If I had the steelman the case for keeping Biden in it’s probably a combination of the risk of fracture in the Democratic coalition....
Fcuk that. If the Demo coalition is going to stand by that turd, they ought to fracture.
...the fact that Trump’s negatives are themselves so severe and structural that it’s hard to imagine him ever totally pulling away.
Surprisingly enough, this is a dog that's not barking this cycle. Not just the horse race, but Trump's personal numbers have been going up for a while. Contrary to what I would have guessed a few months ago, it doesn't look like Trump is going to beat himself.
We'll see who picks for VP. If it's Kari Lake or Tulsi Gabbard, I might flip back to Biden again. But realistically, I don't think that's going to happen.
The resolution to this situation is pretty clear. We should all support the best candidate in the race, Donald Trump, who wins and serves in the office as best as he can. And Biden can shuffle off somewhere we can mercifully ignore him.
I think you're overselling your traction there, and in fact the risks pertaining to a peaceful change of power are coming from Biden supporters as opposed to Trump people.
It's one of the reasons I find David Thornton's posts about Trump to be so distasteful. For David Thornton/David Frum/Jennifer Rubin etc, I don't think they will be in any hurry to recognize Trump's (hypothetical) win in November. In fact, I think they will be grasping at any straws to assert or pretend it didn't happen.
Which is, in a subtextual kind of way, one reason why I think Trump is doing so well in the polls.
Making a reasonable guess as to the probabilities is complicated. Given a particular model, there will be probabilities assigned to each state and therefore the Electoral College.
But also important, we also have to make a guess as to how good the model is.
IMO, Biden's best hope is that there is a significant polling miss in his favor. Which to be fair, the last few elections, there have been some big misses. But most of them have been in the Republicans' favor. What's the chance that there's a big miss in Biden's favor?
Whatever Biden's overall chances are, it's way less than 50%.
If we’re looking around for who should be president next, which is not really the proper way to be running this thing, but at least would avoid idiotic infighting tearing the party apart, we have a, you know, VP.
Kamala Harris is an absolute dumpster fire as an executive and politician. The idea that opposition to her (in this case, internal opposition inside the Democratic Party as a successor to President Biden) is sexist, that's simply bad faith on your part.
The same bad faith that says that the opposition to Biden is unfair because of stuttering, or misleading video splices, or Robert Hur, or whatever. And I'm sure we'd find all of it if we looked in your comment history.
To state the obvious, the political weakness of Kamala Harris has always been for some time part of the cold water discouraging Democrats from replacing Biden.
Yeah I know. He was bad then, but we wasn't _as bad_. Or even now to be fair. But I swear for five years or so at least, he was the hackiest hack in all of media.
Because the interest in defeating Donald Trump greatly outweighs....
Yeah yeah yeah, does it really though?
Obviously in this case we're talking about the interest of foreign nationals being able to emigrate to America, and it's hard to say that is hugely compelling except for the most diehard of immigration libs.
But in general though, this sort of argument is being used to justify a lot of things that don't necessarily hold up. I'd like to see Trump gone too. But the idea that that is supposed to outweigh any other topical consideration of the day, some combination of them, doesn't at all follow.
What's worse, for me at least, is that for those who do believe that, are typically arguing from a very niche frame of reference that other Americans are very likely not to share.
In the end, you don't see much credible discussion of what a second Trump term would look like, because you can't get past all the sputtering.
She claimed he’d been defaming her after she made a rape accusation. Jury agreed and awarded her single digit millions.
That's right. But that's because the jury (and judge) were the corrupt instruments of a literal rotten borough who were empowered by some attainder-ish moves in the NY state legislature to piss on Trump in spite of the evident facts of the situation.
At this point it’s a legal fact that he defamed her. Trump claiming otherwise in public doesn’t matter to the courts.
That's right, it doesn't matter to the courts, but it matters to us, or least it ought to. There was basically no case against Trump. Trump raped Carroll because she said so, the case was in no meaningful way any deeper or stronger than that. In fact, it's actually quite a bit weaker, given what we know of Jean Carroll's financial motives, and more importantly, her propensity to assert other unsubstantiated claims of sexual misconduct against her by other men. And in fact, it's even weaker than that, given that the nature of Carroll's accusations against Trump are inherently very implausible on its own terms.
Trump is being unfairly railroaded, like for real. I know it's hard to separate that from his continuous bluster and bullshyt. But still, he is.
James is dealing with Trump’s defamation case. I think you’re confusing that with his business records case which is really Presidential Election Interference. This is at least the second case being brought for this sort of thing, I think the first one was against Edwards.
No, I think you're the one being confused here.
Counting the Edwards thing you just mentioned, there are three cases: the "Carroll case", as I have called it, is a purely private civil lawsuit instigated by Jean Carroll accusing Donald Trump of rape and defamation.
The "Tish James case", is a sorta rare public civil case by New York State against Trump accusing him of fraud, specifically misrepresenting the square-footage and valuation of some of his real estate holdings way back in the day.
The "Bragg case" is what we're in the middle of now. That is a criminal case by New York city prosecutors against Trump accusing him of maintaining or creating false business records relating to his payoffs to Stormy Daniels. That's is where the Edwards things come in. It is an absolute legal abomination, among other reasons because it presumes that the financial structure of the payoffs were an in-kind donation to his Presidential campaign, which is basically the same thing as what the DOJ tried and failed to convict Sen Edwards of. But frankly, this case is ridiculous for many many reasons well beyond that.
The $400 million. $600 million figure is from the Tish James case. I suspect Trump will end up having that award eliminated or substantially reduced.
The $90 million he owes in the Jean Carroll case is equally disgraceful as a legal matter, but I suspect Trump is stuck with that one.
In any event, the big picture is your understanding of theses case is incomplete in some very important ways. I suspect that if you follow them more closely, you might change your mind about them. I know I did.
In all four of them his actions aren’t seriously disputed (although his lawyers are making unserious disputes). Nor is it disputed that those actions are illegal.
Not on your life. The facts are completely disputed in the Jean Carroll case. In fact, in that case there is basically no evidence against him, except assertions from a woman with a huge motive to lie and a history of making unsubstantiated accusations of sexual misconduct against her.
The Alvin Bragg case and the DC Jack Smith case (and the Georgia case) it's not at all clear that his actions were illegal, and the Alvin Bragg case in particular is absolutely obscene either way. He's nominally guilty of the fraud accusations in the Tish James case, which ought to be a 50 dollar fine, if that.
The argument here is that someone else wouldn’t be charged.
Yes, but it goes well beyond that as well, to the point where it would equally disgraceful if anybody else were charged under the circumstances where Trump has been.
Frankly, a big turning point for me was the statement from Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor of New York, reassuring the financial community that other people will not be charged in the same circumstances as Trump was in the Tish James case.
Trump has been successful at delaying some of them past the election. The inexperienced Trump appointed Judge has been a problem in the documents case.
No no. There's that too, but I'm talking about something different. I'm talking about Donald Trump either straight out winning on the merits, like the 14th Amendment case. Or, losing legally but demonstrating his substantial innocence, or the corruptness of his adversaries or both. That's what happened in the Jean Carroll civil case, the Tish James civil case, the Georgia case, and maybe the Alvin Bragg case as well.
Over the last year or three, we've all heard a lot from the media and the pundit class talking a big game about how bad Trump is and how much legal trouble he's in. And things are looking a lot different now that they have to put some cards on the table.
With Trump's situation as it stands today, it's weak to say that he can't or shouldn't be President because of his legal problems. And without that, the case against Trump is much weaker than the libs thought, or think.
Trump is too dangerous to return to power. That is THE issue of the 2024 election.
The fcuk it is.
I suspect I agree with David Thornton on a lot of issues of substance. But unfortunately this piece, and much or most of what he writes here, is embarrassingly small-minded and tedious.
And oblivious. The world is a different place than it was on Jan 6, or even last year at this time. Since then, we've had the terror attacks on Oct 7, the substantive failure of the various legal cases against Trump, the persistence of inflation and the obvious continued deterioration of President Biden's energy and mental capacity. And in this world, it's getting more and more difficult to say that America's biggest priority ought to be keeping former President Trump out of power.
The David Frum/Jennifer Rubin/David Thornton/Chip Daniels theory is becoming less and less relevant every day, and frankly out of the four of them only Frum really even tries to argue a case for it, as opposed to the other three who just put down sill platitudes and banalities as if nobody could actually argue anything else.
No, this is a real election coming up and we'll have a real choice. If lib wants to win it, they'll have to find a way out the sterile confines they have put themselves in. And they if they don't want to win it, well I guess that works for me too.
Frankly, the whole thing doesn't seem very obscure for me. For Israel, it's better to elect Trump, or Republicans in general, rather than have to carry a rabbit's foot for Weathervane Joe and hope the wind is blowing in your direction today.
Beyond that, and at least as important to me, is that by supporting Republicans you make yourself a better person and America a better country.
The party that you have voted for your entire life is either terror-simp at the grassroots level, or is controlled by a noisy activist class who is terror-simp. Either way, you bought a pig in a poke. Instead of special pleading in the most useless way for the lib-nasties not to terror-simp, you should simply support the not-terror-simp party instead.
6-18 months ago, I thought the Trump campaign was a bad joke and had no real at winning on several different levels. 3-6 months ago, I thought this election was the most fundamentally unpredictable cycle I have seen in my lifetime. I still feel that way to a large extent, but I definitely think we have more clarity now than we had then.
Whereas before the narrative was horrible for Trump but the polling was surprisingly good, now the narrative has substantially flipped. Specifically, Trump has, in a political context, the legal cases against him. This is the heart of the bullish case for Trump. If the polls _and_ the narrative are both for Trump, how is he supposed to lose? Biden's rabid energy in barnstorming the campaign trail? Oh please.
The bullish case for Biden is a bit more subtle, but nonetheless still credible, for me at least. If the anti-Trump narrative is or has been repudiated, what's propping up Biden? If the voters are truly comfortable with Trump, he should have some opened up some real daylight against Biden, and that hasn't happened.
Trump is doing better in the states than he is nationally, enough to where he is clearly winning at the moment. But not enough where that wouldn't change if Biden caught a couple random-ish breaks. To me, that means that there is still a lot of discomfort out there in returning Trump to the Oval Office, and therefore the Trump campaign is necessarily going to be a highwire act between now in November, probably demanding more savvy and intelligent maneuver out of the candidate than he is capable of executing on.
Yeah yeah yeah. Lee, you've been beating this horse for what, at least 2-3 months now?
You've been supporting the Hamas party in America for your entire adult life and just now, you've figured out that you bought a pig in a poke.
I got a radical plan. How about you do something good for America once, figure out a way to meaningfully help the Republicans, to start making amends for everything you'd done before Oct 7?
The settlements are just another example of this kind of conflict, and it doesn’t matter that its Jews and Arabs rather than different sects of Islam. The region drags everyone to its mean.
The settlements maybe, but not Oct 7. I don't think it's in anybody's interest to pretend that Oct 7 is one of those things that just happens.
Oh yes they are. It's useful to note, at least for me, that it really doesn't have that much to do with Israel, and I don't really consider myself a particularly Israeli-philic American.
But back to the Palestinians. Politically speaking, Palestinians are Hamas, who are terrorists, and Fatah/PA, who are also terrorists. Therefore, politically speaking, Palestinians are all terrorists, and it is in the US national interest that terrorists lose.
That was before October 7. The Hamas attack on Oct 7 and related atrocities were so evil, so obscene, so repulsive to any kind of humane life, that it must be repudiated as a matter of urgent public order.
The idea that anybody could possibly give a shyt about what Palestinians might think is unfair regarding some land beef with the Israelis, now, after Oct 7, it's absolutely ridiculous and disgusting.
As to the bigger picture, again, if there is a tradeoff that has to be made in US national interest, then OK fine, do it you have to. But it's not the sort of thing that we should be doing if we don't have to.
Preventing things like Oct 7 is in a very large way the purpose of our statecraft in the first place. It's why we want to contain Iran, Russia, China and other bad actors. It's not at prudent or savvy to concede our deepest values right from the get-go absent a situation of dire necessity.
Regarding Iran and geopolitics, I concede that what you're talking about is hypothetically possible. I haven't seen any indication at all that it is actually true.
I also have another particular reason to be skeptical of your theory. From say, 2005-2015, the libs and a large portion of the foreign policy establishment believed that Israel, and the settlements in particular, were the underlying cause of conflict in the ME. That theory was bullshyt, in particular bullshyt that was repudiated by the Abraham Accords. Israel is a burr under the saddle no doubt. But it is not the fundamental cause of conflict in the ME. The fundamental cause of conflict is Arab/Islamic society-level dysfunction. In order to make progress in the ME, that's what has to be addressed.
So, your idea that Iran geopolitics means we have rein in the Israelis, for me that's the same as what the foreign policy establishment believed from 2005-2015. They were wrong then, and I don't see anything meaningfully different now.
Finally, it's also useful to know, that the path to progress represented by the Abraham Accords, is not about pretending that the nation-states in the ME are Western democracies waiting to break out. It's about isolating bad actors, specifically Iran, and denying the strategic and diplomatic ambiguity to benefit from chaos at the regional level, without making unrealistic demands for reform inside any nation state.
Hell, Israeli security isn’t relevant to American security or any other interest. They’re a proxy not an ally.
Oh no. Not at all. Let's stipulate for a moment that the US and Israel have no common purpose, something that I'm sympathetic to though maybe not always entirely true.
What we clearly do have, though, is common enemies. Palestinian nationalists, Iran, and crucially important for us, pro-Palestinian terror simps here in the US.
This isn't to say that we can't prioritize, or make tradeoffs when necessary or appropriate.
But if there's no tradeoff, what's the point? It seems to me to be more likely that by defeating our enemies in one place we diminish them everywhere.
Geopolitically, India has played the non-aligned game for 50 years, maybe 80. Always looking to play the middle against both ends. India is not Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, Eqyptians, Jordanians have very good, clear reasons to be on the other side of Iran, and therefore with us and Israel.
It will be embarrassing for them if Israel cleans house in Gaza without any meaningful intervention from the nearby Arab states, but it doesn't change the geopolitical lay of the land for any of those countries.
The current priority for America in the ME is containing Iran. Israel can be a productive part of that but it requires rapprochement with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Monarchies. That isn’t possible while this is going on and ....
I don't see why not. This was the conventional wisdom among a number of libs and foreign policy establishment types say 10-15 years ago, subsequently repudiated by the Trump Administration and the Abraham Accords.
The diplomatic progress of that time occurred against the backdrop of increasing Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which was a finger in the eye of the Arab ME nation-states but push comes to shove not really very important.
it may not be possible in the near future if Israel goes complete scorched Earth for no reason other than to prolong Netanyahu’s political survival.
Israel is going scorched earth on Gaza as a matter of enormous vital Israeli national security interest, not Bibi's partisan interest (it may or may not be that as well).
Frankly, I don't know how this could possibly be any plainer.
It's also worth mentioning that the American national interest there is opposed to Palestinian nationalism for basically the same reasons that it's opposed to Iranian expansionism.
Of course, as things stand preventing Iran expansionism is more important than anything dealing with Palestine by orders of magnitude. So if there were a tradeoff to be made we could concede Palestinian terrorism in order to prevent Iran expansionism. But in reality there is no meaningful tradeoff there so we might as well stop both.
Finally, it has to be pointed out, that the main reason why Iran is a much bigger priority than Palestine is that Palestine is very very weak and Iran is not, at least in relative terms. And a very big part of that is that Iran is a nation-state and Palestine is not. Therefore, it is a substantial national interest of the United States that Palestine not become a nation state, so as to prevent the problems there that we currently have to deal wrt Iran.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “About Last Night: Debate Debacle Edition”
Fcuk that. If the Demo coalition is going to stand by that turd, they ought to fracture.
Surprisingly enough, this is a dog that's not barking this cycle. Not just the horse race, but Trump's personal numbers have been going up for a while. Contrary to what I would have guessed a few months ago, it doesn't look like Trump is going to beat himself.
We'll see who picks for VP. If it's Kari Lake or Tulsi Gabbard, I might flip back to Biden again. But realistically, I don't think that's going to happen.
"
"Who is the Shakespeare of the Zulus?"
Shakespeare is the Shakespeare of the Zulus.
"
~eyeroll~ LOL. The onlines and the meme-makers got this one right. This is Afghanistan round 2.
"
No no no, fcuk that sideways.
The resolution to this situation is pretty clear. We should all support the best candidate in the race, Donald Trump, who wins and serves in the office as best as he can. And Biden can shuffle off somewhere we can mercifully ignore him.
"
I think you're overselling your traction there, and in fact the risks pertaining to a peaceful change of power are coming from Biden supporters as opposed to Trump people.
It's one of the reasons I find David Thornton's posts about Trump to be so distasteful. For David Thornton/David Frum/Jennifer Rubin etc, I don't think they will be in any hurry to recognize Trump's (hypothetical) win in November. In fact, I think they will be grasping at any straws to assert or pretend it didn't happen.
Which is, in a subtextual kind of way, one reason why I think Trump is doing so well in the polls.
"
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5eYJNf8Z-gw
Yeah, how on earth could that be?
"
If you're in a hole this deep, any change is necessarily for the better. But fcuk it, I'm just happy it's not my team.
By all means Demos ought to stay with Biden. Works for me perfectly fine.
"
Making a reasonable guess as to the probabilities is complicated. Given a particular model, there will be probabilities assigned to each state and therefore the Electoral College.
But also important, we also have to make a guess as to how good the model is.
IMO, Biden's best hope is that there is a significant polling miss in his favor. Which to be fair, the last few elections, there have been some big misses. But most of them have been in the Republicans' favor. What's the chance that there's a big miss in Biden's favor?
Whatever Biden's overall chances are, it's way less than 50%.
"
I wonder if that's supposed to be a bad thing.
"
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12558357/Kamala-Harris-incompetent-unqualified-worst-Vice-President-40-years-according-voters-brutal-Daily-Mail-poll.html
Kamala Harris is an absolute dumpster fire as an executive and politician. The idea that opposition to her (in this case, internal opposition inside the Democratic Party as a successor to President Biden) is sexist, that's simply bad faith on your part.
The same bad faith that says that the opposition to Biden is unfair because of stuttering, or misleading video splices, or Robert Hur, or whatever. And I'm sure we'd find all of it if we looked in your comment history.
To state the obvious, the political weakness of Kamala Harris has always been for some time part of the cold water discouraging Democrats from replacing Biden.
"
Yeah I know. He was bad then, but we wasn't _as bad_. Or even now to be fair. But I swear for five years or so at least, he was the hackiest hack in all of media.
"
LOL Jamelle Bouie. What an utterly cringeworthy comical hack.
On “Biden Executive Orders on Southern Border: Read Them For Yourself”
Yeah yeah yeah, does it really though?
Obviously in this case we're talking about the interest of foreign nationals being able to emigrate to America, and it's hard to say that is hugely compelling except for the most diehard of immigration libs.
But in general though, this sort of argument is being used to justify a lot of things that don't necessarily hold up. I'd like to see Trump gone too. But the idea that that is supposed to outweigh any other topical consideration of the day, some combination of them, doesn't at all follow.
What's worse, for me at least, is that for those who do believe that, are typically arguing from a very niche frame of reference that other Americans are very likely not to share.
In the end, you don't see much credible discussion of what a second Trump term would look like, because you can't get past all the sputtering.
On “Republicans Defending Joe Biden”
That's right. But that's because the jury (and judge) were the corrupt instruments of a literal rotten borough who were empowered by some attainder-ish moves in the NY state legislature to piss on Trump in spite of the evident facts of the situation.
That's right, it doesn't matter to the courts, but it matters to us, or least it ought to. There was basically no case against Trump. Trump raped Carroll because she said so, the case was in no meaningful way any deeper or stronger than that. In fact, it's actually quite a bit weaker, given what we know of Jean Carroll's financial motives, and more importantly, her propensity to assert other unsubstantiated claims of sexual misconduct against her by other men. And in fact, it's even weaker than that, given that the nature of Carroll's accusations against Trump are inherently very implausible on its own terms.
Trump is being unfairly railroaded, like for real. I know it's hard to separate that from his continuous bluster and bullshyt. But still, he is.
No, I think you're the one being confused here.
Counting the Edwards thing you just mentioned, there are three cases: the "Carroll case", as I have called it, is a purely private civil lawsuit instigated by Jean Carroll accusing Donald Trump of rape and defamation.
The "Tish James case", is a sorta rare public civil case by New York State against Trump accusing him of fraud, specifically misrepresenting the square-footage and valuation of some of his real estate holdings way back in the day.
The "Bragg case" is what we're in the middle of now. That is a criminal case by New York city prosecutors against Trump accusing him of maintaining or creating false business records relating to his payoffs to Stormy Daniels. That's is where the Edwards things come in. It is an absolute legal abomination, among other reasons because it presumes that the financial structure of the payoffs were an in-kind donation to his Presidential campaign, which is basically the same thing as what the DOJ tried and failed to convict Sen Edwards of. But frankly, this case is ridiculous for many many reasons well beyond that.
The $400 million. $600 million figure is from the Tish James case. I suspect Trump will end up having that award eliminated or substantially reduced.
The $90 million he owes in the Jean Carroll case is equally disgraceful as a legal matter, but I suspect Trump is stuck with that one.
In any event, the big picture is your understanding of theses case is incomplete in some very important ways. I suspect that if you follow them more closely, you might change your mind about them. I know I did.
"
Not on your life. The facts are completely disputed in the Jean Carroll case. In fact, in that case there is basically no evidence against him, except assertions from a woman with a huge motive to lie and a history of making unsubstantiated accusations of sexual misconduct against her.
The Alvin Bragg case and the DC Jack Smith case (and the Georgia case) it's not at all clear that his actions were illegal, and the Alvin Bragg case in particular is absolutely obscene either way. He's nominally guilty of the fraud accusations in the Tish James case, which ought to be a 50 dollar fine, if that.
Yes, but it goes well beyond that as well, to the point where it would equally disgraceful if anybody else were charged under the circumstances where Trump has been.
Frankly, a big turning point for me was the statement from Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor of New York, reassuring the financial community that other people will not be charged in the same circumstances as Trump was in the Tish James case.
"
Yeah. Unfortunately, I suspect that's probably true.
"
No no. There's that too, but I'm talking about something different. I'm talking about Donald Trump either straight out winning on the merits, like the 14th Amendment case. Or, losing legally but demonstrating his substantial innocence, or the corruptness of his adversaries or both. That's what happened in the Jean Carroll civil case, the Tish James civil case, the Georgia case, and maybe the Alvin Bragg case as well.
Over the last year or three, we've all heard a lot from the media and the pundit class talking a big game about how bad Trump is and how much legal trouble he's in. And things are looking a lot different now that they have to put some cards on the table.
With Trump's situation as it stands today, it's weak to say that he can't or shouldn't be President because of his legal problems. And without that, the case against Trump is much weaker than the libs thought, or think.
"
The fcuk it is.
I suspect I agree with David Thornton on a lot of issues of substance. But unfortunately this piece, and much or most of what he writes here, is embarrassingly small-minded and tedious.
And oblivious. The world is a different place than it was on Jan 6, or even last year at this time. Since then, we've had the terror attacks on Oct 7, the substantive failure of the various legal cases against Trump, the persistence of inflation and the obvious continued deterioration of President Biden's energy and mental capacity. And in this world, it's getting more and more difficult to say that America's biggest priority ought to be keeping former President Trump out of power.
The David Frum/Jennifer Rubin/David Thornton/Chip Daniels theory is becoming less and less relevant every day, and frankly out of the four of them only Frum really even tries to argue a case for it, as opposed to the other three who just put down sill platitudes and banalities as if nobody could actually argue anything else.
No, this is a real election coming up and we'll have a real choice. If lib wants to win it, they'll have to find a way out the sterile confines they have put themselves in. And they if they don't want to win it, well I guess that works for me too.
On “Open Mic for the week of 4/1/2024”
Frankly, the whole thing doesn't seem very obscure for me. For Israel, it's better to elect Trump, or Republicans in general, rather than have to carry a rabbit's foot for Weathervane Joe and hope the wind is blowing in your direction today.
Beyond that, and at least as important to me, is that by supporting Republicans you make yourself a better person and America a better country.
The party that you have voted for your entire life is either terror-simp at the grassroots level, or is controlled by a noisy activist class who is terror-simp. Either way, you bought a pig in a poke. Instead of special pleading in the most useless way for the lib-nasties not to terror-simp, you should simply support the not-terror-simp party instead.
On “About Those Swing State Polls”
6-18 months ago, I thought the Trump campaign was a bad joke and had no real at winning on several different levels. 3-6 months ago, I thought this election was the most fundamentally unpredictable cycle I have seen in my lifetime. I still feel that way to a large extent, but I definitely think we have more clarity now than we had then.
Whereas before the narrative was horrible for Trump but the polling was surprisingly good, now the narrative has substantially flipped. Specifically, Trump has, in a political context, the legal cases against him. This is the heart of the bullish case for Trump. If the polls _and_ the narrative are both for Trump, how is he supposed to lose? Biden's rabid energy in barnstorming the campaign trail? Oh please.
The bullish case for Biden is a bit more subtle, but nonetheless still credible, for me at least. If the anti-Trump narrative is or has been repudiated, what's propping up Biden? If the voters are truly comfortable with Trump, he should have some opened up some real daylight against Biden, and that hasn't happened.
Trump is doing better in the states than he is nationally, enough to where he is clearly winning at the moment. But not enough where that wouldn't change if Biden caught a couple random-ish breaks. To me, that means that there is still a lot of discomfort out there in returning Trump to the Oval Office, and therefore the Trump campaign is necessarily going to be a highwire act between now in November, probably demanding more savvy and intelligent maneuver out of the candidate than he is capable of executing on.
On “Open Mic for the week of 4/1/2024”
Yeah yeah yeah. Lee, you've been beating this horse for what, at least 2-3 months now?
You've been supporting the Hamas party in America for your entire adult life and just now, you've figured out that you bought a pig in a poke.
I got a radical plan. How about you do something good for America once, figure out a way to meaningfully help the Republicans, to start making amends for everything you'd done before Oct 7?
On “Open Mic for the week of 3/25/2024”
The settlements maybe, but not Oct 7. I don't think it's in anybody's interest to pretend that Oct 7 is one of those things that just happens.
"
Oh yes they are. It's useful to note, at least for me, that it really doesn't have that much to do with Israel, and I don't really consider myself a particularly Israeli-philic American.
But back to the Palestinians. Politically speaking, Palestinians are Hamas, who are terrorists, and Fatah/PA, who are also terrorists. Therefore, politically speaking, Palestinians are all terrorists, and it is in the US national interest that terrorists lose.
That was before October 7. The Hamas attack on Oct 7 and related atrocities were so evil, so obscene, so repulsive to any kind of humane life, that it must be repudiated as a matter of urgent public order.
The idea that anybody could possibly give a shyt about what Palestinians might think is unfair regarding some land beef with the Israelis, now, after Oct 7, it's absolutely ridiculous and disgusting.
As to the bigger picture, again, if there is a tradeoff that has to be made in US national interest, then OK fine, do it you have to. But it's not the sort of thing that we should be doing if we don't have to.
Preventing things like Oct 7 is in a very large way the purpose of our statecraft in the first place. It's why we want to contain Iran, Russia, China and other bad actors. It's not at prudent or savvy to concede our deepest values right from the get-go absent a situation of dire necessity.
Regarding Iran and geopolitics, I concede that what you're talking about is hypothetically possible. I haven't seen any indication at all that it is actually true.
I also have another particular reason to be skeptical of your theory. From say, 2005-2015, the libs and a large portion of the foreign policy establishment believed that Israel, and the settlements in particular, were the underlying cause of conflict in the ME. That theory was bullshyt, in particular bullshyt that was repudiated by the Abraham Accords. Israel is a burr under the saddle no doubt. But it is not the fundamental cause of conflict in the ME. The fundamental cause of conflict is Arab/Islamic society-level dysfunction. In order to make progress in the ME, that's what has to be addressed.
So, your idea that Iran geopolitics means we have rein in the Israelis, for me that's the same as what the foreign policy establishment believed from 2005-2015. They were wrong then, and I don't see anything meaningfully different now.
Finally, it's also useful to know, that the path to progress represented by the Abraham Accords, is not about pretending that the nation-states in the ME are Western democracies waiting to break out. It's about isolating bad actors, specifically Iran, and denying the strategic and diplomatic ambiguity to benefit from chaos at the regional level, without making unrealistic demands for reform inside any nation state.
"
Oh no. Not at all. Let's stipulate for a moment that the US and Israel have no common purpose, something that I'm sympathetic to though maybe not always entirely true.
What we clearly do have, though, is common enemies. Palestinian nationalists, Iran, and crucially important for us, pro-Palestinian terror simps here in the US.
This isn't to say that we can't prioritize, or make tradeoffs when necessary or appropriate.
But if there's no tradeoff, what's the point? It seems to me to be more likely that by defeating our enemies in one place we diminish them everywhere.
Geopolitically, India has played the non-aligned game for 50 years, maybe 80. Always looking to play the middle against both ends. India is not Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, Eqyptians, Jordanians have very good, clear reasons to be on the other side of Iran, and therefore with us and Israel.
It will be embarrassing for them if Israel cleans house in Gaza without any meaningful intervention from the nearby Arab states, but it doesn't change the geopolitical lay of the land for any of those countries.
"
I don't see why not. This was the conventional wisdom among a number of libs and foreign policy establishment types say 10-15 years ago, subsequently repudiated by the Trump Administration and the Abraham Accords.
The diplomatic progress of that time occurred against the backdrop of increasing Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which was a finger in the eye of the Arab ME nation-states but push comes to shove not really very important.
Israel is going scorched earth on Gaza as a matter of enormous vital Israeli national security interest, not Bibi's partisan interest (it may or may not be that as well).
Frankly, I don't know how this could possibly be any plainer.
It's also worth mentioning that the American national interest there is opposed to Palestinian nationalism for basically the same reasons that it's opposed to Iranian expansionism.
Of course, as things stand preventing Iran expansionism is more important than anything dealing with Palestine by orders of magnitude. So if there were a tradeoff to be made we could concede Palestinian terrorism in order to prevent Iran expansionism. But in reality there is no meaningful tradeoff there so we might as well stop both.
Finally, it has to be pointed out, that the main reason why Iran is a much bigger priority than Palestine is that Palestine is very very weak and Iran is not, at least in relative terms. And a very big part of that is that Iran is a nation-state and Palestine is not. Therefore, it is a substantial national interest of the United States that Palestine not become a nation state, so as to prevent the problems there that we currently have to deal wrt Iran.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.