07-03]: 320 links, 16021 words.

Local tags (these can be linked to directly): on music, Christgau.

Top story threads:

Israel:

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

Israel vs. world opinion:

About last Thursday's debate:

When the Biden-Trump debates were announced, I jotted down the following:

Ed Kilgore: [05-24] Is Biden gambling everything on an early-debate bounce? My read is that the June debate is meant to show Democrats that he can still mount a credible campaign against Trump. If he can -- and a bounce would be nice but not necessary -- it will go a long way to quelling pressure to drop out and open the convention. If he can't, then sure, he'll have gambled and lost, and pressure will build. But at least it will give him a reference point that he has some actual control over -- unlike the polls, which still seem to have a lot of trouble taking him seriously.

I'm writing this before I go through the paces and collect whatever links I deem of interest, which will help me better understand the debate and its aftermath, but my first impression is that Biden failed to satisfy Democrats that he is really the candidate they need to fight off Trump in November. I'll also note that my expectation was to see a lot of confirmation bias in reactions. I'd expect people who dislike Biden and/or Trump, for any reason, to find faults that fortify their feelings, while people who are personally invested in their candidates will at least claim to be vindicated. Hence, the easy way to scan this section is to look for reactions that go against type.

Debate tweets:

  • Zachary D Carter: Donald Trump is delivering the second-worst presidential debate performance I've ever seen.

And more post-debate tweets:

  • Zachary D Carter: [06-30] If Biden refuses to step aside it will not be an act of high principal or strong character. He did not just have a bad night. He is not fit for the job and stayuing in the race would be the worst kind of vanity and betrayal.

  • Laura Tillem: [06-30] He did terrible in the debate because he gags when he has to pretend to support abortion rights or universal health care.

  • holly: [06-28] If you want to see Joe Biden in his prime, just go back and watch footage of him calling Anita Hill a liar and ensuring that we'd have to deal with Clarence Thomas forever.

  • Moshik Temkin: [06-28] Worth recalling that the only reason Biden is President now is because, after he finished 5th in NH Dem primary in 2020, Obama persuaded all the other candidates to drop out and endorse Biden in order to stop Bernie Sanders, who was in 1st place (and crushing Trump in the polls)

    • John Ganz: Dude they just gotta roll the dice with Harris.

Plus I scraped this from Facebook:

  • Allen Lowe [07-02]: Cold medicine my a##. On my worst day during chemo and radiation I made more sense than Biden did at that debate; coming out of the anaesthetic after a 12 hour surgery with half of my nose removed I could have debated Trump more coherently; after they pulled a tube out of of my arm at 4 in the morning after another (8 hour) surgery, causing me to scream in the worst pain of my life and curse like a sailor, I would have remembered more accurately what I last said and organized my thoughts more clearly. The night I was born and ripped from my mother's womb I was better prepared than Biden was (my first words were "Henry Wallace!").

    This guy must go. Go. Go.

    This whole thing has, honestly, made me lose all respect for Biden, as he continues to place his personal ego and "legacy" ahead of the country. As Carl Bernstein reports [on YouTube], aides have privately reported a Biden loss of coherence and noticeable cognitive slippage occurring "15 to 20 times" in the last year.

Election notes:

Trump:

And other Republicans:

Biden and/or the Democrats:

  • Jonathan Alter: [06-28] How the Democrats should replace Biden: This seems ok to me, aside from the snootiness of dismissing Sanders and Warren out of hand and seeking to ban "anyone from the Squad." That they've already limited the electorate to Biden's hand-picked supporters is rigged enough without having to rub it in.

  • Aaron Blake:

  • Abdallah Fayyad: [06-29] LBJ and Truman knew when to quit. Will Biden? "Some lessons from the two presidents who walked away."

  • Margaret Hartmann: [07-01] All the gossip on the Biden family's postdebate blame game.

  • David Klion: [06-19] The lifelong incoherence of Biden's Israel strategy: "The president's muddled policy course in the Middle East is angering voters across the political spectrum -- and it could usher Trump back into the White House."

  • Eric Levitz:

    • [06-19] Biden's ads haven't been working. Now, he's trying something new. Written before the debate: "President Joe Biden's odds of reelection may be worse than they look. And they don't look great."

    • [06-28] How Democrats got here: "Democrats really need to choose electable vice presidents." This might have gone deep into the sorry history of vice presidents and vice-presidential candidates, few of whom could be described as "electable" -- at least as Levitz defines it to exclude Biden and Harris, which is the point of his article.

      Unfortunately, the last two Democratic presidents did not prioritize political chops when selecting their veeps.

      Barack Obama didn't choose Joe Biden because he thought that the then-Delaware senator would make a great Democratic nominee in 2016. To the contrary, by most accounts, Obama thought that Biden would be a totally nonviable candidate by the time his own hypothetical presidency ended. And he reportedly selected Biden precisely for that reason. . . .

      Biden's choice of Kamala Harris in 2020 was even more misguided. When he made that choice in August 2020, there was little basis for believing that Harris was one of the most politically formidable Democrats in the country.

      There's a lot that could be said about this, most of which comes back to the poor conception of the office (both in the Constitution and when revised after the emergence of political parties led to the 1800 fiasco and the 12th Amendment). The VP has to do three things, which require three very different skill sets, especially since the presidency has grown into this ridiculous imperial perch: they have to add something to the campaign (e.g., "Tippecanoe and Tyler too"); once elected, they have to behave themselves innocuously, for which they are sometimes given busy work (LBJ's Space Race, Pence's Space Force, Gore's Reinventing Government) or sometimes just locked in a closet (remember John Nance Garner?); and if the president dies, they're thrust into a role they were rarely prepared for, with no real, personal political mandate (some, like Tyler and Andrew Johnson, were wretched; a few, like Teddy Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson, thrived; but most were just mediocre, including the two others who went on to win full terms: Calvin Coolidge and Harry Truman).

      I accept that Obama's pick of Biden was part of a deal to give the 2016 nomination to Hillary Clinton. The Clintons had turned the Democratic Party into a personality cult. Obama rode a popular backlash against that, but Obama was no revolutionary: he wanted to lead, but was willing to leave the Party to the Clintons. We now know that wasn't such a good idea, but after a very divisive primary, in the midst of economic and military disaster, it was at least understandable.

      The Harris nomination made at least as much sense in 2024. The "little basis" line is unfair and inaccurate. She won statewide elections in the most populous and most expensive state in the country. Her resume entering 2016 was similar to and every bit as strong as Obama's in 2008. She had enough financial backing to organize a top-tier presidential campaign. She floundered, because (unlike Obama) she was outflanked on the left (Sanders and Warren), while hemmed in on the right (Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Bloomberg, and Biden). But she wasn't incompetent (like Biden already was), and her position and standing made her the logical choice to unite the party. And sure, her affirmative action points may have helped a bit with the left -- at least she wasn't another Tim Kaine, or Al Gore -- without the tokenism raising any hackles with the donors.

      Sure, Harris polls poorly now, but that's largely because Biden never put her to good use: she could have taken a more prominent role in cajoling Congress, which would have given her opportunities to show her mettle fighting Republicans, and she could have spelled Biden on some of those high-profile foreign trips (especially confabs like G7 and NATO); instead, they stuck her with the tarbaby border issue. Having wasted those opportunities, I can see wanting to go with some other candidate, one with a bit more distance from Biden. But I'm not convinced that she would be a weak, let alone losing, candidate. And while I give her zero credit for those affirmative action tick boxes, I can't see holding them against her, either. And as for the people who would, well, they were going to vote for Trump anyway, so why appease them?

  • Nicole Narea:

  • Evan Osnos: [06-29] Biden gets up after his debate meltdown: Good. But are people talking about that, or the meltdown? Even if they could flip the message back to "Biden's really ok," that would still be a huge deficit. We need people talking about how awful Trump is. Even if you can't impress on many people how bad his policies are, he gives you lots of other things you can fixate on.

  • Christian Paz:

    • [06-26] We rewatched the 2020 Trump-Biden debates. There's so much we didn't see coming. "The five most telling moments and what they foreshadow ahead of this week's rematch."

      1. Trump calls the 2020 election rigged and doesn't commit to accepting the results
      2. Roe v. Wade is nearly forgotten
      3. Trump gets defensive on immigration
      4. No one is worried about inflation
      5. Everyone is worried about Russia, Ukraine, or China, but for the wrong reasons

    • [06-26] What about Kamala? "The vice president has taken on an expanded role in the last few months. Now Biden needs her more than ever."

  • Rick Perlstein: [07-03] Say it ain't so, Joe: "With democracy itself on the ballot, a statesman with charactger would know when to let go of power."

  • Andrew Prokop: [06-28] Will Biden be the nominee? 3 scenarios for what's next.

  • Bryan Walsh: [07-01] Democrats say Trump is an existential threat. They're not acting like it. "If the stakes of the 2024 election are as great as the party says, there's no excuse for inaction."

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Economic matters:

  • Dean Baker:

    • [06-17] We can't have a new paradigm as long as people think the old one was free-market fundamentalism. He's on solid ground pointing out that most profits in our current economy are effectively rigged by monopolies (either government-minted, like patents, facilitated through favors, or just tolerated with lax enforcement), it's less clear to me what this is about:

      • Farah Stockman: [06-17] The queen bee of Bidenomics: On Jennifer Harris. Back when Trump started flirting with tariffs, I tried to make the point that tariffs only make sense if they are exercised in concert with a coherent economic development plan. Biden has, somewhat fitfully, moved in that direction, so that, for instance, tariffs and content rules can be seen as nurturing domestic production of EVs, helping the US develop them into world-class exports, as opposed to simply providing shelter for high prices (which was the net effect of Trump's corrupt favoritism). Whether this amounts to a paradigm shift is arguable, as government sponsorship of private industry has always been part of the neoliberal position (most obviously in arms and oil).

    • [06-20] NAFTA: The great success story: Compares Mexican-to-American GDP figures since 1980, showing that the gap has increased since NAFTA, putting Mexicans even more behind. What would be helpful here is another chart showing income inequality in both countries. It has certainly increased in the US since NAFTA, and probably in Mexico as well.

  • Kevin T Dugan: [06-18] Nvidia is worth as much as all real estate in NYC -- and 9 other wild comparisons.

  • Corey Robin: [06-29] Hayek, the accidental Freudian: "The economist was fixated on subconscious knowledge and dreamlike enchantment -- even if he denied their part in this relationships."

Ukraine War and Russia:

America's empire and the world:

Other stories:

Noam Chomsky: Briefly in the news after false reports that he had died at 95 -- see Brett Wilkins: [06-18] Manufacturing Obituaries: Media falsely reports Noam Chomsky's death -- which led to a quick burst of posts, including a couple of his own, still vibrant and still relevant:

William Hartung: [06-25] An AI Hell on Earth? Silicon Valley and the rush toward automated warfare.

Sean Illing: [06-23] What nuclear annihilation could look like: "The survivors would envy the dead." Interview with Annie Jacobsen, author of Nuclear War: A Scenario.

Joshua Keating: [06-16] The world is running out of soldiers: Good. Soldiering is a losing proposition, no matter what side you think you are on. I'm not sure that Keating is right that "wars are getting more common and militaries are building up." I'll grant that war business is booming, and that the costs -- both to wage and to suffer war -- are way up, but aren't costs supposed to be self-limiting? One cost, which is finding people dumb and/or desperate enough to enlist, certainly is, and that's a good thing. Somehow some related pieces popped up:

  • Jack Hunter: [06-18] Congress moves to make Selective Service automatic: "Raising the specter of the draft, this NDAA amendment seems ill-timed." Actually, no one's advocating to bring back the draft. All the amendment does is simplifying the paperwork by leaving it to the government to sign people up, giving people one less awful thing to do. Simpler still would be to eliminate registration, and the whole useless bureaucracy behind it.

  • Edward Hasbrouck: [06-29] A war draft today can't work. Let us count the ways.

Jacob Kushner: [06-23] The best plan to help refugees might also be the simplest: "More refugees live in cities. Could cash help them rebuild their lives?"

Dave Lindorff: [06-28] Assange is finally free as America, Britain, Sweden and Australia are shamed.

Also, some writing on music:

Robert Christgau: [06-26] Xgau Sez: June, 2024: Several things of possible interest here, but I wanted to comment on this interchange:

[Q] On October 18, you tweeted a defense of Israel citing a well written piece which postulated that the hospital bombing committed one week after 10/7 was actually not committed by Israel. You stated that prior to this evidence, you were "profoundly disturbed" that such a thing could happen. So now here we are, over half a year later, after tens of thousands of deaths and countless hospital bombings which have all undeniably been committed by Israel--and you haven't said a single word? It's one thing for you to have stayed quiet on the issue completely, but you only speak up when Israel can be protected? Bob, what is wrong with you? How are you not profoundly disturbed as the death toll of innocent civilians reaches nearly 40,000 with no clear end in sight? The last thing I ever expected from my decades of following your works was for you to be so spineless. I refuse to believe you only actively stand for something when the narrative suits your desires. -- Brandon Sparks, America

[A] Anyone but a genuine expert who writes about the appalling Gaza war risks being incomplete and probably wrong. I cited that hospital bombing story because that early there seemed some reason for hope that the war would resolve itself with a modicum of sanity. It wasn't yet clear just how appalling Netanyahu would prove to be--or, I will add with my hands shaking, Hamas either. The "lots" I know is too little and in public at least I intend to say as little as possible. I've long believed in a two-state solution and this war is easily the cruelest and most gruesome international conflict of my adulthood. But it hasn't yet turned me into a full-bore anti-Zionist, because as an American of German extraction with many dozens of Jewish friends, I've spent too much of my life taking anti-Semitism seriously to put it on any sort of back burner now.

Christgau has been a good friend for close to fifty years, and a friend of my wife's even longer (he introduced us), and we're generally pretty simpatico politically, drawing on similar class and cultural backgrounds and experiences -- although he's eight years older than I am, which is enough for him to look up to other people as mentors (especially Greil Marcus, whose view of Israel and Gaza I wrote about here, and probably the late Ellen Willis, who was left of Marcus but still a devoted Zionist) and to look down on me as a protégé (not that he doesn't respect what I have to say; he's often a very astute reader, but still doggedly fixed in his beliefs).

After what Marcus wrote, we gave him credit for publishing this letter, and not for simply shirking it off. But while his cautious and self-effacing tone evaded our worst expectations, nearly every line in his answer is wrong in some fundamental sense, just not in the manner of Marcus (ridiculous, hypocritical accusations cloaked in a storm of overwrought emotion and self-pity), but mostly by pleading ignorance and accepting it as bliss. To wit:

  1. "Anyone but a genuine expert . . . risks being incomplete and probably wrong." If you know any history at all, you must know that in 1948 Israel expelled 700,000 Palestinians, driving many of them into Gaza (more than the previous population of Gaza), leaving them under Egyptian rule until Israel invaded and occupied Gaza in and ever since 1967, and that under Israeli rule, they were denied human rights and subject to multiple waves of violent repression, a dire situation that only got worse when Israel left Gaza to the circumscribed gang rule of Hamas. Under such circumstances, and having repeatedly failed to appeal to Israel's and the world's sense of justice, it was only a matter of time before Hamas resorted to its own violence, since nothing less could move Israel.

    If you don't know the history, you might not have understood the Hamas revolt on Oct. 7, but you would have observed that the revolt was limited and unsustainable, because Hamas had nothing resembling a real army, few modern arms, no arms industry, no safe haven, no allies. It may have come as a shock, but it was no threat. Israel killed or repelled the attackers within a couple days. After that, virtually all of the violence was committed by Israel, not just against people who had desperately fought back but against everyone in Gaza, against their homes, their farms, their utilities, their hospitals. Since Hamas was powerless to stop Israel, even to make Israel pay a further price for their war, the only decent choice Americans had was to inhibit Israel, to back them down from the genocide their leaders openly avowed. There was nothing subtle or complex about this.

  2. "There seemed some reason for hope that the war would resolve itself with a modicum of sanity": Really? Israel, following the example of the British before them, has always punished Palestinian violence with disproportionate collective punishment. The Zionist leadership embraced what is now commonly called "ethnic cleansing" in 1937, as they embraced the Peel Commission plan to forcibly "transfer" Palestinians from lands that Britain would offer for Israel. From that point on, genocide was woven into the DNA of Zionism. The only question was whether they could afford to discredit themselves to the world (which, by 2023, really just meant the US). When Biden vowed unlimited, uncritical support, Israel was free to do whatever they wanted, sane or not, with no fear of reprisal, isolation, and sanctions.

  3. "It wasn't yet clear just how appalling Netanyahu would prove to be": Granted, few Americans have any real appreciation for Israeli politics, especially given the extent to which most Israeli politicians misrepresent themselves to Americans. Still, you have to be awful naïve not to understand where Netanyahu came from (he was born royalty on the fascist right: his father was Jabotinsky's secretary) and where he would go any time he got the chance (ever farther to the right). Sure, he was more circumspect than his partners Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, who were free to say what he actually wanted to do. Even before the Oct. 7 revolt, their coalition was curtailing Palestinian rights within Israel, and was encouraging and excusing a campaign of terror against Palestinians in the West Bank, while Gaza was being strangled, and the only relatively liberal courts were being neutered. Outrage over Oct. 7 was immediately turned into license to intensify operations that were already ongoing.

  4. "I've long believed in a two-state solution": "Two states" isn't a belief. It's just something people talk about to keep people separated into rival, hostile blocs. Give them equal power and they would be at each other's throats, but with unequal power you have one standing on the other's neck. "Two states" started out as a British idea, tried disastrously first in Ireland then in India. Israelis endorsed the idea in 1937 (Peel Commission) and in 1947 (UN Partition Plan), but when they had the chance to actually build a state, they went with one powerful state of their own, and prevented even a weak Palestinian state from emerging: Jordan and Egypt were given temporary control of chunks of Palestine, their population swelled with refugees from ethnic cleansing in Israel's captured territories, then even those chunks were regained in 1967, when Israel was finally strong enough to keep their people confined to impoverished stans.

    True, the "two state" idea recovered a bit in the 1990s, as bait to lure corrupt "nationalists" into policing their own people, but few Israelis took the idea seriously, and after Sharon in 2000, most stopped pretending -- only the Americans were gullible enough to keep up the charade. You can dice up territories arbitrary to provide multiple states with different ethnic mixes allowing multiple tyrannies, but that kind of injustice only leads to more conflict. The only decent solution is, as always, equal rights for everyone, however space is allocated. Imagining othewise only shows how little you know about human nature.

  5. "Easily the cruelest and most gruesome international conflict of my adulthood": The American wars in Indochina and Korea were worse by almost any metric. The oft-genocidal wars in and around India and the eastern Congo certainly killed more people. Even the CIA-backed "white terror" in Indonesia killed more people. Israel's wars are more protracted, because they feed into a self-perpetuating culture of militarism, but while the latest episode in Gaza is off the charts compared to any of these catastrophes, but averaged out over the century since British imperialism gave force to the Balfour Declaration, Israel's forever war has been fairly well regulated to minimize its inconvenience for Israelis. It persists only because Israelis like it that way, and could be ended easily if they had any desire to do so.

  6. "But it hasn't yet turned me into a full-bore anti-Zionist": You don't have to be an anti-Zionist to oppose genocide, or to oppose a caste system where given or denied rights because of their birth and parents. Admittedly, those behaviors are deeply embedded in the fabric of actually-existing Zionism, but there have been alternative concepts of Zionism that do not encourage them, and even actual Zionists have resisted the temptation to such barbarism more often than not. You can be Israeli, or you can love Israel and Israelis and wish nothing more than to keep them safe and respected and still oppose the racist and genocidal policies of the current regime. Indeed, if you are, you really must oppose those policies, because they do nothing but bring shame on the people you profess to love and cherish. And you can do this without ever describing yourself as pro-Palestinian, or in any way associating yourself with Palestinian nationalists -- who, quite frankly, have made a lot of missteps over the years, in the worst cases acting exactly like the Israelis they claim to oppose.

  7. "Because as an American of German extraction with many dozens of Jewish friends, I've spent too much of my life taking anti-Semitism seriously to put it on any sort of back burner now." Again, you can be Jewish, or you can love and respect Jews, and still oppose Israel's policies of racism and genocide. You can find ample reason within Judaism, or Christianity, or any other religion, or secular humanism, socialist solidarity, or simple human decency, to do so. And you can and should be clear that if the roles were reversed you would still oppose racism and genocide, and seek to protect and sustain victims of those policies.

    This is actually quite easy for people of the left to do, because the definition that identifies us on the left is that we believe that all people deserve equal political, economic, and human rights. It is harder for people on the right, who again by definition believe that some people are chosen to rule and that others are commanded to serve, or at least not annoy or inconvenience their betters by their presence. They are likely to be divided, depending on whether they identify with the people on top or on the bottom, and they are likely to be the worst offenders, because they also believe that the use of force is legitimate to promote their caste and to subdue all others.

    There is a form of gravity involved in this: if you're under or excluded from the dominant hierarchy, you tend to move left, because your self-interest is better served by universal rights and tolerance than by the slim odds that you can revolt and seize power. This is why almost all Jews in America lean left -- as do most members of most excluded and/or disparaged minorities, pretty much everywhere. Israel is different, because right-wing Jews did manage to seize power there, and as such have become a glaring example of why the right is wrong.

    Zionists have worked very hard to obscure the inevitable divide between rightist power in Israel and left leanings in the diaspora, and for a long time, especially in America, they've been remarkably successful. I'm not going to try to explain how and why, as the key point right now is that it's breaking down, as it is becoming obvious that Israel acts are contrary to the political and moral beliefs of most Jews in America -- that there is any significant support for Israel at all can only be attributed to denial, lies, and the rote repetition of carefully crafted talking points.

    One of those talking points is that opposition to Israel's wars and racism reflects and encourages anti-semitism, thus triggering deep-seated fears tied back to the very real history of racism and genocide targeting Jews -- fears that, while hard to totally dismiss, have been systematically cultivated to Israel's advantage by what Norman Finkelstein calls "the holocaust industry." Some people (and Marcus presents as an example) grew up so traumatized that they are completely unreachable (which is to say, disconnected from reality) on Israel. Others, like Christgau, are just enmeshed in sympathy and guilt -- although in his case, I don't see what other than his name binds him to German, much less Nazi, history and culture (for instance, the Christian church he often refers to was Presbyterian, not Lutheran, not that Lutheranism is all that Teutonic either; in music about all I can think of is that he likes Kraftwerk and Kurt Weill, but who among us doesn't?).

    That Zionists should be accusing leftists, including many Jews, of being anti-semitic is pretty ripe. Zionism was a minority response to the rising tide of anti-semitism in 19th century Europe, which insisted that anti-semitism was endemic and permanent -- something so ingrained in Euopean culture that could never be reformed by socialist political movements or tolerated by liberalism, a curse that could only be escaped from, by retreating to and fortifying an exclusively Jewish nation-state, isolated by an Iron Wall.

    But along the way, Zionists learned to play anti-semitism to their advantage. They pleaded with imperialists to give them land and to expel their unwanted Jews. They pointed Christians to the prophecy in Revelations that sees the return of Jews to the Holy Land as a prerequisite for the Second Coming. (David Lloyd George was one who bought that line. In America today, Postmillennial Dispensationalists are the staunchest supporters of Zionism, and every last one of them relishes the Final Solution that eluded Hitler.) They negotiated with Nazis. They lobbied to keep Jews from emigrating to America. They organized pogroms to stampede Arabic Jews to ascend to Israel. They stole the shameful legacy of the Holocaust and turned it into a propaganda industry, which plies guilt to obtain deferrence and support, even as Israel does unto others the same horrors that others had done to Jews.

    Opposition to anti-semitism is a core belief of liberals and the left in America. This is because such forms of prejudice and discrimination are inimical to our principles, but it's gained extra resonance because Jews tend to be active in liberal/left circles, so non-Jews (like Christgau and myself) know and treasure many of them. Nearly all of us are careful, sometimes to the point of tedium, to make clear that our criticisms of Israel are not to be generalized against Jews. In this, we are helped by the many Jews who share our criticisms, and often, like the group Jewish Voice for Peace, lead the way. But not everyone who criticizes Israel exercises such care, and not everyone does so from left principles, and those are the ones who are most likely to fall back on anti-semitic tropes and popularize them, increasing the chances of an anti-semitic resurgence. That would be bad, both politically and morally, but no form of opposition to tyranny justifies the tyranny. We need to understand that the offense is responsible for its opposition, and to seek its solution at the source: Israel's racist and genocidal behavior.

    So if you're really concerned that this war may make anti-semitism more common, the only solution is to stop the war: in practical terms, to demand a ceasefire, to halt arms deliveries to Israel, to insist that Israel give up its claims to Gaza (if anything is clear by now, it's that Israel is not competent to administer Gaza), to organize aid and relief, and to open a dialogue with Israel to come to some sort of agreeable solution where everyone can live in peace, security, and hopefully prosperity with full and equal rights. The main reason for doing this is that it's the right thing to do, for pretty much everyone, but if you're primarily concerned about anti-semitism, that is one more reason to sue for peace.

    In this age where kill ratios exceed 100-to-1, and the starvation ratio is infinite, I'm not going to pretend that the psychic trauma the war is causing for Israelis, for Jews, and for philo-semitic Americans somehow balances off against the pain and suffering that is being inflicted on Palestinians, but that traums is real, and needs to be addressed and relieved, and only peace can do that. And in this particular conflict, only Israel can grant peace. Until they choose to do so, all focus should be directed on those who are responsible for this war: for fighting it, for supporting it, for excusing it, and for letting them get away with it.

I guess that last point ran away from me a bit, while still leaving much more to be said. More succinctly: to whatever extent Israel is able to identify its war with Jews in general, and to equate opposition to its war with anti-semitism, the prevalence and threat of anti-semitism will grow. To stop this, stop the war. If anti-semitism is the issue you really care about, stopping the war is the only thing that will help you.

People on the left, by definition, are opposed to the war, and are opposed to anti-semitism, and see their opposition to both as part of the same fight. People on the right are often confused, crazy, and/or sick. You may or may not be able to help them, but know that they are much less dangerous in times of peace and good will than in times of war and turmoil, so again the imperative is to stop the war. And if you, like Christgau (and even Marcus) hate and fear Donald Trump (who's firmly on the right for all three reasons), same prescription: stop the war.

One last point: you don't have to specifically care about Jews on this matter. I'm addressing these points to people who do. While I think it would be more helpful to protest in ways that help gain support from people who are initially sympathetic to Israelis -- e.g., I think a lot of Palestinian flag waving isn't very helpful -- I understand that people can come to the right conclusion from all sorts of reasoning. What matters most is that we all demand a ceasefire, and an end to Israel's mistreatment of Palestinians.

David A Graham: Doug Emhoff, first jazz fan: "The second gentleman gets the beauty and meaning of the genre."

Chris Monsen:

  • [06-19] Midweek pick, June 19th, 2024: Okka Disk: A reminder of Bruno Johnson's Milwaukee-based avant-jazz label, noting that "perhaps a deep dive into their output would be in order at a later date." For what little it's worth, I started working on Ken Vandermark & Friends: A Consumer Guide back around 2004, as it seemed like a good follow up to my A Consumer Guide to William Parker, Matthew Shipp, et al., but I didn't get very far. My database does contain 66 albums released by Okka Disk, 55 with grades, of which the following rated A- or higher:

    • Jim Baker/Steve Hunt/Brian Sandstrom/Mars Williams: Extraordinary Popular Delusions (2005 [2007])
    • Peter Brötzmann/Toshinori Kondo/Massimo Pupillo/Paal Nilssen-Love: Hairy Bones (2008 [2009])
    • Caffeine [Ken Vandermark]: Caffeine (1993 [1994])
    • FME [Vandermark]: Underground (2004)
    • FME: Cuts (2004 [2005])
    • Triage [Dave Rempis]: Twenty Minute Cliff (2003)
    • Triage: American Mythology (2004) [A]
    • School Days [Vandermark]: Crossing Division (2000)
    • School Days: In Our Times (2001 [2002])
    • Steelwool Trio [Vandermark]: International Front (1994 [1998])
    • Ken Vandermark/Kent Kessler/Ingebrigt Håker Flaten/Nate McBride/Wilbert De Joode: Collected Fiction (2008 [2009])

  • [06-26] Midweek pick, June 26th, 2024: Gayle, Graves and Parker's WEBO: What I'm listening to to calm my nerves while writing about Gaza and Biden.

Phil Overeem: June 2024: Halfway there + "old reggae albums I'd never heard before were my June salvation."

Robert Sullivan: [06-24] The Sun Ra Arkestra's maestro hits one hundred: "Marshall Allen, the musical collective's sax-playing leader, is celebrating with a deep-spacey video installation during the Venice Biennale."

Werner Trieschmann: [06-20] Fox Green score hat trick with excellent third album, Light Over Darkness.

Midyear Lists:

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Saturday, June 22, 2024

Speaking of Which

I woke up Thursday morning with my usual swirl of thoughts, but the one I most felt like jotting down is that I prefer to take an optimistic view of the 2024 elections, contrary to the prospect of doom and gloom many rational people fear. I find it impossible to believe that most Americans, when they are finally faced with the cold moment of decision, will endorse the increasingly transparent psychopathology of Donald Trump. Sure, the American people have been seduced by right-wing fantasy before, but Reagan and the Bushes tried to disguise their aims by spinning sunny yarns of a kinder, gentler conservatism.

Even Nixon, who still outranks Trump as a vindictive, cynical bastard, claimed to be preserving some plausible, old-fashioned normality. All Trump promises is "taking back" the nation and "making America great again": empty rhetoric lent gravity (if not plausability) by his unbridled malice toward most Americans. Sure, he got away with it in 2016, partly because many people gave him the benefit of doubt but also because the Clinton spell wore off, leaving "crooked Hillary" exposed as a shill for the money-grubbing metro elites. But given Trump's media exposure, both as president and after, the 2024 election should mostly be a referendum on Trump. I still can't see most Americans voting for him.

That doesn't mean Trump cannot win, but in order to do so, two things have to happen: he has to make the election be all about Biden, and Biden has to come up seriously short. One can ponder a lot of possible issues that Biden might be faulted for, and come up with lots of reasons why they might but probably won't matter. (For example, the US may experience a record bad hurricane season, but will voters blame Biden for that and see Trump as better?) But we needn't speculate, because Biden already has his albatross issue: genocide in Gaza. I'm not going to relitigate his failures here, but in terms of my "optimistic view," I will simply state that if Biden loses -- and such an outcome should be viewed not as a Trump win but as a Biden loss -- it will be well deserved, as no president so involved in senseless war, let alone genocide, deserves another term.

So it looks like the net effect of my optimism is to turn what may look like a lose-lose presidential proposition into a win-win. We are currently faced with two perilous prospects: on the one hand, Biden's penchant for sinking into foreign wars, which he tries to compensate for by being occasionally helpful or often just less miserable on various domestic policies; on the other, Republicans so universally horrible we scarcely need to list out the comparisons. Given that choice, one might fervently hope for Biden to win, not because we owe him any blanket support, but because post-election opposition to Biden can be more focused on a few key issues, whereas with Trump we're back to square one on almost everything.

But if Biden loses, his loss will further discredit the centrist style that has dominated the Democratic Party at least since Carter. There are many problems with that style, most deriving from the need to serve donors in order to attract them, which lends them an air of corruption, destroying their credibility. Sure, Republicans are corrupt too, even more so, but their corruption is consistent with their values -- dog-eat-dog individualism, accepting gross inequality, using government to discipline rather than ameliorate the losers -- so it comes off as honest, maybe even courageous. But Democrats are supposed to believe in public service, government for the people, and that's hard to square with their individual pursuit of power in the service of wealth.

So, sure, a Trump win would be a disaster, but it would free the Democrats from having to defend their compromised, half-assed status quo, and it would give them a chance to pose a genuine alternative, and a really credible one at that. I'd like to think that Democrats could get their act together, and build that credible alternative on top of Biden's half-hearted accomplishments. It would be nice to not have to start with the sort of wreckage Trump left in 2021, or Bush left in 2009, or that other Bush left in 1993 (and one can only shudder at the thought of what Trump might leave us in 2029). But people rarely make major changes based on reasoned analysis. It usually takes a great shock to force that kind of change -- like what the Great Depression did to a nation previously in love with Herbert Hoover, or like utter defeat did to Germany and Japan in WWII.

If there was any chance that a Trump win in 2024 would result in a stable and prosperous America, even if only for the 51% or so it would take for Republicans to continue winning elections, we might have something to be truly fearful of. But nothing they want to do works. The only thing they know how to do is to worsen problems, which are largely driven by forces beyond their control -- business, culture, climate, war, migration -- and all their lying, cheating, and outright repression only rub salt into the wounds. When people see how bad Republican rule really is, their support will wither rapidly.

The question is what Democrats have to do to pick up the support of disaffected Trumpers. One theory is to embrace the bigotry they showed in embracing Trump. A better one would be promise the grit, integrity, independence, and vision that Trump promised by couldn't deliver on, partly because he's a crook and con man who never cared, but largely because he surrounded himself by Republicans who had their own corrupt and/or deranged agendas.

I had more thoughts I wanted to write up, mostly involving what I like to think of as dialectics, but which can be defined as how seemingly stable states can suddenly be transformed into quite different states. One example was how Germans went from being Nazis to fawning Israelphiles, while Israelis became the new Nazis. Alas, no time for that here, but the theme is bound to recur.

I didn't get around to gathering the usual links and adding my various comments this week. Better luck next time.

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Sunday, June 16, 2024

Speaking of Which

I picked up a couple new projects this week, which has put me in a dither, but I got up Sunday morning and stuck with this, making my usual rounds (though not much time on X), and figure I've collected and written enough. (Would be nice to add some more music mid-year lists, but I may add them in a Monday update.)

I'm reading Steve Hahn's Illiberal America: A History, well into the chapter on neoliberals who proved their "neo" by going "il" -- quite a bit of Bill Clinton there, but not so much Buchanan/Perot, who pop up in a book review toward the end here. No doubt there's still a lot of Trump to come.

PS: Laura Tillem reposted a poem she wrote for "a poetry slam, for international day of peace celebration in Wichita."

Initial count: 202 links, 9,929 words.

Local tags (these can be linked to directly): on music.

Top story threads:

Israel: This remains, as it has since the Hamas revolt on Oct. 7, 2023, our top story, both in terms of its overall impact and the extent and volatility of news coverage. After going through several permutations, I've found it useful to break the stories up into three groups. This one covers the political concerns and the conflicts within Israel (including Gaza, and neighboring areas like Lebanon that Israel is in direct conflict with). We should be clear that what the IDF is doing in Gaza is genocide, and is intended as such. We should also be clear that Israel practices systematic discrimination and sporadic terror against Palestinians outside of Gaza which, while not rising to the intensity of genocide, should be universally condemned.

The most common word for these policies and practices is "apartheid" -- a word used by South Africa to describe their peculiar implementation of racist segregation, drawn largely on the American example. While there are subtle differences in Israel's implementation, the word is good enough for practical use. One major problem with genocide in Gaza is that it provides cover for increasing violence in the broader practice of apartheid.

The second section concerns diplomatic relations between Israel and the US, and political directives regarding Israel within the US. Israel's ability to carry out genocide in Gaza is directly related to US military, political, and diplomatic support, and this extends to efforts to suppress free speech and to influence elections within the US. (It is, for instance, impossible to see AIPAC as an American interest group given that it operates in lockstep with Israeli foreign policy.)

Student demonstrations, on the other hand, fall into a third subject grouping, "Israel vs. world opinion." This also includes the ICC/ICJ genocide cases, world diplomatic activity aside from that by Israel and the US, and more general discussions of what charges of genocide and antisemitism mean.

America's Israel (and Israel's America):

  • As'ad AbuKhalil: [06-11] Biden's Saudi deal.

  • Michael Arria:

  • Ramzy Baroud: [06-15] America crawls further into global isolation by backing Gaza genocide.

  • Jonathan Chait: [06-08] Why on Earth is Chuck Schumer inviting Netanyahu to address Congress? "It's hard for me to think of an explanation for Schumer's action other than sheer spinelessness."

  • Isaac Chotiner: [06-11] Is Biden's Israel policy cynical or naïve? "Evaluating eight months of the President's attempt to moderate Netanyahu's bombing campaign in Gaza." Interview with Matt Duss, of the Center for International Policy, former chief foreign-policy adviser to Bernie Sanders. Worth quoting at length when asked "what can you imagine a different Democratic Administration doing?":

    Well, I think a different Democratic Administration could have taken this issue more seriously before October 7th. That's not to say we needed another round of the usual peace process. But there have been alarms sounded about Gaza for many, many years by international N.G.O.s; certainly by Palestinians, constantly; by Israeli security officials; by members of Congress, including my former boss. The idea that we could just kind of kick the Palestinians into the corner and manage the problem without any real consequences -- that was revealed as a fantasy on October 7th.

    After October 7th, I hope and think any Democratic Administration would've done immediately what President Biden did: show full support, full solidarity, and really spend time with what occurred on October 7th in all its horror, and stand by Israel as it defended its people.

    At some point though, and fairly quickly, it became clear that what was going to be carried out in Gaza was not just self-defense. It became clear very quickly that this was a war of revenge. We have countless statements from Israeli government officials, many of which have been collected in South Africa's case in the International Court of Justice, which includes accusations of genocide. And we can see with our own eyes the kind of tactics that are being used on densely populated civilian areas in Gaza. A different Democratic Administration might've taken that much more seriously and acted with much more urgency much sooner.

    It's hard to imagine what a different Democrat could have done pre-October 7th. Obama, who almost certainly knew better, managed next to nothing helpful in eight years. There have been ways for an American president to impress upon Israel the need to take some constructive steps, but there has been little political urgency to do so, especially given the influence of pro-Israel donors in our oligarchic political system. While Sanders certainly knows better, I doubt he would have risked whatever political capital he had to bang his head against against a very recalcitrant Netanyahu.

    The next two paragraphs fairly describe what Sanders did, but ineffectively without the portfolio of the presidency. The rush to rally to Israel's defense was nearly universal in Washington, although what was really needed was to lean hard -- starting in private -- against Israel's armed response, as it was instantly clear that the intent would be genocidal, and that would lock Israel into a disastrous public relations spiral while doing virtually nothing for Israel's long-term security.

    One more point to stress here: Biden's failure to anticipate and correct for Israel's horrific response -- indeed, his failure to comprehend the problem despite following Israel closely for over fifty years -- is not simply attributable to the corrupt influence of the Israel lobby. It is deeply ingrained in America's own habitual response to security issues, which especially with the neocons under Clinton and Bush took Israel as the model for managing the threat of terrorism.

  • Zachary Cohen/Katrie Bo Lillis: [06-07] CIA assessment concludes Netanyahu is likely to defy US pressure to set a post-war plan for Gaza.

  • Juan Cole: [06-15] How Netanyahu and fascists in his coalition shot down the Biden peace plan.

  • Joshua Keating: [06-12] The perplexing state of Gaza ceasefire negotiations, explained: "The problem is that it's not clear either side wants a ceasefire." Beware of explanations that start off with a patently false subhed. Literally every single Palestinian, even ones claiming to represent whatever's left of Hamas, want a ceasefire, and have been pleading for one ever since the rupture on Oct. 7 was closed. It's Israel that doesn't want a ceasefire, which is due to three factors: the first is that they're doing well over 99% of the firing, and they like those odds; they also think that the more Palestinians they kill, and the more of Gaza they destroy and render uninhabitable, the closer they'll be to their goal, which is the complete the removal of Palestinians from Eretz Israel; and as long as the US is willing to provide ammo and run diplomatic cover, they see no need for restraint, let alone for disengagement. Much of Netanyahu's power in Israel is tied to the reputation he's built as someone who can cower American presidents, and in that regard, Biden has been a very dependable ally.

    The "negotiations" also involve hostages, but this, too, is very asymmetrical. Hamas took 250 during the Oct. 7 attacks, not so much to exchange them for Palestinians imprisoned by Israel (thousands of them, a number which has increased rapidly since Oct. 7) as to inhibit Israel's attacks. In short, their value was to press for a truce (Hamas likes the term "hudna"), but trades for temporary ceasefires and prisoners offer little respite and diminished protection. And now, after eight months, with half of the hostages exchanged, and many more killed by Israeli fire, the remaining hostages are down to about 80. And at this point, Netanyahu is unwilling to give up his war just to get hostages back. If anything, the hostages do Netanyahu more good if "Hamas" keeps them, as they give him an excuse to keep attacking. At this point, Palestinians would be better off just freeing the hostages, in the probably vain hope that doing so might generate some good will. But that's hard for "Hamas" to do, because without the hostages, do they even exist any more?

    More on Biden's proposal and the "negotiations":

    • Dave DeCamp:

    • Adam Hanieh: [06-14] Why the fight for Palestine is the fight against US imperialism in the region: There is a lot of useful history in this piece, but I don't particularly subscribe to its thesis and drift. US imperialism was real enough but has become increasingly incoherent, especially once it lost its Cold War compass in the 1990s, so that these days it's mostly a sleazy game of graft, with a hugely expensive logistics network but no coherent vision, at least beyond nursing a few old grudges (like Iran and North Korea). British colonialism is even more of a ghost. That you can find echoes and innuendos in Israel is no surprise, but these days it's the Israelis who are pulling American and British strings, for their own purposes, with hardly any regard for whatever the West may want. The article claims that Israel and the Gulf monarchies are "two pillars [that] remain the crux of American power in the region today." But they're really just playing their own games, as likely to trip the US up as to help it.

    • David Hearst: [06-14] Blinken is dragging the US ever deeper into Israel's quagmire.

    • Adam Johnson: [06-11] Media keeps playing along with fiction there is an "Israel ceasefire deal" "Don't squint too hard, one may notice Israel is clear they have no intention to 'end the war.'" By the way, Johnson also published an interesting piece by "a Palestinian-American quantitative researcher focusing on disinformation and censorship in mass media," under the pseudonym "Otto": [2023-11-15] "Massacred" vs "Left to Die": Documenting media bias against Palestinians Oct 7-Nov 7: "A quantitative analysis of the first month of conflict, reveals how dehumanization is baked into the ideoogical cake of cable news."

    • Fred Kaplan:

      • [06-12] Why there's so much confusion about the Israeli peace plan: Uh, because as articulated it's not actually an Israeli plan. Because there is no Israeli plan -- not for peace, anyway. And since permanent conflict with periodic acts of war doesn't much need forethought, there's no plan for that either.

      • [06-13] Hamas's counteroffer is neither realistic nor serious. But only if you start from the assumption that Israel's demands -- which, though never clearly articulated, are roughly: Hamas frees all the hostages, gives up its struggle for Palestinian rights, and surrenders its leader for summary execution -- are the very definition of serious and realistic. In any normal world, the argument that Israel should withdraw its military from Gaza and refrain from further attacks would be completely reasonable.

    • MEE Staff: [06-13] Hamas demands Israel end Gaza blockade as part of ceasefire deal.

    • Mitchell Plitnick: [06-15] Blinken's lies about Hamas rejecting a ceasefire reveal the Biden administration's true intentions: "The Biden administration is playing a shell game with the Gaza ceasefire that aims to trick the Democratic base into thinking meaningful action is taking place to end fighting while still allowing Israel to continue its genocidal campaign."

    • Ishaan Tharoor: [06-12] Israel shrugs at Palestinian civilian casualties. So does Hamas. "In new report, Hamas's leader in Gaza is said to describe Palestinian civilian deaths as 'necessary sacrifices.'" I'm inclined to dismiss anything attributed to Hamas, as I regard them as a spent force, one at present only being propped up by Israel in their need to identify an enemy not quite as inclusive as every Palestinian. But the idea that martyrdom is preferable to subjection and slavery runs deep in the human psyche, so we shouldn't be surprised to find it articulated by Hamas speakers (especially ones removed from the fray). We should reject such sentiments, of course, but also be clear that the blame for them, and for the sacrifices they demand, belongs squarely on those whose power has made only those choices seem possible.

    • Spencer Ackerman: [06-03] 'Phase 2': The shape of Israeli rejectionism to come: "Biden has declared that Israel's reasonable war aims have been achieved. Netanyahu is in no position to agree."

  • Jim Lobe: [06-12] That stinks: Global opinion of US goes down the toilet.

  • Blaise Malley: [06-14] GOP trying to drive wedge between Dems with Israel votes.

  • Stephen Semler: [06-12] Washington is not telling truth about the Gaza pier: "They say food is 'flowing' to the people, but data shows the opposite."

    • Tareq S Hajjaj: [06-14] The story of the US 'floating dock' built from the rubble of Gaza's homes: "The U.S. said it was constructing a floating pier off Gaza's coast to deliver humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza. However, the real reason it exists is to protect American interests in the region."

    • Ahmed Omar: [06-11] Gaza resistance sources say fear is rising US pier will be used for forced displacement of Palestinians: "Critics warn the U.S.-constructed pier off Gaza's coast is being used for military purposes. Now a source in the Gaza resistance says there are indications it will be used to facilitate the forced displacement of Palestinians." They have good reason to be fearful. Most of the Palestinian refugees in Beirut were stampeded onto British ships in Jaffa, as they fled the indiscriminate shelling by the Irgun in 1948, the Israelis having their preference for killing all Palestinians at Deir Yassin. With Egypt resisting their efforts to drive Gazans out through the Sinai, the pier and the ever-obliging Americans will increasingly look like some kind of final solution.

  • Emily Tamkin:

  • Prem Thakker: House votes to block US funding to rebuild Gaza.

Israel vs. world opinion:

Election notes:

Trump:

And other Republicans:

Biden and/or the Democrats:

  • Yasmeen Abutaleb: [06-16] Biden, Obama warn of Trump dangers in star-studded L.A. fundraiser.

  • David Atkins: [06-07] Democrats should run against the Supreme Court: "And they should take on more than the overturning of Roe v. Wade. They ought to campaign against the whole Trump-enabled, rights-stealing, gift-taking conservative supermajority." Of course they should, and to some extent they clearly are, although their message hasn't been fully articulated yet. But it shouldn't be: if we win, we're going to pack the Court. It should be to win big in Congress and the Presidency, then pass popular laws, daring the Court to strike them down. Either the Court will back down, or discredit itself. Either way, win more elections, and appoint better judges. Eventually, like FDR, you will win.

  • Zachary D Carter: [06-10] Inflation is not destroying Joe Biden.

  • David Dayen:

  • Chauncey DeVega:

  • Pramila Jayapal: [06-03] The Congressional Progressive Caucus agenda for 2025.

  • Eric Levitz: [06-13] Biden is on track to beat inflation and lose the presidency: "The data on prices is getting better, but the public's disapproval of the president remains unchanged."

  • David Masciotra: [06-14] Hillary Clinton, truth teller: "Republicans, the media, and plenty of Democrats were shocked -- shocked! -- to hear her say anti-Israel protestors don't know Middle Eastern history and to suggest prejudice might animate a large swatch of Trump voters." As soon as I saw this title, my mind offered a quick edit to the title: "truth teller for sale." Of course, that's not totally accurate: she is so attuned to the whims and wishes of her donors that she doesn't have to wait for the checks to clear. But is what she says about those who protest against Israeli policies true? I don't doubt that she's a very smart person who has been thoroughly schooled in the fine arts of hasbara, but I'm pretty sure I know a lot more Middle Eastern history than she does, and for good measure I'd drop American history into the mix. (Actually, her quote seems to be "that most 'young people' don't know the history of 'many area of the world, including our own country.'")

    Or at least, I understand what I know a lot better than she does. Not for a minute did I ever think invading Iraq would be a good idea. As for other protestors, some may be less knowledgeable, but some know even more than I do: for instance, the author picks on Juan Cole ("an academic popular with the hard left who consistently defends the brutality of Iran and flirts with antisemitism" -- link on Iran, which actually goes to a 2006 article by neocon-convert Christopher Hitchens, but not on antisemitism), who has written many useful books on the region and who runs a website that has consistently earned its "Informed Comment" moniker for more than 20 years.

    While understanding history can help you sort out arguments, which side you take depends more on how you respond to one very simple question: does the sympathy/respect you feel for Jews in Israel allow for or deny sympathy/respect for Palestinians? Or you can reverse the question either way (swap the people, or swap the sentiment to "disdain/disinterest"). Any way you slice it, people who respect all others as people will recoil from the treatment of Israelis against Palestinians, and therefore be critical of the current Israeli regime. History may help you to understand why this particular state happened, and maybe even how it might be changed. It will certainly suggest much about what happens if the current hatreds are allowed to continue and fester. But whether you care depends more on what kind of person you are. And Hillary Clinton's insensitivity and arrogance tells you much about what kind of person she is, which is someone whose only guiding principle is the pursuit of power. The willingness to say unpleasant things in that cause doesn't make you an oracle. It may just mean you're an asshole.

    By the way, Masciotra doesn't stop with Clinton's shilling for the Israel lobby. He still wants to defend her 2016 campaign "basket of deplorables" gaffe, which even she apologized for at the time. He seems to think that if she hadn't spilled the beans, nobody would have realized that lots of racists supported Trump because they recognized in him a fellow racist. (Clinton didn't put it that precisely. She said "deplorable" instead of racist, a code that her fellow liberals recognized while it just seemed snobby to the racists. And by saying "many" she got taken for "most," leaving the rest free to take umbrage over the generalization.) He also bothers to quote and defend Clinton's "truth" about Bernie Sanders: "Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him. He got nothing done." You'd think that a truther would be more concerned with what Sanders was proven right about than with how much lobby-backed legislation he lent his name to, but evidently not. What did Clinton ever accomplish that wasn't in the service to well-heeled lobbyists? I mean, aside from losing an election to Donald Trump?

  • Nicole Narea: [06-11] Biden's overlooked campaign to protect Americans from Big Business: "Many Americans are focused on inflation, but from Big Tech to junk fees, Biden is advancing a pro-consumer agenda." I think this sort of thing is very important, and a very stark contrast to the Trump embrace of kleptocracy, fraud, and business criminality (which, as should be clear by now, he not only enables and excuses, but has vast experience engaging in).

  • Christian Paz: [06-12] Are LGBTQ voters about to abandon Biden? One of those things I refuse to worry about. If Democrats could ever figure out how to get most of the votes from all the people who would be better served by Democrats rather than Republicans winning, they wouldn't have to subdivide their message into constituent identity groups, many of which don't want to hear about each other, let alone what they perceive as pandering to others. On the other hand, if you do identify as a member of a group Republicans are orchestrating hate against, are you really going to hurt yourself just so you can spite Biden? At some point between now and November, you're going to have to wake up and smell the sewer, and decide whether drown in it or escape. Then do the grown up thing and vote.

  • Stephen Prager:

  • Michael Tomasky: [06-14] There's a new "silent majority" out there -- and it is not conservative: "Ever since Richard Nixon used the phrase, it's been a Republican thing. But the Republicans are the extremists now, and the Silent Majority isn't what it was in 1969." I think there's a lot to be said for this point, but it's hard to figure out how to use it.

  • Dylan Wells: [06-15] Meet the 24-year-old trying to solve Biden's problems with young voters: "Eve Levenson, the Biden campaign's national youth engagement director, may have one of the hardest jobs in American politics." Maybe because it's defined by a meaningless artifact of polling?

Hunter Biden: The jury convicted him on all three counts, with a possible maximum sentence of 25 years in jail. I'm surprised that I find this as disturbing as I do. I never liked the father, and find the son to be nothing but nepotistic scum. But he was charged with a crime that shouldn't be illegal, and convicted on evidence that shouldn't be admissable, only because Republicans in Congress (and the Special Prosecutor's office, and evidently the courts) through a hissy fit when he agreed to plead the charge down to near-nothing (more of a compromise than he should have had to do). That the jury went along with this sham is just more evidence of how rigged the system is against defendants. Moreover, because the defendant isn't Trump, Democrats are biting their tongues and expressing their pride in a very corrupt justice system, while Biden won't consider a pardon because he believes that would look bad (like he's playing politics with justice) -- totally the opposite of what Trump has done all along.

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Economic matters:

  • American Prospect: Their June 2024 issue promises to expose: "How Pricing Really Works: The many innovations corporations have devised to get you to pay more." Here are some articles:

    • [06-14] The underbelly of the grocery store: "Nothing you see on the shelves is there by accident." How "junk fees, price-fixing, shrinkflation, personalization, and data collection -- come together at the grocery store. Every product's placement, every advertisement, every coupon is a function of marketing wizardry and hardball tactics, in a bid for the eyes and wallets of consumers."

    • [06-14] Lina Khan: Extraction exterminator: "The Federal Trade Commission chair plays a key role in preventing exploitative pricing schemes from taking root." An interview.

    • Bilal Baydoun: [06-14] Taming the pricing beast: "The government has a variety of strategies to protect the public from price-gouging and information advantages over the consumer."

    • David Dayen: [06-04] One person one price: "Digital surveillance and customer isolation are individualizing the prices we pay."

    • David Dayen/Lindsay Owens: [06-03] The age of recoupment: "How power, technology, and opportunity have come together to gouge consumers."

    • Jarod Facundo: [06-12] War in the aisles: "Monopolies across the grocery supply chain squeeze consumers and small-business owners alike. Big Data will only entrench those dynamics further."

    • Luke Goldstein: [06-05] Three algorithms in a room: "A growing number of industries are using software to fix prices. Law enforces are beginning to fight back."

    • Sarah Jaffe: [06-07] The urge to surge: "Businesses are hiking prices to take advantage of consumers. They learned it from Uber."

    • Hassan Ali Kanu: [06-06] Loaded up with junk: "Extra profits are the only explanation for many fees businesses charge."

    • Robert Kuttner: [06-13] Fantasyland general: "Hospital pricing is impenetrable to consumers and regulators alike. The result: increased costs and profits, and wasteful reliance on armies of middlemen."

    • Joanna Marsh: [06-10] The one-click economy: "Digital subscriptions are here to stay. What should we do about that?"

    • Kalena Thomhave: [06-11] What we owe: "The big banks behind the rising cost of credit."

Ukraine War and Russia:

America's empire and the world:

  • Jess Craig: [06-12] We're in a new era of conflict and crisis. Can humanitarian aid keep up? "Utter neglect of displaced people has become the new normal."

    Last year, more than 360 million people worldwide needed humanitarian assistance. To cover the costs of aid, the United Nations appealed to global donors -- primarily governments but also philanthropic individuals and institutes -- for a record $56 billion.

    But even as humanitarian needs peaked, funding for aid dwindled to its lowest levels since 2019. Less than half of that $56 billion was raised. As a result, the gap between global humanitarian funding needs and donor contributions reached its highest level in more than 20 years.

    And that's not the worst part. What funding was available was not allocated equitably across the world's crises. Conflicts in the Global South went vastly underfunded. Last week, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), a major humanitarian organization, published its annual ranking of the world's most neglected displacement crises. Nine of 10 were in Africa.

  • Ellen Ioanes:

    • [06-10] Why Europe is lurching to the right: "Far-right parties made big gains in EU Parliament elections -- and that's already having an effect." One thing I'll admit is that I've never had the slightest understanding of how the EU Parliament works or what, if anything, it is capable of doing. As near as I've been able to figure out, the EU seems to be a cloistered bureaucracy mostly concerned with economic matters, tightly controlled by a neoliberal oligarchy that is very well insulated against possible encroachments from the Democratic left -- who when they do manage to win elections, get beat down like Syriza in Greece. It is similarly unclear whether the right can have any real impact in the EU Parliament, although I suppose it might afford them an arena the one thing they specialize in, which is irritable gesticulating. Also on the EU elections:

    • [06-13] The fracturing of South African politics, explained: "What the defeat of the party that ended apartheid means for South Africa."

  • Hafsa Kanjwal: [06-13] How India is implementing the 'Israel model' in Kashmir.

  • Peter Oborne: [06-11] Tory Britain is about to fall. But what follows could be far worse: "The Conservatives have traditionally acted as a buffer against fascist forces. But after the impending electoral defeat, Farage and the far right are poised to win control of the party."

  • Vijay Prashad: [06-07] Migrating workers provide wealth for the world.

Other stories:

Erin Blakemore: [06-08] Tens of millions of acres of cropland lie abandoned, study shows: "The biggest changes took place around the Ogallala Aquifer, whose groundwater irrigates parts of numerous states, including Colorado, Texas and Wyoming."

Vivian Gornick: [06-06] Orgasm isn't my bag: A review of Trish Romano: The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture. If it seems like I'm collecting reviews of this book, perhaps that means I should write my own. I read it, and perhaps more importantly, I lived it -- starting as a clueless subscriber in the 1960s.

Balaji Ravichandran: [06-12] Imperialilsm isn't in the past. Neither is the damage it did. A review of Charlotte Lydia Riley: Imperial Island: An Alternative History of the British Empire. Few subjects are more deserving of "a withering indictment" than the British Empire. The "damage done" to the rest of the world has been extensively documented, although little of it has sunk into the Churchill-worshipping cliques in the US and UK. What's far less well understood are the lingering distortions within British politics, and not just for the feedback immigration, which has become conspicuous of late.

Nathan J Robinson: [2018-12-07] Lessons from Chomsky: "Some things I've learned from his writings . . ."

Becca Rothfeld: [06-13] Donald Trump didn't spark out current political chaos. The '90s did. Review of John Ganz: When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. Histories of 1990s US politics tend to feature the main event of Gingrich vs. Clinton, but I can see where focusing on fringe-crazy might offer some insights. Also on Ganz:

Music and other arts:

David Hajdu: [06-11] Seeing ourselves in Joni Mitchell: Review of Ann Powers' "deeply personal biography of Joni Mitchell": Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell. For another review:

Brad Luen: [06-16] Semipop Life: A very high shelf.

Michael Tatum: Books read (and not read): June 2024: I jumped straight to Trish Romano's The Freaks Came Out to Write, as that's the one I've actually read.

Midyear reports: I've been factoring these into my metacritic file.

A friend posted this on Facebook:

I am super critical of Biden's kneejerk support for Netanyahu but I agree 100% with my friend Linda L. Gebert who write this . . . "Please anyone, tell a young person that not voting or voting for a third-party candidate will only help Trump win -- we have to vote for Biden if we want to preserve women's health rights, our healthy economy, good relations with leaders of other countries, etc. . . ."

I offered this comment:

Rather than trying to weigh out positives and negatives on issues, or pondering the curse of lesser-evilism, another way to approach this is to accept that whoever wins is going to do lots of things that you oppose, so ask yourself who would you rather protest against? Biden's not so great on anything you mentioned, but at least with him, you don't have to start with arguments that even Biden agrees with.

I also added a link to Nathan J Robinson: No Leftist Wants a Trump Presidency.

Ask a question, or send a comment.

Sunday, June 9, 2024

Speaking of Which

I'm posting this after 10PM Sunday evening, figuring I'm about worn out, even though I've only hit about 80% of my usual sources, and am finding new things at a frightening clip. I imagine I'll add a bit more on Monday, as I work on what should be a relatively measured Music Week. There is, in any case, much to read and think about here. Too much really.

I have two fairly major pieces on Israel that I wanted to mention before I posted Sunday night, but didn't get around to. They're big, and important, enough I thought about putting them into their own post, but preferred to stick to the one weekly post. I didn't want to slip them into the regular text as mere late finds, so thought I'd put them up here first, easier to notice. But I already wrote a fairly lengthy intro, which I think is pretty good as an intro, so I finally decided to put the new pieces after the old intro, and before everything else.

I thought I'd start here with a quote from Avi Shlaim, from his introduction to one of the first books to appear the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks from Gaza against Israel and Israel's dramatic escalation from counterterrorism to genocide (Jamie Stern-Weiner, ed.: Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm):

The powerful military offensive launched by Israel on the Gaza Strip in October 2023, or Operation Swords of Iron to give it its official name, was a major landmark in the blood-soaked history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was an instant, almost Pavlovian response to the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7. The attack caught Israel by complete surprise, and it was devastating in its consequences, killing about 300 Israeli soldiers, massacring more than 800 civilians, and taking some 250 hostages. Whereas previous Hamas attacks involved the firing of rockets from the Gaza Strip on southern Israel, this was a ground incursion into Israeli territory made possible by breaking down the fence with which Israel had surrounded Gaza. The murderous Hamas attack did not come out of the blue as many believed. It was a response to Israel's illegal and exceptionally brutal military occupation of the Palestinian territories since June 1967, as well as the suffocating economic blockade that Israel had imposed on Gaza since 2006. Israel, however, treated it as an unprovoked terrorist attack that gave it a blank check to use military force on an unprecedented scale to exact revenge and to crush the enemy.

Israel is no stranger to the use of military force in dealing with its neighbors. It is a country that lives by the sword. Under international law, states are allowed to use military force in self-defense as a last resort; Israel often employs force as a first resort. Some of its wars with the Arabs have been "wars of no choice," like the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948; others have been "wars of choice," like the Suez War of 1956 and the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Wars are usually followed by the search for a diplomatic resolution of the conflict. When one examines Israel's record in dealing with the Arabs as a whole, however, the use of force appears to be the preferred instrument of statecraft. Indeed, all too often, instead of war being the pursuit of politics by other means, Israeli diplomacy is the pursuit of war by other means.

Also, a bit further down:

Deadlock on the diplomatic front led to periodic clashes between Hamas and Israel. This is not a conflict between two roughly equal parties but asymmetric warfare between a small paramilitary force and one of the most powerful militaries in the world, armed to the teeth with the most advanced American weaponry. The result was low-intensity (but for the people in Gaza, still devastating) conflict which took the form of primitive missiles fired from inside the Gaza Strip on settlements in southern Israel and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) counter-insurgency operations designed to weaken but not to destroy Hamas. From time to time, Israel would move beyond aerial bombardment to ground invasion of the enclave. It launched major military offensives into Gaza in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2022, and 2023.

Israeli leaders used to call these recurrent IDF incursions into Gaza "mowing the lawn." This was the metaphor to describe Israel's strategy against Hamas. The strategy did not seek to defeat Hamas, let alone drive it from power. On the contrary, the aim was to allow Hamas to govern Gaza but to isolate and weaken it, and to reduce its influence on the West Bank. Israel's overarching political objective was to kep the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government geographically separate so as to prevent the emergence of a unified leadership. In this context, Israel's periodic offensives were designed to degrade the military capability of Hamas, to enhance Israeli deterrence, and to turn the civilian population of Gaza against its rulers. In short, it was a strategy of managing the conflict, of avoiding peace talks, of using the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah as a sub-contractor for Israeli security on the West Bank, and of containing Palestinian resistance within the open-air prison of the Gaza Strip.

Shlaim opens the next paragraph with "This strategy lay in tatters following the Hamas attack," but that's just a momentary reflection of Israeli histrionics plus a bit of wishful thinking. The latter was based on the hope that Israelis would recognize that the old strategy had backfired, and needed to be revised. But the histrionics were at most momentary, and quickly evolved into staged, as Netanyahu and his gang realized the attacks presented a opportunity to escalate the conflict to previously unthreatened levels, and in the absence of meaningful resistance have seen little reason to restrain themselves.

Israel has a very sophisticated propaganda operation, with a large network of long-time contacts, so they sprung immediately to work, planting horror stories about Hamas and Palestinians, while pushing rationales for major war operations into play, so Israel's habitual supporters would always be armed with the best talking points. That they were so prepared to do so suggests they know, and have known for a long time, that their actions and programs aren't obviously justifiable. They know that their main restraint isn't the threat of other powers, but that world opinion will come to ostracize and shame them, like it did to South Africa. It's not certain that such a shift in world opinion will sway them -- the alternative is that they will shrivel up into a defensive ball, like North Korea, and there would certainly be sentiment in Israel for doing so (here I need say no more than "Masada complex").

Israel has, indeed, lost a lot of foreign support, including about 80% of the UN General Assembly. But though all of that, the US has remained not just a reliable ally to Israel, but a generous one, and a very dutiful one, even as Israel is losing support from the general public. Netanyahu is Prime Minister by a very slim and fractious coalition in Israel, but when he speaks in Congress, he can rest assured that 90% of both parties will cheer him on -- a degree of popularity no American politician enjoys.

I meant to include these two major pieces, but missed them in the rush to post Sunday night.

Adam Shatz: Israel's Descent: This is a major essay, structured as a review of six books:

While most of these books go deep into the history of Zionist attempts to claim exclusive representation for the Jewish people -- a topic Sand previously wrote about in The Invention of the Jewish People (2009) and The Invention of the Land of Israel (2012) -- and that features further down in the review, the first several paragraphs provide one of the best overviews available of the current phase of the conflict. I'm tempted to quote it all, but especially want to note paragraphs 4-8, on why this time it's fair and accurate to use the term "genocide":

But, to borrow the language of a 1948 UN convention, there is an older term for 'acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group'. That term is genocide, and among international jurists and human rights experts there is a growing consensus that Israel has committed genocide -- or at least acts of genocide -- in Gaza. This is the opinion not only of international bodies, but also of experts who have a record of circumspection -- indeed, of extreme caution -- where Israel is involved, notably Aryeh Neier, a founder of Human Rights Watch.

The charge of genocide isn't new among Palestinians. I remember hearing it when I was in Beirut in 2002, during Israel's assault on the Jenin refugee camp, and thinking, no, it's a ruthless, pitiless siege. The use of the word 'genocide' struck me then as typical of the rhetorical inflation of Middle East political debate, and as a symptom of the bitter, ugly competition over victimhood in Israel-Palestine. The game had been rigged against Palestinians because of their oppressors' history: the destruction of European Jewry conferred moral capital on the young Jewish state in the eyes of the Western powers. The Palestinian claim of genocide seemed like a bid to even the score, something that words such as 'occupation' and even 'apartheid' could never do.

This time it's different, however, not only because of the wanton killing of thousands of women and children, but because the sheer scale of the devastation has rendered life itself all but impossible for those who have survived Israel's bombardment. The war was provoked by Hamas's unprecedented attack, but the desire to inflict suffering on Gaza, not just on Hamas, didn't arise on 7 October. Here is Ariel Sharon's son Gilad in 2012: 'We need to flatten entire neighbourhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn't stop with Hiroshima -- the Japanese weren't surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too. There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing.' Today this reads like a prophecy.

Exterminationist violence is almost always preceded by other forms of persecution, which aim to render the victims as miserable as possible, including plunder, denial of the franchise, ghettoisation, ethnic cleansing and racist dehumanisation. All of these have been features of Israel's relationship to the Palestinian people since its founding. What causes persecution to slide into mass killing is usually war, in particular a war defined as an existential battle for survival -- as we have seen in the war on Gaza. The statements of Israel's leaders (the defence minister, Yoav Gallant: 'We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly'; President Isaac Herzog: 'It is an entire nation out there that is responsible') have not disguised their intentions but provided a precise guide. So have the gleeful selfies taken by Israeli soldiers amid the ruins of Gaza: for some, at least, its destruction has been a source of pleasure.

Israel's methods may bear a closer resemblance to those of the French in Algeria, or the Assad regime in Syria, than to those of the Nazis in Treblinka or the Hutu génocidaires in Rwanda, but this doesn't mean they do not constitute genocide. Nor does the fact that Israel has killed 'only' a portion of Gaza's population. What, after all, is left for those who survive? Bare life, as Giorgio Agamben calls it: an existence menaced by hunger, destitution and the ever present threat of the next airstrike (or 'tragic accident', as Netanyahu described the incineration of 45 civilians in Rafah). Israel's supporters might argue that this is not the Shoah, but the belief that the best way of honouring the memory of those who died in Auschwitz is to condone the mass killing of Palestinians so that Israeli Jews can feel safe again is one of the great moral perversions of our time.

A couple paragraphs later, Shatz moves on to "Zionism's original ambition," which gets us into the books, including a survey of how Israel's supporters have long sought to quell any Jewish criticism of Israel, eventually going so far as to declare it anti-semitic. I find this particular history fascinating, as it provides some counterweight to the claim that Zionism was intrinsically racist and, if given the power and opportunity, genocidal. Just because this is where you wound up doesn't mean this is where you had to go.

Again, there is much to be learned and thought about everywhere in this article. Let's just wrap up with a few more choice quotes:

  • But the tendency of Israeli Jews to see themselves as eternal victims, among other habits of the diaspora, has proved stronger than Zionism itself, and Israel's leaders have found a powerful ideological armour, and source of cohesion, in this reflex. [This has made them] incapable of distinguishing between violence against Jews as Jews, and violence against Jews in connection with the practices of the Jewish state.

  • Today the catastrophe of 1948 is brazenly defended in Israel as a necessity -- and viewed as an uncompleted, even heroic, project.

  • The last eight months have seen an extraordinary acceleration of Israel's long war against the Palestinians.

  • Benjamin Netanyahu is a callow man of limited imagination . . . [but] his expansionist, racist ideology is the Israeli mainstream. Always an ethnocracy based on Jewish privilege, Israel has, under his watch, become a reactionary nationalist state, a country that now officially belongs exclusively to its Jewish citizens.

  • But this was no accident: conflict with the Arabs was essential to the Zionist mainstream. . . . Brit Shalom's vision of reconciliation and co-operation with the indigenous population was unthinkable to most Zionists, because they regarded the Arabs of Palestine as squatters on sacred Jewish land.

  • This moral myopia has always been resisted by a minority of American Jews. There have been successive waves of resistance, provoked by previous episodes of Israeli brutality: the Lebanon War, the First Intifada, the Second Intifada. But the most consequential wave of resistance may be the one we are seeing now from a generation of young Jews for whom identification with an explicitly illiberal, openly racist state, led by a close ally of Donald Trump, is impossible to stomach.

  • For all their claims to isolation in a sea of sympathy for Palestine, Jewish supporters of Israel, like the state itself, have powerful allies in Washington, in the administration and on university boards.

  • For many Jews, steeped in Zionism's narrative of Jewish persecution and Israeli redemption, and encouraged to think that 1939 might be just around the corner, the fact that Palestinians, not Israelis, are seen by most people as Jews themselves once were -- as victims of oppression and persecution, as stateless refugees -- no doubt comes as a shock.

  • Operation Al-Aqsa Flood thrust the question of Palestine back on the international agenda, sabotaging the normalisation of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, shattering both the myth of a cost-free occupation and the myth of Israel's invincibility. But its architects, Yahya Sinwar and Mohammed Deif, appear to have had no plan to protect Gaza's own people from what would come next. Like Netanyahu, with whom they recently appeared on the International Criminal Court's wanted list, they are ruthless tacticians, capable of brutal, apocalyptic violence but possessing little strategic vision. 'Tomorrow will be different,' Deif promised in his 7 October communiqué. He was correct.' But that difference -- after the initial exuberance brought about by the prison breakout -- can now be seen in the ruins of Gaza.

  • Eight months after 7 October, Palestine remains in the grip, and at the mercy, of a furious, vengeful Jewish state, ever more committed to its colonisation project and contemptuous of international criticism, ruling over a people who have been transformed into strangers in their own land or helpless survivors, awaiting the next delivery of rations.

  • The 'Iron Wall' is not simply a defence strategy: it is Israel's comfort zone.

There is a lot to unpack here, and much more I skipped over -- a lot on US and other protesters, even some thoughts by Palestinians -- but for now I just want to offer one point. If Israel had responded to the Oct. 7 "prison break" with a couple weeks (even a month) of indiscriminate, massive bombardment, which is basically what they did for the first month, then ended it with a unilateral cease-fire, with the looming threat to repeat if Hamas ever attacked again, their wildly disproportionate response would have more than reestablished their "deterrent" credibility.

Those who hated Israel before would have had their feelings reinforced, but those who hadn't hated Israel wouldn't have turned against Israel. (Sure, some would have been shocked by the intensity, but once it ended those feelings would subside. The UN, the ICJ, the ICC wouldn't have charged Israel. The word genocide would have gone silent. The protests would have faded, without ever escalating into encampments and repression. Israel could have washed its hands of governing Gaza, leaving the rubble and what, if anything, was left of Hamas to the international do-gooders, and simply said "good riddance."

The Shatz article helps explain why Israel didn't do that. It is strong on the psychology that keeps Israelis fighting, that keeps them from letting up, from developing a conscience over all of the pain and hate they've inflicted. But it misses one important part of the story, which is the failure of the Biden administration to restrain Israel. Over all of its history, Israel has repeatedly worked itself into a frenzy against its enemies, but it's always had the US to pull it back and cool it off, usually just before its aggression turns not just counterproductive but debilitating. You can probably recite the examples yourself, all the way up to GW Bush and Obama, with their phony, half-hearted two-state plans. Often the restraint has been late and/or lax, and no Israeli ever publicly thanked us for keeping them from doing something stupid, but on some level Israelis expected external restraint, even as they plotted to neutralize it. So when they finally went berserk, and Biden wasn't willing to twist arms to tone them down, they just felt like they had more leeway to work with.

So the piece missing from the Shatz article is really another article altogether, which is what the fuck happened to America, who in most respects is a decent human being, and the rest of America's political caste (some of whom aren't decent at all), couldn't generate any meaningful concern much less resistance against genocide vowed and implemented by Israel? There's a long story there, as deep and convoluted as the one behind Israel, but it should be pretty obvious by now if you've been paying any attention at all.

The second piece I wanted to mention is:

Amira Haas: [06-04] Starvation and Death Are Israel's Defeat. I'm scraping this off Facebook, because the original is behind a paywall. My wife read this to our dinner guests recently, which made me a bit uneasy, because I don't like the use of the word "defeat" here (see my Ali Abunimah note below), although I suppose there could be some language quirk I'm missing, like the difference between "has lost" and "is lost." Israel has not lost the war, but Israel is very lost in its practice. Still, I take this mostly as a cri de coeur, and am grateful for that.

Israel was defeated and is still being defeated, not because of the fact that at the start of the ninth month of this accursed war, Hamas has not been toppled.

The emblem of defeat will forever appear alongside the menorah and flag, because the leaders, commanders and soldiers of Israel killed and wounded thousands of Palestinian civilians, sowing unprecedented ruin and desolation in the Gaza Strip. Because its air force knowingly bombed buildings full of children, women and the elderly. Because in Israel people believe there is no other way. Because entire families were wiped out.

The Jewish state was defeated because its politicians and public officials are causing two million three hundred thousand human beings to go hungry and thirsty, because skin ailments and intestinal inflammation are spreading in Gaza.

The only democracy in the jungle was overwhelmingly defeated because its army expels and then concentrates hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in increasingly smaller areas, labeled safe humanitarian zones, before proceeding to bomb and shell them. Because thousands of permanently disabled people and children with no accompanying adults are hemmed in and suffering greatly in those targeted humanitarian areas.

Because mounds of garbage are piling up there, while the only way to dispose of them is to set them on fire, spouting toxic emissions. Because sewage and excrement flow in the streets, with masses of flies blocking one's eyes. Because when the war ends, people will return to ruined houses chock full of unexploded ordnance, with the ground saturated with toxic dangerous substances. Because thousands of people, if not more, will come down with chronic diseases, paralyzing and terminal, due to that same pollution and those toxic substances.

Because many of those devoted and brave medical teams in the Gaza Strip, male and female doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers and paramedics and yes -- including people who were supporting Hamas or on its government's payroll -- were killed by Israeli bombs or shelling. Because children and students will have lost precious years of study.

Because books and public and private archives went up in flames, with manuscripts of stories and research lost forever, as well as original drawings and embroidery by Gazan artists, which were buried under the debris or damaged. Because one cannot know what else the mental damage inflicted on millions will bring about.

The defeat, forever, lies in the fact that a state that views itself as the heir of the victims of genocide carried out by Nazi Germany has generated this hell in less than nine months, with an end not yet in sight. Call it genocide. Don't call it genocide.

The structural failure lies not in the fact that the G-word was affixed to the name "Israel" in the resounding petition filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice. The failure lies in the refusal of most Israeli Jews to listen to the alarm bells in this petition. They continued supporting the war even after the petition was filed in late December, allowing the petition's warning to become a prophecy, and for doubts to be obliterated in the face of additional cumulative evidence.

The defeat lies with Israel's universities, which trained hordes of jurists who find proportionality in every bomb that kills children. They are the ones providing military commanders with the protective vests, of repeated cliché: "Israel is abiding by international law, taking care not to harm civilians," every time an order is given to expel a population and concentrate it in a smaller area.

The convoys of displaced people, on foot, in carts, on trucks overloaded with people and mattresses, with wheelchairs carrying old people or amputees, are a failing grade for Israel's school system, its law faculties and history departments. The debacle is also a failure of the Hebrew language. Expulsion is "evacuation." A deadly military raid is an "activity." The carpet bombing of entire neighborhoods is "good work by our soldiers."

Israel's monolithic nature is another reason for and proof of utter defeat, as well as being emblematic of it. Most of the Jewish-Israeli public, including opponents of Benjamin Netanyahu's camp, was taken captive by the notion of a magical total victory as an answer to the October 7 massacre, without learning a thing from past wars in general and from ones against the Palestinians in particular.

Yes, the Hamas atrocities were horrific. The suffering of the hostages and their families is beyond words. Yes, turning the Gaza Strip into a huge depot of weapons and ammunition ready to be used, through an imitation of the Israeli model, is exasperating.

But the majority of Israeli Jews let the drive for revenge blind them. The unwillingness to listen and to know, in order to avoid making mistakes, is in the DNA of the debacle. Our all-knowing commanders did not listen to the female spotters, but they mainly failed to listen to Palestinians, who over decades warned that the situation cannot continue like this.

The seeds of defeat lay in protesters against the judicial overhaul rejecting the basic fact that we have no chance of being a democracy without ending the occupation, and that the people generating the overhaul are the ones striving to "vanquish" the Palestinians.

With God's help. The failure was inscribed back then, in the first days after October 7, when anyone trying to point out the "context" was condemned as a traitor or a supporter of Hamas. The traitors turned out to be the real patriots, but the debacle is ours -- the traitors' -- as well.

In looking this piece up, I found another at Haaretz worth notice for the title:

Dahlia Scheindlin: [06-10] Will the real opposition stand up: Is anyone trying to save Israel from Netanyahu, endless war and isolation? "Benny Gantz's unsurprising departure from the Netanyahu government won't strengthen the opposition, because Israel barely has one worthy of the name."

The Shatz piece doesn't have links, but a casual reference there to "philosemitic McCarthyism" led me to search out this piece:

Susan Neiman: [2023-10-19] Historical reckoning gone haywire: "Germans' efforts to confront their country's criminal history and to root out antisemitism have shifted from vigilance to a philosemitic McCarthyism that threatens their rich cultural life."

That, in turn, led me to Neiman's recent review of Shatz's book The Rebel's Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon:

Susan Neiman: [06-06] Fanon the universalist: "Adam Shatz argues in his new biography of Frantz Fanon that the supposed patron saint of political violence was instead a visionary of a radical universalism that rejected racial essentialism and colonialism."

Initial count: 209 links, 12260 words. Updated count [06-10]: 235 links, 15800 words.

Local tags (these can be linked to directly): on music.

Top story threads:

Israel: As I'm trying to wrap this up on Sunday, I must admit I'm getting overwhelmed, and possibly a bit confused, by the constant roll call of atrocities Israel is committing. There appears to be not just one but several instances of mass slaughter at Nuseirat refugee camp. There is also "late news" -- later than the earliest reports below -- including the Benny Gantz resignation, that are captured in various states of disclosure below. While I've generally tried to group related reports, that's become increasingly difficult, so my apologies for any lapses in order. These are truly trying times. And yet the solution of a simple cease-fire is so blindingly obvious.

America's Israel (and Israel's America): The Biden administration, despite occasional misgivings, is fully complicit in Israel's genocide. Republicans only wish to intensify it -- after all, they figure racism and militarism are their things.

  • Janet Abou-Elias: [06-06] Who's minding the stockpile of US weapons going to Israel? "Congress has further weakened constraints on a special DOD arms reserve, which is spread over multiple warehouses and lacks a public inventory."

  • Michael Arria: [06-06] The Shift: Netanyahu is going back to Washington: "Benjamin Netanyahu's upcoming speech to Congress will be his fourth, giving him the most of any foreign leader. He's currently tied with Winston Churchill at three. He was invited by the leadership from both parties. Who says bipartisanship is dead?" More on the Netanyahu invite:

  • Matthew Mpoke Bigg: [06-05] Here's a closer look at the hurdles to a cease-fire deal: "Neither Israel nor Hamas have said definitively whether they would accept or reject a proposal outlined by President Biden, but sizable gaps between the two sides appear to remain." NY Times remain masters at both-sidesing this, but Israel is the only side that's free to operate deliberately, so lack of "agreement" simply means that Israel has refused to cease-fire, despite what should be compelling reasons to do so. More on the Biden (presented as Israel) proposal:

    • Ali Abunimah: [05-31] Biden admits Israel's defeat in Gaza: Author seeks to poke Biden in the eye, but quotes Biden's actual speech, adding his annotation. Mine would differ, but the exercise is still worthwhile. I'd never say Israel has been defeated in Gaza, except perhaps to say that Israel has defeated itself (although I'd look for words more like degraded and debilitated, as I hate the whole notion that wars can be won -- I only see losers, varying in the quantities they have lost, but less so the qualities, which afflict all warriors).

      I haven't been following his publication, but I've been aware of Abunimah for a long time. He's written a couple of "clear-eyed, sharply reasoned, and compassionate" books on the subject: One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impassed (2007: not remotedly agreeable to Israel, but not wrong either, and would have "avoided all this mess" -- quote's from a Professor Longhair song, about something else, but hits the spot here); and The Battle for Justice in Palestine (2014; my Books note was: "tries to remain hopeful")

    • Fred Kaplan:

  • Sheera Frenkel: [06-05] Israel secretly targets US lawmakers with influence campaign on Gaza War: "Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs ordered the operation, which used fake social media accounts urging U.S. lawmakers to fund Israel's military, according to officials and documents about the effort."

  • Ellen Ioanes: [06-05] What happens if Gaza ceasefire talks fail. "Nearly 40 Palestinians in Rafah will die each day due to traumatic injuries if Israel continues its incursion, according to a new analysis." How they came up with that figure, which they project to 3,509 by August 17, boggles the mind. Israel has been known to kill more than that with a single bomb. And note how they're breaking out "traumatic injuries" into a separate category, presumably to separate them out from starvation deaths and who knows what else? For that matter, "traumatic" is about a pretty tame generic word for blown to bits and/or incinerated, which is what Israel's bombs are actually doing, as well as burying bodies under tons of rubble. When we commonly speak of trauma, usually we mean psychological injuries -- something which in this case no one has come close to quantifying.

    And can we talk about this passive-voiced "if talks fail." Biden announced what he called "Israel's plan," and Hamas basically agreed to it, so who is still talking? The thus-far-failing talks Ioanes alludes to here are exclusively within Israel's war cabinet, where failure to agree to anything that might halt the war is some kind of axiom.

  • Alon Pinkas: [06-06] Biden wants an end to the Gaza war. But he is finally realising Netanyahu will block any attempts at peace. This has been more/less the story since about a month into the war. although it took Biden much longer to dare say anything in public, and he's still doing everything possible to appease Israel. If, after a few weeks of their savage bombing of Gaza, Israel had unilaterally ceased fire, no one would doubt their deterrence. Everyone would have understood that any attack on them would be met with a disproportionately savage response. They could then have turned their backs and walked away, simply dumping responsibility for Gaza and its people, which they have no real interest in or for, onto the UN. The hostages would have been freed, even without prisoner swaps. The ancillary skirmishes with Hezbollah and the Houthis would have ended. Months later, no one would be talking about genocide, or facing charges from the ICC. Israel's relations with the US would be unblemished. And Israel's right-wing government would still have a relatively free hand to go about its dispossession of and terror against Palestinians in the West Bank. This didn't happen because Biden didn't dare object to Israel's genocidal plans, because he's totally under their thumb -- presumably due to donors and the Israel lobby, but one has to wonder if he just doesn't have a streak of masochism. Even now that he's writhing in misery, he still can't bring himself to just say no.

  • Mitchell Plitnick: [06-08] The Biden administration must stop Israel before it escalates in Lebanon: "There are dangerous signs Israel intends to escalate attacks on Lebanon and raise the stakes with Hezbollah. If it does, the risk of a regional war grows enormously. The only way out is to end the fighting in Gaza." More evidence that the theory of deterrence is a recipe for disaster. To rally American support, Israel has tried to paint its genocide in Gaza as a sideshow to its defense against Iran, the mastermind behind the "six front" assault on Israel -- because, well, Americans hate Iran, and are really gullible on that point. To make this war look real, Israel needs to provoke Hezbollah, which is easy to do because Hezbollah also buys into the theory of deterrence, so feels the need to shoot back when they are shot at. This is close to spiraling out of control, but a ceasefire in Gaza would bring it all to an abrupt close. A rapprochement between the US and Iran would also be a big help, as it would knock the legs out from under Israel's game-playing.

  • H Scott Prosterman: [06-06] How Trump and Netanyahu are tag-teaming Biden on Gaza.

    Before these men served, no Israeli leader had ever dared to interfere in US electoral politics. Trump openly campaigned for Bibi. It's almost as if they ran on the same ticket in 2020. The political survival of both men is dependent on generating political outrage among their bases, because they have nothing else to run on.

  • Philip Weiss:

    • [06-02] Weekly Briefing: The political and moral consequences of hallowing Trump's verdict while nullifying the Hague: "Joe Biden wants it both ways. He wants Democrats to stop criticizing genocide but he also wants the Israel lobby's support. Thus, he has a ceasefire plan in one hand, and an invitation to Netanyahu, a war criminal, to speak to Congress in the other." Pretty good opening here:

      Joe Biden is trying to end the war in Gaza. He's not trying that hard. But he's trying.

      Biden knows that the Democratic base is on fire. He knows that for a certain bloc of voters in American society -- Genocide is not acceptable. Sadly, most people will go along fine with a genocide. That's what history tells us and what the U.S. establishment is demonstrating right now. Samantha Power wrote a whole book about the Sarajevo genocide and launched a great career but now she's a top Biden aide and just keeps her head down. It's not fair to single her out -- because all the editorial writers and politicians have a similar stance. It's a terrible thing that so many civilians and babies are being killed by American weaponry in Gaza, but hey, look what Hamas did on October 7. That's the ultimate in whatabboutery. What about Hamas? While we are burning up civilians.

    • [06-09] Weekly Briefing: 274 Palestinian lives don't matter to the Biden administration: "A week culminating with the massacre of 274 Palestinians in Gaza provided further evidence -- though none is needed -- that anti-Palestinian bias is simply a rule of American politics, and today maybe the leading rule."

    • [06-09] 'Allow me to share a story that touched me deeply' -- Harry Soloway on Palestinian resistance.

Israel vs. world opinion:

  • Yuval Abraham/Meron Rapoport: Surveillance and interference: Israel's covert war on the ICC exposed: "Top Israeli government and security officials have overseen a nine-year surveillance operation targeting the ICC and Palestinian rights groups to try to thwart a war crimes probe."

  • Yousef M Aljamal: [06-07] Israel's progression from apartheid to genocide: "The unfolding genocide in Gaza is the latest chapter in Israel's attempt to remove Palestinians from their land. All those calling for a ceasefire should join in the longer-term efforts to dismantle Israeli apartheid."

  • Michael Arria: [06-03] San Jose State University professor says she was suspended over her Palestinian activism: "Last month Sang Hea Kil, a justice studies professor at the San Jose State University, was placed on a temporary suspension because of her Palestine activism."

  • Ramzy Baroud: [06-06] End of an era: Pro-Palestinian language exposes Israel, Zionism.

  • Reed Brody: [06-06] Israel's legal reckoning and the historical shift in justice for Palestinians.

  • Chandni Desai: [06-08] Israel has destroyed or damaged 80% of schools in Gaza. This is scholasticide: This is another new word we don't need, because it just narrows the scope of a perfectly apt word we're already driven to use, which is genocide. The lesson we do need to point out is that genocide isn't just a matter of counting kills. If the goal is to ending a type of people, it is just as effectively advanced to destroying their homes, their environment, their culture and historical legacy. Counting the dead is easy, but much of the devastation is carried forward by its survivors, and those impacts are especially hard to quantify.

  • Connor Echols/Maya Krainc: [06-04] House votes to sanction ICC for case against Israeli settlers: "The bill, which is unlikely to pass the Senate, would punish US allies and famous lawyer Amal Clooney."

  • Richard Falk:

  • Abdallah Fayyard: [06-05] It's not Islamophobia, it's anti-Palestinian racism: "Anti-Palestinian racism is a distinct form of bigotry that's too often ignored."

  • Joshua Frank: [06-05] It's never been about freeing the hostages: "Israel's scorched-earth campaign will cruelly shape the lives of many future generations of Palestinians -- and that's the point."

  • Philippe Lazzarini: [05-30] UNRWA: Stop Israel's violent campaign against us. How violent?

    As I write this, our agency has verified that at least 192 UNRWA employees have been killed in Gaza. More than 170 UNRWA premises have been damaged or destroyed. UNRWA-run schools have been demolished; some 450 displaced people have been killed while sheltered inside UNRWA schools and other structures. Since Oct. 7, Israeli security forces have rounded up UNRWA personnel in Gaza, who have alleged torture and mistreatment while in detention in the Strip and in Israel.

    UNRWA staff members are regularly harassed and humiliated at Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank including East Jerusalem. Agency installations are used by the Israel security forces, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups for military purposes.

    UNRWA is not the only U.N. agency that faces danger. In April, gunfire hit World Food Program and UNICEF vehicles, apparently inadvertently but despite coordination with the Israeli authorities.

    The assault on UNRWA has spread to East Jerusalem, where a member of the Jerusalem municipality has helped incite protests against UNRWA. Demonstrations are becoming increasingly dangerous, with at least two arson attacks on our UNRWA compound, and a crowd including Israeli children gathered outside our premises singing "Let the U.N. burn." At other times, demonstrators threw stones.

    PS: The day after this op-ed was published, Israel replied as directly and emphatically as possible: [06-06] Israel strike on Gaza school kills dozens. Israel claims "the compound contained a Hamas command post." Perhaps Netanyahu should brush up on The Merchant of Venice, where the "wise judge" allowed that Shylock could take his "pound of flesh" but could spill no blood in the process. Of course, Netanyahu is unlikely to get beyond the thought that Shakespeare was just being antisemitic. On the other hand, the notion that one wrong does not allow you to commit indiscriminate slaughter isn't novel.

  • Natasha Lennard/Prem Thakker: Columbia Law Review refused to take down article on Palestine, so its board of directors nuked the whole website.

  • Eric Levitz: [06-03] Israel is not fighting for its survival. I mentioned this piece in an update last week, but it's worth reiterating here.

  • Branko Marcetic: [06-03] The corporate power brokers behind AIPAC's war on the Squad: Their investigation "reveals the individuals behind AIPAC's election war chest: nearly 60% are CEOs and other top executives at the country's largest corporations." I haven't cited many articles so far on AIPAC's crusade against Democrats who actually take human rights and war crimes seriously, but they are piling up. Bipartisanship is a holy grail in Washington, not because either side treasures compromise but because a bipartisan consensus helps to exclude critics and suppress any further discussion of an issue that those in power would rather not have to argue for in public. Cold War and trade deals like NAFTA are other classic examples, but support for Israel has been so bipartisan for so long it defines the shape of reality as perceived all but intuitively by politicians in Washington. But apartheid and genocide are unsettling this equation, disturbing large numbers of Democratic voters, so AIPAC is reacting like its Israeli masters, by cracking the whip -- the same kneejerk reaction we see when university administrators move to arrest protesters. Both are turns as sharply opposed to the basic tenets of liberal democracy as liberal Democrats routinely accuse Republicans of. That both are driven primarily by the extraordinary political influence of money only exposes the sham that our vaunted democracy has become under oligarchy.

  • Qassam Muaddi: [06-03] Against a world without Palestinians: "If the world as it is cannot abide Palestinian existence, then we will have to change the world." This piece makes me a bit queasy, but I recognize that is largely because I've never accepted the conditions under which it was written, and always preferred to think of Palestinians as just another nationality, like all others, with its harmless parochial quirks. But the effort to deny them recognition, and to erase their memory, has been a longstanding project in Israel.

    In early days, this was done through pretense (see A land without a people for a people without a land and denial (see Golda Meir's oft-repeated There was no such thing as Palestinians). Norman Finkelstein wrote about all that in Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (1995; revised 2003), especially his critique of Joan Peters' 1984 book, From Time Immemorial.

    Another book that was very insightful at the time (2003) was Baruch Kimmerling: Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War Against the Palestinians -- reissued in 2006 with the new subtitle, The Real Legacy of Ariel Sharon. Kimmerling's precise meaning is still operative, although since then the methods have become much cruder and more violent. Sharon, of course, would turn in his grave at the suggestion that he engaged with tact. I'll never forget the expression on his face when Bush referred to him as "a man of peace." Even if you dispute that the Gaza war fully counts as genocide, it is impossible to deny that politicide is official policy.

    I'm sure there are more recent books on the subject, like Rebecca Ruth Gould: Erasing Palestine: Free Speech and Palestinian Freedom (2023), which deals specifically with the canard that "pro-Palestinian" statements should be banished as anti-semitic. But another aspect of this piece is the notion that the Palestinian survival is redemptive, potentially for everyone. I can't say one way or the other, but I will say that this reminds me of a book I read very shortly after it came out in 1969: Vine Deloria, Jr.: Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. As an American, I find it completely natural to think of Zionism as a settler-colonial movement, as was European-settled America. There are many aspects to this: if I wanted to launch a career as a scholar, I'd research and write up some kind of global, comparative study of how other settlers and natives viewed the American-Indian experience. (Sure, there's enough for a book just on Israel, but I'd also like to see some bit on Hitler's use of America's "frontier myth.")

    Suffice it for now to draw two points here. The first is that what permanently ended Indian violence against settlers was the US army calling off its own attacks, and restraining settlers from the free reign of terror they had long practiced. Indians were "defeated," sure, but they would surely have regrouped and fought back had they been given continued cause. The second is that "Custer died" is pretty damn generous given all of the sins it's been allowed to redeem.

  • Jonathan Ofir: [06-02] Netanyahu is back and leading the polls, all thanks to the ICC: "In Israel, a potential arrest for crimes against humanity can help boost the popularity of a politician. That itself is a telling indictment."

  • Edith Olmsted: [04-27] Pro-Israel agitator shouts 'kill the Jews,' gets everyone else arrested: "Around 100 protesters were arrested on Saturday at a pro-Palestine encampment at Northeastern University, but not the one whose hate speech got everything shut down."

  • James Ray: [06-05] Do you condemn Hamas? How does it matter? This was a question every concerned thinking person was asked at the moment of the October 7, 2023 attacks, although there was never any forum by within which disapproval of Hamas could have affected their acts. There were, at the time, many reasons why one might "condemn Hamas," ranging from the pure immorality of armed offense to the political ramifications of provoking a much more powerful enemy, including the probability that Israelis would use the attacks as a pretext for unleashing much greater, potentially genocidal, violence of their own. But even acknowledging the question helped suppress the real question, which is whether you approve of the way Israel has exercised power over Gaza and wherever Palestinians continue to live.

    Many of us who have long disapproved of Israel's occupation were quick to condemn Hamas, only to find that our condemnations were counted as huzzahs for much more devastating, much more deadly attacks, a process which continues unabated eight months later, and which will continue indefinitely, until Israel's leadership (or its successors) finally backs off, either because they develop a conscience (pretty unlikely at present) or some calculation that the costs of further slaughter can no longer be justified. Given this situation, I think it no longer makes any sense to condemn Hamas, as all doing so does is to encourage Israel to further genocide.

    I'm not even sure there is a Hamas any more -- sure, there are a couple blokes in Syria who once had connections with the group, and who continue to negotiate to release hostages they don't actually have, but for practical purposes what used to be Hamas has dissolved back into the Palestinian people (as Israel makes clear every time they allegedly target "high value" Hamas operatives while killing dozens of "human shields" -- something which, we should make clear, Israel has no right to do). If, at some future point, the war ends, and Palestinians are allowed to form their own government -- which is something they've never been permitted to do (at least under Israeli, British, Ottoman, or Crusader rule) -- and some ex-Hamas people try to reconstitute the group, that would be a good time to condemn them. Otherwise, focus on who's responsible for the devastation and violence. It's not Hamas.

    In this, I'm mostly responding to the title. The article is a bit more problematical, as it does a little arm-chair analysis of "when armed struggle becomes material necessity." Clearly, a number of the Palestinian groups listed here decided that it did become necessary, and they proceeded to launch various attacks against Israeli power, of which Oct. 7 was one of the most dramatic (at least in a long time; the revolt in 1937, and the war in 1948, were larger and more sustained; the 2000-05 intifada killed slightly fewer Israelis over a much longer period of time). Still, before one can condemn the resort to armed struggle, one needs to ask the questions: Were there any practical non-violent avenues for Palestinians to redress their grievances (of which they had many)? It's not obvious that there were. (Short for a long survey of who missed which opportunities for opportunities for peace -- as the oft-quoted Abba Eban quip comes full circle.)

    I was thinking of a second question, which is how effective have all those efforts at armed resistance been? The answer is not very, and the prospects have probably diminished even further over time, but that's easier for someone far removed like myself to say than for someone who's directly involved. But in that case, the question becomes: how desperate do you have to be to launch a violent attack against a power that's certain to inflict many times as much violence back at you? If you've been following the political dynamics within Israel, especially with the rise of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, but also for the long decline of Labor (starting with the assassination of Rabin) through the rise of Netanyahu, with the marginalization of the corrupt and pliant PA and the exclusion of Hamas, Palestinian prospects for achieving any degree of decent human rights have only grown dimmer. During this period, I believe that most Palestinians favored a non-violent appeal to world opinion, hoping to shift it to put pressure on Israel through BDS. However, thanks to Israel's machinations, Hamas maintained just enough privacy and autonomy in Gaza to stage an attack, with nothing other than fear as a constraint, so they took matters into their own hands. I feel safe in saying that a democratic Gaza would never have launched such an attack. Which is to say that responsibility for the attack lay solely on Israel, for creating the desperate conditions that made the attack seem necessary, and for not allowing any other peaceable outlets for their just grievances.

    One should further blame Israel for post-facto justifying the Hamas attack. This is a point that Israelis should understand better than anyone, because they have been trained to celebrate the uprising of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto, even though it was doomed from the start. I don't want to overstate the similarities, but I don't want to soft-pedal them either. Such situations are so rare in history as to necessarily be unique, but they do excite the imagination. Although Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas, they seem to be doing more than anyone to build Hamas up, to restore their status as the Palestinians who dared to fight back. Because Israel has never really minded a good fight. It's peace they really cannot abide -- and that is what makes them responsible for all of the consequent injustice and violence, the first of many things you should blame Israel for.

    And as Hamas -- at least as we understand it -- wouldn't exist but for Israel, when you do condemn Hamas, make sure it's clear that the blame starts with Israel.

  • Hoda Sherif: [06-06] 'The generation that says no more': Inside the Columbia University encampments for Palestine: "Students at Columbia University continue to disrupt business as usual for Gaza and have birthed a radical re-imagining of society in the process."

  • Yonat Shimron: [04-29] How unconditional support for Israel became a cornerstone of Jewish American identity: Interview with Marjorie N. Feld, author of The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism.

  • Tatiana Siegel: [06-06] Hollywood marketing guru fuels controversy by telling staffers to refrain from working with anyone 'posting against Israel': The Hollywood "black list" returns.

Trump:

  • Charlie Savage/Jonathan Swan/Maggie Haberman: [06-07] If Trump wins: Nothing new here that hasn't been reported elsewhere, but if you find the New York Times a credible source, believe it. (I should write more on this piece next week.)

  • David Corn: [06-06] Trump's obsession with revenge: a big post-verdict danger.

  • Michelle Cottle/Carlos Lozada: [06-07] The 'empty suit' of Trump's masculinity: With Jamelle Bouie and David French.

  • Chas Danner: [06-06] Trump can no longer shoot someone on fifth avenue. Well, his "New York concealed carry license was quietly suspended on April 1, 2023, following his indictment on criminal charges," leading him to surrender two guns, and move one "legally" to Florida. If he shoots someone on Fifth Avenue, he could be charged with illegal possession of a firearm, but if he could previously get away with murder, it's hard to see him more worried now.

  • Maureen Dowd: [07-28] The Don and his badfellas. She has fun with this, but seems to get to an inner truth:

    Trump is drawn to people who know how to dominate a room and exaggerated displays of macho, citing three of his top five movies as "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly," "Goodfellas" and "The Godfather."

    As a young real estate developer, he would hang out at Yankee Stadium and study the larger-than-life figures in the V.I.P. box: George Steinbrenner, Lee Iacocca, Frank Sinatra, Roy Cohn, Rupert Murdoch, Cary Grant. He was intent on learning how they grabbed the limelight.

    "In his first big apartment project, Trump's father had a partner connected to the Genovese and Gambino crime families," said Michael D'Antonio, another Trump biographer. "He dealt with mobbed-up suppliers and union guys for decades.

    "When Trump was a little boy, wandering around job sites with his dad -- which was the only time he got to spend with him -- he saw a lot of guys with broken noses and rough accents. And I think he is really enchanted by base male displays of strength. Think about 'Goodfellas' -- people who prevail by cheating and fixing and lying. Trump doesn't have the baseline intellect and experience to be proficient at governing. His proficiency is this mob style of bullying and tough-guy talk."

  • Abdallah Fayyad:: [06-04] Trump's New York conviction is not enough: "If the federal government wants to uphold democracy and the rule of law, it can't leave convicting Trump to the states."

    • Phil Freeman, in a [06-01] Facebook post, summed up Trump's post-verdict appearances almost perfectly (assuming you get what by now must be a very esoteric reference):

    Donald Trump is officially in his "Lenny Bruce reading his trial transcripts to audiences that came in expecting jokes" era. Hope everyone's ready for five solid months of rambling, self-pitying speeches about how unfair everyone is to him, 'cause that's what's coming, from today till November 5.

  • Matt Ford: [06-09] The right's truly incredible argument for weakening consumer safety: "A baby products company and an anti-woke activist group are trying to weaken a critical consumer watchdog agency. If one of their cases reaches the Supreme Court, we're all in trouble."

  • Michelle Goldberg: [06-07] Donald Trump's mob rule: Starts with an anecdote from Peter Navarro, currently in prison for contempt of Congress, describing how his Trump ties "make him something of a made man," both with guards and inmates. "One of the more unsettling things about our politics right now is the Republican Party's increasingly open embrace of lawlessness. Even as they proclaim Trump's innocence, Trump and his allies revel in the frisson of criminality."

    There's a similar dichotomy between Trump and his enemies: He represents charismatic personal authority as opposed to the bureaucratic dictates of the law. Under his rule, the Republican Party, long uneasy with modernity, has given itself over to Gemeinschaft. The Trump Organization was always run as a family business, and now that Trump has made his dilettante daughter-in-law vice chair of the Republican National Committee, the Republican Party is becoming one as well. To impose a similar regime of personal rule on the country at large, Trump has to destroy the already rickety legitimacy of the existing system. "As in Machiavelli's thought, the Prince is not only above the law but the source of law and all social and political order, so in the Corleone universe, the Don is 'responsible' for his family, a responsibility that authorizes him to do virtually anything except violate the obligations of the family bond," [Sam] Francis [a white nationalist who has become posthumously influential among MAGA elites] wrote. That also seems to be how Trump sees himself, minus, of course, the family obligations. What's frightening is how many Republicans see him the same way.

  • Sarah Jones: [06-06] The anti-abortion movement's newest lie: Are they going after contraception next?

  • Ed Kilgore:

    • [06-06] GOP primaries prove Trump has thoroughly dominated the party.

    • [06-08] Trump doubles down on plan for huge spending power grab.

      But arguably some of the most important second-term plans involve Team Trump's dark designs on the so-called swamp of the federal bureaucracy. Their interest in tearing down the civil service system is well-known, along with a scheme to fill vacant positions created by mass firings of non-partisan professional employees and their replacement via a so-called Schedule F of political appointees chosen for all the top policy-making jobs in the executive branch. The purpose of placing these MAGA loyalists throughout the bureaucracy isn't just to ride herd on such bureaucrats as remain in federal departments and agencies. These new commissars would also serve as Trojan Horses charged with advising the Trump high command on how to eliminate or disable executive branch functions the new order dislikes or can do without.

  • Ben Mathis-Lilley:

  • Kim Phillips-Fein: [06-04] The mandate for leadership, then and now: "The Heritage Foundation's 1980 manual aimed to roll back the state and unleash the free market. The 2025 vision is more extreme, and even more dangerous." This is part of an issue on Project 2025, which includes pieces like:

  • James Risen:

  • Greg Sargent: Trump's bizarre moments with Dr. Phil and Hannity should alarm us all.

  • Alex Shephard: [06-06] The billionaires have captured Donald Trump.

  • Matt Stieb: [06-09] The time Trump held a national security chat among Mar-a-Lago diners: "When he strategized about North Korea on a golf-resort patio, it was an early indication of how crazy his administration would get."

  • Ishaan Tharoor: [05-31] Netanyahu and Putin are both waiting for Trump: "Some foreign leaders may be holding out for a Trump victory." It's not just that they can expect to be treated more deferentially by Trump. It's also that they have a lot of leverage to sabotage Biden's reëlection chances, which are largely imperiled by the disastrous choices Biden made in allowing wars in Ukraine and Gaza to open up and to drag on indefinitely.

  • Michael Tomasky: It's simple: Trump is treated like a criminal because he's a criminal.

And other Republicans:

Biden and/or the Democrats:

  • Jeet Heer: Showing contempt for young voters is a great way for Democrats to lose in November: "Hillary Clinton's arrogance already lost one election. And if Joe Biden follows her example, it can easily cost another."

  • Annie Linskey/Siobhan Hughes: [06-04] Behind closed doors, Biden shows signs of slipping: "Participants in meetings said the 81-year-old president performed poorly at times. The White House said Biden is sharp and his critics are playing partisan politics." My wife found this very disturbing, but I find it hard to get interested, beyond bemoaning the obvious obsession of much of the media and some of the public with his age. Perhaps some day I'll write out my thoughts on aging politicians, but I don't feel up to it now, and expect I'll have many opportunities in the future. But I do have a lot of thoughts, which lead to a mixed bag of conclusions: about Biden (who I've never liked, and am very chagrined with over certain key policies), Democrats (who are so terrified, both of Trump and of their own rich donors, that they're unwilling to risk new leadership), the presidency (where the staff matters much more than the head or face), and the media (which has turned that face into some kind of bizarre circus act, relentlessly amplifying every surface flaw), and maybe even the people (we suffer many confusions about aging). Also on this:

    • Angelo Carusone tweeted about this piece: "The person who wrote that deceitful WSJ attack piece on Biden age is the same reporter who a few years ago (while at WaPo) had to delete a tweet for taking a jab at Biden as he visited his late son, wife and daughter's graves."

    • Greg Sargent: [06-06] Sleazy WSJ hit piece on Biden's age gets brutally shredded by Dems: "After a new report that dubiously hyped President Biden's age infuriated Democrats, we talked to a leading media critic about the deep problems with the press this sage exposes."

  • Blaise Malley: [06-05] 'We are the world power': Biden offers defense of US primacy: "In TIME interview, president talks up foreign policy record, offers few details on what second term would hold."

  • Nicole Narea: [06-04] Biden's sweeping new asylum restrictions, explained: "Biden's transparently political attack on asylum put little daylight between him and Trump." Some more on immigration:

Legal matters and other crimes:

Climate and environment:

Economic matters:

  • Paul Krugman: Famed economist and New York Times token liberal columnist, I've paid very little attention to his columns of late, but thought a quick catch-up might be in order. His more wonkish pieces, especially on the recurring themes of inflation and budgets, are informative. And while he seems especially loathe to criticize Biden from the left, he is pretty clear when he focuses on the right.

Ukraine War and Russia:

  • Connor Echols: [06-07] Diplomacy Watch: What's the point of Swiss peace summit? It's not to negotiate with Russia, which won't be attending. Zelensky has a "10-point peace plan, which demands the full expulsion of Russian troops from the country and the prosecution of top Kremlin officials," which suggests he still thinks he can "win the war." I seriously doubt that, while I also see that Ukrainians have much more to lose if the war is prolonged.

  • Dave DeCamp: [05-30] France may soon announce it's sending troops to Ukraine for training.

  • Joshua Keating: [06-05] The US tests Putin's nuclear threats in Ukraine: "Allowing Ukraine to fire Western weapons into Russia strengthens an ally, but risks violating an unknown red line." I thought the "red line" was pretty loudly proclaimed. They're basically testing whether Putin is serious (which has usually been a bad idea, but the idea of him escalating directly to nuclear arms is pretty extreme, even for him). Also, it really isn't obvious how taking occasional pot shots inside Russia "strengthens Ukraine." Russia has more capability to strike Ukraine than vice versa, so once you factor the reprisals in it's unlikely that there will be any net gains, or that such gains could actually be realized through negotiation. And since negotiation is really the only avenue for ending this war, that's where the focus should really be.

  • Constant Méheut: [06-09] Ukrainian activist traces roots of war in 'centuries of Russian colonization': "One Ukrainian researcher and podcaster is a leading voice in efforts to rethink Ukrainian-Russian relations through the prism of colonialism." Mariam Naiem. I don't doubt that there is some value in this approach, but I can also imagine overdoing it. We tend to view colonialism through a British prism, perhaps with variations for France, maybe even Spain/Portugal, each of which varied, although the power dynamic was similar.

  • Theodore Postol: [06-05] Droning Russia's nuke radars is the dumbest thing Ukraine can do: "Attacks on the early warning system actually highlights the fragility of peace between the world's nuclear powers."

  • Reuters: [06-05] Russia to send combat vessels to Caribbean to project 'global power,' US official says: "Naval exercises spurred by US support for Ukraine are likely to include port calls in Cuba and Venezuela, says official." Nothing to be alarmed of here. (My first thought was how Russia sent its Baltic Sea fleet all the way around Africa in 1905, only to have it sunk in the Sea of Japan, an embarrassment that triggered the failed revolution of 1905.) But it does show that the era where only "sole superpower" US was arrogant enough to try to project global naval power is coming to a close. Also:

    • Guardian: [06-06] Russia nuclear-powered submarine to visit Cuba amid rising tensions with US. By the way, The Guardian remains a reliable source for news and opinion with an anti-Russian slant, as evidenced by:

    • Pjotr Sauer:

    • Léonie Chao-Fong: [06-05] Putin says Trump conviction 'burns' idea of US as leading democracy: Funny guy.

    • Patrick Wintour: [06-08] 'We're in 1938 now': Putin's war in Ukraine and lessons from history. The Guardian's "diplomatic editor," this could become a classic in the abuse of history for political ends, although he offers a nice feint in this:

      As Christopher Hitchens once wrote, much American foolishness abroad, from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq, has been launched on the back of Munich syndrome, the belief that those who appease bullies, as the then British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, sought to do with Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1938, are either dupes or cowards. Such leaders are eventually forced to put their soldiers into battle, often unprepared and ill-equipped -- men against machines, as vividly described in Guilty Men, written by Michael Foot, Frank Owen and Peter Howard after the Dunkirk fiasco. In France, the insult Munichois -- synonymous with cowardice -- sums it up.

      But then he quotes Timothy Snyder, and reverts to the stereotype that Putin is Hitler's second coming, an expansionist so implacable that he will continue besieging us until we finally gather up our courage and fight back. The problem here isn't just that Putin is not Hitler, but that this isn't even a valid portrait of Hitler, who had specific territorial ambitions that were conditioned by his times and place -- when "the sun never sets on the British Empire," presided over by a country no larger or more developed than Germany, while the vast land mass to Germany's east looked to him like the American West, promising Lebesraum for the superior Aryan race. Putin may conjure up the occasional odd fantasy of Peter the Great or Vlad the Impaler, not something we can take comfort in, but in an unconquerable world, nationalism is a self-limiting force, which falls far short of the ambitions of Hitler or the inheritance of Churchill.

  • Ted Snider: [06-04] Why Zelensky won't be able to negotiate peace himself: "The way out is to transcend bilateral talks to include moves toward a new, inclusive European security architecture."

America's empire and the world:

Other stories:

Associated Press: [06-06] Charleston bridge closed as out-of-control ship powers through harbor: In South Carolina, another 1,000ft ship, narrowly avoided knocking down another major bridge, as happened in Baltimore recently.

Kyle Chayka: [05-29] The new generation of online culture curators: "In a digital landscape overrun by algorithms and AI, we need human guides to help us decide what's worth paying attention to." This isn't meant as an advertisement, but perhaps it is an idea for one:

The onslaught of online content requires filtering, whether technological or human, and those of us who dislike the idea of A.I. or algorithms doing the filtering for us might think more about how we support the online personalities who do the job well.

Ivan Eland: [06-03] Finding a foreign policy beyond Biden and Trump: "There has to be an option that would allow the US to engage and protect its interests without aggressive primacy."

Tom Engelhardt: [06-04] Making war on Planet Earth: The enemy is us (and I'm not just thinking about Donald Trump).

AW Ohlheiser: [06-06] Why lying on the internet keeps working. Reviews, or at least refers to, a forthcoming book: \ Renée DiResta: Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality, with what I suppose is a second-order subhed: "If You Make It Trend, You Make It True."

Kelsey Piper: [06-07] Where AI predictions go wrong: "Both skeptics and boosters are too sure of themselves."

Tejal Rao: [06-07] His 'death by chocolate' cake will live forever: "The chief Marcel Desaulniers, who died last month, had an over-the-top approach to dessert, a sweet counterpoint to the guilt-ridden chocolate culture of the time."

Music and the arts:

Mike Hale: [06-05] 'Hitler and the Nazis' review: Building a case for alarm: "Joe Berlinger's six-part documentary for Netflix asks whether we should see our future in Germany's past."

Tom Maxwell: [04-12] How deregulation destroyed indie rock across America: "On the corporate capture of regional radio stations." What happened with The Telecommunications Act of 1996, enacted by Newt Gingrich and signed by Bill Clinton: "The act . . . became a checkered flag for a small number of corporations to snap up commercial radio stations across the country and homogenize playlists." Excerpted from Maxwell's book, A Really Strange and Wonderful Time: The Chapel Hill Music Scene: 1989-1999.

Michael Tatum: A Downloader's Diary (52): June 2024.

Midyear reports: I've been factoring these into my metacritic file.

My nephew Ram Lama Hull dredged up a 2016 Facebook "memory" where he wrote "I'm likely voting 3rd party, and encourage everyone in Kansas to do the same." He didn't say who, but had a libertarian streak as well as the family's left-leanings. However, this year he writes:

I've changed my stance. I still stand by this as a general principle, but I voted Democrat in 2020, and will do so in 2024: even if my vote doesn't shift the electoral college results, I want to do my part to push for a Democratic mandate in the popular vote.

I added this comment:

I moved back to KS in 1999. In 2000, I voted for Nader, figuring that the Gore campaign was so invisible he might not even get as many votes as Nader. Bush won bit (58.04%), while Nader only got 3.37%, less than one-tenth of Gore's 37.24%. I drew two conclusions from this: one is that Kansas has a very solid minority that will show up as Democrats no matter how little effort one makes to reach them. (You can also see this in Moran's Senate results, where he rarely cracks 60% despite outspending his opponents as much as 100-to-1.) And second, if you ever want to get to a majority, you have to first win over your own Democrats. I'm very upset with Biden at the moment over his foreign policy (not just but especially Israel), but by now I've become pretty used to lesser-evilism.

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