I saw a report that on CNN Sen. Lindsey Graham said of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin: “He’s so naive, I mean I just lost all confidence in this guy.” Old Lindsey is not naive. No, he is so sophisticated that, like Henry Kissinger, he would not hesitate to slaughter innocent people in order to WIN.
Why do they invite this flip-flop, security-risk, senator-for-sale onto television. Whatever opinion he says he has will soon change.
We’ve learned that at the end of the cease fire Israel rushed to renew the bombardment of Gaza. We’ve also learned that Israeli intelligence knew all about the planned Hamas attack a year ago and that that Hamas’ preparations for the attack were reported more recently. We’re hearing that the big bugs in Israeli intelligence decided not to take this evidences of Hamas’ fanatic ambitions seriously, because they did not believe that Hamas could achieve what Hamas was planning and preparing to do. This excuse for the intelligence failure makes Israeli intelligence seem not negligent, but virtually criminal.
Or is there another way to view this? Could it be that Israeli intelligence knew all along about the planned attack by Hamas and chose to allow the attack to happen? The attack by Hamas provided Israel with a casus belli for a war against Gaza, a war the goal of which is to expel the Palestinian population from Gaza and annex that region to Israel. To be sure, Hamas is an irredeemably bad lot, but wiping out Hamas is not Israel’s main goal in its aggression against Gaza.
Am I being too suspicious of Israel? The death of that cynical butcher Henry Kissinger reminds of the need to be endlessly suspicious of devotees of Realpolitik.
Here, from an article on Huffpost, are the words of Ireland’s Prime Minister, Mr. Leo Varadkar, about the “demonstrators” who lately went on an arson-cum-robbery-cum-terror spree in Dublin: “These criminals did not do what they did because they love Ireland, they did not do what they did because they wanted to protect Irish people, they did not do it out of any sense of patriotism, however warped,” Varadkar told reporters on Friday morning. “They did so because they’re filled with hate, they love violence, they love chaos and they love causing pain to others.”
His description reminds me of many of the people who were participating in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on 6 January. Reminds me too of the people who are now conducting their own anti-Jewish, anti-Palestinian, anti-civilization demonstrations.
In another time and place, these sorts would be common football hooligans or college-sports enthusiasts who trash the town whether their team wins or loses. These are mindless, destruction-prone, attention-seekers who feel a sense of belonging only among similar misfits. Wherever two or three of these are gathered together, they will in no time identify an object for their hatred and go ahead and attack and riot. What the object may be is of no real importance. What matters is the opportunity for trashing people and cultural environment in company with fellow hoodlums.
I’ve seen here and there various writers expressing there anxiety about Donald Trump misstatments, his mixing up one opponent with another, one war with another, one dictator with another, etc. As a member of the geriatric club myself, I can feel some degree of understanding, even compassion for another elder who gets his words mixed up. But Trump, and his garbleings and confusions are repulsive. He makes much of President Biden’s senior failings. This is only a variant of his usual attribution to an opponent of his own signature frailties and vices, lying, stealing, selective realities, dementia, incontinence, etc.
I must wonder though about Trump’s now famous “vermin” pledge made to the mob in New Hampshire: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”
This list of vermin combines apples and oranges. Yes, communists, Marxists, and radical left thugs might, I suppose, be grouped together. But fascists is a community quite different from the other three, one that includes Trump himself and his cultists. He is thoughtlessly promising to root out those he had in mind when he said after the Charlottesville riot that there were good people on both sides.
I have been reading more and more about the forced fidelity of the Trump base. Trump, like the King in British law, can do no wrong. They’ll vote for him under indictment, vote for him convicted of crimes, they’ll vote for him in prison, they’ll vote for him after he is dead.
I am reminded of an anecdote from distant times. At one point when the aged Eisenhower was ill during his first term, some were questioning whether the Republicans could run him for president for a second term. The Republican senator William Jenner of Indiana was quoted as saying: “We’ll run him if we have to stuff him!” So I wonder if the Trump base would vote for their demi-god after his death.
This is not as far-fetched as it seems. If Donald Trump were to die before the coming presidential election, his “base” will deify the Departed; anyone not energetically praising him and mourning him will have no hope of nomination. His place will be taken by the Republican who can pretend most convincingly to be a virtual Trump, the next-best-thing to Donald, whose first question will always be: “What would Trump do?”
Headline on CNN: Alabama sets date for execution of a death row inmate by nitrogen gas, a method never used in any state. Alabama has repeatedly screwed up its attempts to execute prisoners by lethal injection. The victim of the last botched execution, Kenneth Eugene Smith, requested to be executed with nitrogen gas. This is, as Smith’s lawyer described it, “an experimental, never-before-used method” for execution.
The article on CNN reports that according to the Death Penalty Information Center “Death by nitrogen hypoxia deprives the brain and body of oxygen,” and this is assumed to be a more humane, or, rather, a more reliable technique for execution. So Alabama, usually the most backward of former Confederate states, is now leading the way.
Politico reports: Sarah Huckabee Sanders to endorse Trump in debate counterprogramming. Y’all remember Sarah. She used to be Trump’s humorless mouthpiece and is now governor of Arkansas, one of our antebellum states. Of course she remains as resolutely deluded and mendacious as any veteran of Team Trump. Gov. Sarah’s endorsement will boost Trump’s standing where it needs no boosting, but will increase the alienation of anyone who has any memory of her bare-faced lies.
In an interview that is reported in yesterday’s Politico Mr. Doug Emhoff comments upon the current upsurge of antisemitism in America, and there he makes the following point:
The tenor of some of the protests over Israel’s response to the Hamas’ attacks that killed 1,400 have shocked him, he said. He believes Americans are dispensing with distinctions between being critical of Israeli politics and Jewish people. “There seems to be a conflation of not being able to separate the actions of the Israeli government and Jewish people and taking out feelings that they have about the actions of the Israeli government on all Jews, irrespective of how those Jews may also feel about the actions of the Israeli government.”
I think that Mr. Emhoff is right. Many who are angry about the behavior of the Israeli regime thoughtlessly lump non-Israeli Jews as well as leftist Israelis together with the coalition of neo-fascists and religious reactionaries in the Israeli government that is so relentlessly bombing Gaza.
However, I would suggest that the conflation of which Mr. Emhoff complains is among very many unreflective Americans quite predictable. The majority of American Jews are supporters, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, of the state of Israel. Consider this report from the Pew Research Center:
Israel, the world’s only Jewish-majority country, is a subject of special concern to many Jews in the United States. Caring about Israel is “essential” to what being Jewish means to 45% of U.S. Jewish adults, and an additional 37% say it is “important, but not essential,”‘ according to a new Pew Research Center survey that was fielded from Nov. 19, 2019, to June 3, 2020 – well before the latest surge of violence in the region. Just 16% of U.S. Jewish adults say that caring about Israel is “not important” to their Jewish identity.
This conflation of Jews in America with Jews in Israel and with the Israeli state is fostered by the Israeli government that relies on the American Jewish community for political and financial support. It is fostered also by Israel’s strenuously anti-American enemies. It is fostered as well by the many Americans who have become armed “settlers” on the West Bank. The The Times of Israel and other sources say: “Approximately 60,000 US Jews, out of the 170,000 in Israel, live in West Bank, study shows.”
These factors combine to incline very many in the U.S. to identify American Jews with the Israeli state, and turn the closer-to-home American Jews into the objects of naive, popular hostility: “If you can’t be with the ones you hate, hate the ones you’re with.”
I would make the additional point that some of the anonymous antisemitic outrages that are reported in the U.S. may not flow from the perpetrators’ specific hate for Jews, but from their generalized hate that focuses on whoever is in the news. The Trump years have shown that the number of not institutionalized insane in the United States, like the number of crypto-criminals, is far greater than we once supposed.
Our Senior [sic] Senator, Josh Hawley, gave another performance of virtuoso sleaze in his recent questioning of Secretary Mayorkas. Using the logic best suited to his audience, he asked the Secretary if the deranged anti-Israeli posting of a single Homeland Security employee indicates an anti-Israeli bias through the entire Agency. It was almost like asking if the dog-whistle anti-semitism and racism of Trump and his followers in Congress means that all Trumpists are bigots.
Hawley is frenetically ambitious and is counting on Trumpism to advance his career. So he never misses an opportunity to enhance the deception of those who are already deceived.
A headline in today’s Politico begins: “Trump lashes out ….” Is Trump lashing out really newsworthy? If an old man’s peevishness is news, I may one day be famous. Unfortunately, report of this pseudo-news is additional evidence that the media is chiefly responsible for the perpetuation of Trump.