Very Quick Early Reaction To Iran's Attack On Israel

Here's my puzzle. According to this link, the first wave of Iranian drones and missiles arrived in Israel about 2:00 AM Saturday morning Israel time, which would have been 5:00 PM Friday night on the US East Coast. I spend a lot of my day on my computer, and I check the news a lot. The only headlines I saw all day yesterday (Saturday) was breathless reports that an Iranian drone strike could happpen -- but as far as the US was concerned, the strike had already taken place, early Friday evening on the East Coast, midafternoon Friday on the West Coast.

Yet the first reports that it had already taken place didn't appear, at least for me, until this morning, Sunday, nearly two days later. Nothing yesterday afternoon on YouTube, nothing on the conservative aggregators, nothing on Real Clear Politics. By midafternoon in Washington, nearly a day after the attacks began, the White House didn't quite know what to say:

CORRECTION: Report that Biden will address the nation false - CNN pic.twitter.com/Q84Cwdvhqm

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) April 13, 2024

The explanation is what I've believed for a couple of years: the holidays extend through each other, spring break extends to Memorial Day, probably the toughest stretch of the year, but then Memorial Day extends to Juneteenth, which extends to July 4, which extends to Labor Day, which extends to Indigenous Peoples Day, and so forth. Conservative writers and reporters are in on the scam as much as anyone else.

At 9:30 AM yesterday, Kaitlan Collins posted,

President Biden, who is currently in Rehoboth Beach, will return to the White House this afternoon to “consult with his national security team about events in the Middle East,” the admin says.

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) April 13, 2024

As of 9:30 AM on the East Coast, the whole attack, I would guess, had been over for some hours, as it would have been 16:30, or 4:30 PM, at that time in Israel, which is 7 hours ahead. The big National Security Council meeting that took place that afternoon was over yesterday's papers.

There isn't a single person in this picture that gives me even the slightest bit of confidence. Not one.

They can't even get the proper drug cocktail mixed in time for Biden to address the nation tonight. https://t.co/6drwf4RlHU

— Jeff Carlson (@themarketswork) April 13, 2024

My biggest problem at this point is that long-form reporting and opinion writing has been out to lunch for at least the past year. Short-form talking heads on news reports and YouTube have been losing credibility since early 2023 when the Ukraine war turned south and the retired generals' predictions of driving Putin out of Crimea came to naught.

Here's a Fox report time stamped 3:25, but whether that was 3:25 PM yeterday or 3:25 AM today, I can't tell:

It doesn't matter if it was midafternoon yesterday or early this morning, the voice says breathlessly,

So the drones are on their way from Iran, apparently some have already been engaged, possibly or maybe probably, shot down. . .

No, this was concluded the night before.

Everyone's still on spring break, and they're already getting ready for Memorial Day. It doesn't matter which side of the political spectrum anyone's on, they're all coasting.

Oh, NO! The Stormy Daniels Hush Money Trial Starts Next Week!

Even writers for respectable media who are mildly supportive of Donald Trump, like Byron York of the Washington Examiner, are starting to worry:

THE ANTI-TRUMP DREAM COME TRUE. Barring some last-second surprise, on Monday a dream will come true for the Democrats, resistance warriors, Never Trumpers, and lawfare specialists who have hoped for years to put former President Donald Trump on trial. It finally happens Monday in a courtroom in Manhattan.

Many legal experts, and not just those on the Right, have said the case against Trump is weak. But that doesn’t really matter. The fact is, Trump will be on trial, charged with 34 dubious felonies, and a jury in deep-blue Manhattan will likely find him guilty of something. That’s the point. After this trial, if things turn out like Trump’s enemies hope, every single Democratic reference to the former president, every single political ad, every party utterance will refer to Trump as convicted felon Donald Trump.

Even Alan Dershowitz seems slightly off the mark here:

At about 12:47, he says,

Donald Trump may very well be convicted, starting next week, the case will take a while because the jury has to be selected, but Donald Trump may very well be convicted of a non-crime. What he is charged with is simply not a crime. It's not a federal crime; it could have been a federal crime; the federal government didn't think it was, and they didn't prosecute him for it; it's not a state crime, and if it is a state crime, it's a misdemeanor, and what the prosecution did is that they cobbled together a federal crime which isn't really a crime and a state crime which isn't a crime, and they created what I call the Alexander Hamilton crime. Remember Alexander Hamilton paid hush money to Mrs Reynolds to make sure that she didn't disclose their consensual affair, exactly the same as the Donald Trump situation, and I doubt that Alexander Hamilton put that on his forms. He was the Secretary of the Treasury! But I doubt that anyone in American history has ever been charged with failing to disclose hush money payments on a corporate or even a government form.

This is odd, because although Dershowitz is a legal scholar, he's also a brilliant media strategist (I note that as of that YouTube from this past Tuesday, he appears to be back in Israel). A much more apposite case is one he's discussed himself recently, and I quoted him here over that Chicago Seven case:

I was a consultant on the case, because there were free speech issues, and the trial turned into a farce, because they had picked a judge named Julius Hoffman, who was a very right-wing jurist to preside over the trial, and he hated these radical defendants, and the radical defendants hated him, and Abby Hoffman came up with a tactic, he said basically to his lawyers and everybody else, "Look, we can't win this case in front of Judge Julius Hoffman. Let's see if we can go about getting it reversed on appeal, and the best way to do it is to provoke this judge, he has a short fuse, and provoke him into making error after error."

It seems to me that Trump and his attorneys are following a twofold strategy not much different from Abby Hoffman's: they've been filing motion after motion in recent weeks, in the view of the media aimed at delaying the trial, but I'm sure Trump and his attorneys are fully aware that the game is rigged, and there isn't going to be any delay. The motions are meant to build a record for post-conviction appeal -- the attorneys are professionally obligated to do this, but they're also fully aware that the intent of the trial is to convict Trump of something -- anythng -- before the election, and the appeals will be after the election. So all their motions are pro forma and not important to Trump's actual strategy.

But Abby Hoffman's strategy wasn't just to build an appellate record, it was to turn the trial itself into a circus. This was brilliantly successful, and it worked right away, no need to wait for the appeals court. It turned Hoffman and his codefendants into celebrities -- their celebrity status even outshone their status as martyrs, which was entirely secondary. Trump is a brilliant media strategist himself -- he has even Dershowitz's grudging admiration.

The upcoming trial is likely to put Trump in a perfect storm of media attention, with tabloid-style allegations of an affair with a porn star, but with the added feature of additional lowlifes like Michael Cohen and Michael Avenatti doing what comes naturally, namely, trying to extort Trump. We had a preview of this with E Jean Carroll. By that point, the public had tuned out the legal issues and focused on the circus, the narcissistic old woman who fantasized about being raped by Donald Trump. He kept edging up in the polls throughout the case. The media won't be able to turn their attention away from this case, either, which is the sort of environment in which Trump thrives. Abby Hoffman could have cooked this up himself.

As far as anyone knows, Joe Biden was the one who thought up the lawfare strategy. How's that been working out for him so far? The problem with this case for the Democrats is that nothing can go wrong -- but they're relying on a wonky cast of characters for whom much has already gone wrong. Frankly, I can't wait for the circus to start.

More On Joe From Obama's Staff

Yesterday I ran across yet another set of remarks from a former Obama-era staffer who'd gotten to know Joe as vice president.

Mike McCormick, who served as Joe Biden’s stenographer traveling with him around the world including to Ukraine, recently published a book revealing what he saw, which included criminal activity in regards to the Burisma kickback scheme. “The Case to Impeach and Imprison Joe Biden” lays out probably the most comprehensive account ever written about the scheme.

I'm less concerned about Burisma, because it really isn't figuring into the current campaign, and I'm still puzzled that the amounts of money involved are so trivial, especially when spread around among Hunter and maybe a dozen other family members. A vice president ought to be getting more than a million here and a million there -- how can this be worth his time? That's the really interesting question, and if we ever get an anmswer, it'll say a lot more about the roots of his character. Is he a combination of kinda greedy but really dumb?

McCormick's remarks on Biden's overall persona seem consistent with those of Obama advisers and cabinet members we've already seen:

“When I worked for him, I thought Joe was harmless — egotistical, buffoonish, and unpresidential, but harmless,” he said.

Here's a problem worth working through: current conventional wisdom claims Joe has been in decline at least since his time as vice president, but this guy Mike McCormick served as his stenographer and traveled with him around the world -- and his impression as of ten or 15 years ago was that he was "egotistical, buffoonish, and unpresidential", pretty much what we have now. But if this was the case, how was he ever sold as presidential material?

After a brief web search, from what I can see, Joe was consistently listed as the front runner as of August 2019. There were several dozen candidates in the early running, including Bernie Sanders, Mike Bloomberg, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, Tulsi Gabbard, John Kerry, Beto O'Rourke, Elizabetgh Warren, and, of course, Kamala Harris. NPR's recap of Biden's path to the nomination in 2020 said this:

What people do remember is that Biden began the current presidential cycle as the Democrats' putative front-runner, that he stumbled along the way and nearly washed out early. The Real Clear Politics average of polls showed him leading — but not dominating — the field throughout 2019. In a field that at one point teemed with more than 20 other hopefuls, Biden's polling rarely surpassed 30%.

. . . As the debates ground on and impeachment proceedings in Washington diverted media attention, Biden struggled to break away from the field. When his main challenger, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, had a heart attack in October, some Sanders backers gravitated to Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and other candidates, not Biden.

By the end of the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3, Biden found himself an also-ran, just as in 2008. It was upstart candidate Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., who shared the winner's circle with Sanders. Biden finished fourth.

But Sanders won primaries until South Carolina, when James Clyburn, the highest ranking black member of Congress as the House majority whip, announced his endorsement of Biden. According to NPR, this changed the momentum.

After Nevada, Sanders had been poised to win most of the 14 states voting in the March 3rd Super Tuesday contests. But South Carolina shifted the momentum. Sanders won in California, Colorado, Utah and his home state of Vermont. Biden swept the rest, including Texas and five other Southern states where he won at least 55% of votes among African Americans.

The shift in momentum dimmed Sanders' hopes for recovery in states where he had done well in 2016 — such as Missouri, Michigan and Washington. After Wisconsin joined that list on April 7, Sanders dropped out. Within a week, he endorsed Biden.

It appears that the lizard people Democrat establishment thought Sanders was too far left -- or at least, he seemed too far left and threatened to give up the game -- to succeed against Trump. In hindsight, it looks like there was never mich daylight between Biden and other putatively farther-left candidates like Sanders or Warren, which is a question someone needs to pursue.

As best anyone can tell, the lizard people then conducted a campaign based on a strategy of keeping Joe out of the public eye as much as possible while portraying him as a moderate. At the same time, COVID restrictions kept Trump from holding rallies, which reduced his visibility. But it looks like Biden's weakness as a candidate was fully apparent to insiders as of 2020, which may be behind more recent moves as reported by Politico last week:

President Joe Biden’s campaign is bringing on a slate of new pollsters to lead its number-crunching operation.

The group, which features several pollsters involved in efforts around Democrats’ stronger-than-expected 2022 midterms, reflect a continued shift to broaden Biden’s polling operation beyond the team that worked on his first successful campaign against former President Donald Trump. The moves were shared first with POLITICO.

. . . The expansion of Biden’s polling team comes at a complicated moment, given Biden’s stubbornly low approval ratings and pollsters’ struggles to measure the electorate accurately in the past two presidential races.

This may also reflect the lizard people's discomfort at Joe's, and now Dr Jill's, insistence that Joe is up in the polls, and the media is just reporting the wrong ones. The problem overall is that Joe is Caesar, which isn't much different from the problem the Romans had, which was that Caesar was Caesar.

A Stormy Daniels Letter Resurfaces

From the Gateway Pundit yesterday:

This afternoon, President Trump shared an image of a 2018 letter from Stormy Daniels on his Truth Social Account.

Above the image of the letter from the porn star, turned darling of the Democrat Party, President Trump wrote:

“LOOK WHAT I JUST FOUND!”

He asked, “WILL THE FAKE NEWS REPORT IT??”

The image and part of the post are shown above. (Click on the image for a larger view.) It reads in part:

Over the past few weeks, I have been asked countless times to comment on reports of an alleged sexual relationship I had with Donald Trump many, many, many years ago.

The fact of the matter is that each party to this alleged affair denied its existence in 2006, 20011, 2016, 2017 and now again in 2018. I am not denying this affair because I was paid “hush money” as has been reported in overseas owned tabloids. I am denying this affair because it never happened.

This piqued my curiosity, since I posted two weeks ago on Michael Avenatti's reported allegation that the Trump hush money story was cooked up by Michael Cohen to extort the Trump Organization before the 2016 election, and in fact it was done while Cohen and Daniels were themselves having an affair.

Just about all anyone can conclude at this point is that the whole thing is hokum from start to finish, and anything anyone can possibly say about it is unprovable. But it turns out that this isn't the first time even this purported letter has come out. Factcheck.org had this to say about an earlier incarnation of the story in 2023:

Trump has denied the affair, claiming the payment was “to stop the false and extortionist accusations made by her about an affair.” Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, has said multiple times that she and Trump did have sex.

But a January 2018 letter in which Daniels denied that they had intercourse is being misleadingly cited by some conservatives on social media as proof that there is no case against Trump.

Daniels has said that, although the letter was not true, she signed it under pressure from her representatives, who warned that her life could become “hell in many different ways” if she did not sign it.

She doesn't identity her "representatives" in the statement, but according to Wikipedia, Michael Avenatti filed a lawsuit on her behalf against Trump for defamation in March 2018. According to the same entry, she terminated her arrangemeent with Avenatti in March 2019. In other words, it's hard not to conclude that it was Avenatti who pressured her to do the letter.

That defamation suit has its own twisted history:

Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, tried to sue Trump for defamation in 2018, specifically taking aim at a tweet attacking her account of being threatened by a stranger in 2011 to stay quiet on her Trump story. Trump attacked the account as a "con job, playing the Fake News Media."

Federal Judge S. James Otero dismissed the lawsuit, saying Trump's tweet constitutes " 'rhetorical hyperbole' normally associated with politics and public discourse" and is protected by the First Amendment.

Daniels tried to appeal the decision in 2022, saying her then-attorney Michael Avenatti filed the defamation suit "without my permission and against my wishes." But a judge ruled against her, leaving her on the hook for nearly $300,000 in Trump's legal fees.

So it looks as though Avenatti and Daniels will say just about anything on one day and contradict themselves on any other day. In any case, probably connected with Avenatti's reported claim that Michael Cohen and Daniels had cooked up the Trump story in an attempt to extort him prior to the 2016 election,

Former President Trump’s legal team on Monday asked the judge in his hush money case to subpoena adult film actress Stormy Daniels’ communications with Michael Cohen, the former president’s ex-fixer. . .

In a letter to Justice Juan Merchan, Trump’s attorneys asked the judge to enforce a subpoena for the communications Daniels — whose real name is Stephanie Clifford — had with Cohen and former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who are both expected to testify in the hush money trial starting later this month.

It sounds as though this trial, and the cross-examination of witnesses like Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen, is going to be quite a circus. So far, the outcomes of trials and court hearings in the various lawfare cases against Trump have served only to create figures of ridicule like Judge Engoron, Fani Willis, and Nathan Wade, and their cumulative effect has been to drive Trump higher in the polls.

It's hard to avoid thinking the New York criminal trial will have an equivalent effect -- although delaying any such trial is Criminal Defense 101, I have a feeling that the efforts by Trump's attorneys to delay it here are actually something of a head fake, and they can't wait to get this bizarre assortment of crooks, perjurers, and hookers on the stand.

Whether the trial is completely rigged and the verdict a foregone conclusion, the whole affair will play out against this cast of characters, and finding Trump guilty will only boost his standing. I think Trump himself is fully aware of this, probably more than anyone.

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.