Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

New York Times Editorial Board this morning, quoted in full.

Quote:

THIS ELECTION YEAR IS UNLIKE ANY OTHER

At the outset of this election year, with Donald Trump leading the race to be the Republican presidential nominee, Americans should pause to consider what a second Trump term would mean for our country and the world and to weigh the serious responsibility this election places on their shoulders.

By now, most American voters should have no illusions about who Mr. Trump is. During his many years as a real estate developer and a television personality, then as president and as a dominant figure in the Republican Party, Mr. Trump demonstrated a character and temperament that render him utterly unfit for high office.

As president, he wielded power carelessly and often cruelly and put his ego and his personal needs above the interests of his country. Now, as he campaigns again, his worst impulses remain as strong as ever — encouraging violence and lawlessness, exploiting fear and hate for political gain, undermining the rule of law and the Constitution, applauding dictators — and are escalating as he tries to regain power. He plots retribution, intent on eluding the institutional, legal and bureaucratic restraints that put limits on him in his first term.

Our purpose at the start of the new year, therefore, is to sound a warning.

Mr. Trump does not offer voters anything resembling a normal option of Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, big government or small. He confronts America with a far more fateful choice: between the continuance of the United States as a nation dedicated to “the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” and a man who has proudly shown open disdain for the law and the protections and ideals of the Constitution.

If in 2016 various factions of the electorate were prepared to look beyond Mr. Trump’s bombast in the hope that he might deliver whatever it was they wanted without too much damage to the nation, today there is no mystery about what he will do should he win, about the sorts of people he will surround himself with and the personal and political goals he will pursue. There is no mystery, either, about the consequences for the world if America re-elects a leader who openly displays his contempt for its allies.

Mr. Trump’s four years in the White House did lasting damage to the presidency and to the nation. He deepened existing divisions among Americans, leaving the country dangerously polarized; he so demeaned public discourse that many Americans have become inured to lies, insults and personal attacks at the highest levels of leadership. His contempt for the rule of law raised concerns about the long-term stability of American democracy, and his absence of a moral compass threatened to corrode the ideals of national service.

The Republic weathered Mr. Trump’s presidency for a variety of reasons: his lack of prepared agenda, the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic and the efforts of appointees who tried to temper his most dangerous or unreasonable demands. Most important, it survived because of the people and institutions in his administration and in the Republican Party who proved strong enough to stand up to his efforts to undermine the peaceful transfer of power.

It is instructive in the aftermath of that administration to listen to the judgments of some of these officials on the president they served. John Kelly, a chief of staff to Mr. Trump, called him the “most flawed person I’ve ever met,” someone who could not understand why Americans admired those who sacrificed their lives in combat. Bill Barr, who served as attorney general, and Mark Esper, a former defense secretary, both said Mr. Trump repeatedly put his own interests over those of the country. Even the most loyal and conservative of them all, Vice President Mike Pence, who made the stand that helped provoke Mr. Trump and his followers to insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, saw through the man: “On that day, President Trump also demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution,” he said.

There will not be people like these in the White House should Mr. Trump be re-elected. The former president has no interest in being restrained, and he has surrounded himself with people who want to institutionalize the MAGA doctrine. According to reporting by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swan, Mr. Trump and his ideological allies have been planning for a second Trump term for many months already. Under the name Project 2025, one coalition of right-wing organizations has produced a thick handbook and recruited thousands of potential appointees in preparation for an all-out assault on the structures of American government and the democratic institutions that acted as checks on Mr. Trump’s power.

The project ties in with plans from Mr. Trump and his supporters to reclassify tens of thousands of federal workers so they can be fired if they do not buy fully into the Trump agenda. He also plans to strip the Justice Department of its independence in order to use it to wreak vengeance on those who, in his view, failed to concoct a victory for him in the 2020 election or otherwise didn’t support his unconstitutional demands. There is more, including threats by Mr. Trump to find ways to use federal troops against those who might protest his policies and practices. These ambitions demonstrate that the years out of office and the mounting legal challenges he faces have only sharpened his worst instincts.

Mr. Trump was impeached twice as president and since leaving office has been charged in four criminal cases — two related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, one over hush money paid to a porn star and another for hoarding classified documents after he left office and impeding the government’s efforts to retrieve them. No other sitting or former president has ever been indicted on criminal charges. Not only has Mr. Trump shown no remorse for these actions, he has given no sign that he understands these indictments to be anything but a political crusade meant to undermine him. He continues to claim that the Jan. 6 insurrection has been misrepresented. “There was love and unity,” he said in an interview last August. And he has suggested that, if re-elected, he could use his presidential powers to pardon himself.

Mr. Trump’s forays into foreign affairs remain dangerously misguided and incoherent. During his presidency, he displayed consistent admiration for autocratic leaders — including Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un — and contempt for our democratic allies. While in the White House, he repeatedly threatened to leave NATO, an alliance critical to the stability of Europe that he sees only as a drain on American resources; now his campaign website says, without elaborating, that he plans to “finish” the process of “fundamentally re-evaluating NATO’s purpose and NATO’s mission.”

He has announced his intention to abandon Ukraine, leaving it and its neighbors vulnerable to further Russian aggression. Encouraged by an American president, leaders who rule with an iron fist in Hungary, Israel, India and elsewhere would face far less moral or democratic pressure.

Mr. Trump has made clear his conviction that only “losers” accept legal, institutional or even constitutional constraints. He has promised vengeance against his political opponents, whom he has called “vermin” and threatened with execution. This is particularly disturbing at a time of heightened concern about political violence, with threats increasing against elected officials of both parties.

He has repeatedly demonstrated a deep disdain for the First Amendment and the basic principles of democracy, chief among them the right to freely express peaceful dissent from those in power without fear of retaliation, and he has made no secret of his readiness to expand the powers of the presidency, including the deployment of the military and the Justice Department, to have his way.

Democracy in the United States is stronger with a formidable conservative political movement to keep diversity of thought alive on important questions, such as the nation’s approaches to immigration, education, national security and fiscal responsibility. There should be room for real disagreement on any of these topics and many more — and there is a long tradition of it across the American experiment. But that is not what the former president is seeking.

Re-electing Mr. Trump would present serious dangers to our Republic and to the world. This is a time not to sit out but instead to re-engage. We appeal to Americans to set aside their political differences, grievances and party affiliations and to contemplate — as families, as parishes, as councils and clubs and as individuals — the real magnitude of the choice they will make in November.

But in any case, this is all a red herring from Lash. The surprise is that she didn't toss out the phrase "fake news". CNN has been a particular target of Trump and the far right for years now along with some allies and fellow travelers. But more generally, the right has been on a decades-long campaign to denigrate mainstream media and that's the game Lash is once again playing.

Of course, this present mid east conflict is important and it's entirely reasonable that we'd address it here. And it is perhaps understandable that Izzy would look to it as worthy of much attention given that he's a resident of the UK and so less interested in the American political crisis than the rest of us.

But the main culprit here in the recent hijacking of this thread is Lash. As I noted before when she returned under a fake name (which I spotted on her very first post and noted in my reply to it) after her despicable performance regarding the attack on Paul Pelosi where she forwarded pretty much every piece of disinformation pushed by Fox and other right wing agents as a means to again denigrate Nancy Pelosi. And of course, there's the earlier history where she pretended to have become a Sanders leftie and used that pretense as a means to denigrate Clinton and the Democratic Party. I recently asked, rhetorically, Why has Lash returned now? And I answered my rhetorical question as follows... because there is an election coming.

It really should be absolutely transparent, folks, that her game is to use the mid east problem to try to 1) distract from the existential danger to US democracy that Trump and the modern GOP represents and 2) to encourage disaffection with Biden and 3) to "flood the zone with ****".

There was ages ago a United Kingdom of Israel.

The first week of January isn't usually wildfire season. But as 2024 began, more than 100 "zombie fires" were actively burning in British Columbia — holdovers from last summer that typically go dormant over winter.

"That is mind boggling to me. Just unheard of," said Lori Daniels, a professor with the University of British Columbia's department of forest and conservation sciences...

A new national poll from the New York Times–Siena College reinforces a development that’s getting clearer every day: Joe Biden’s strength among Democrats and other past supporters is being steadily sapped by deep unhappiness with his staunch support of Israel in its war with Hamas. The phenomenon is particularly evident among young (under-30) voters, a left-leaning group that astonishingly favors Donald Trump over Biden by a 49 percent to 43 percent margin in the Times–Siena poll. While there are a variety of contributing factors to Biden’s poor standing with young voters — including his age, cost-of-living concerns, and unfulfilled promises on student loans and climate change — Times data wizard Nate Cohn sees a lot of evidence that the war is pivotal:

Quote:

Usually, it’s not worth dwelling too much on a subsample from a single poll, but this basic story about young voters is present in nearly every major survey at this point. Our own battleground-state surveys in the fall showed something similar, with Mr. Biden ahead by a single point among those 18 to 29. Either figure is a big shift from Mr. Biden’s 21-point lead in our final poll before the midterms or his 10-point lead in our last national poll in July.

And there’s a plausible explanation for the shift in recent months: Israel …

[Young] voters in the survey took an extraordinarily negative view of Israel’s recent conduct: They overwhelming say Israel isn’t doing enough to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza, believe Israel isn’t interested in peace, and think Israel should stop its military campaign, even if it means Hamas isn’t eliminated.

If it’s true that Biden is losing voters to Trump because he’s tilting too far toward Israel in this war, then the question has to be asked: Do these voters know Trump’s position on this war? Do they imagine Trump would be more benevolent toward the suffering people of Gaza?

Anyone familiar with the 45th president’s Middle Eastern policies — and, for that matter, his Islamophobic immigration policies — while he was in office would laugh at the idea of his being more sympathetic to Palestinians than Biden is. His own January 2020 “peace plan” for the region, unveiled with his longtime ally Bibi Netanyahu at his side, would have “give[n] Israel most of what it has sought over decades of conflict while offering the Palestinians the possibility of a state with limited sovereignty,” as the New York Times described it:

Quote:

Mr. Trump’s plan would guarantee that Israel would control a unified Jerusalem as its capital and not require it to uproot any of the settlements in the West Bank that have provoked Palestinian outrage and alienated much of the world …

President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority immediately denounced the plan as a “conspiracy deal” unworthy of serious consideration, making the decades-long pursuit of a so-called two-state solution appear more distant than ever. “We say a thousand times over: no, no, no,” Mr. Abbas said on Tuesday in Ramallah, in the West Bank

.

While the “Trump peace plan” is DOA, the former president can (and often does) boast that he gave Netanyahu the gift of a U.S. embassy in Jerusalem and recognition of that divided and contested city as Israel’s capital, itself a blow to Palestinian aspirations. He also frequently cited the belief of Republican (and Likud) mega-donor Sheldon Adelson that a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians was “impossible” because of a mutual legacy of hatred.

But what’s interesting is how little — quantitatively or substantively — Trump has had to say about the war currently underway between Israel and Hamas.

He got attention right after it broke out for calling Hamas’s allies the Lebanon-based terrorist group Hezbollah (which many feared would join in the war against Israel) “very smart,” while criticizing Netanyahu on petty grounds that had nothing to do with the conflict.

But even as his Republican rivals for the 2024 presidential nomination competed with one another to show who could be more vicious in encouraging uninhibited Israeli military action in Gaza, Trump’s comments have mostly revolved around his narcissistic claims that this war — like the Russia-Ukraine War — would never have happened if he were still in office. Apparently, he believes his fearsome presence in Washington would have deterred Hamas from its original plan of attack, though there’s very little evidence that the U.S., assumed to be a close ally of Israel with Biden in office, was much of a factor in the decision to go to war.

Trump has also used the Israel-Hamas War to reinforce his positions on other issues remote from the conflict itself, particularly his hostility to Muslim refugees, making it clear that Gazans (and, likely, Muslims generally) would be stopped from entering the U.S. if he is reelected.

In any event, nothing in Trump’s self-centered utterances about the war suggests he could change Israel’s conduct or bring about a cease-fire, much less a lasting peace. You have to wonder if, by refusing to address the situation in any concrete detail, the GOP front-runner for the 2024 nomination is deliberately sowing ambiguity about his position or even making himself acceptable to voters who would normally flee in horror from the idea of this advocate of violence, chaos, and prejudice being placed in charge of U.S. foreign policy. Perhaps he’s just trying to lie in the weeds and, for once, keep himself out of the center of a political news story. If young voters indeed are inclined to punish Biden for inadequate sympathy for the Palestinian people, then voting for an independent or third-party candidate or not voting at all would benefit Trump’s campaign even if they cannot bring themselves to vote for the former president himself. His silence or incoherence on the war could well be strategic.

How do democracies die?

“President Biden on Friday delivered his first campaign speech of this election year, attempting to define the 2024 presidential race as a battle for the future of American democracy and portray former president Donald Trump as its chief antagonist.”

This new approach. Is it going to work? Probably not, sadly, as necessary as it is. Why not? For a very simple reason.

We all already know. And…who cares? Not enough Americans do, certainly. Nobody in America can claim not to know what happened over the last few years. Abuse of power, soft coup attempt, hard coup attempt, conspiracy, right down to the imposition of martial law and overturning an election, no less. The world witnessed all that. Many Americans are in denial, true, and yet that’s perhaps entirely the point. Can you really warn a nation embracing Trump about the dangers of…Trumpism? A “warning” tells people to beware of dangers they don’t know of. But can you warn people about what they already full well know…and appear to perversely want? For junkies, the deadlier the warning, the harder the desire. The high is all that counts.

How do democracies die? In America’s case, they commit suicide. We’re watching something surreal, spectacular, incredible, and historic happen. In other words. Democracies die in many ways. Power’s seized, tyrants rise, history offers an endless litany of disaster. Democracies are strangled, suffocated, pulverized. But it’s not often that democracies embrace oblivion, and willfully commit suicide. Yet that’s what’s happening in America.

Trump’s not just open about who he is and what he hopes to do—he flaunts it. Being a dictator become a campaign slogan. Right down to the absolutist rhetoric of elimination, of “vermin” and “invasions” and endless threats against everyone from political opponents to judiciary to journalist and on and on, ad infinitum.

And it’s not even that that’s easy enough to witness. It’s that we were all there for January 6th. The committee hearings afterwards were of course public. We all watched the Capitol be stormed, and before that, we were all there for the manifold abuses of power, from kids in camps to scapegoating, intimidation, and fanatics appointed to high office. The entire world watched this unfold, as did, of course, Americans.

We all know exactly who Trump is, and what he wants. None of this is in the slightest a mystery, in any way veiled, hidden, obscured—if anything, it’s magnified, amplified, broadcasted, and shouted, in the way that all demagogic movements are made.

And yet.

And yet America’s embraced Trump. After all this. Nobody can claim innocence, naïveté, or ignorance now. And that’s what makes this moment so chilling, and so historically rare, too. You see, democracies die, most often, at the hands of demagogues who promise people all sorts of things, to tempt them. But this? This is different. This is the open proclamation of dictatorship, in the literal voice of the demagogue, who’s flaunting authoritarianism. There are no illusions being sold here. There’s no con game left to play. This is as naked as the sunrise.

Think of how ugly and surreal this moment really is, at least if you’re on the side of democracy, as laughably pathetic as that is , for the dwindling number of us who still count ourselves in that corner.

Trump’s support cuts across every single social group in America. Including those who are at risk from demagoguery, hate, and authoritarianism. Trump’s resurged across social groups. To the point that even young people support Trump. Really stop and think about that for a second. There’s scarcely a social group in which Trump’s support hasn’t grown.

Let me say that again, so you get it.

There’s scarcely a social group in which Trump’s support hasn’t grown. What does all this mean? It means that a society is embracing a demagogue as in a) his support cuts across social groups, and that’s after b) his worst abuses of power c) not just despite but because of his authoritarian promise and d) his absolutism and eliminationism.

It beggars belief, but here we are. This is a wholesale, full-throated rejection of democracy.

How do democracies die? In America’s case, they commit suicide. It’s hard to put what’s happening any other way.

By now, Americans should know better. They’ve seen everything from their Capitol stormed, to their symbols desecrated, to their law trampled—again, why recite the list? By now, basically, they’ve seen it all, as far as the authoritarian playbook’s warm-up goes. And they’ve heard it all, too. How much more explicit does it get than “vermin,” really? And yet there they are, not rejecting the figure at whose hands all this took place, and still does—but embracing him.

There’s not much to say beyond that, sadly, though I suppose I should make a weak attempt to keep trying. Let me offer some final observations.

When a democracy is tempted with illusions and lies, perhaps that can be stopped, by pointing out the truth. But what’s happening in America is now very different—in fact, completely the opposite. When a democracy, instead, embraces its own undoing, despite all the evidence, having seen with its own eyes who a demagogue is, and what he’s capable of—when it roars its approval of all that…can anything really stop it?

Biden’s new appeal is all but sure to fall on deaf ears, then. Because Americans, enough of them, at least, have made their choice, already. Democracy? It’s values of equality, justice, truth, freedom? These don’t matter. What more evidence could convince them? To embrace Trump at this point is to say that none of the above really matters, and never did, because of course, if it did, one might care to have reservations, to put it mildly. If Americans don’t care about anything from Jan 6th to the plot to overturn the election…why would they care about Biden’s warnings now? Their decision’s already been made. Their ears and eyes aren’t just closed. They have turned away from democracy.

That’s not “all Americans,” of course. But it is enough of them that if the election were held today, then Trump would win. He wouldn’t have to seize power, even. And in that sense, American democracy is in the rarest and strangest of positions. It isn’t being murdered, or being strangled, or being suffocated, which is how democracies usually. It’s committing suicide, and that, my friends, is an astonishing thing to behold—because that choice is deliberate. theissue

Taking any strong position pro or anti Israeli acts risks real damage to their electoral chances.

Now they're not talking about voting for Trump, just not voting for Biden for whom they have developed a strong personal animus.