I'm Starting To Wonder If Joe Has Thought This Up Himself

Sometime around February, it looks like the message started to go out to Democrats: we're backing off Israel. My reflexive attitude up to this week had been that this was the brainchild of the big guy's handlers, and they were just feeding him talking points. Now, I'm not so sure. What's changed my mind starts with a Fox News op-ed from Clinton pollster Mark Penn:

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., set off a firestorm of his own making last week as he decided to intervene in Israeli politics by telling Israel to abandon its leader right in the middle of sensitive negotiations with Hamas.

I don’t think Schumer will do that again. He heard from pretty much the world and it’s clear that Schumer is out of touch with Israel or he would have known that telling Israelis what to do is likely to produce the opposite result.

But OK, here's Schumer, apparently not a very observant Jew, but a Jew nonetheless, who represents New York Jews, an important constituency not just in terms of US politics, but in terms of world influence roughly equivalent to Israel itself, and he's throwing Israel under the bus. Mark Penn, who has worked for Israeli politicians as well as the Clintons and others, seems to have a pretty good grasp of how this is playing among Jews and mainstream Americans alike:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired right back, calling it inappropriate to tell an ally and a democracy when they should hold elections and who they should vote for, especially during a war. Israel is the only democracy within the region which otherwise features everything from monarchies, theocracies, Putin puppets, and terrorist regimes. In fact, 72% in the February Economist/YouGov poll see Israel as an ally and friend, while most Americans (57%) see "Palestine" as an enemy and unfriendly.

. . . By about 82 to 18 Americans support Israel over Hamas in this conflict and nearly two-thirds believe that any ceasefire should occur only after Hamas releases the hostages, according to the latest Harvard CAPS Harris poll.

. . . The danger in the politics of what Schumer and Biden are doing is that it emboldens Hamas and actually complicates arriving at any kind of peace. If Biden had remained steadfast in his support for Israel and put the blame on Hamas for creating a tunnel city intertwined with civilian life instead of singling out Netanyahu, Hamas would be fearing extinction and would be much more likely to send out the hostages.

So it isn't bringing about peace in the region, and Penn's argument is very similar to Alan Dershowitz's the other day, that after all, there was a cease fire in effect on October 6; going squishy simply encourages Hamas. But Biden isn't helping himself domestically, either. Penn continues,

The truth is that the electorate is about 2% Jewish and less than 2% Muslim and when asked to name the most important issue, 2% named the Israel-Hamas policy.

In Michigan, 100,000 votes for uncommitted is a small fraction of the 10 million people there and just how likely are they to help elect Donald Trump? And the more Biden has waffled on Israel, the lower his Israel approval ratings have sunk.

. . . Playing domestic politics with the issue will only backfire.

The fact that this idea seems to be so counterproductive in any important way is what suggests to me that Joe came up with it himself. He seems to have a visceral reaction to Netanyahu:

President Biden unexpectedly crossed himself Wednesday [September 20, 2023] during a one-on-one meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in Midtown.

The 80-year-old Roman Catholic president made the conspicuous hand gesture — touching his forehead, stomach and left and right breast area with his right hand — as the Jewish leader began speaking.

And it's hard to avoid thinking the White House has sent the message that senators must get with the program.

In an early general election-phase gift to Republicans, incumbent Democrat U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio was reportedly caught on video saying he "frankly" doesn't "trust" the government of Israel to abide by a ceasefire any more than he does the Hamas terrorists seeking to eliminate the Jewish state.

. . . After some pre-approved questions were answered by Brown and Booker, according to [TikToker] Jordan's retelling, he decided to ask one of his own as the event was ending. "Do you support a ceasefire in Gaza?” Jordan asked while recording with his phone.

"I would answer that question for weeks, 'no,' only because I don't trust that either Hamas or frankly Netanyahu would live up to that ceasefire," Brown said in his off-camera answer.

After capturing Brown's answer, Jordan said in a TikTok recapping the meeting that a staffer for the senator asked Jordan to delete the video and at one point asked for Jordan to "Give me your phone," two requests with which Jordan did not comply.

. . . the reactions from Brown's aides once they realized his comments had been recorded seem to speak for themselves.

Another indication that Joe is running the administration's Gaza policy comes from Netanyahu himself:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly suggested that the new US-built makeshift port off Gaza, which was installed to help ship aid to the besieged enclave, could be used to deport Palestinians.

. . . [S]peaking at a private meeting of the Knessett's Foreign Affairs and Security Committee, Netanyahu suggested the port could also facilitate the removal of Palestinians from Gaza.

Netanyahu said there was "no obstacle" to the Palestinians leaving the Gaza Strip apart from the unwillingness of other countries to accept them, according to a Kan News journalist.

Isn't this just the sort of idea Joe might come up with, importing a whole new set of refugees with a whole new bundle of angry demands on top of the millions already coming over US borders? If Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt don't want that sort of thing, then hey, we'll take them ourselves!

But the actual threat is more immediate:

The New York Sun reported Monday that Old Joe and his henchmen are “reportedly considering leaving Israel short of the armaments it needs to fight Hamas.” The veiled threat was there on that same day, during the callow but thoroughly indoctrinated National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s White House press briefing. A reporter reminded Sullivan that “the deadline for Israel to comply with the National Security Memorandum 20 is coming up on Sunday,” and asked him: “Has Israel responded in writing?”

National Security Memorandum 20 . . . . is only a few weeks old, dating from Feb. 8. It seeks, among other things, to “prevent arms transfers that risk facilitating or otherwise contributing to violations of human rights or international humanitarian law.”

. . . [Y]ou will be absolutely unshocked to learn that Old Joe’s new rule is being applied selectively. The Sun notes that “In reality, arms are sold to foes and allies alike in all five continents, with little notice of rights violations. Mr. Biden urged Congress last month to approve the sale of F-16s to Turkey, even as it massacres Kurds in Iraq and Syria.” No one asked Jake Sullivan at Monday’s press briefing if arms sales to Turkey would be cut off.

Alan Dershnowitz, in the YouTube I linked Wednesday, said at 21:00

Everybody has their red line. I'll tell you what my red line is. If you stop supplying ammunition and arms to Israel and deny them the right to defend themselves, you have crossed my red line. I hope that doesn't happen. I now have a more open mind than I ever thought I would have about whom I will vote for in this election. The Democratic Party cannot take me, the people who listen to me, the people who vote the way I do, they can't take us for granted, sorry.

This particular issue is causing me to move away from the idea that Joe is somehow less than fully functional, at least in certain areas. I really think he's capable of making at least some decisions -- they're just bad ones. If he's losing Dershowitz, which he clearly seems to be in the process of doing, he has a problem of political judgment that goes beyond some potential issue of medical diagnosis.

Joe's Schedule

Over the past couple of weeks, I thought I was beginning to see a pattarn of increased activity from the big guy, if only due to the increased coverage of his fumbles and gaffes on the road. It turns out I was right, I checked his daily public schedule. Yesterday and today, he's in Texas. Tuesday,, he was in Arizona. On Saturday, he gave the Gridiron Club address; on Sunday, he had St Patrick's Day activities.

Last week, he was in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and Michigan. There's been a flurry of activity ever since the State of the Union, but before that, it was business as usual, long weekends at Camp David or in Wilmington. although there were similar campaign trips in February. This is in major contrast to his schedule last year; via the Washington Times,

Leisure time has become a factor in the White House — and the Republican Party is tracking the trajectory of it while providing the damning numbers as well.

“President Biden requires a lot of vacation. In 2023, Biden spent 142 days — 38.9% of the year — on vacation. That includes at least 30 trips to Delaware, 10 trips to Camp David, portions of two visits to the U.S. Virgin Islands, and vacations in Nantucket and Lake Tahoe,” said Jake Schneider, director of rapid response for the Republican National Committee.

“After nearly three years in office, Biden remains well on track to outpace each of his modern-day predecessors in leisure,” he said in a written statement shared with Inside the Beltway.

It's become clear that the big guy is under pressure to look like he wants to keep his job. His public activities over the past couple of months, though, are campaign appearances, aimed at November, which is still eight months away, and this current level of appearances is quite a bit more than he's been used to. Beyond that, they aren't having the intended effect. In the Washingtonm Examiner, Democrat pollster John Zogby observed,

The newly energized president hit the road with a message of real projects for communities, while Vice President Kamala Harris made an historic first visit to an abortion clinic, emphasizing a key issue for Democrats in the fall.

But Biden’s approval rating barely moved. He is still at 40% approval. The national polls continue to show a close race between him and former President Donald Trump, whether in a two-way or five-way race. And, only one in four feel that the country is headed in the right direction. I could possibly copy this report card so I can paste it another time when I need to.

The problem continues to be what Nate Silver has been pointing out, increased public appearances mean increased opportunies to wander around stages, utter gaffes and malapropisms, lose his temper, and chat up pre-teen girls. So far, it's the same problem Hillary Clinton had, the more people saw of her, the less they found to like. This is an important contrast to the conventional wisdom on Biden's lawfare campaign against Trump, for instance from Byron York:

So far, the lawfare directed at Trump — two federal indictments from a special counsel appointed by the Biden Justice Department, plus two local indictments from elected Democratic prosecutors, plus a financial lawsuit from another elected Democratic prosecutor and a sex-and-defamation lawsuit financed by a Democratic megadonor — has backfired at the polls. It helped boost Trump to a runaway victory in the Republican primaries, and so far, it hasn’t hurt him in general election matchup polls against Biden.

. . . But the lawfare campaign is already having another effect on Trump. It has put the former president under severe financial stress in two ways. The first is the tens of millions of dollars in legal fees Trump has already spent defending himself against the onslaught of criminal charges and lawsuits. The other is the crippling financial penalty, $454 million, in the lawsuit brought by the elected Democratic attorney general of New York, Letitia James.

The difference is that, even if James seizes Trump Tower, the Donald still lives at Mar-a-Lago, and he's still ahead in the polls. He's still got a constantly mutating version of the Chicago Seven defense, for which Alan Dershowitz, who helped originate it in the 1960's, gives Trump his grudging admiration. Instead of a single Judge Julius Hoffman, Trump has an expanding range of foils, not just Judge Engoron, but now, in addition to Letitia James, he's got Fani Willis, Nathan Wade, Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, and no doubt more. It's not just publicity, it's comic book villain-vs-superhero material. (Isn't there an element of Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne in Trump's image?)

This is what Joe, basically an over-the-hill nebbishy mediocrity, has working against him, he's a bore, but even more so is the calendar. He's having to conduct a national campaign, which normally lasts from September to November, that's already begun in early March. I don't think he can sustain it.

Alan Dershowitz On Biden's Two-State Solution

He begins his discussion above:

The war in Gaza is becoming a major issue in the American political campaign. . . . What we're seeing is a very, very nasty debate over support for Israel, with the hard left of the Democratic Party saying to President Biden that they're not going to vote for him if he continues to support Israel, and there's no way, even if Biden were to abandon Israel, there's no way he would ever give the hard left enough. They don't want a cease fire, they want the end of Israel. . . . They don't want a two-state solution. The problem is that Biden has a two-state solution. His two states, however, are Michigan and Minnesota. . . . He's particularly focused on Michigan, because Michigan, has a population of several hundred thousand Muslims and Arabs, who will never be satisfied with a president who supports Israel in any way, and the ceasefire is just a pretext.

This is a continuation of the Democrat dilemma since the 1960s: as their middle American appeal has gradually fallen away, by the Pelosi-Biden era, they've had to appease their hard left fringe to maintain a steadily shrinking majority. But caving on hard left issues from unlimited abortion to same-sex marriage to unisex restrooms and now to Israel has driven away large swaths of their traditional base, first Catholics and now, apparently, Jews as well.

On one hand, it's understandable that Biden would cave on Israel -- he's tired, he's focused on re-election, and he seems to see Netanyahu as a lesser Satan nearly as bad as the Great Satan Trump. But this is pushing him into foreign policy, his weakest area. As the Bush-Obama fusion defense secretary Robert Gates put it, "I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” It also seems as though Senate Majority Leader Schumer has now bought into the Pelosi-Biden cave:

“The world has changed — radically — since [October 7], and the Israeli people are being stifled right now by a governing vision that is stuck in the past,” Schumer said in what was described as a major speech.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has “lost his way,” Schumer added, “by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel.”

Schumer went on to accuse Netanyahu of aligning with “far-right extremists” who are “pushing support for Israel worldwide to historic lows.”

The State Department has gone so far as to nuance the administration's stated position on "defeating" Hamas:

State Department Deputy Spokesman Vedant Patel told reporters in a briefing on Tuesday that the U.S. shares the goal of “degrading” Hamas — avoiding the use of the word “defeating,” in an apparent shift of U.S. policy on the Gaza war.

On Monday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters that President Joe Biden shared Israel’s goal of “defeating” Hamas, but believed it was not necessary for Israel to attack Hamas in the last stronghold of Rafah to do so.

On Tuesday, as Breitbart News reported, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated his view that while he was happy to talk to the Biden Administration about it, there was no way to defeat Hamas without entering Rafah.

. . . Later, on Tuesday, Patel was asked to respond to Netanyahu’s statement. Patel said that the Biden Administration was looking forward to discussions with Israeli officials in Washington about “alternative approaches” to “target key elements of Hamas, help secure the Egypt-Gaza border, and do so without a major ground operation in Rafah.”

Patel then referred to “our shared goal of degrading Hamas,” which is significantly different from “defeating” Hamas.

Schumer himself seems to recognize where his stance on Israel puts him with his Jewish constituents and Jews nationally:

Mr. Schumer said he spent hours after his speech talking with conservative Jewish constituencies whose members were enraged. On Tuesday, he addressed a broad spectrum of Jewish American leaders, facilitated by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, by Zoom. In a statement after the meeting, the group said “our membership continue to have deep reservations about Senator Schumer’s speech.”

In the interview, Mr. Schumer was characteristically more eager to recount the kudos he received. “Did you see Nancy today?” he said of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat, who in a CNN appearance on Sunday called his speech an “act of courage.” He directed an aide to share a letter he received from Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli prime minister, that called him “honest and ready to step forward and say what needs to be said.”

Pelosi, of course, isn't Jewish; she's a nominal Catholic who has nevertheless been denied communion in her home diocese. It appears that Schumer is now simply part of the Democrat movement away from traditional religious affiliation, to the point that even liberal Jews are beginning to have second thoughts about the Democrat party.

At about 12:00 above, Dershowitz says,

If Hamas knew that Israel had the unequivocal support of the United States, and it would never back down, and it would always veto resolutions at the Security Council against Israel, Hamas would not continue fighting. They would give back the hostages, call for a cease fire, the war would be over. So yes, I am pointing a finger of Blame at President Biden for not doing what he should have done, which could have ended the war more quickly, it could have saved more lives. Hectoring Israel doesn't save lives. Threatening Israel doesn't save lives.

The problem is that Biden is tired, and whatever it may specifically be, something ails him, he's sick, and he's being pushed into an area where he's never had strengths, foreign policy. He's the creature of his handlers, who right now are sending him out on grueling campaign trips that are doing nothing to help him in the polls, apparently in hopes of keeping their jobs just a little longer, and which he almost certainly can't maintain. But whatever his fate between now and November, handlers of one sort or another will be in charge, and there's not much anyone can do before then.

The Cheneys

I'm a little puzzled at Dick and Liz Cheney. The Buish dynasty's time has come and gone, the Bush family itself seems to have decided to keep quiet, but the Cheneys are raging on. Last week, "Sleazy" Liz Cheney Loses It After Bombshell Report Claims She "Suppressed Exonerating Evidence" With J6 Committee, The story refers to a Mollie Hemingway piece in The Federalist that claims she helped the January 6 committee suppress exculpatory evidence for Trump:

Cheney and her committee falsely claimed they had “no evidence” to support Trump officials’ claims the White House had communicated its desire for 10,000 National Guard troops. In fact, an early transcribed interview conducted by the committee included precisely that evidence from a key source. The interview, which Cheney attended and personally participated in, was suppressed from public release until now.

Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato’s first transcribed interview with the committee was conducted on January 28, 2022. In it, he told Cheney and her investigators that he overheard White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows push Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to request as many National Guard troops as she needed to protect the city.

. . . Not only did the committee not accurately characterize the interview, they suppressed the transcript from public review.

According to Wikipedia,

She represented Wyoming's at-large congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2017 to 2023, and served as chair of the House Republican Conference—the third-highest position in the House Republican leadership—from 2019 to 2021. Cheney is known for her vocal opposition to former President Donald Trump.

. . . She was once considered one of the leaders of the Republican Party's neoconservative wing, and was critical of the foreign policy of the Donald Trump administration while consistently voting in favor of Trump's overall agenda.

However,

Because of her stance on the Capitol riot, her impeachment vote, and her opposition to Trump's false stolen-election narrative, pro-Trump Freedom Caucus members of the House Republican Conference twice attempted to remove her from party leadership. With House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy supporting her removal, Cheney was removed from her position in May 2021.In July 2021, Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed Cheney to the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack. Two months later, she was made vice chair of the committee. As a consequence of her service on the Select Committee, Cheney's membership in the Wyoming Republican Party was revoked in November 2021. She was censured by the Republican National Committee (RNC) in February 2022.

On August 16, 2022, Cheney lost renomination in Wyoming's Republican primary to Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman in a landslide, garnering just 28.9% of the vote.

Among other things, this suggests that Trump's influence in the Republican Party even while out of office has been underrated. And generally, Liz Cheney's star has waxed and waned with the influence of the Bushes and her father; she carried little weight on her own. Wikipedia:

Cheney worked for the State Department for five years and the United States Agency for International Development between 1989 and 1993. After 1993, she took a job at Armitage Associates LLP, the consulting firm founded by Richard Armitage, then a former Defense Department official and later the Deputy Secretary of State.

. . . In 2002, Cheney was appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, a preexisting vacant post with an "economic portfolio", a mandate to promote investment in the region.

. . . After two years, Cheney left her State Department post in 2003 to work for the Bush–Cheney 2004 reelection campaign. She participated in the campaign's "W Stands for Women" initiative to target female voters.

. . . On February 14, 2005, she returned to the U.S. State Department and was appointed principal deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs and coordinator for broader Middle East and North Africa initiatives.

She lasted another year at the State Department until Condoleeza Rice, the Secretary at the time, dissolved her area of responsibility in response to adverse press reports. Her father as vice president seems to have been unable to secure other work for her in the State Department, and it's hard to avoid thinking the jobs she held there were effectively sinecures.

In June 2007 Cheney signed on as one of three national co-chairs of Fred Thompson's 2008 presidential campaign. . . . After Thompson dropped out of the race, Cheney joined Mitt Romney's presidential campaign as a senior foreign policy advisor.

After that, she seems to have had a series of failed career attempts, ranging from founding a short-lived advocacy group with William Kristol and Deborah Burlingame, to guest-hosting on Fox News, to a failed primary bid for the Republican-held Senate seat in Wyoming. Only in 2016 did she succeed in running for a House seat, but by 2021, she'd managed to ruin her career prospects as a Republican. By May of that year, it emerged

Rep. Liz Cheney secretly masterminded an extraordinary Washington Post op-ed authored by top military leaders, just three days before the Capitol riot, it has been claimed.

The letter published in the Washington Post contained a stark warning from 10 Defense Secretaries from both parties.

. . . The letter from the Defense Secretaries stated that the time for questioning election results 'has passed' and said involving the military in electoral disputes would take the nation into 'unlawful and unconstitutional territory.'

It was a key break as members of the military, lawmakers, and retired statesmen issued public statements in an effort to promote a transition in power despite Trump's refusal to concede the election.

'She was the one who generated it, because she was so worried about what Trump might do,' Eric Edelman, a friend of Cheney's and career diplomat who served as national security advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney, told the New Yorker. 'It speaks to the degree that she was concerned about the threat to our democracy that Trump represented.'

But it's hard to avoid she was also casting about for a new career option, given Trump's electoral loss, her limited ability to work with other Republicans in the House, and her father's diminishing influence in the Republican Party.

Meanwhile, Trump's prospects continue to improve -- in part, that's because he can use figures like Liz Cheney as foils.

Why The Continued Silence?

While the Senate bill providing roughly $60 billion in continued Ukraine aid remains stalled in the House, the overall picture for Ukraine continues to deteriorate.

The French paper Marianne has published excerpts by secret military documents that are causing an uproar in Europe and the world, for dealing with the situation on the ground in Ukraine without the disguise of propaganda that pervades almost all reports on the subject.

. . . The greatest takeaway from the documents is that ‘a Ukrainian military victory now seems impossible’. The Russian forces are waging ‘a slow and long, high-intensity war based on the continued attrition of the Ukrainian army’.

The defense reports harshly criticize the ‘disastrous’ planning done by western military and Ukraine:

“‘The planners believed that as soon as the first Russian lines of defense were crossed, the entire front would collapse […] These fundamental preliminary phases were carried out without taking into account the moral strength of the enemy on the defensive’.

"[…] These Ukrainian ‘Year II soldiers’ were launched to attack ‘a Russian fortification line which proved to be impregnable’. Without any air support, with Western equipment that is disparate and less efficient than the old Soviet equipment (‘obsolete, easy to maintain, and capable of being used in degraded mode’), the Ukrainian troops had no hope of breaking through. Let us add ‘Russian arch-domination in the field of electronic jamming penalizing, on the Ukrainian side, the use of drones and command systems’.”

In other news,

Russian President Vladimir Putin won a landslide reelection victory on Sunday, taking 87% of the vote after a three-day election derided by government critics and the West as neither free nor fair.

Going into the vote, the Kremlin was believed to seek not merely victory but a historic turnout: one that showed the country more united than ever behind their leader, more than two years into the full scale invasion of Ukraine.

Russia's Central Elections Commission later issued data showing 77% of the country's eligible 114 million voters had cast ballots — a new post-Soviet record.

Wait a moment. Wasn't Putin not long for this world? As of June 2022,

The US intelligence community believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s health is suffering and that he’s being treated for cancer, according to a new report.

The assessment, attributed by Newsweek to high-ranking officials at three separate intelligence agencies, comes after months of speculation that the Russian strongman is suffering from terminal ailments.

“Putin is definitely sick,” an official from the office of the Director of National Intelligence told the outlet, while noting, “whether he’s going to die soon is mere speculation.”

Two other officials — one from the Defense Intelligence Agency and one retired Air Force officer — also claimed to have access to a comprehensive intelligence assessment of Putin’s health, and said the outlook for the Russian leader is bleak, according to the report.

I assume these are among the 51 intellgence officials who signed the letter saying Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation. Well, but wasn't Putin irreparably damaged by Prigozhin's coup last June?

With a so-called 24-hour coup by Russia’s mercenary boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, ending in an anticlimactic pullback, Russian President Vladimir Putin was able to avoid a dramatic and bloody standoff with his one-time ally.

Nonetheless, the fact that the outspoken Prigozhin could even mount an armed mutiny with his private military company, the Wagner Group, with little resistance and an apparently muted response is widely seen as a deep political blow for Putin and his regime.

“Prigozhin’s armed rebellion indicates a political crisis within Russia and shatters the myth of Russia’s invincibility and overwhelming power,” Hanna Liubakova, a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, and a journalist and researcher from Belarus, said in a note Sunday.

Except,

A top confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin approved the plan to kill Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the security council for Russia, set in motion the operation to take out Prigozhin, according to a former Russian intelligence officer, per the Journal. The plans were later seen by Putin, who didn’t push back against them, Western intelligence agencies told the outlet.

Prigozhin died in a plane crash in August only a few months after he and his mercenary group launched a short-lived rebellion with a goal of ousting Russia’s defense minister.

We must infer that Putin never lost the support of the organs of state security (otherwise his own plane would have crashed, right?), which operated with accustomed efficiency, and less than a year later, those organs reestablished him in power with near-Stalin era levels of popular support. Recent photos show Putin in apparent perfect health.

As of May 2023, this was the US scenario for that year's projected Ukraine counteroffensive, via the Atlantic Council:

If a thrust to sever Russia’s land bridge proved successful, two options could then be considered. One would be to wheel westward and isolate Russian troops in the Kherson region. Alternatively, Ukrainian forces could turn to the east and attempt to recover Mariupol, which has been occupied by Russia since May 2022.

In either case, seizing Melitopol would cause a crisis among Russian political and military leaders, as Russian forces in the south and east would be cut off from each other, rendering a coherent defense at the operational level impossible. This would dramatically undermine Russian morale and encourage further international support for Ukraine.

If mounted in June, Ukraine’s counteroffensive could potentially be concluded by summer’s end, leaving the Crimean Bridge as the only remaining option for ground resupply of Russian forces in Crimea. Campaign success, however, would bring Ukrainian long-range missiles within range of the bridge, which would also be vulnerable to drone attacks.

Why have these projections, advanced with the prestige of the US deep state, proven so incorrect? Why is the administration so far doing nothing to telegraph necessary changes in policy and just continuing with "as long as it takes"? So far, all we've had has been Tori Nuland announcing her retirement. How many other intelligence and foreign policy chiefs should be resigning in disgrace?

It's been almost 50 years since the Church Committee. We badly need a new one. Short of that, Trump's outright firing of James Comey should be a precedent for much more decisive action -- change their office locks overnight, revoke their clearances, and publicly fire them the next day.

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.