Damage Control

Biden ally and Democrat US Senator Chris Coons was on ABC’s “This Week” with Martha Raddatz yesterday to spin Joe's acknowledgement Wednesday night that he was pausing military aid to Israel. But this attempt at damage control came between Trump's Saturday rally in New Jersey that was estimated to have drawn 80-100,000, and Michael Cohen's anticipated appearance in Trump's New York trial, which will likely focus all of this week's media attention on Trump as well. Poor Joe's handlers can hardly get a word in edgewise.

The odd part about Coons's defense is that it walks nothing back, despite commentators calling Biden's move a "terrible miscalculation" that threatens the loss of the Jewish vote from the traditional Democrat coalition. Instead,Coons tries to shift the blame onto Netanyahu:

RADDATZ: So, you’re saying he’ll stop offensive weapons? . . . So are you saying offensive weapons should be stopped?

COONS: Look, I think whatever munitions, such as the 2,000-pound bombs that have previously been used in Gaza, that are supplied only by the United States, and that can cause massive civilian casualties may well be paused.

It is tragic that we’re at this point. And, Martha, I want to conclude by saying that I hope Prime Minister Netanyahu is thinking about his legacy. Right now his legacy is the huge, strategic and defensive failure of October 7th and his legacy could be a real gap, a break in the long, strong, bipartisan, strategic relationship between the United States and Israel. I think that would be tragic. His legacy could instead be achieving regional security and peace for Israel.

Whatever happens now, it's Netanyahu's fault. And Democrat US Senator Chris Murphy said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that Joe is a centrist on this issue, of all things:

Anchor Dana Bash said, “Do you think that when the president said what he said to Erin Burnett this week that what ended up happening is he tried to, I don’t want to take away from what he tried to do on policy, but just on the politics that it ended up kind of pleasing no one. Is that a potential problem, or do you think that is what he said and did is helpful for his detractors on the left?”

Murphy said, “I think, frankly, when you’re being a good leader, who you are often upsetting people on the right and the left. And so President Biden advertised himself when he ran for office as someone who would often play it down the middle, who would not pay attention to the extremes of the debate and would just do what he thought was right for the country and what the broad middle of the country wants.”

He added, “I actually think that’s where the broad middle of the country is. I think the broad middle of the country wants to support Israel’s ability to destroy Hamas but is very concerned about the fact that there are so many kids dying that, for the last week, there’s been no humanitarian assistance getting into the country. I think the president really is squarely where the middle of this country is on this on this conflict.”

But as of Saturday, even the UN had halved its estimate of Gaza civilian casualties:

On May 8, the UN published data showing 34,844 people had reportedly been killed, including 4,959 women and 7,797 children.

The new figures showed the number of identified deaths as of April 30, which total 24,686 people. The new data also specified that 10,006 men and 1,924 elderly had been killed.

The UN also highlighted that the plurality of identified fatalities were 40% men, while children were 32% and women were 20%.

. . . The Washington Institute for Near East Policy released a report in January that showed major discrepancies in the fatality reports. The research concluded that such discrepancies were most likely caused by manipulation.

In other words, Joe's handlers are claiming to base a highly controversial shift in policy on unreliable and manipulated data. But this leaves aside the generally accepted view that Biden is catering to Muslim voters in Michigan, which is actually part of his overall miscalculation:

Ahead of the 2024 elections, the Marxist-Islamist alliance in Michigan has been insisting that Biden’s re-election is dependent on their votes. And so they used the Democratic primary on Feb. 27 to try and demonstrate their power. Led by Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), the alliance’s “uncommitted” campaign called for Israel haters to vote “uncommitted” in the primaries to show the White House that U.S. support for Israel will cost Biden the swing state of Michigan.

In the event, the “uncommitted” campaign was a dud. Biden won 81.1% of the vote. The “uncommitted” ballots comprised a mere 13.2% of the ballots. While the media, Tlaib and her cronies presented 13.2% as a major accomplishment, it was a failure. Around 10% of Michigan Democrats habitually vote “uncommitted” in presidential primaries. Ahead of the 2012 elections, 11% of Michigan Democrats voted “uncommitted” against then-President Barack Obama.

Moreover, perhaps buoyed by this week’s Harvard-Harris poll that showed massive majorities of Americans supporting Israel and its war aims, including its planned conquest of Hamas’s final outpost of Rafah, establishment American Jews are beginning to openly criticize the Biden administration’s hostile policies towards Israel.

On Thursday, Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote a long post on X sharply criticizing the Biden administration’s refusal to support Israel’s planned operation in Rafah. The Washington Institute has long been viewed as AIPAC’s think tank, and its views are perceived as representative of the liberal American Jewish establishment. It is hard to think of any instance where its senior leaders have openly rejected a Democratic administration’s positions on Israel.

. . . As one Washington insider quipped, “If Satloff is advocating in public what is subtly but clearly a sharp break from the administration over Hamas and Rafah, then it is a strong sign the political winds have shifted in the Jewish establishment and bodes very ill ultimately for the Democrats.”

The piece makes the final point that other Jews have been making, that the Jewish vote in swing states is larger than the Muslim vote in Michigan:

According to Richard Baehr, co-founder and former political correspondent for American Thinker, not only does the Jewish vote matter, it could easily be decisive. It is true that New York and California have the largest Jewish communities, and they remain firmly in the Democratic column. But four swing states—Pennsylvania, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona—may well be decided by their large Jewish communities.

Baehr explains that the Jewish vote in all four states is larger than the margins of victory in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential races. In 2020, Baehr notes, the final margin of victory in Pennsylvania was 80,000 votes. It was 33,000 in Nevada, 10,000 in Arizona and 12,000 in Georgia. According to the World Population Review, in 2022, Pennsylvania’s Jewish population stood at 434,165. Georgia’s numbered 141,020. There were 123,725 Jewish Americans in Arizona and 79,800 in Nevada.

But this brief discussion on the Sunday talks is likely to be swamped by wall-to-wall coverage all this coming week of Michael Cohen's testimony in Trump's New York trial, in which the focus will inevitably be on Trump, not Joe -- and as the saying goes, there's no such thing as bad publicity. The timing here, if nothing else, is indicative of the general miscalculations that have characterized Biden's reelection campaign.

They're Shocked, Shocked

Thinking about my last several posts on Dershowitz and Netanyahu, I'm puzzled why it is that if I do a web search on "Biden Israel betrayal", I get so many hits, like at the UK Telegraph, Biden’s sudden betrayal of Israel is a terrible miscalculation. This was neither sudden nor a surprise, or at least it shouldn't have been.

It almost certainly wasn't sudden or a surprise to Netanyahu. Yesterday I linked to a 2016 article at the Times of Israel that said, "On January 20 — Inauguration Day — President Barack Obama will exit the world stage, and with him the specter of vindictive action against the Israeli government." Netanyahu fully understood where he in particular stood with Obama and any of his Democrat allies. A 2015 story at CBS made this plain:

President Obama sent top political advisers to Israel to influence the election's outcome and prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's win, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said Tuesday.

"He can't say he has a business-like relationship or that it isn't personal when his entire political machine, virtually, some of the top people in his political operation, were in Israel on the ground trying to defeat Netanyahu, which is unprecedented," Rubio told conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt in a radio interview Tuesday. "You know, he didn't send anyone in any other country to try to influence the outcome of those elections."

. . . [Obama] has recently dismissed reporting of his strained connections with the newly re-elected Israeli leader, instead characterizing their relationship as "very businesslike."

"The issue is not a matter of relations between leaders. The issue is a very clear, substantive challenge," Mr. Obama told reporters Tuesday in a press conference held with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. "We believe that two states is the best path forward for Israel's security, for Palestinian aspirations and for regional stability. That's our view and that continues to be our view. And Prime Minister Netanyahu has a different approach."

What puzzles me is that Alan Dershowitz is very close to Netanyahu, and in at least two recent podcasts, he's made the point that he speaks to Netanyahu on the phone several times a week. Netanyahu seems never to have harbored any illusions about US views on a two-state solution, particularly under Obama and Biden, yet Dershowitz's current podcasts have expressed the much more typical, and naive, reactions of surprise and disappointment.

I've got to think there's some deliberate indirection taking place here -- Dershowitz often implies that he's much closer to the thinking of Israeli leadership than he lets on here. And as I suggested yesterday, Netanyahu is necessarily a US political player as much as he is an Israeli, because as we've seen here, US politicians will send their advisers to help Netanyahu's opponents in Israel -- so if he's smart, Netanyahu will fight back in the US.

For instance, what just happened here?

Buried in a glowing [New York] Times report written by far-left columnist Peter Baker is a mention that's raising some eyebrows and will no doubt be of interest to Congressional Republicans. In the piece, the president is painted as a stalwart defender of human rights standing up to the evil Israeli government, but amid the tongue bath is an admission that the White House hid a call readout to avoid public backlash.

That revelation comes just days after Biden was caught stopping aid shipments to Israel in an effort to regain his domestic political footing, yet another thing Democrats have assured us is impeachable.

Biden privately threatened to rethink his support for the war in a private call with Netanyahu in February, two months before doing so publicly, but the White House didn't put it into the readout of the call to try to avoid a public blowup. https://t.co/zPytMW5glq

— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) May 11, 2024

That threat, made in the call February 15, was more than two months prior to the passage "after months of struggle" in the House of aid to Ukraine and Israel --but Biden himself appears to have been equivocal. This appears to have surprised Speaker Johnson:

House Speaker Mike Johnson said he felt betrayed by President Biden’s threat to withhold US weapons shipments to Israel and expressed hope the remark could be chalked up to a “senior moment.”

. . . “I don’t think that’s something that staff told him to say. I hope it’s a senior moment, because that would be a great deviation in what is said to be the policy there.”

However, the question does arise -- who leaked the threat and forced Biden to take a public stand? Because the big loser here is Joe Biden.

From a political and tactical standpoint, this decision by the President may be the dumbest one he's committed to date, and that's saying something with Joe Biden, because there is literally no upside, and only downside. If you are a Democratic member of the House or Senate who voted for the aid package last week that the President signed, a vote that was fraught with political peril considering a third of the Democratic base is abjectly antisemitic, . . . you only have the fever swamp trying to primary and/or harass you wherever you go. You're pretty ticked off.

If you're a NeverTrumper, one who made the case in 2020 that Joe Biden was by far the better option, and until this week still tried to stake out that ground in 2024, Wednesday's interview from Wisconsin with CNN's Erin Burnett stabbing Israel in the back was the final straw.

If Netanyahu was at least rooting for Trump from the sidelines in 2016, it looks like he's actively in the game in 2024. And he's a very agile politician.

Thinking About Netanyahu

According to Wikipedia,

Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu . . . is an Israeli politician who has been serving as the prime minister of Israel since 2022, having previously held the office from 1996 to 1999 and again from 2009 to 2021.He is the chairman of the Likud party. Netanyahu is the longest-serving prime minister in the country's history, having served for a total of over 16 years. He is also the first prime minister to have been born in Israel after its establishment.

. . . Netanyahu rose to prominence after being elected as the chairman of Likud in 1993, becoming Leader of the Opposition. In the 1996 election, Netanyahu beat Shimon Peres, becoming the first Israeli prime minister elected directly by popular vote, and its youngest-ever. Netanyahu and Likud were heavily defeated in the 1999 election by Ehud Barak's One Israel alliance; and Netanyahu chose to retire from politics entirely, entering the private sector. Netanyahu later returned to politics, and served as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Finance under Ariel Sharon. During the latter position, he initiated reforms of the Israeli economy that led to significant growth.

. . . After the 2009 election, Netanyahu formed a coalition government with other right-wing parties and was sworn in as prime minister for a second time. He went on to lead Likud to victory in the 2013 and 2015 elections. A period of political deadlock ensued after three consecutive elections in 2019 and 2020 failed to produce a government, which was solved after a coalition rotation agreement was reached between Netanyahu and centrist Blue and White alliance's Benny Gantz. The coalition collapsed in December 2020, before the rotation could take place, and a new election was held in March 2021. . . In June 2021, after Naftali Bennett formed a government with Yair Lapid, Netanyahu was removed from the premiership, becoming opposition leader for the third time, before returning as prime minister again after forming a coalition with right-wing parties after the 2022 election.

Another intermittently successful politician comes to mind, Benjamin Disraeli,

a British statesman, Conservative politician and writer who twice served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He played a central role in the creation of the modern Conservative Party, defining its policies and its broad outreach. Disraeli is remembered for his influential voice in world affairs, his political battles with the Liberal Party leader William Ewart Gladstone, and his one-nation conservatism or "Tory democracy". He made the Conservatives the party most identified with the British Empire and military action to expand it, both of which were popular among British voters. He is the only British Prime Minister to have been born Jewish.

After several unsuccessful attempts, Disraeli entered the House of Commons in 1837. In 1846, Prime Minister Robert Peel split the party over his proposal to repeal the Corn Laws, which involved ending the tariff on imported grain. Disraeli clashed with Peel in the House of Commons, becoming a major figure in the party. When Lord Derby, the party leader, thrice formed governments in the 1850s and 1860s, Disraeli served as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons.

Upon Derby's retirement in 1868, Disraeli became prime minister briefly before losing that year's general election. He returned to the Opposition before leading the party to a majority in the 1874 general election. . . . the Liberals defeated Disraeli's Conservatives at the 1880 general election.

It's worth noting, though, that Netanyahu's career as prime minister has been longer than Disraeli's, and Netanyahu is also to some degree a politician whose familiarity with the US has been key to his tenacity in Israel. Back to Wikipedia,

Between 1956 and 1958, and again from 1963 to 1967, his family lived in the United States in Cheltenham Township, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. . . .Netanyahu returned to the United States in late 1972 to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . After briefly returning to Israel to fight in the Yom Kippur War, he returned to the United States and, under the name Ben Nitay, completed a bachelor's degree in architecture.

. . . At MIT, Netanyahu studied a double-load while simultaneously taking courses at Harvard University, completing a master's degree in two and a half years, despite taking a break to fight in the Yom Kippur War. . . . In 1976, Netanyahu graduated near the top of his class at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

. . . Netanyahu was headhunted to be an economic consultant for the Boston Consulting Group in Boston, Massachusetts, working at the company between 1976 and 1978. . . . In 1978, Netanyahu returned to Israel.

A protégé of Moshe Arens, who was Israeli Amassador to the US, he was appointed Deputy Chief of Mission in Washington between 1982 and 1984, and between 1984 and 1988, he was in New York as Israeli Ambassador to the UN. He returned to Israel again to build his political career.

Netanyahu was the Likud's candidate for prime minister in the 1996 Israeli legislative election which took place on 29 May 1996 and were the first Israeli elections in which Israelis elected their prime minister directly. Netanyahu hired American Republican political operative Arthur Finkelstein to run his campaign, and although the American style of sound bites and sharp attacks elicited harsh criticism, Netanyahu won the 1996 election[.]

But it's increasingly plain that Netanyahu isn't just a US-style politician in Israel; he has to negotiate the US political environment as well. For instance, according to the Times of Israel, as of late 2016,

In less than 45 days, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be able to finally rest assured that he won what might have been the riskiest political poker match of his career.

On January 20 — Inauguration Day — President Barack Obama will exit the world stage, and with him the specter of vindictive action against the Israeli government. When Donald Trump ascends to the presidency, Netanyahu will no longer have to worry about a backlash from Washington for vociferously opposing the Iran nuclear deal or for expanding Jewish settlement in the West Bank.

. . . If this assessment is correct and the outgoing administration does not take any steps on the Palestinian front, Netanyahu can congratulate himself for having a played a very risky hand for years but eventually coming out on top.

Biden's current reversal on sending military aid to Israel -- only a short time after getting the House to pass that same aid -- comes in the context of long-standing enmity between both the Obama and Biden administrations and Netanyahu, something Netanyahu has been able to negotiate with some skill over a period of many years. And as of the past week, things are continuing to work in Netanyahu's favor:

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s domestic support is on the rise as Israel’s war against Hamas advances, according to poll numbers released on Thursday.

. . . In a matchup for prime minister between Netanyahu and his longtime rival, Benny Gantz, Netanyahu is the preferred candidate, securing 46 percent of the total sample’s support compared to Gantz’s 33 percent.

. . . On Thursday, the Israeli premier again affirmed Israel’s readiness to confront Hamas alone if necessary, invoking the unity and determination from the Jewish State’s war of independence.

“Today, we are much stronger. We are determined, and we are united in order to defeat our enemies and those who want to destroy us,” the prime minister said, adding that “If we need to stand alone, we will.”

It's plain tnat Netanyahu is playing US politics in the current election cycle just as much as he's playing Israeli politics. He's gambling again, and I suspect the risks are going to pay off again.

The CNN Interview

I keep returning to Nate Silver's Feburary advice to the White House, in which he warns

[H]e's losing now and there's no plan to fix the problems other than hoping that the polls are wrong[.]

I'm starting to think that Silver, like Alan Dershowitz, is a highly intelligent traditional Democrat who's sincerely trying to think his position through, and it's a fascinating process to watch. Let's revisit his February position on Biden interviews:

Biden’s doing a lot fewer interviews than even the media-hostile Trump. And when he does them, his performance is still just mediocre.

Again, he recommended that Biden turn things around:

Over the course of the next several weeks [i.e, in March}, Biden should do four lengthy sitdown interviews with “non-friendly” sources. “Non-friendly” doesn't mean hostile: nonpartisan reporters with a track record of asking tough questions would work great. A complete recording of the interviews should be made public. The interviews ought to include a mix of different media (e.g. television and print) and journalistic perspectives.

. . . This really isn't too much to ask. These are the sorts of interviews that every other recent president has done. I admit that I'm asking Biden to pack in several in a row, but he has to make up for lost time. And the timing is urgent because he and his inner circle have to make sure that he's really up for a second term and that this is the best option for Democrats. If Biden was willing to take five hours to speak with Hur, he ought to to take five hours for this.

So he's implying that these interviews, to turn Joe's prospects around, should be roughly an hour long, and there should be maybe four of them. Well, even though the timing was urgent in February, Joe and his handlers haven't done what Silver thought would be needed. Finally on Wednesday, months behind schedule, Joe gave an interview -- but news of it didn't break until Thursday morning, when Stormy Daniels's resumed cross-examination dominated the breathless headlines. It might as well not have happened -- but by Thursday evening, the New York Post editorialized,

The White House rarely allows President Biden to sit down for interviews, and Wednesday’s chat with CNN’s Erin Burnett shows why.

In a brief 17 minutes, Biden told 15 lies — nearly a lie a minute.

From whoppers about the economy to prevarications on Israel, Biden spun a fantasyland of a presidency that voters know is false.

Once people tore themselves away from Stormy Daniels, which did little but keep the ongoing focus on Trump, giving him yet another day of free media, they learned of Joe's claims that inflation was 9% under Trump or that people are reading the wrong polls.

The president, comparing his policies with those of former President Trump, rejected polls that show that voters trust Trump on the economy more than they trust Biden.

During an interview with CNN, the president was hard pressed to construct an accessible story about how his economic policies are affecting real Americans.

“We’ve already turned it around,” Biden said from Wisconsin. “The polling data has been wrong all along.”

David Axelrod seems to be another Democrat who's trying to recalibrate.

On Wednesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “OutFront,” CNN Senior Political Commentator and former Obama Adviser David Axelrod. . . . stated, “I don’t understand this. I don’t understand, all these months later, he went — I thought they spent $25 million, mistakenly, last fall, touting Bidenomics and making the same argument that the President’s making here. It is absolutely true, the world was plunged into an economic crisis and America was plunged into an economic crisis by the pandemic, and we’ve come back faster than almost any other country. . . but that’s not the way people are experiencing the economy. They’re experiencing it through the lens of the cost of living. . . . I think he’s making a terrible mistake. It may not be — if he doesn’t win this race, it may not be Donald Trump that beats him, it may be his own pride.”

It's fascinating that Axelrod, whom Wikipedia says was raised in a liberal Jewish family, should attribute Biden's failings to "pride", which is more often addressed as a sin in a Roman Catholic context. According to Britannica,

Pride, in Roman Catholic theology, one of the seven deadly sins, considered by some to be the gravest of all sins. In the theological sense, pride is defined as an excessive love of one’s own excellence. As a deadly sin, pride is believed to generate other sins and further immoral behaviour and is countered by the heavenly virtue of humility.

But Axelrod's assessment is insightful. It reminds me of the Dunning-Kruger effect, "a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities". It's hard to avoid thinking something like this is a basic mover in Biden's character, and I think it's a pretty good explanation for why so much has been going wrong on his watch.

The interview strongly suggests that he's in a bubble, the polls are wrong, he's already turned the economy around, corporations are gouging, and Israel is targeting civilians. And he's going to be stubborn about this -- he isn't listening to reasonable people on his side like Nate Silver, David Axelrod, and Alan Dershowitz. This is disturbing and dangerous.

Dershowitz Update

Yesterday, in response to news that the Biden administration had "paused" certain arms shipments to Israel in an attempt to hold back Israel's intent to go into Rafah to eliminate the threat from Hamas, I quoted Alan Dershowitz's statement from back in March, "If you stop supplying ammunition and arms to Israel and deny them the right to defend themselves, you have crossed my red line." I'd been waiting, as apparently many others have, for Dershowitz's reaction to this latest development. It's come, at least for now, in yesterday's Dershow podcast, which is linked above.

If I had to vote today, I would not vote for President Biden

. . . For those who have asked me, has my red line been crossed, this is the red line, and if it is crossed by the Biden administration, I will abide by my commitment and not support those who have crossed my red line, and I'm sure it's a red line for many of you as well. So I hope it hasn't been crossed, and I hope there's still a possibility that Israel can remain a bipartisan issue, but it's moving away from that, and that's a very dangerous development, both for the United States and for Israel.

His position, as first articulated in March, was tentative. He followed "you have crossed my red line" then with, "I hope that doesn't happen," and his statement in the podcast is still, "So I hope it hasn't been crossed". This is not an earth-shakng move by any means. On the other hand, elsewhere in the podcast, he mentions that he talks on the phone with Prime Minister Netanyahu several times a week, apparently without fully understanding that Netanyahu is Biden's bête noire, second only to Trump.

There can be no question that in Biden's mind, a policy that helps Israel is one that helps Netanyahu, and its hard to avoid thinking that Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister in Israel's history, has been a far more successful politician than Biden -- deep down, Biden knows this, and he hates Netanyahu for it. (This is also why Republicans like Romney and Jeb Bush hate Trump, by the way.) I don't think Dershowitz has fully wrapped his head around this yet, but he's getting there.

Biden's remarks to Erin Burnett in last night's CNN interview indicate that his thinking is at best muddled:

Biden described warning Netanyahu about the risks of becoming bogged down in Gaza, drawing parallels to the American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“I said to Bibi, ‘Don’t make the same mistake we made in America. We wanted to get bin Laden. We’ll help you get Sinwar,’” he said, referring to the Hamas leader in Gaza. “It made sense to get bin Laden; it made no sense to try and unify Afghanistan. It made no sense in my view to engage in thinking that in Iraq they had a nuclear weapon.”

But Biden supported the Iraq war in 2002, despite his later claims that he didn't:

Joe Biden has claimed that despite voting to authorize military force against Iraq in 2002, he opposed the Iraq war from “the moment” it began. That’s not accurate, and Biden now says he misspoke.

. . . Biden wasn’t against using military action against Iraq to force Iraq to give up weapons of mass destruction (which, as it turned out, it did not have).

The day the war commenced, Biden told CNN: “There’s a lot of us who voted for giving the president the authority to take down Saddam Hussein if he didn’t disarm. And there are those who believe, at the end of the day, even though it wasn’t handled all that well, we still have to take him down.”

Biden in last night's remarks also claimed it "made sense to get bin Laden", but he consistently opposed doing this when he was vice president. In a 2020 exchange with Peter Doocy, he denied it:

Doocy responded, “Didn’t you tell President Obama not to go after bin Laden that day?”

To which Biden responded: “No, I didn’t. I didn’t.”

Biden’s description of his advice to Obama changed between 2012 and 2015; two of his accounts were contradictory. He said in 2012 that he had advised Obama “don’t go” with the raid before obtaining more information. He then said in 2015 that he had not uttered this “don’t go” opinion.

Former top officials in the Obama administration have written in their memoirs that Biden was “against the operation,” that he was “firmly in favor of waiting for more information,” and that he was concerned about the risks of a raid.

The problem continues to be that Joe, as Robert Gates has said, is consistently wrong, and in fact, right or wrong, he'll do what's expedient, which he's always done. Here's the problem, which Dershowitz is working hard not to confront:

Why, you may ask, are the campus and other protesters inspired to protest in increasing numbers, and with greater violence and aggressiveness?

The answer is that the protesters believe their protests are working.

When @POTUS Biden withholds weapons from @Israel a few weeks… https://t.co/9lsXKI1joN

— Bill Ackman (@BillAckman) May 8, 2024

Itr's hard not to conclude that Biden is dangerous at this point. He's playing footsie with the far left, trying to avoid offending them by supporting Israel, while hoping people like Dershowitz won't lose patience with his equivocations. But the bottom line is he's hoping he can keep on being lucky, and nothing will go south in the Middle East before the election. This isn't a strategy.

In Other News

Michael LeBron, who posts as Lionel on his YouTube channel, summed up yesterday's New York trial: As the Skank Tanks. I can't possibly top that, and otrher things are happening, so I'll mention just three of them.

First, according to Politico,

The Biden administration is holding up shipments of two types of Boeing-made precision bombs to send a political message to Israel, according to a U.S. official and six other people with knowledge of the deliberations.

The U.S. has yet to sign off on a pending sale of Boeing’s Joint Direct Attack Munitions — both the munitions and kits that convert them to smart weapons — and Small Diameter Bombs, according to six industry and congressional sources with knowledge of the discussions.

While the Biden administration has not formally denied the potential sale, it is essentially taking action through inaction — holding off on approvals and other aspects of the weapons transfer process — to send a message to Israel, a U.S. administration official familiar with the process told POLITICO.

Meanwhile,

[A]n Israeli official told NBC News there is deep frustration in the Israeli government over the decision. The official added that tensions had already been running high after Israel felt the U.S. allowed it to be blindsided by Hamas’ announcement earlier this week that it was accepting a version of a cease-fire proposal.

. . . Hamas on Monday said it had accepted the terms of a proposal brokered by Egypt and Qatar, but Israel said it was “far from” meeting its demands. Negotiators have been trying to resolve disagreements over phasing, among other differences over a truce deal that would secure the release of hostages, according to another senior administration official.

. . . Facing mounting criticism at home and abroad, Biden has increasingly clashed with Netanyahu over his military's conduct in Gaza and his insistence on an operation in Rafah that Israel says is necessary to eliminate Hamas but which aid groups fear would be catastrophic for civilians in southern Gaza.

As the news of the weapons hold has emerged in the past couple of days, I keep going back to statments from Alan Dershowitz that I've posted here. For instance, more than a month ago, I quoted his statement on YouTube,

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.

It looks like Biden is coming closer and closer to crossing Dershowitz's red line, and the problem is that it's also becoming clearer and clearer that Biden's judgment is in question -- whether a medical diagnosis needs to be invoked or not, it seems to me that there's reason simply to question whether he's under the influence of alcohol or possibly overmedicated. But the people around him, especially Vice President Harris, are no better.

Vice President Kamala Harris dodged reporters on the campaign trail Monday, creating another awkward moment as she left a restaurant in Detroit Michigan.

Harris made a campaign stop at Joe Louis Southern Kitchen to order food, but did not let reporters join her into the establishment.

As she walked briskly out of the restaurant with what looked to be a bag of takeout food, one reporter shouted a question about the details surrounding Gaza terror group Hamas accepting a ceasefire.

Shrimp and grits. You wanted to know? Shrimp and grits,' Harris said quickly without stopping and jumping into a waiting SUV.

Clearly she's being counseled to avoid the cackling laugh with which she would have answered such questions up to a few weeks ago, but "shrimp and grits" isn't any sort of improvement. A normal politician or bureaucrat at the cabinet level would have had the instinct to say something adult-sounding like can't comment on ongoing blah blah blah, but so far, Kamala hasn't even reached that level -- it's just shrimp and grits.

Another big development is

United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida Judge Aileen Cannon postponed former President Donald Trump’s classified records trial indefinitely for discovery and pre-trial motions.

It would have started on May 20.

This makes it highly unlikely that the case will come to trial before the election. However, instead of the trial beginning on May 20, the Judge has instead scheduled a number of hearings on pretrial motions to begin on that date, extending into June.

Oh damn this is too good.

Cannon set hearings on key motions including selective prosecution, unlawful of appointment of Special Counsel, and what Jack Smith really hoped to avoid--a hearing on the scope of the prosecution team incl Biden White House.

Almost an extended mini… pic.twitter.com/aTs3m9mYRZ

— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) May 7, 2024

Several of these hearings will be on defense motions to dismiss the case.

On top of that, just this morning,

The Georgia Court of Appeals on Wednesday agreed to review a decision by a Fulton County Superior Court judge who declined to disqualify District Attorney Fani Willis and her office from the 2020 election case against former President Donald Trump because of a personal relationship Willis had with a prosecutor.

. . . The defendants submitted a formal application to appeal McAfee's decision in March, and the appeals court had 45 days to decide whether to take up the matter. Trump could ask the Georgia Court of Appeals to pause proceedings while it considers the disqualification issue.

The court's decision to grant Trump's appeal will likely delay the start of any trial, though no date has been set for it to begin. The case in Fulton County is one of four Trump is facing as he mounts a third bid for the White House.

It was within the appeals court's authority simply not to hear the case, which is significant in itself, since the court has at least seen merit in the appellants' arguments, but beyond that, the developments in Florida and now Georgia have effectively removed two of the four lawfare cases Trump had faced from any likelihood they can be tried before November.

Joe Biden As Of 2022

I happened to be watching a program about space travel on TV over the weekend, and it included the clip above, which I was also able to find on YouTube. It shows Joe receiving a NASA briefing on the first images from the James Webb Space Telescope on July 11, 2022, less than two years ago. Compared to the Joe Biden we've come to know more recently, I think it's remarkable: he's engaged, on point, speaking clearly, not slurring, not mumbling, getting all the words right. At 1:34:

. . . light where stars were born, and from where they die. Light from the oldest galaxies, the oldest documented light in the history of the universe, from over 13 billion -- let me say that again -- 13 billion years ago. It's hard to even fathom. Tomorrow when this image is shared with the world, it'll be a historic moment.

Clearly this was written for him. But there are also Bidenisms, the fascination with a big number, the need to rephrase the remark about light -- but some of these words are tonguetwisters, Joe has never been great at enunciation, yet he gets them all out clearly. In far too many episodes throughout his presidency, he's struggled to read from the teleprompter, yet here he's able to do it quite well, and in a relatively minor forum.

At 2:30, the camera backs off to show him seated at a desk, facing a NASA screen and watching pictures apparently with an audience of NASA munchkins, which is an unusual setting, and I'm assuming that the seated position is some sort of planned accomodation by his handlers, possibly to keep him from getting tired out during his speech -- but whatever it is, we've got to allow that it's working here.

This brings me to my puzzle: what did they do right this time that they've almost never been able to do before or since? The clip below, for instance, outlines Joe's biggest gaffes in 2021, the year before his July 11, 2022 NASA appearance:

In fact, another video that claimed to show Joe slurring during a speech on July 4, 2022, just a week before the NASA clip, generated controversy. Since then, of course, it's become much harder to claim that videos showing Joe slurring have been doctored. Still, 2022 was late in the game -- how did they get Joe to put on a near-flawless peformance for the NASA ceremony, if even for less than ten minutes? And the clip below is apparently from April of that year:

From the start:

We're gonna seize their yachts, their luxury homes, their ill-begotten gains -- Putin's klep-to-cra-cy -- yeah. Klep -- the guys who are in the kleptocracies. Heheheheheh.

This brings me back to the point I've frequently made here, that hypercorrection, overly careful speech, and slurring are signs that someone is drunk. For a cop on traffic patrol, they're probable cause for sobriety testing. And if Joe is, as he showed during those 2022 episodes, able to turn the intoxicated speech on and off, what's happening there? At the NASA peformance, something was different. If it was some new meds, why don't they give those to him all the time? If they were able to keep him away from alcohol, how did they do that, and why do they seem to be so seldom successful?

I'm back to The King's Speech, where the speech therapist Lionel Logue is able to demonstrate to George VI that there are circumstances where he can speak without stammering -- when he's singing, when he can't hear himself talking, or when he's shouting cusswords. All of these things suggest causes and cures, even for heads of state. I still wonder if Joe's handlers could keep him off the sauce, there might be a big improvement. Joe, of course, has repeatedly claimed he's never had a drink. And Uncle Bosey was eaten by cannibals.

All I can surmise is there's a lot we aren't being told.