David Gelernter On Israel And The US

I mentioned David Gelernter, a Yale professor of computer science, Orthodox Jew, and Republican yesterday as someone I've followed in the past for his views on America and Israel. So far, I haven't found much from him on the current situation, but he wrote a 2006 essay that bears on the problem, Why do so many American Jews hate the president who stands by Israel? Here's his key point:

For those who continue to insist on voting Democratic, the future is written in a recent column by Richard Cohen--who explains that the "greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake." Who advises Israel to "hunker down," while "waiting (and hoping) that history will get distracted and move on to something else." It is hard to understand why Israel is a mistake if Switzerland isn't--or the United States, or any other nation or (for that matter) human being. Cohen himself is occupying space right now that someone else could be using, and maybe wants to. The earth's surface did not expand to make room for him. Births have outstripped deaths on this planet for many generations. But we are not in the habit of demanding that human beings justify their existence or be mowed down, and the idea is equally bad in the case of nations.

Life is valuable in itself--human life or the life of nations; one of the main differences being that it is so much harder to create a nation. That the Israelis have done so--have created in fact a free nation and a hugely productive one that treats all its citizens humanely and is a world center of science, medicine, scholarship, and argument (all flavors)--is one of the stunning facts of modern history.

And, of course, the origins of no two nations more resemble each other than Israel's and America's, both created by Europeans clutching Bibles, searching for freedom, prepared to fight for a room of their own. Both populated by human beings, a species not noted for perfection. Yet both strongholds of democracy, freedom, and tolerance nonetheless. Anyone who has decided that Israel is a mistake is likely to come around to the same view of the United States.

So we're back to the question I raised yesterday -- why do the people who call for "death to Israel" see such internal logic in also calling for "death to America"? I keep coming back to the question of natural law. The US Declaration of Independence refers to "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" -- Thomas Jefferson, the author, was a freethinker himself and surrounded by like-minded Freemasons and deists, but he still clearly believed in a natural law. He also refers to "self-evident" truths. Abraham Lincoln referred to the Declaration as “a rebuke and a stumbling-block to tyranny and oppression,” with the strong implication that this rebuke comes from natural law itself.

Gelernter accuses US Jews of acting against their own interests, at least as of his 2006 article, which is remarkably prophetic:

Most Democratic politicians speak up for Israel. But grassroots Democrats are increasingly dangerous to the Jewish state (not to mention the American state). Still, American Jews vote for (and bankroll!) Democrats. And each time they repeat this performance, the risk is greater.

. . . American Jews (especially the intellectual leadership) have a tragic history of acting against their own professed interests. In the years before Pearl Harbor, U.S. intellectuals on the whole (especially New York intellectuals) vehemently opposed American entry alongside Britain into the war against Nazi Germany. Of course many New York intellectuals were not Jews, and many American Jews didn't care for New York intellectuals. But journals like Partisan Review helped shape the cultural climate--and were fiercely antiwar until Pearl Harbor--and were shaped, themselves, by Jewish intellectuals. Leading Jewish intellectuals signed a Partisan Review statement explaining that "Our entry into the war, under the slogan of 'Stop Hitler!' would actually result in the immediate introduction of totalitarianism over here. . . . The American masses can best help [the German people] by fighting at home to keep their own liberties."

He mentions Pearl Harbor several times as a key turning point, and I think that's significant, because Pearl Harbor is the main justification for US involvement in World War II, which had several implications. Had it not taken place, the eventual Western reponse to the Holocaust, as well as the circumstances of Israel's creation, would have been different. The Allied effort in World War II appears, with some exceptions if one considers the fire bomb raids on German cities or the atomic bomb on Japan, to have been consistent with just war doctrine as enumerated in Paragraph 2309 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which amounts to yet another attempt to make natural law concrete.

So we're effectively back to the Old Testament, the dialectic by which natural law was in large measure expressed and developed in Western Civilization, and the particular effort to realize an understanding of natural law in the founding and operation of a country. Gelernter's main conmplaint about Jewish Democrats is that they're dangerously inconsistent in their support for natural law, which is to say Jewish, principles.

The question of Israeli "atrocities" in Gaza in the current conflict is something I haven't seen Gelernter address yet, if indeed he ever will. Dershowitz makes the frequent point that the Israeli military does far more than any other country to avoid civilian casualties. But we still have the uncomfortable issue that God's intent for ancient Israel was that they occupy a particular territory and subdue the aboriginal inhabitants (insofar as any particular group is aboriginal anywhere).

This is a messy question. The Catholic philosopher Edward Feser, who argues that there is scriptural authority for the death penalty, also argues that use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese was an atrocity, when God Himself delivered nuclear-level destruction against Sodom and Gomorrah, and Joshua was clearly executing the divine will in the siege of Jericho, when, "Following God's law, the Israelites killed every man and woman of every age, as well as the oxen, sheep, and donkeys."

About all we can say is that these things are working themselves out day by day.

Why Death To America?

From the New York Post:

Anti-Israel activists were heard chanting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” at a rally in a Michigan city recently dubbed the “jihad capital” of the US.

The sick chants erupted at a rally Friday in Dearborn marking Al Quds Day, in which Muslims around the world denounce Israel, according to a video posted by the Middle East Media Research Institute.

They came after Dearborn activist Tarek Bazzi ripped the US for supporting Israel — and told the crowd that “the chant ‘Death to Israel’ has become the most logical chant across the world today.

My reaction to this is just a follow-on to the issue that came up in Sunday's post -- the objective of the current wave of anti-Semitism isn't just to wipe out Israel, it's to "globalize the intifada", in other words, to wipe out all Jews. Why does this project seem to resonate so widely? After all, the speaker in Dearborn quoted by the post claims “the chant ‘Death to Israel’ has become the most logical chant across the world today".

Well, I don't find any sort of syllogistic logic in this chant, to start with, but I'll grant that it seems to have found some sort of appeal, and that goes beyond early 20th century theories of eugenics that the Nazis used to justify their own anti-Semitism. That alone says anti-Semitism has roots beyond what post-Holocaust conventional wisdom assigns. So the question returns, why the Jews, and why, by extension, the US, where Jews account for just 2.4% of the population?

I think the answer lies in another issue I raised in Sunday's post, the Old Testament, which has posed a problem even to Christians. For instance, the Marcion heresy was one of the first problems in the early Church:

Study of the Hebrew Bible, along with received writings circulating in the nascent Church, led Marcion to conclude that many of the teachings of Jesus were incompatible with the actions of Yahweh, characterized as the belligerent god of the Hebrew Bible. Marcion responded by developing a ditheistic system of belief around the year 144. This notion of two gods—a higher transcendent one and a lower world-creator and ruler—allowed Marcion to reconcile his perceived contradictions between Christian Covenant theology and the gospel proclaimed by the New Testament.

In contrast to other leaders of the nascent Christian Church, however, Marcion declared that Christianity was in complete discontinuity with Judaism and entirely opposed to the scriptures of Judaism. Marcion did not claim that these were false. Instead, he asserted that they were entirely true, but were to be read in an absolutely literalistic manner, one which led him to develop an understanding that Yahweh was not the same God spoken of by Jesus.

This in turn is based on the uncomfortably belligerent dialectic through which God gradually reveals himself in the Old Testament, which frequently involves wiping out the Philistines or other indigenous inhabitants of the Promised Land. We can interpret this metaphorically, but we still have to recognize the literal account for what it is and deal with it.

The uncomfortable truth is that this is the dialectic through which scripture reveals natural law, which is generally understood to have its most complete expression in the Ten Commandments. The history of the Old Testament Jewish state, warts and all, turns out especially to be a dialectic development of the first two commandments in particular, You shall have no other gods before Me, and You shall not make idols. In fact, though, the detailed individual failures of figures like Samson, Eli, David, Solomon, and many others illustrate how the other eight commandments are derived from the first two.

So in brief, the problem of the Old Testament is the whole uncomfortable problem of natural law, as well as the other tricky problems of God's nature illustrated in stories like Job. But St John Henry Newman adds another, derivative problem to natural law: consicience is an indisputable part of human nature, but it was created by God to operate on the principles of natural law. If there's natural law, it's also enforced in part by conscience and the principle of justice.

So to certain elements, Nazis, Communists, other totalitarians, Islamists, and so forth, the main obstacle to their programs is natural law and the derivative issues of conscience and justice. If you can get rid of those, you've got much more of a green light. A good program to do this is to get rid of the Old Testament, which isn't too far from Marcion's insight into the problem it raises. But the only good way way to do this is to get rid of the Jews. If you can do that, the Old Testament is just a recondite literary artifact of no greater import than, say, the Gilgamesh epic.

But then, why do we also need to chant Death to America? Isn't it enough just to wipe out the Jews, including the 30 or 40 million in the US? I think this is a more complex problem, and Bp Robert Barron has referred to it when he quotes Lincoln saying Americans are "God's almost chosen people". The highly underrated Catholic convert and former Episcopalian bishop Frederick Kinsman gets into a similar problem in his 1924 book Americanism and Catholicsm, which can be found on line here.

I'm still working on this problem myself, but it goes in part to the arguments of Jews like Alan Dershowitz and David Gelernter that the American project is deeply related to the Zionist project. At least for now, I'm highly uncomfortable with the idea that it's not, and the idea that anti-Semites and anti-Zionists seem to sense the same relationship reinforces my instinct.

Is Dr Jill Behind It All?

One question keeps pestering me. We have the most famous assessment of Joe's capabilities from Barack Obama -- "Don't underestimate Joe's ability to [mess] things up" -- but this piece from 2020 on the eve of Biden's nomination goes farther:

Interviews with dozens of senior officials of the Obama-Biden administration painted a picture of eight years during which the president and vice president enjoyed a genuinely close personal relationship, built particularly around devotion to family, while at the same time many senior aides, sometimes tacitly encouraged by the president’s behavior, dismissed Biden as eccentric and a practitioner of an old, outmoded style of politics.

“You could certainly see technocratic eye-rolling at times,” said Jen Psaki, the former White House communications director. Young White House aides frequently mocked Biden’s gaffes and lack of discipline in comparison to the almost clerical Obama. They would chortle at how Biden, like an elderly uncle at Thanksgiving, would launch into extended monologues that everyone had heard before.

Former administration officials treated Biden dismissively in their memoirs.

The link cites characterizations from Ben Rhodes and James Comey, but it doesn't mention the better-known observation from Robert Gates, "I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

So far, we're seeing the consequences of those character traits, which appear to have been well known to many people in the administration at the time he was vice president. Whether his current condition represents a deterioration since then is an intriguing question. But I find recent vignettes involving his wife, Dr Jill, unsettling. The first is this one:

“No, he’s not losing in all the battleground states,” she told “CBS Mornings” [on April 3] when asked about a poll showing Joe losing to Donald Trump in six of seven battleground states and tied in Wisconsin. “He’s coming up even or doing better … It’s obvious that Joe will win this election.”

But this echoes Joe's own remarks on the polls since last year:

Three times now in a little over a month, Biden has dismissed polls that show him trailing Trump or other potential GOP rivals and insisted that reporters aren’t getting the full picture.

On Sunday [December 17]as he was leaving his campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Del., Biden responded to a shouted question from a reporter about why he’s losing to Trump in the polls.

“You’re reading the wrong polls,” Biden said.

. . . At a Chicago fundraiser on Nov. 9, Biden told donors that while “the press has been talking about two polls ... there are 10 other polls we’re winning,” according to a pool report.

. . . Earlier that same day, Biden told reporters at Maryland’s Joint Base Andrews that reporters “don’t read the polls.”

“Ten polls. Eight of them I’m beating him in those states. Eight of them. You guys only do two, CNN and New York Times,” Biden said.

So who is telling Joe this stuff? It's hard to eliminate Dr Jill as a suspect. But more recently, we have indications that she's driving Israel-Hamas policy:

And now we hear that the first lady has been pressuring her husband on Israel’s war on Hamas with these words: “Stop it. Stop it now, Joe.”

At a Ramadan event at the White House last week, Joe Biden reportedly told attendees about Jill’s sophisticated geopolitical advice.

The New York Times report was titled “Jill Biden Privately Urges an End to Conflict in Gaza.” Lo and behold, over the weekend Israel withdrew all its ground troops from southern Gaza, a move characterized by the White House as a “rest and refit” for the troops.

Commentators have been puzzling over the question of who pulls Joe's strings -- their surmise falls most frequently on Barack Obama, but we simply have too much evidence that Obama, who knew Joe pretty well, never thought much of him, and neither did people in Obama's inner circle. I think they had a pretty clear idea that if you pulled a string that they thought would control his hand, it would instead throw his knee out of joint or something, As a puppet, he's defective merchandise.

So who's the real puppeteer, and to what end? The same link raises one possibility:

A lot of women look at Jill and wonder how she can allow her husband to keep bumbling around and falling over on camera.

A Nancy Reagan would have been by his side like a limpet, ensuring his dignity was preserved, or at least insisting that staffers take up the slack, instead of leaving the leader of the free world looking like an escapee from a geriatric care facility.

Caught on the tarmac once helping him get into a jacket when he seemed to have forgotten what armholes are, Jill looked more exasperated than solicitous. It is a difficult situation, for sure, but the wise counsel she should have given Joe was not to run for a second term.

Instead she continues to enable his behavior and revel in the perks, jetting around the world solo on Air Force One to a wedding in Jordan or to meet the president of Namibia.

It cites some of Hunter's estimates -- again, he must know his stepmother about as well as anyone:

He once called her “a f–king moron” in a series of texts he sent his uncle Jim.

Hunter claimed he told Jill: “The drunkest I’ve ever been is still smarter than you could ever even comprehend and you’re a shut [sic] grammar teacher that wouldn’t survive one class in a ivy graduate program.”

Elsewhere,

Hunter Biden lashed out at first lady Jill Biden in a 2018 text message to his romantic partner and late brother’s widow, calling her a “selfish silly entitled c[***].”

“Go f**k yourself,” Hunter said in mockery of Dr. Jill Biden’s acclaimed teaching prowess, the Sun reported Friday from the “laptop from hell.

I continue to think theories of Biden's mental decline neglect evidence that he's never been especially capable, to the extent that as we've seen, he'll sell himself out for relatively trivial amounts -- and beyond that, for much of his adult life, he's allowed himself to be manipulated by his second wife, who herself isn't especially bright. The big question for me is when, if ever, we'll hear from others with insight into the personal dynamics involved.

Caution: May Lead To Unpredictable Results

John Hinderaker, whom I normally take as seriously as I take any other Ivy League Republican, actually raised an important point yesterday. First, he cited the Washington Free Beacon:

A Rutgers University town hall descended into anarchy Thursday evening as anti-Israel students chanted demands to "globalize the intifada," hurled anti-Semitic insults at Jewish students, and forced the school's president to end the event early[.]

Hinderaker then observes,

“Globalize the intifada” means that no Jew should ever be able to live in safety, anywhere in the world.

He cites shouts of "Go back home!" elsewhere in the story and asks,

“Go back home”? Where might that be? Not Israel, evidently. Maybe, like the former “dean of the White House press corps,” Helen Thomas, they want Jews to go “back” to Germany and Poland. But they don’t want Jews here in the U.S., or in Israel.

What strikes me in the current outbreak is that since the Holocaust, anti-Semitism has been characterized as something that developed from medieval Christianity, or perhaps from European occultism or neo-paganism, which all led to the Nazis. This is the subtext of Raiders of the Lost Ark, for instance. But the whole idea of the chant "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free" derives from a much more basic conflict, the original one between the Jews and the Canaanites or Philistines. This is something Hinderaker senses; these demonstrators aren't brown shirts, they're something much older. (Dershowitz even makes this mistake in calling them brown shirts. Nazis don't explain it.)

This year I've been following Ascension's Bible in a Year podcast -- I tried it when it came out two years ago, but at the time, I faltered as it plodded through Numbers and Leviticus (I discovered in Leviticus that boilerplate is nothing new). After I completed their Catechism in a Year program last year, I decided to give Bible in a Year another try, and this year, it's caught on with me.

At the end of each day's readings, the host, Fr Mike Schmitz, gives remarks that put the readings in context. As they move through Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, and 1 Samuel, commentators like Jeff Cavins, Fr Schmitz, and Bp Barron make the point that God is gradually making Himself known to the Jews in the specific historical dialectic of the conquest of the Promised Land. Not only are the Jews taking geographical territory, but there are specific requirements that they have nothing to do with the pagan beliefs of the original inhabitants.

A consistent theme is that whenever the Jews wander away from God's clear directive -- for instance, when they vacillate over the whole question of whether to go through with the conquest at all, or decide worshiping the pagan idols is more or less OK -- things work out badly for them. Then one or another figure herds them into line, and things work out a lot better, until they wander away again. But this always takes place in the specific context of the temptation represented by the Philistine inhabitants.

This isn't just an isolated historical artifact. Pope Pius XI made this point on September 6, 1938:

At the most solemn moment of the Mass we recite the prayer which contains the expression "sacrifice of Abel, sacrifice of Abraham, sacrifice of Melchisedek" in three strokes, three times, three steps, the entire religious history of mankind—a magnificent passage. Every time we read it we are seized by an irresistible emotion. The sacrifice of our patriarch Abraham. Note that Abraham is called our patriarch, our ancestor. Antisemitism is incompatible with the thought and the sublime reality expressed in this text. It is alien to us, a movement in which we Christians can have no part. The promise was made to Abraham and to his descendants. It is realized in Christ, and through Christ in us who are members of his mystical body. Through Christ and in Christ we are the spiritual descendants of Abraham. No, it is not possible for Christians to take part in antisemitism. We acknowledge for all the right to defend themselves, to adopt measures of protection against what threatens their legitimate interests. But antisemitism is inadmissible. Spiritually, we are Semites.

I'm profoundly uncomfortable with an agenda that seeks in some way to redo Old Testament history, especially by wiping out the Jews. I used to write software manuals that had the standard phrasing in relation to deviating from prescribed procedure: "Caution: May Lead To Unpredictable Results". It reminds me of Wikipedia's account of the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark:

The vessel travels to an island in the Aegean Sea, where Belloq intends to test the power of the Ark before presenting it to Hitler.

On the island, Jones ambushes the Nazi group and threatens to destroy the Ark but surrenders after Belloq deduces that Jones would never destroy something so historically significant, also surmising that Jones wants to know if the Ark's power is real. The Nazis restrain Jones and Marion at the testing site as Belloq ceremonially opens the Ark but finds only sand inside. At Jones' instruction, he and Marion close their eyes to avoid looking at the opened Ark, as it releases spirits, flames, and bolts of energy that kill Belloq, Toht, and the assembled Nazis before sealing itself shut. Jones and Marion open their eyes to find the area cleared of bodies and their bindings removed.

You don't mess with the Ark of the Covenant. This isn't myth or fairy tale. Some things can lead to unpredictable results.

More Warnings From Alan Dershowitz

I'm at a point in my life where I'm ready to make a decision I never thought I'd ever have to make. and that is abandoning the Democratic party. Like Ronald Reagan said, I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me. . . . I think a lot of people in America are going through an assessment. Many Democrats, people who voted for Democrats, are now saying I can't vote for Kamala Harris, I can't vote for Joe Biden, but they're also saying I can't vote for Donald Trump. They're looking for a third alternative, and there may be some third alternatives. Bobby Kennedy has been very strongly supportive of Israel, and we don't know who the candidate for No Labels will be.

He goes on to point out that the current election is likely to hinge on a few critical states, but

. . . it will not be Michigan. It will not be the Muslims and the Arabs of Michigan. They will not determine the outcome of this election. Why? Because we won't let that happen. I think the Biden administration and those who calculate the costs and benefits of alienating particular groups are making a dreadful mistake when they think they can shift over to pro-Hamas, pro-Arab, pro-Muslim, anti-Israel attitudes is cost free, that all it will do is give them more votes among those groups and young radicals. No!

He apparently made this presentation just before No Labels announced it wouldn't field a 2024 candidate at all:

After failing to recruit serious contenders to run on an imagined "unity ticket" in 2024, the "No Labels" organization announced that it would "stand down" from the current presidential cycle and end its efforts to offer an alternative to voters the group said were weary of the presumptive Democrat and Republican candidacies of Biden and Trump, respectively.

. . . Before the group decided to discontinue its search for a unity ticket candidate after spending millions in its recruitment push, individuals such as former New Jersey Republican Governor Chris Christie, U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), and former Maryland Republican Governor Larry Hogan had been eyed as potential candidates to run under the No Labels banner, but they — along with anyone else the group tried to recruit — declined to mount a bid.

Thus it's likely that the only third alternative for Dershowitz and other centrist Democrats for whom he speaks will be Kennedy Jr, and it's plain from current polling that Kennedy will be an effective spoiler -- but this is still as of April. But remarks from yesterday by former Clinton adviser Dick Morris suggest the trend may be more toward Trump:

He enumerates the astonishing changes in Hispanic, African-American, Asian-American, and Independent groups just in recent weeks away from Biden and toward Trump and concludes,

When you add all those up, you're talking about a gigantic victory and landslide by Trump. And I personally can't believe the Democrats are going to stay with Biden given the situaion. He's just getting wiped out, and frankly, he's dropping every week by a point or two, and the leakage is coming from his base. . . . this is becoming a rout and a landslide.

But whom can the Democrats fall back on? He mentions Michelle Obama, but she's already taken herself out of the running. The only serious alternative for now is Gavin Newsom, with other standbys including JB Pritzker and Gretchen Whitmer -- but for any replacement to succeed, at least with Dershowitz style centrists, they'd have to announce a reversal on Israel in particular, which would cost them the radical left but likely not bring in others disaffected by the range of other policies that likely wouldn't change under a replacement.

The problem is that the Democrats have managed to lose yet another member of the New Deal coalition, the Jews, having already lost labor, Catholics, and legal immigrants -- but as Morris enumerates, they're in the process of losing Hispanics and Asian-Americans as well. And the range of alternatives for the newly disaffected is rapidly shrinking. This is Dershowitz's dilemma.

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.

Joe Regresses To The Mean

This morning, I saw this:

On Tuesday, he had nothing at all on his public schedule. But, as I noted, he looked horrible at his healthcare remarks that he had to deliver on Wednesday and lost badly in a fight with the teleprompter.

. . . Biden was late to the event which was supposed to be at 11 a.m. He kept Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and the health care advocates who attended the even [sic] waiting for an hour before he bothered to appear. He didn't show up until around 12 p.m. And when he showed up finally, people noticed that he had CPAP strap marks still very evident on his face.

He supposedly sleeps with a CPAP machine helping him because he has sleep apnea.

But if he's showing up at that time with the straps still evident on his face, then one has to concluded it's very likely he overslept. Fox's Jesse Watters made this point.

"If he has a creasy face at noon, he just got out of bed," Watters surmised. He wasn't up late or doing anything the day before, yet he's still so late this morning?

Last month, he was spending two or three days a week on the road at campaign appearances, but according to his daily schedule, he's back in the White House this week with limited daily activities. But as it turns out, stories about Joe with CPAP creases on his face are nothing new. The photo at the top of this post is from last summer, when this story appeared:

President Biden used a CPAP machine Tuesday night while sleeping, explaining visible marks on his face when he was talking to reporters on Wednesday.

White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates told Fox News that Biden has sleep apnea, as previously disclosed.

"Since 2008, the President has disclosed his history with sleep apnea in thorough medical reports. He used a CPAP machine last night, which is common for people with that history," Bates said.

According to Forbes in another story that came out at the same time,

An official told Forbes Biden started using the machine to optimize sleep quality in recent weeks.

Biden’s last health summary from the White House, issued in February [2023], made no mention of a CPAP machine and concluded that Biden, 80, “remains a healthy, vigorous” person “who is fit to successfully execute the duties of the Presidency.”

. . . Though CPAPs aren’t the only treatment, if sleep apnea goes untreated it can lead to a lack of quality sleep, resulting in “trouble concentrating, making decisions, remembering things or controlling your behavior.”

It's hard to avoid thinking that Joe is having trouble keeping up with the campaign schedule he'd been on last month, and he's having to adjust things and use the CPAP machine to recover. After the delayed Wednesday meeting, his former chief of staff, Ron Klain, tried to put the best face on things:

“[T]he President’s done a good job, he’s running on his record, and he also has an agenda to make the country a better place. . . . So, I think the President thinks he’s going to confront Donald Trump on his disgraceful conduct, on his record, and also talk about what he’s done and what he wants to do. And the event today with Sen. Sanders (I-VT) was a good example. It also — it acknowledged the progress they’ve made on bringing down the cost of prescription drugs. Yet, there’s still a big agenda left to be done. . . . Prices are too high. People need more money in their pockets. And so, I think both confronting President Trump on his outrageous conduct and chaos and having an agenda for what he wants to do in another four years, I think that is the key thing for getting President Biden re-elected.”

But the fact remains that Joe had suggested he'd turn things around with the State of the Union, but nearly a month later, the polls haven't moved, while he's allowed himself to be caught up in more gaffes and bad visuals. Ron Klain wants him to take on Trump, put forward an agenda, brng down prices, and fix the border. Big order.

Except they've got him back on his CPAP machine and heaven knows what else.