Dissenting View

A week or two ago, The Nation magazine published an endorsement of Kamala Harris. In today's online edition The Nation published a dissenting view from its fall interns, entitled "Kamala Harris Does Not Deserve The Nation's Endorsement". It's a pretty bold and compelling piece. I commend The Nation for allowing this to be made public.

A Failed Presidency

I will be among the few people on the left who will rate the totality of the Biden presidency as a failure. All the good things accomplished on the domestic side are totally overshadowed and outweighed by the administration’s unabashed support for Israel’s Gaza genocide, which Israel has now widened into the West Bank, Lebanon, and Yemen. Cabinet members are openly talking about an all-out attack on Iran.

I have to assume that Biden and his War Cabinet never had any intention of pushing a ceasefire in Gaza. The US has a tremendous amount of leverage with Israel and exercised zero amount. As a lame duck, even if he wanted to now, that leverage has expired.

Bibi wants Trump to win the election. AIPAC (which determines American foreign policy vis-a-vis Israel) wants Trump to win. Biden, and now Harris, have done all they can to increase the odds of Trump winning.

I have already voted for Harris. I hope she wins. It’s not looking good. I hope I’m wrong. Joe Biden’s failed presidency hasn’t helped.

Two Weeks to Go

• Harris is still campaigning with Liz Cheney. Wow.
• Biden administration still has taken zero meaningful action to stop the genocide. Over a year now. Unbelievable.
• US has embarked on a dangerous Cold War with China. Meanwhile we are arm-in-arm with tyrants like Netanyahu in Israel, MBS in Saudi Arabia, Modi in India, et al.
• The UN--who, by the way, have much more credibility than either the Israeli government or the Blinken State Department--says that it will take 350 years to rebuild Gaza to its pre-genocide levels. And Israel hasn't stopped its death and destruction yet.
• It still seems to me that Iran has demonstarted much more restraint that Israel or the US.

 

 

Rogue State

As Mehdi Hasan has written in The Guardian, Israel has become a rogue state, having exempted itself from any modicum of civilized behavior. If the last twelve months haven’t proven this to the world, the past few weeks should.

Israel just murdered the mayor of a city in Lebanon. Two cabinet ministers recently used out-and-out genocidal language. Gaza has been deprived by Israel of humanitarian aid to such an extent that even Milquetoast Blinken is using stronger language with Israel.

Having said that, the time for more than words has long passed. Biden and his team have been 100% complicit so far, threatening the US moral standing in the world (if we still have any), and making the election of Donald Trump more likely .

I expect that Hasan’s idea if expelling Israel from the UN, however compelling, would never fly with Zionist Biden, but the US could at least start by following through on withholding further aid. Time to stop talking and start acting.

Things I Don’t Care About

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:

• Israel is investigating….

• Antony Blinken (or Jake Sullivan or any other State Department spokesperson) says ….

• Israel accuses….

• Israel is not targeting….

Forever Wars (continued)

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.

Quote of the Day - October 9

 Headline from Ahmad Moor's piece in The Nation today. The sad truth.

The One Guaranteed Winner in 2024: American Empire

Democrat or Republican, the next presidency will still mean death for others in faraway places.

Biden's Legacy

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.

 

 

One-Liners

• Melania Trump declares her support for reproductive rights. Who cares?
• Emmanuel Macron ain't no leftie, but I applaud his call for a halt in arms sales to Israel.
• Waiting for actions rather than words from the Biden-Harris Administration re:Gaza.
• Note to Harris: How many voters at this point are actually teetering between voting for a reasonably sane center-left candidate and a raving maniacal narcissistic neofascist?
• Tacking to the right is not the solution to the immigration issue that Dems should be pursuing.
• Simple and obvious truth: Chicago (where I live) always seems able to find plenty of money for cops, but never for schools and housing.

 

 

 

Bipartisan Foreign Policy Blunders

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.

Bad Election Strategy

 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.

The Election

Okay, so a couple members of my family have convinced me to vote for Harris in November. (Disclaimer: I live in Illinois, so my vote either way doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things anyway. If I lived in a swing state I wouldn't have the luxury of considering a protest vote in the frist place.) I had intended to vote for Cornel West, but my daughter informed me that he wasn't on the ballot in Illinois, as I had assumed. The only way a protest vote would mean anything is if some number of voters--maybe 2-3%--voted for someone like West. This is highly unlikely if a write-in vote is required.

Having said that, I will continue to criticize Biden-Harris-Dems when it is warranted.

Today, I see that Israel sent bombers to the West Bank. And is considering invading Lebanon in the ground. And wants to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. And has declared the UN Secretery General persona non grata.

If there was any doubt in my mind that Israel's goal all along was to create a regional war throughout the entire Middle East (and drag the US into it), there are no doubts anymore.

The US seems to be ready to support such war.

Biden Administration Shows Its True Colors

In case there's any doubt about where the Biden/Harris Administration lines up on the Gaza genocide, here's an example of the Biden Department of Education playing a part in getting a (Jewish) college professor fired for opposing the US-supported genocide, accusing her of antisemitism.

If Harris wants to claim a part in the good things that happened under Biden, I will also hold her partly responsible for the bad. And this is bad. 

 

 

Biden's Week

Okay so already this week Biden has doubled down on Trump-like border policies, relaxed environmental rules so that chip makers can pollute even more, and responded to Israel's expanding war by reasserting America's iron-clad commitment to Israel's dangerous aggressiveness. And it's only Tuesday. What's in store for the rest of the week?

(It's interesting that the only country showing restraint in the area is Iran.)

Kamala Harris's response? Crickets.