Back to Götterdämmerung!

Early in the history of this blog, I brought up the end-of-the-world oppurtunity presented by the notion that the Mayan calendar predicted everything would wrap on December 21, 2012. I said that if anyone believed that, their best option would be to run up their credit cards all that month, because they would never have to pay back the balance. As far as I know, whether people believed the world was going to end in 2012 or not, none of them ran up their credit cards thinking it would.

However, what I did think was happening in the wake of the 2020 election was that Democrats, having swept into power on the thinnest of margins, began running up whatever political balance they could on the basis that they'd never have to pay anything back down the road. Last August, I reviewed this:

[Speaker Pelosi] expected to enact the Great Reset agenda via a pair of infrastructure bills in 2021, getting it all done before the start of the 2022 election cycle, when by this point conventional wisdom expects Republican control of congress to return. The problem with this strategy is that it simply doesn't think past 2021 -- who cares if everything falls apart after this year? Speasker Pelosi will retire! The Götterdämmerung won't be her problem! The COVID strategy fails? The border collapses? The Taliban humiliates us? Inflation? None of those bills will come due until next year, when the Speaker will retire!

Lower down, I linked to a source that has since disappeared, but the quote from Pelosi is still apposite:

When asked about the possibility of another Trump presidency, Pelosi commanded the reporter “Don’t even think of that.”

“Don’t think of the world being on fire,” she continued, adding “It cannot happen, or we will not be the United States of America.”

As of yesterday, there seems to be an emerging acceptance that the world is, in fact, going to end:

Democrats with deep knowledge of the Biden campaign acknowledged former President Donald Trump’s significant chances of completing the greatest political comeback in American history.

. . . Democrat fundraiser John Morgan said his party is “prepared to lose” the presidential election to Trump. Morgan, a very successful lawyer from Central Florida, added he is nervous about President Joe Biden’s current political position.

“As my great-grandfather used to say, ‘I’m as nervous as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.’ Yes, hell yes,” Morgan told the Washington Post. “We all know this is a jump ball,” he said. “In 2016, we were reading Nate Silver, and we weren’t worried at all. When we woke up, we realized we’ve never been to Wisconsin and we’ve never been to Michigan and then all the Monday-morning quarterbacks are out.”

. . . The Post’s Jesús Rodríguez questioned if [Biden's campaign manager Julie] Chavez Rodriguez has the tools to prevent Trump’s return to the White House. “What if Biden’s campaign manager can’t manage to keep it at bay?” he asked. “That won’t be the case for Julie,” Morgan defended Biden’s campaign manager. “Because we all are prepared to lose. . . . No matter what, I don’t think people are going to blame Julie like people blame Robby Mook for Hillary. Because Hillary was supposed to win this.”

Joe himself seems to be hedging his bets:

Today, my Administration is announcing protections for 2.2 million career civil servants from political interference, to guarantee that they can carry out their responsibilities in the best interest of the American people. . . . This rule is a step toward combatting corruption and partisan interference to ensure civil servants are able to focus on the most important task at hand: delivering for the American people.

In other words, if Trump gets in, we'll make sure he can't touch the Deep State. Beyond that, he may well be looking toward starting World War III before Trump can do anything about it:

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday that Ukraine will eventually join NATO as support for the country remains "rock solid" among member states.

"Ukraine will become a member of NATO. Our purpose at the summit is to help build a bridge to that membership," Blinken told reporters in Brussels.

Inevitably,

Russia and NATO are now in "direct confrontation", the Kremlin said as the U.S.-led alliance marked its 75th anniversary on Thursday.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: "In fact, relations have now slipped to the level of direct confrontation." NATO was "already involved in the conflict surrounding Ukraine (and) continues to move towards our borders and expand its military infrastructure towards our borders", he said.

What I don't really understand is that Blinken's remarks are purely aspirational. Russia would need to be driven out of Ukraine's pre-2014 borders and beaten badly enough to create a stable environment that would allow Ukraine to enter NATO with territorial integrity that could then be defended via the alliance -- but given the current battlefield situation, this is highly unlikely, even looking out for years in the future. Blinken's brave words won't help a thing in the medium term, and I suspect Putin is simply going to bide his time until the election.

Meanwhile in a move that's just as inexplicable,

President Joe Biden demanded an “immediate ceasefire” from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call on Thursday between the two leaders, threatening a loss of U.S. support for the war if Israel does not comply.

A White House statement quoted in the link said in part,

He underscored that an immediate ceasefire is essential to stabilize and improve the humanitarian situation and protect innocent civilians, and he urged the Prime Minister to empower his negotiators to conclude a deal without delay to bring the hostages home.

The link continues,

Biden’s statement confirms that the U.S. has effectively adopted Hamas’s demand that a ceasefire precede a deal to release the remaining 130 or so Israeli hostages. The U.S. previously agreed with Israel that a ceasefire depended on a deal.

This comes in the face of threats by Alan Dershowitz and others that Jews will withdraw their support for Democrats in the fall if the administration doesn't continue to support Israel. Dershowitz has insisted several times that a cease fire benefits Hamas by allowing them to rearm and regroup, and his own publc support for Biden is definitely not a sure thing.

Meanwhile, Joe has revealed that his wife has been pushing for precisely that outcome, acccording to Muslim leaders who met with him this week:

“It’s got to stop,” he recounted the first lady had said to him recently, according to the recollection of Dr. Nahreen Ahmed, who was in the room.

Another participant, who declined to be named, told CNN they remembered the president saying that the first lady had used these words: “Stop it. Stop it now.”

Dershowitz has been puzzled for weeks that Biden appears to be letting a small group of Michigan voters drive Israel policy, when caving to their pressure is likely to lose him a far larger segment of the Jewish vote. But naturally, if Dr Jill is telling him what to do, that's what's going to happen. The White House has been struggling to keep up; farther down in the link:

Ahmed said it was unclear to her whether the first lady’s comment was directed at the Israel-Hamas war at large, or the mounting civilian death toll in Gaza.

Asked about the president’s remarks, a White House official said there is “no daylight” between the couple on the issue,with both sharing in outrage over civilian deaths. The official added that Dr. Biden was not calling for Israel to end its efforts against Hamas.

Ah, so Dr Jill's policy views are fully nuanced. I'm with her stepson Hunter's previously expressed view that she's an entitled something or other. There seems, though, to be a slowly emerging consensus that the election can't come soon enough.