Dear Weekend Jolter,
If President Biden's foreign policy for Israel were an ice-cream flavor, it would have to be Neapolitan. A noncommittal mush of options that satisfies no one.
Antony Blinken condemns Hamas for fighting from within schools and apartment buildings. Biden himself rails against antisemitism. The administration votes against treating "Palestine" as a U.N. member state. It moves forward with a weapons package for Israel including tank ammo and mortar rounds. The president, at the same time, withholds bombs for use in Rafah, drawing a distinction between the supply of offensive and defensive weapons. The U.S. reportedly sits on intel about Hamas (though the White House denies this). Blinken declares the terror group is likely to stay in power no matter what Israel does, absent an "enduring" plan for stability. A spokesman says no civilians should be put at greater risk by a Rafah ground operation.
Biden once agreed that Hamas should be eliminated entirely; the administration says still that it shares Israel's goal of removing Hamas from power in Gaza. It understandably wants to minimize civilian casualties. Yet Blinken's comments, and Biden's own, now appear to rule out any major operation aimed at defeating Hamas in southern Gaza.
"If you're confused, imagine how it must feel to be a member of this administration right now," writes Noah Rothman:
On Israel, the administration speaks not in one voice but in a cacophony of asynchronous soloists, all of whom likely have reason to believe their policy preferences are shared by the president and his cabinet. The result has been a muddle. . . . In trying to please everyone, the Biden White House has achieved the opposite.
Pleasing everyone on this issue is, of course, impossible. But it would not be so difficult to satisfy a reasonable majority. The latest New York Times/Siena poll of swing-state voters found that they sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians by two to one (with only young people favoring the latter), and they trust Donald Trump over Biden to better handle the conflict, 50 to 35 percent. On these numbers and Biden's course of action so far, Rich Lowry writes:
Biden may imagine that he is maneuvering with incredible skill — subtly balancing geopolitics, alliance management, and domestic imperatives — when he is really upsetting all sides in the course of further undermining his already-rickety presidency.
This is less Otto von Bismarck than Jimmy Carter minus the Camp David accords.
A couple of centuries after Machiavelli warned against the allure of a fence-straddling neutrality and counseled instead being "either a true friend or downright enemy," Joe Biden is sort of, but not completely, with Israel and certainly not with Hamas, but not in favor of the terror group getting destroyed with all due dispatch, either.
Few parties are assured. Many are alarmed. Last week, Democrats in the House objected to Biden's aid hold-up, writing that "stalling these shipments will allow terror groups to continue stealing humanitarian aid, ultimately putting innocent Palestinians at even greater risk" — and saying the U.S. has a duty to "equip Israel with the resources she needs to defend herself." The GOP-controlled chamber sought this week to force the transfer.
The president seems to be courting the inverse of a silent majority as the war drags on, only the noisy fraction is unlikely to be satisfied by his half measures. As Jim Geraghty writes of the campus protests, "just 8 percent of surveyed college students said they had participated in a protest for or against Israel." Even among young voters, just 4 percent in the Times poll listed the Mideast conflict as their top issue in November.
In terms of policy and not politics, Noah observes that a broader problem is that the administration struggles to envision victory, as reflected in Blinken's Sunday-show comments and other diplomats' statements. "The president and his allies might believe their outlook is sophisticated and nuanced. They take the long view of history, in which there are no permanent successes — no cause that is definitively won because no cause is ever definitively lost," Noah writes. "This White House's problem is that their opponents do not think that way."
America's reticence is unlikely to convince those foes to see the world differently.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Let's hope this happens: It's Good News That Trump and Biden Have Agreed to Debate
No, it's not time to move on from the government's irresponsible Covid conduct: The Covid Comeuppance
UNC strikes a blow: DEI on the Run
Release the list: Trump Needs Another Judges List
ARTICLES
James Lynch: Exclusive: Former NIH Head Francis Collins Admits Covid Origins Not Settled, No Science to Back Social-Distance Guidance
Andrew McCarthy: Lawyer Cohen Testifies about Covertly Recording Client Trump
Dan McLaughlin: Biden Says He'll Debate Trump. Don't Hold Your Breath
Henry Olsen: Judge Marjorie Taylor Greene by the Company She Keeps
Caroline Downey: University of North Carolina Board Slashes DEI Funding, Diverts Money to Campus Police
Abigail Anthony: The Revolution Is Catered
Elliott Abrams: The U.N.'s 'Palestine' Vote: Tinker Bell at Turtle Bay
David Adesnik: Why the U.N.'s Gaza Casualty Figures Were So Off
Jessica Schwalb: My Columbia Education Is Not What I Expected
Natan Ehrenreich: Enough with the 'Uniparty' Canard
Becket Adams: The Media Aren't to Blame for Noem's Downfall
Wilfred Reilly: The Man-vs.-Bear Fallacy
Dominic Pino: What Made the Onion Funny
Richard Brookhiser: Painter of the American Revolution, and Jefferson's Wingman
Erick Erickson & Akash Chougule: The Tea Party Is Not Dead — It's Evolving
Andrew Follett: The Carbon-Offset Game Is Up
CAPITAL MATTERS
Dominic Pino proposes something that's really not so radical: Privatize the Airports
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen makes his case for why the Met gala isn't so bad, and is actually enjoyable, at least from afar. Behold the outfits — and some choice zingers: At the Met Gala, Silk, Sequins, Sass . . . and Sand?
Armond White discovers a new genre: I Saw the TV Glow Holds TV Culture Accountable
FROM THE NEW, JULY 2024 ISSUE OF NR
Andrew Roberts: D-Day at 80: How the Allies Won at Normandy and Changed History
Zach Kessel: Who Are the Anti-Israel Campus Protesters?
Madeleine Kearns: Mike Pence's Unexpected Encore
Elizabeth Currid-Halkett: The Myth of Rural Rage
Jack Butler: When Confederates Attack
HERE BE EXCERPTS. YE ARE FOREWARNED
The new issue of NR is out. There is much to explore, some of it, if you could just raise your pupils a few lines of text above this one . . . yep, right there . . . accessible from this very newsletter. As an entry point, may I recommend Elizabeth Currid-Halkett's piece on "the myth of rural rage":
Today, talk of a divided America has become a cliché, almost too obvious to remark on. The country's political geography is now reductively mapped as urban versus rural, the meritocrats versus the uneducated, liberals and the far Left at war with conservatives and the far Right. Much of the polarization argument centers on the belief that liberals and conservatives do not share the same values. According to the standard narrative, rural Americans feel rage and hate toward the liberal elite, and we are hurtling toward another civil war.
But what if, for the vast majority of rural Americans, none of this is true?
I first spoke to Craig Parker, now 72, in the autumn of 2022. Craig is a retired environmental worker, now a tree farmer, who lives in Jesup, Iowa, population 2,806. His great-great-grandfather came to Iowa in 1857, and the family has been there ever since. After our first conversation, Craig sent me a photo of himself with his son and grandchildren riding a green Oliver tractor, a moody sky and vast verdant landscape behind them. "Three generations of Parker men at the tree farm," Craig wrote.
Over the course of two years, I had many conversations with Craig, a lifelong rural Republican, about his views on America and its hot-button issues. "There should be a way for people to come to this country and follow their dreams and build up," Craig told me when I asked him about immigration and the infamous wall.
Craig was clear that he's lived a very fortunate life, but for him privilege isn't about money and things. He knows he was born into a world where many are not treated equally. "We had a guest pastor and he talked about white privilege. I'd never thought about it that way — a pretty sheltered life. Everyone should have the opportunity to do things for themselves. Nobody should have to sleep in the streets or go home hungry."
Craig doesn't own a Whole Foods tote bag, but he is a true conservationist who lives mainly off what he grows on his own land. When I asked him about same-sex marriage, Craig said he "struggles," given his relationship to Scripture, but believes civil rights should be for everyone. His responses capture the sentiment of dozens of rural Americans I got to know over the past few years while conducting research for my book, The Overlooked Americans. But these aren't just anecdotes.
Yet you would never know that Craig, or any of the millions of Americans like him, existed if you read many of the recent observations of rural America as a place filled with hate and vitriol. Recently, an academic, accompanied by his journalist co-author, trotted onto MSNBC and denounced rural Americans as "the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay, geodemographic group in the country," and their book, endorsed by a Nobel Prize–winning economist, became an instant best seller.
In reality, most Americans, in all regions, care about the same things — family, friends, health and happiness, democracy. Rural citizens are more likely to include religion on that list. But according to the University of Chicago's General Social Survey, even on politically charged issues of racial equality, religion, the environment, and trust in our government, urban and rural Americans largely feel the same way. Statistically, about half of both rural and urban Americans are religious, even if rural Americans are more likely to openly discuss their belief in God. Over half of both rural and urban Americans feel too little is being done to protect the environment. When asked whether they believe government should aid black Americans, rural and urban respondents are similarly supportive. The General Social Survey also reports that rural Americans with less than a high-school education are the most likely group to support preferential hiring of black people.
For years, pundits have issued shrill warnings that rural American voters are at best ignorant of what is best for them and at worst angry and vengeful. In his 2004 book What's the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank portrayed rural, working-class America's loyalty to the Republican Party as a form of "derangement." Every few years a book comes out claiming to reveal the real rural America, as we've seen in the condescension of J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, the false-consciousness argument in Jonathan Metzl's Dying of Whiteness, or the mistrust and bitterness described in Katherine Cramer's Politics of Resentment. Some reporting is more sympathetic than others, but all of it says more or less the same thing in different measures: Rural America is angry. Rural America is backward. Rural America feels left behind. For many liberal academics and journalists, it is simply incomprehensible that the vast majority of rural Americans might actually be content and not resentful of coastal elites — or, perhaps worse, not thinking about coastal elites at all. People like Craig challenge the view that rural America is a monolith of angry, poor racists. I'm here to tell you it's not.
The presidential debates are on. Or . . . are they? Dan McLaughlin makes the case for viewing this week's big announcement with skepticism:
For now, the campaigns say that they have agreed to an initial debate on June 27 on CNN and a second debate on ABC on September 10.
I warned last fall that we shouldn't assume any debates would happen this year, and that Trump ducking the Republican debates was forfeiting the high ground that could be used to make it costlier for Biden to back out. I will believe we are having debates when I see them. This race is between two very old men who struggle verbally. We have one candidate whose doctors don't want him walking, and one whose lawyers don't want him talking.
That said, there is political risk in appearing afraid to debate. The recent movement of the two candidates toward an agreement to debate suggests that both of them realize that they need to appear willing to debate the other. Also, the side that thinks it is losing knows that there is more risk in not debating, and Trump's persistent leads in the polls have started to sink in enough to worry Team Biden.
But consider the incentives to bail out. Start with the fact that the candidate who's ahead won't want to debate. Right now, that's Trump. By the fall, it might be Biden. In the primaries, it was both of them. Either way, the incentive to debate drops on one side in proportion to how it rises on the other.
Sure, neither candidate will want to take the heat for just pulling out. But these are not exactly two candidates who have been unwilling to break norms in the past when they thought it would help them — Biden has some gall in hitting Trump for ducking primary debates when Biden did the same thing. Either will gleefully use some pretext to claim that the debate system was being rigged against them, and their supporters will eat it up. Moreover, both campaigns have thus far operated as if firing up their own supporters is the only thing in this election.
Even aside from the pre-existing Biden narrative that the president shouldn't dignify his opponents with a platform, there will be no shortage of available pretexts, because both sides will be jockeying to control how the debates are staged. Biden has finally done what Republican campaigns have flirted with for years: he's rejecting the role of the Commission on Presidential Debates. That means that everything about the debates — timing, moderators, rules, crowds, third-party access to the stage — will be negotiated directly between the two campaigns.
David Adesnik, with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, explains the significant revision in Gaza casualty figures from the U.N.:
The U.N. offered no explanation for the sudden change. On May 6, the body's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) released an infographic showing that more than 9,500 women and 14,500 children had been killed in Gaza. Two days later, OCHA's updated graphic cut those numbers nearly in half, showing that 4,959 women and 7,797 children had actually lost their lives — a combined reduction of more than 11,000. When a reporter pressed U.N. spokesman Farhan Haq to explain the revision, all he received was a standard disclaimer that "in the fog of war, it's difficult to come up with numbers."
True enough, yet for months the U.N. put its trust in numbers generated by Hamas-controlled sources, and the Biden administration put its trust in the U.N. These numbers have served as the basis for relentless criticism of Israel, with Joe Biden accusing it of "indiscriminate bombing" and deciding, ultimately, to withhold shipments of weapons. In his State of the Union address in March, Biden told Congress that 30,000 Palestinians had died in the war, without giving any indication that this number came from a Hamas-run ministry. If 11,000 fewer women and children than previously reported have died, it becomes difficult to portray the Israeli armed forces as an out-of-control war machine. Instead, the president should return to his policy of marching in lockstep with the Israelis toward the common goal of eradicating Hamas.
To understand the U.N.'s sudden revision of the casualty data, one has to know there are actually two separate Gaza institutions that generate and distribute these numbers. Both are controlled by Hamas, but the information they release is often contradictory. The first institution is the Gaza Ministry of Health, which runs the hospitals and receives their information about casualties. The second is the Government Media Office (GMO), which shares information from the Ministry of Health but makes explained additions. As OCHA itself admitted with regard to GMO, "their methodology is unknown." Nevertheless, OCHA has relied on GMO data since the start of the war — on May 6, OCHA cited GMO as its source for the claim that 9,500 women and 14,500 children had died in Gaza.
On May 8, OCHA switched without notice to employing data from the Health Ministry that showed that 4,959 women and 7,797 children had been identified among the dead. . . .
Despite its far lower estimates of female and child fatalities, the Health Ministry still insists that the overall death toll is greater than 35,000 because there are more than 10,000 unidentified individuals among the dead. The U.N. is borrowing that story to justify its continued use of the 35,000 figure, but the number may not hold up, because it is based on what the ministry calls "reliable media sources," not hospital reports. If the U.N., the Biden administration, and the press corps can summon the skepticism necessary to do a full vetting of the numbers put out by Hamas-controlled sources, many more revisions may be necessary.
Okay, one last thing on the Noem dog debacle — from Becket Adams, on her attempt to blame the media:
The press is guilty of many things, but destroying South Dakota governor Kristi Noem's political career is not one of them.
She did that all by her lonesome, though she would have you believe otherwise.
Noem went into hiding last week following a string of disastrous media interviews meant to promote her new book, No Going Back. The final straw was when she bombed in an interview with Fox Business's Stuart Varney. Immediately following that disaster, which ended with the governor visibly furious and grumbling, Noem abruptly canceled scheduled interviews with Fox News's Greg Gutfeld and CNN's Dana Bash. In explaining the cancellations, Noem's office cited a brewing snowstorm in South Dakota, which was an odd thing to cite considering that the governor was still physically in New York City, where Gutfeld's and Bash's studios are located. She had already been in the Fox building that very day!
But what can you do? Noem's press tour was doomed from the start after a passage came to light wherein she boasted that she shot and killed her family's 14-month-old puppy, Cricket, because he was unruly. She also wrote in her book that her Day One first step as president would be to put down President Biden's dog, Commander ("Commander, say hello to Cricket for me!"). Interviewers were justifiably fascinated not just by Noem's admission — a politician with national aspirations proudly admitting that she once executed a puppy in a gravel pit is indeed a rarity in American politics — but by her effort to tie it to a larger story about fearless leadership.
Were there no other personal anecdotes available? Is she unaware that humans are fond of dogs?
Does she think Old Yeller is feel-good family fun? The billion-dollar John Wick franchise is a four-movie slaughter-fest of revenge killings sparked by a puppy's execution — and every single person in the audience is comfortable with the killings. After all, they killed his puppy!
The mind reels. . . .
Following the uncomfortable interviews and the criticisms, Noem has alleged a shadowy media conspiracy to destroy her.
But the press did nothing wrong. It's her book. There is no conspiracy. There is no "gotcha." The worst anyone has done to Noem is quote her book at her!
Shout-Outs
The entirety of Jerry Seinfeld's Duke commencement address
Josh Christenson & Jennie Taer, at the New York Post: Biden plans executive order to shut down border once crossings reach 4,000 per day — despite saying he needs Congress to act
River Page, at the Free Press: Barron Trump, American Caesar
CODA
A little something celestial after last weekend's aurora viewing in the lower 48 (for those, unlike me, who were able to see it): Sidestepping the also-apt "Purple Haze" . . . here's an exultant instrumental titled for another feature of northern skies. It's atmospheric, in a couple ways.
Megyn Kelly -> Pete Hegseth responds to 2017 rape accusation. 🔥 vol. 3, issue 13 | December 6, 2024 Quick Hits All the news you need in...
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