The bear hug of political death
I listened to the April 3rd edition of The Next Level Podcast with Tim Miller, Sarah Longwell, and Andrew Eggers, with a sense of bemusement, particularly the last segment about Gaza. Holy s**t they say, this is a serious problem! Israel is blowing up aid workers! Well, no kidding. (They have been for months.) I have listened to the Never Trumpers, the Democrats, the podcast industrial complex, and Biden advisers all say since October 7th that Palestine wouldn’t be a big problem, that it would go away long before the election, and just ignore it. Nobody wanted to talk about Palestine.
Hahaha. It was all whistling past the graveyard. Anybody who knew anything about Bibi, Likud, and Israeli society generally knew this wouldn’t be a transitory issue. Biden’s bear hug of the thug Netanyahu will haunt him forever.
Chances are excellent that Joe Biden will be remembered as the president who traded democracy for Bibi Netanyahu. Maybe it will be his epitaph. Probably will be.
Longwell says, “I’ve always supported Israel, but . . . .” That’s a remark that could only be made by a Palestine naïf, someone ignorant of seventy years of racism, apartheid, oppression, land theft, and violence against Palestinian Arabs by European Zionist, settler colonialists.
Regrettably, the American political establishment, and sadly, my tribe the Democrats, especially, are in the bag for AIPAC and allied Israeli interests. Joe Biden has received over eleven million dollars from them during his political career. His phone call with Netanyahu on April 4th reads like the transcript of a hostage video.
And it is all coming a cropper. The group that gave Biden his biggest boost in 2020, young people, are against our policy in Palestine, three to one. Two of Biden’s “firewall” states, Michigan and Wisconsin, are probably already lost. It’s grim.
The Onion has it right on the nose. Biden is lining up to be the second Democrat to lose to the worst candidate the Republicans – maybe anybody – has ever fielded. I don’t blame young people or Arab Americans: I blame Joe Biden and a political establishment that’s been blind to decades of oppression by Israel and captured by its supporters.
They deserve what they get. It’s just too bad they’ll take the rest of us with them.
Update 4/6: If you don’t believe me about Michigan and Wisconsin, listen to the Bulwark podcast with Ron Brownstein. If you are in a hurry (you shouldn’t be; the whole podcast is good) cue it up to about 24:00.
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