Whew!

I'm still amazed at how quickly this year's campaign timetable is moving. I've been saying for quite a while that even in years where Democrats lost the presidential election badly, McGovern in 1972, Dukakis in 1988, or Kerry in 2004, opinion pieces on how badly the Democrat campaigns were going didn't start to emerge until after the summer party conventions. Rush Limbaugh used to speculate that this was because the big-name reporters who had the inside info wanted to keep it secret until they published their own books as post-mortems after the election.

By the same token, the defining images of the failed campaigns, like John Kerry windsurfing in the photo above, didn't come out until fall; the Republican ad featuring him turning with the wind came out in September 2004, as did the September 1988 film of Dukakis riding an Abrams tank. The extended drama of Thomas Eagleton's electric shock treatments took place in late July 1972 following the Democrat convention; he eventually withdrew as McGovern's vice presidential running mate on August 1.

As of the middle of March in this election year, though, we're already getting doom-and-gloom insider stories and op-eds. Just this morning:

In a private meeting at the White House in January, allies of the president had just told him that his poll numbers in Michigan and Georgia had dropped over his handling of the war between Israel and Hamas.

Both are battleground states he narrowly won four years ago, and he can’t afford any backsliding if he is to once again defeat Donald Trump. He began to shout and swear, a lawmaker familiar with the meeting said.

. . . For months, Democrats have watched the 2024 campaign unfold with rising alarm as the sitting president struggles to gain ground against his defeated predecessor. Frustrations rippling through the party have reached the top, with Biden at times second-guessing travel decisions and communications strategies that have left much of the electorate clueless about his record, interviews with nearly 20 lawmakers, present and past administration officials and Biden allies show.

As of yesterday,

There have been various solutions proposed to deal with the uncomfortable fact that Joe Biden looks like a loser heading into the 2024 election. One idea proposed by NY Times columnist Ezra Klein was for Joe Biden to stand aside and let the Democratic Party choose a successor at an open convention.

. . . In the same piece in which he proposed the open convention, Klein also addressed the other problem with his plan: Kamala Harris.

. . . Which brings us to another proposal to save Biden's chances that appeared in the Washington Post yesterday. Columnist Kathleen Parker argues that Biden's chances would improve if Harris would simply agree to step aside.

. . . This isn't the first time a columnist has made this suggestion. David Ignatius suggested it as a back up plan to Biden himself stepping down last September.

As of today, Real Clear Politics is running a poll-average November electoral map that shows Trump beating Biden 219-215 with 104 tossups.

Yesterday, the Trump campaign released a second ad purporting to be for Visiting Angels, showing Joe being shepherded into a Michigan campaign stop as though he were in need of assisted living. This was based on a clip that's been out since his Michigan visit on Thursday:

What do you do when Biden is so confused? Not only do they have to guide him around, but they have to choreograph his every move including with his "cheat sheets." He needed the notes for even reading the simplest of remarks with the Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar.

. . . The cheat sheets not only had his remarks to make, but they also had things like Varadkar's name, his official Irish title (phonetically spelled so Biden would know how to pronounce it correctly), and they even had a picture of him so Biden could identify who he was.

The sheets also had similar descriptions and pictures of other participants in the meeting, including the Irish ambassador to the U.S. and how to pronounce their names.

That's wild that he needs such a detailed description of the Irish leader, given he's met with Varadkar multiple times in the past, including last year around St. Patrick's Day. He needs pictures to be able to identify who he is? What does that say about Biden at this point? . . . The level of scripting is intense and concerning.

Since the State of the Union, it looks like Joe's handlers had been trying to implement a modified version of Nate Silver's prescription, impromptu public appearances combined with longer press interviews, but it looks as though the hyper-scripted campaign events are starting to backfire if Trump can turn them into devastating campaign ads. Clearly a basement campaign isn't going to work this year -- the risk is there will be Kate Middleton style rumors that he's missing in action.

But proof-of-life appearances aren't going to work if they backfire this badly. And this is only March. I simply haven't lived through a presidential campaign year where things have looked this bad for one side so early, and even his own side is acknowledging it.

Nathan Wade And The Incompetence Problem

I certainly agree with the consensus expressed by Alan Dershowitz and others over Judge McAfee's ruling in the Fulton County RICO case, that in an effort to be even-handed, he split the baby, but the baby died. But most observers miss the bigger point, which I began to discuss a month ago in another post about incompetence as it relates to Nathan Wade and the eventual progress of the Fulton County case. Jordan Sekulow looks at the edges of the same problem below at 2:57:

Sekulow: . . . here's the queation, Andy: If Nathan Wade is removed, the work that he generated, the work product that he generated during this period of time, would be, under the Wong Sun case [371 U.S. 471 (1963)], normally deemed fruit of the poisonous tree.

Andy: That's right.

Sekulow: There's nothing in the order about that at all.

Andy: No, he doesn't think it out, the judge doesn't think it out.

Sekulow: What happens, then, to all the -- he was the lead prosecutor. What happens to all the witness interviews and evidence they gathered -- ?

Andy: I tell you wnat I would do if I were the defense attorney, it's called a motion to suppress. I would say that everything that was gained by this person who was improperly in the case should be suppressed, and everything that comes from that fruit of the poisonous tree should also be suppressed, and all the evidence that was accumulated by the acts, uh, and practices of Nathan Wade should be suppressed and not be permitted to be used as evidence in the case.

It looks like this will be yet one more defect in the whole case, which is generally acknowledged to have become a tainted mess. I'm sure the defense will pursue it, if only to delay the trial past the election, although this will mean more uncertainty and expense for all the defendants -- rather than facilitating the path of justice, it seems as if Judge McAfee has, with whatever good intentions, simply piled new complications on top of each other when the best course would have been to dismiss the case entirely.

But I see another problem that may cancel out the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree issue: just what did Nathan Wade do over the time he was lead prosecutor? His main accomplishment seems to have been to take DA Willis on six vacations in a five-month period. The exchange above refers to his "work product", but in another case, a 2020 investigation of Cobb County jail deaths, Wade actually generated no work product at all:

Asked about his findings for a local TV news investigation, Wade conceded that he created no “documents, communications, or records memorializing, reflecting evidence, or relating to the work,” according to the news station, 11Alive.

“I have obviously my brainchild, what’s going on in my mind about it. That’s what I have,” Wade told a lawyer for 11Alive who was trying to obtain Sheriff’s Department internal records about the probe through public records act requests.

On Wednesday, two days before he released his findings in the Willis-Wade matter, Judge McAfee dismissed six charges from the RICO indictment for being too vague. The consensus among observers was that this was a reflection of Wade's inexperience in such cases, which goes back to the question of whether he ever accomplished much as lead prosecutor -- we know now that he wasn't hired for his legal expertise in any case. His work history in the Cobb County investigation is that he simply doesn't do much other than bill the client.

I'm not a lawyer and have no experience working in a DA's office. On the other hand, I do have lots of experience working in organizations where incompetence is a problem. When incompetents are at the top, it's pervasive throughout. Competent people who can make higher-ups look bad are weeded out; others are shunted into irrelevance. I suspect it's been in the nature of things that the Fulton County RICO case was never going to come to trial, but now the problem will be whether a new lead prosecutor can make anything of the work product that's ostensibly been generated by that office since 2021 under Wade's leadership.

And this leaves aside the problem of whether Willis, given what we know of her character, can hire a lead prosecutor capable enough and strong enough to bring the case to trial under the current highly adverse conditions. I expect the farce to continue.

Joe's Staff Shuts Him Down Again

For the second time this week:

President Biden on Thursday was heard asking for permission from a staffer to “take a couple of questions” from the audience during a campaign stop in Michigan — prompting other aides to quickly move the press out of earshot.

“Can I take a couple questions?” Biden, 81, asked a female staffer as he met with supporters and campaign volunteers on the front porch of a Saginaw city council member’s home.

“Yeah, we’re going to take a few questions,” the staffer responded.

The staffer’s response apparently served as a signal to three other aides, who quickly began to herd up the reporters already positioned on the sidewalk about 20 feet away.

“Thank you, press … back in the vehicles,” they shouted, escorting the media away before Biden could take any questions.

It looks like the Post reporter saw the same possibility I entertained on Tuesday, that if Joe "asks for permission to take questions", he's really saying it's time to wrap things up and shoo the reporters away. I still think this presupposes subtlety and self-awareness that Joe simply doesn't have -- among other things, he's the sort of guy who thinks he's smarter than anyone else, and he believes if he gets to answer questions, he'll ace it.

Last month I looked at a very perceptive analysis and prescription from Nate Silver on the state of Joe's campaign. It looks like the handlers are at least aware of this, or Democrat donors are and have been pressing the handlers about it. For instance, Silver says,

A lot of commentators that I respect have pointed out that Biden ought to do more public events that would help to allay public doubts about his mental sharpness. The problem is, one can infer the reason that Biden is not doing them — namely that the White House comms team is rational and has inferred that the cost of doing them outweighs the benefits because Biden is too likely to come across poorly.

Let’s abstract this for a moment. Say that, in any given period of time — maybe over the course of a couple months — Biden has 20 opportunities to do what you might call Improvisational Public Appearances (IPAs). We can define these as events where Biden is not merely making pre-scripted remarks and instead faces sustained questioning from the media, voters or other public figures.

Biden's appearances in New Hampahire Monday and Michigan yesterday might be characterized as quasi-IPAs, with Joe trotted out under highly controlled circumstances to be seen with small groups but not really to interact with them -- and when there's any sign that he's flagging, they're quickly wrapped up. This avoids the problem Silver notes that having Joe do more spontaneous events has risks that outweigh benefits, but a quasi-event that has to be wrapped up with a disingenuous signal that he's about to take questions has its own serious risks, especially if it happens over and over.

Let's think about what a president other than Joe might do -- a Nixon, say, either Bush, or a Clinton -- if his staff told him that there was too much risk of him saying something goofy if he took questions from the press or the public. My guess is such a president would take this to heart but work out a better signal that it was time to wrap things up. Rather than lie that he wanted to take questions, he could use a line more like, "I can't tell you how much I've enjoyed meeting with each of you today, but I'm told I have to take a security briefing. Maybe we can get back later."

My guess is that Joe's handlers simply can't have that discussion with him. Any suggestion that there's too much risk in letting him go off script at all would probably get him yelling and cussing them out, so they take his tentative offer to take questions as the sign to shut the whole thing down. For whatever reason, he doesn't cuss them out for that, at least so far. But I don't see how this can continue much longer without him either losing his temper in front of everyone or actually taking a question and bungling it badly.

In other words, whatever can go wrong will go wrong. And we've started the national campaign for November, and it's only March.

Joe's Gaza Pier Project

I've read enough Bible history to know that Israel was regularly overrun by successive powerful neighbors, beginning with Egypt and leading up to the Seleucid Greeks, at which point the decision was made to ally with the upstart power Rome for protection from all the others. That was mildly successful until Rome took over itself and obliterated Israel at least as successfully as any of the others.

Israel's modern history has involved alliance with another upstart world empire, the US, having received assurance from a fading empire, the UK, that it would grant territory for a new Jewish state in territories it controlled under the Palestine mandate. Harry Truman's immediate support for the emergence of the new state after World War II was the key factor in its initial survival. It's beginning to appear, though, that Israel's relationship with the US may wind up more like its ancient relationship with Rome. Just this morning in The Hill:

During President Biden’s State of the Union address last Thursday, he announced, “I’m directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast.”

Intended to accommodate large vessels carrying food, water, medicine and tents, the pier would be constructed without U.S. “boots on the ground,” he added.

Constructing and securing the pier will be a considerable undertaking, with or without U.S. boots on the ground. Although well-intentioned from a humanitarian standpoint, the pier is likely to create more problems than solutions.

U.S. European and Central Commands are already decisively engaged in Ukraine and the Middle East. Building a vulnerable pier is not the best course of action. Biden’s decision therefore looks like a political response to garner votes from Muslim and progressive voters in Michigan and Minnesota, not an answer to problems in the region.

The pier will also present a new target for Iranian-backed proxies in Gaza and the West Bank, including Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah. The pier will have to be defended from mortar, rocket, aerial drone and unmanned surface vehicle attacks. And some nation or coalition force will have to secure it from a multitude of threats.

. . . Carving out a safe zone in a combat zone is not a good strategy. Hamas terrorists have already repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to place Palestinian civilians between themselves and the Israel Defense Forces — in harm’s way.

It's likely, in fact, that Joe's actual strategy is to use the vulnerability of the US pier in close proximity to Israel's military operation to find more direct ways to interfere with it. Two Democrat administrations have been at odds with Benjamin Netanyahu, who was prime minister fron 2009-21, during Obama's entire administration, and now since 2022 under Biden. Obama and Netanyahu repeatedly clashed on issues related to the Palestinian state and the Iran nuclear deal, and it's alleged that Obama and Biden have enabled an Israeli lawfare strategy against Netanyahu equivalent to the Democrat strategy against Trump:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who visited the White House this week [March 2019], is facing a dubious indictment for corruption, and Israel’s election looms on April 9.

Netanyahu joins Trump as a political target of his own nation’s legal system.

. . . Trump has endured two years of a political investigation initiated by Obama administration holdovers on the charge that he “colluded” with Russia and is its puppet. Special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence that it was true.

Netanyahu is facing charges that he extended regulatory favors, but law professor Alan Dershowitz, a self-described liberal Democrat and civil libertarian, told Israel’s attorney general this would “endanger democracy and freedom of the press. … [It would] bring down a duly elected prime minister on the basis of an expansive and unprecedented application of a broad and expandable criminal statute.” Netanyahu denies the charges and adds, “The left understands that they will not beat me at the ballot box.”

Seymour Hersh in his most recent Substack essay notes:

On October 7, the prime minister was in the middle of a widely publicized criminal trial on fraud, breach of trust, and bribery charges that, according to Israeli media, he was destined to lose and face potentially more than a decade in jail.

But unlike Dershowitz, he doesn't seem inclined to connect the dots between Trump, Netanyahu, and criminal trials. He does, though, hint that Netanyahu's response to October 7 and his hard line on Hamas are meant as distractions from a politicized criminal trial. The bigger conundrum Hersh ignores is that the US Democrat object is to interfere in Israel's domestic politics -- something Hersh has opposed in cases from Viet Nam to Ukraine, but which he now seems to want to encourage in Israel. Netanyahu himself makes the point that Israel's domestic policies are supported by a significant majority there:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a Sunday interview fired back at President Biden’s suggestion that his policies were only hurting Israel.

“I don’t know exactly what the president meant, but if he meant by that that I’m pursuing private policies against the majority, the wish of the majority of Israelis, and that this is hurting the interests of Israel, then he’s wrong on both counts,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Politico.

. . . “These are not my private policies only. They’re policies supported by the overwhelming majority of the Israelis. They support the action that we’re taking to destroy the remaining terrorist battalions of Hamas,” Netanyahu said.

. . . Netanyahu said he thinks the majority of Israelis supports the operation in Gaza to destroy what’s remaining of Hamas — the U.S.-designated terrorist organization that governs the Gaza Strip. Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis in the Oct. 7 massacre and took about 250 hostages.

. . . He said he also thinks Israelis support his view “that says that we should resoundingly reject the attempt to ram down our throats a Palestinian state.”

. . . The Israel Democracy Institute survey gauges Israeli sentiment on current events on a monthly basis.

In the institute’s most recent survey from February, about 64.4 percent of Israeli respondents — including 74.1 percent of Israeli Jews and 16.9 percent of Israeli Arabs — said they agreed Israel should “Expand the military operation into Rafah in order to pressure Hamas into agreeing to a better deal for the release of the hostages.”

What we've seen from recent confused remarks from Joe where he seems to conflate Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, Egypt, and Mexico into a general foreign policy muddle is that he's basically in favor of global interference, except in cases like Afghanistan, where it clearly hasn't worked out. But there's no rhyme or reason to it, and there's no rhyme or reason to Seymour Hersh's general support for that policy, either. Hersh rambles on about his respect for Eugene McCarthy, the 1968 anti-Viet Nam War Democrat candidate:

There is a lesson in the clarity of McCarthy’s purpose for President Joe Biden, who like much of the world responded with rage and a desire for payback at the horror that Hamas inflicted on October 7.

. . . Biden will have difficulty winning re-election unless he retracts his initial justified support for a stricken Israel. He must stand up to Netanyahu and tell him that the United States cannot continue to supply funding, bombs, and other munitions to Israel until, at minimum, there is a ceasefire that could open the door to substantive talks with what is left of the Hamas leadership.

The problem for Biden is he's playing both sides, something domestic politics force him to do -- but in playing both sides, he's interfering in Israel for his own perceived domestic advantage. He isn't going to threaten to cut off aid to Netanyahu, he's just going to build a pier in the ocean next to Gaza and use it as leverage to restrict Israel's military options, which he's nevertheless continuing to supply with weapons they won't be allowed to use.

This is the same strategy that failed in Viet Nam. It's not that different from the strategy that's failing in Ukraine. Meanwhile,

A staggering 53% of Jewish voters in New York state plan on voting for former President Donald Trump in the November election, a new Siena College poll found.

. . . The spike in New York Jewish voters backing Trump has come in the wake of the murderous Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, with antisemitic hate crimes and anti-Israel protests surging in New York City.

President Biden, meanwhile, has lashed out at Israel in its war against Hamas while the Democratic Party has come under fire for tolerating far-left lawmakers in its ranks who sympathize with terrorists, according to Democratic political consultant Hank Sheinkopf.

“The 11th commandment for Jews is ‘Thou shall vote Democrat.’ Now there’s a 12th commandment: ‘Maybe you should be a Republican, darling,'” Sheinkopf quipped.

State Of The Union Fail

Last week I noted that Biden wasn't really addresing the country in his State of the Union address. In fact, he wasn't addressing the free world, he wasn't addressing the American people, he wasn't addressing Congress, he wasn't addressing the justices of the US Supreme Court, although he did offend them gratuitously while insisting women had electrical power. I pointed out that he was actually addressing nervous Democrat donors, who'd sent a back-channel message that they wanted to see "passion and fire out in public as assurances" that Joe was still sharp and able to take on Trump.

The answer from the big guy himself, according to the CNN report I linked, was a cryptic "State of the Union". The implication seems to have been that this is where he'd turn it all around. After a week, it hasn't happened.

In the latest HarrisX/Forbes poll, which was taken three days following last week’s State of the Union address, Joe Biden saw his approval rating drop and former President Donald Trump’s 2024 lead tick up.

The best spin Team Biden can put on this poll is to seek comfort in the margin of error and say the State of the Union address changed nothing. But that wasn’t the goal, nor is it what Biden needed. He needed that speech to be a big win, to change public perception, and launch him into the coming presidential campaign.

In fact, Joe's handlers worked against themselves by sending Joe to an interview Saturday, when he'd have been better off going back to Delaware again. The full Jonathan Capehart MSNBC interview had him "regretting" calling illegals illegals, but the problems went farther than that:

Capehart asked if he would go back to Israel and address the Israeli Knesset. Biden answered, "Yes," then appeared to blank out and gave a long pause.

Capehart tries to help and lead the witness with the subsequent questions.

Biden looks clueless and then says, "I'd rather not discuss it more."

When Capehart asked what that meant, Biden said, "It doesn't mean anything."

. . . he claimed, "America made a mistake" in how it went after bin Laden.

"America made a mistake. We went after bin Laden 'til we got him, but we shouldn't have gone into Ukraine. I mean, excuse me, we shouldn't have gone into the whole thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. It wasn't necessary. It just caused more problems than it raised...than it cured."

. . . This is a very bad window into the thinking -- what there is of it -- of Joe Biden.

Then on Monday we had the handlers cutting his feed in New Hampshire as he threatened to answer reporters' questions, followed yesterday by former Special Prosecutor Hur's testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, which, with the transcripts of his Biden interview released the same day, simply focused more attention on Joe's mental state. Jesse Waters made the point,

Biden’s mental state let him escape justice, which forces the media to argue that Biden’s competent enough to be president, but not competent enough to stand trial.

Just the News noted,

After confirming the date of his son’s death with the lawyers, Biden still appeared to be confused about the timeline of his post-vice presidential private life.

Biden said: “And what's happened in the meantime is that Trump gets elected in November of 2017?"

Two individuals corrected him, saying it was in “2016,” according to the transcript.

“2016. Alright, so – why do I have 2017 here?" Biden asked.

Joe's handlers did their best to give him a script and a schedule that would change the dynamic of the campaign, which, given the results of yesterday's primaries, has effectively begun, with both Trump and Biden having won enough delegates to secure their respective nominations. The challenge for Biden's handlers will be to defeat the growing perception that in private, he's just as vague, shallow, and bumbling as he is in public. The fact that they had clearly hoped to turn this trend around after the State of the Union and haven't is an indication of the problems they face in an extended national election campaign.

Joe can't stop being Joe.

"Am I Allowed To Take Any Questions? Anybody Here?"

BIDEN: "Am I allowed to take any questions? Anybody here?"

Biden's handlers IMMEDIATELY kick the press out of the room and end the feed. pic.twitter.com/VgIyewvQNz

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 11, 2024

Joe was at a New Hampshire rally yesterday and created a remarkable vignette: at the end of his remarks, he asked, "Am I allowed to take questions? Anybody here, the staff?" By several accounts, his handlers immediately cut the feed, replaced it with a test pattern, visible in the clip above, and chased the reporters from the room.

I briefly wondered if this wasn't as spontaneous as it seemed, and maybe it was some sort of pre-arranged code word from Joe to his handlers that it was time in fact to wrap things up -- that might have been a slightly better take on what happened, but only slightly. I watched it again, and Joe seemed very much at loose ends, the audience giggled nervously before an awkward pause, and then the handlers cut the feed. This wasn't scripted.

As Nick Arama commented on Red State, "The leader of the free world, and he appears to be run by unnamed staffers and people behind the scenes."

Well, let's face it, this happens all the time. The New York Post covered an episode in a 2023 book by Franklin Foer when Joe made an off-the-cuff remark that appeared to call for an uprising against Vladimir Putin:

“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.“

The statement alarmed Americans and international US allies who worried it would spark retaliation and escalation from Putin — and his full arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Upon leaving the stage, “Biden instantly knew that the White House would have to clarify his mistake,” according to Foer.

No stranger to walking back comments made by the president, Biden’s staff quickly took the initiative to explain away the controversial statement. But they’d done so without consulting the president, which drew the octogenarian’s ire and resentment, according to the book.

. . . Deep down, he “knew that he had erred” by making the comment in the first place, Foer says. But instead of taking responsibility for the flub, he “resented his aides for creating the impression that they had cleaned up his mess.”

“Rather than owning his failure, he fumed to his friends about how he was treated like a toddler,” Foer writes.

What strikes me about Monday's New Hampshire episode isn't so much that it happened, although it's clearly part of an ongoing problem for Joe as a candidate. The problem is that it took place because the 2024 national campaign has opened in March, instead of after the party conventions in the summer, and this is because the Republicans ended their primary season almost as soon as it started -- just after Super Tuesday, Trump's last Republican challenger dropped out, and Trump began to run against Biden in earnest.

The typical indicators that a Democrat campaign has visibly faltered, like Michael Dukakis's tank ride in September 1988 or John Kerry's windsurfing frolic in September 2004, have taken place during the conventional fall campaigns, and I've noted here that the loyalists who start to post alarms that such campaigns aren't doing well usually begin in the summer and fall. In Biden's case, they've been doing this since last year, and just on Sunday I noted that Denmocrat insiders are demanding "passion and fire out in public" from the big guy.

The problem is that this is March, not September. They seem to have him doing rallies nearly every day, sometimes more than one a day, since the State of the Union, when this sort of thing has never been Joe's strong point -- he does things like dodge his handlers and run off to chat up some pre-teen girl whenever he can manage to do it, and the out-in-public strategy does nothing but create endless opportunities for hair sniffing, MILF groping, gaffes, and malapropisms.

But his handlers can't even keep him to a script. He wanders off the text, inserts new wording, slurs his words, and reverts to vacant pauses -- with month after extra month of an already-begun national campaign. Do Joes' handlers seriously expect to keep up the schedule they seem to be setting for him through November? And this simply leaves aside the accounts of people like Robert Hur of how he acts behind closed doors -- just this morning:

Joe Biden literally said "My Corvette go BRRRRR" while Robert Hur pleaded with him to answer actual questions pic.twitter.com/7dSk53VG3Y

— Dylan Housman (@Dylan_Housman) March 12, 2024

Stein's Law: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.

Back To Victoria Nuland

I noted in last Wednesday's post that Victoria Nuland's retirement from the State Department must represent some change, but so far not one that's been announced, in US policy over the Ukraine war, since she had been both the chief advocate and often an implementer of US support for a pro-Western alignment there since betore the 2014 Maidan Revolution, which was engineered by the CIA with her collaboration. This story at Zero Hedge, while it contains speculation, offers some possible insight into the potential policy change:

Former CIA analyst Ray McGovern in a new interview has speculated over the reasons behind Victoria Nuland stepping down from her high-ranking position as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the number three top official in the State Department.

. . . While there have been rumors that maybe she could be in poor or declining health, McGovern has told Russia's Sputnik that the notoriously hawkish Nuland was a liability at a moment NATO and Russia are inching closer to direct nuclear-armed confrontation.

"My best guess here is that the CIA and the Defense Department and the NSA got this message around saying, 'look, Victoria's got her own agenda here,’" said McGovern.

The former CIA official continued to speculate: "‘The president doesn't really want to strike these ammo depots in Russia or knock down the [Crimean] Bridge. So we got to rein her in, I guess it's time for her to go to early retirement.’"

The piece also notes an alternate theory put forth by Matthew Crosston, a professor of national security at Maryland's Bowie State University, who thinks Nuland had simply come to recognize that Ukraine was losing, and she didn't want to be tied to the failed policy. The piece goes on,

[B]oth McGovern and Crosston would agree that with Nuland as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (in this capacity she basically ran all of US foreign policy in Europe), ceasefire talks between Kiev and Moscow remained an extremely distant prospect or even an impossibility.

"One thing is certain: as long as Nuland remained in that chair, there was literally no chance such talk could even be theorized. Now it can," Crosston concluded.

But isn't it curious that Biden in his State of the Union address hinted at no such change? Here's what he said:

. . . Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons it needs to defend itself. That is all Ukraine is asking. They are not asking for American soldiers.

In fact, there are no American soldiers at war in Ukraine. And I am determined to keep it that way.

But now assistance for Ukraine is being blocked by those who want us to walk away from our leadership in the world.

What's actually happening is that some Republicans are beginning to ask if the continued commitment to Ukraine is cost-effective, especially if it's draining US supplies of ammunition and there's no exit plan, so out of general dissatisfaction with military policy vis-a-vis border policy, they've stalled Ukraine aid in the House. But indications seem to be that both the State Department and the intelligence establishment -- which is to say the deep state -- is also losing confidence in the Biden-Nuland policy.

Glenn Greenwald summarizes Nuland's career:

I spoke to @robbysoave and @briebriejoy today about the singular monstrousness of Victoria Nuland and her bipartisan, blood-stained, ghoulish career:https://t.co/pyHXEIn1iv

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 6, 2024

At about 5:30:

A consensus emerged among liberals then [2005] that neocons were the single worst faction inAmerican political life, Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz and all these people that brought in Guantanimo and torture and the invasion of Iraq and, you know, the attempt to move that to Iran, and she was not only counseling that, but she was also the UN Ambasdsador to NATO that led the way with Condoleeza Rice under Bush and trying to expand NATO, you know, up to the Russian border to include Ukraine, which was again probably the initial act that led us to where we are in Ukraine, so if I had said, you know, 15 or 10 years ago that Victoria Nuland who again is married into the Kagan family, probably the largest and most important dynastic neocon family in the United States, the brother, the father, her husband -- if you had said, Nikki, Victoria Nuland was this sort of symbol of American evil, every liberal would applaud you, because she was a well-known, recognized neocon. . . now, 15 years later, you won't see a single mainstream Democrat or liberal agreeing with you that Victoria Nuland is that, and that's because, like most neocons, she has aligned herself with the Democratic Party. . .

One question nobody has asked is why, once Nuland was well established in the post-2014 Ukraine political realignment, this was also the Biden father-son team's heyday in collecting payments from Ukraine players there. It's hard not to suspect there was, and continues to be, some level of coordination between Nuland's maneuvering and the Biden family interests, which may explain the current Biden as-long-as-it-takes policy.

But Biden seems actually less and less to be the one in charge, and Ukraine policy seems to be changing on its own without Biden's input.