If I see the news stories about Gaza or the Middle East that begin with these phrases, I just assume that whatever follows is bullshit:
The Biden Admin is now bombing in Syria. That means the US is involved in armed conflicts in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria, as well as firing on UN troops. (Did I forget any?) Biden is also silent on the American journalist detained by Israel. The US is fully committed to Forever War, independent of the party in power. Crickets from Kamala Harris.
Days are running out until election day. I don’t know how but she needs to separate herself from this travesty. She will have only herself to blame.
Headline from Ahmad Moor's piece in The Nation today. The sad truth.
Democrat or Republican, the next presidency will still mean death for others in faraway places.
I have never been a huge fan of Joe Biden. One of the ironies of his attempt to ease student debt burden is that he was a major sponsor of the legislation in the mid-aughts that made it essentially impossible for sturdent debt holders to declare bankruptcy. He was a Senator from Delaware, where a legislator's main duty is to look out for the interests of banks and credit card companies. And he delivered.
He also was a supporter of W's Iraq War, and was on the weapons-of-mass-destruction bandwagon. His record on tough-on-crime stuff was pretty bad.
I voted for Biden in 2020. He's done some pretty good things as president on the domestic front. Other than his withdrawal from Afghanistan, however, his foreign policy has been pretty bad, pretty much run-of-the mill Cold War stuff.
But the tragedy of his presidency is that his legacy will be that he was in full support of a genocide in Gaza, which is now becoming a regional war. All through this, Biden and his foreign policy team have been all in, with the flow of money and weaponry from American war profiteers increasing.
LBJ did some equally cool things domestically. But his legacy is forever tarnished by the Vietnam War. Biden will deserve the same kind of scorn. If Harris is elected, maybe this will be reversed. I am hopeful, but not optimistic.
Excellent piece by Peter Beinart in today's Guardian. I quote one paragraph below that is a chilling and damning description of the constant failures of American foreign policy during the seven-plus decades of my life, once again repeated in today's Middle East.
The problem with this dynamic is that ruinous foreign policy decisions often enjoy bipartisan support, at least initially. The 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which granted Lyndon Johnson the authority to escalate America’s intervention in Vietnam, passed the Senate 88-2 and the House 416-0. In 2002, many prominent congressional Democrats – including Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Tom Daschle, then Senate majority leader, and Richard Gephardt, then House minority leader – voted to authorize George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq. And after 7 October, Biden and his Republican opponents vied to show who supported Israel’s war more emphatically.
A quote from Dave Zirin's article in The Nation today (scarily accurate in my opinion):
The Democratic consultant class—the immortal swamp things of DC—only ever seem to have one idea: pitch your campaign to the political center. In 2024, this means trying to win over what are being called “Cheney Democrats”—whatever the hell that means. This strategy apparently requires ignoring your base on domestic issues and horrifying it on foreign policy by funding Israel’s genocide. In our polarized political moment, this is electoral suicide.
The Harris-Walz ticket is running a campaign rooted in the fantasy that there is a centrist wing of the GOP appalled by Donald Trump. For this to work, Trump would need to be an outlier, and a significant section of the GOP would need to be looking for an alternative.
Those reasonable Republicans are gone, if they ever existed. Liz Cheney lost her reelection bid (against a Trumpist stooge) by 30 points, the second-greatest loss of an incumbent member of Congress in US history.
I have always questioned the impulse of Democrats to aim their campaigns to the right, and then blame the ensuing election loss on the left. It seems outright silly to intentionally anagonize people who already want to vote for you, and instead try too woo voters who don't like you and and are unlikely to vote for you no matter what. But the Democratic base doesn't have the insider savviness of the corporate donor/consulting class that always knows better. As I've said before, all they want from the left is their money and their vote; for everything else they want us to shut up.
