Playing a Weak Hand of Trump Cards

 

Trump has been saying that Ukraine "doesn't have any cards" but I've noticed that Trump kept publicly sweetening the deal (no NATO for Ukraine? cede territory?) just to get Putin to this point--a phone call, as if suspecting Putin is the actual harder person to bring to the table and hoping he could do it with an "all carrot, no stick" approach. 

People sometimes ask what Lincoln or Reagan would have made of the peculiar character who leads their party. Today I'm thinking of Theodore Roosevelt, who said, "Talk softly and carry a large stick." Trump might talk loudly, but who knows what "big stick" he would ever use on the one man he never criticizes? 

 He got his phone call, though--after being made to wait and being cut up by Putin amongst his real homies. His 30-day ceasefire was pretty much rejected, as Putin heaped thoroughly unacceptable conditions into the mix. Trump seems unfazed that he has been disrespected, again. 

Trump, the irascible, the petty, the critic of or his critics--he doesn't feel any need at all to respond to Putin? What gives? 

The Elephant at the Protest

 

I am completely opposed to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, I genuinely think the Rafah operation will be a bloodbath and should be reconsidered, and I am highly skeptical that the eradication of Hamas is fully possible without what already are proving to be unacceptable human casualties. I want to believe that in a different political situation, Gazans might want something more like Fatah (which Hamas exterminated in that region) leading them in an autonomous state. I support the free speech rights of the protesters at various colleges, even to the extent that I am dubious of the effect of the protests and don't truly believe they are as well-informed as they need to be.

I do not want a recap of National Guard breaking heads at Berkeley, or Kent State. Reactionaries are looking for the opportunity to have hardhat riots and so on, and some people are openly fantasizing about the Democratic National Convention being another 1968. 

Given my feelings about all of the above, let me be that wet-blanket Gen X asshat who wants to tell the children, ever so delicately--the hell you are doing the same thing my parents' generation did. When pro-Palestinians all say "Genocide Joe", maybe they think they are just echoing their grandparents' asking LBJ how many kids he killed that day. But Joe isn't dropping the bombs, and Israel is getting incoming missiles all the time from Hamas, Hezbollah, and there is a threat of war from Iran.

Which leads me to point out that young man in the picture above with the Hezbollah flag--with a machine gun on it. Almost a gentle hippie, just repping something that is by no means a peace movement, but terrorism. 

When 1968 begat Nixon, he prolonged the Vietnam War. No, really. My dad's generation was drafted. He (Nixon) on the advice of Kissinger, prolonged the war. 

President Biden isn't Sleeping on This

 

A lot of folks won’t read past the first couple paragraphs of Biden’s op-ed today - but don’t sleep on it.

In addition to calling out Hamas, it is a direct refutation of Netanyahu’s policies - almost unheard of from an American President.

free/🎁 link:https://t.co/vov74JkGI1 pic.twitter.com/DVhPuKNjlv

— ClearingTheFog (@clearing_fog) November 19, 2023

I had something utterly different in the pipeline for this evening's post, but it's late, and I will get to it tomorrow, and I did a deep dive into Christian Nationalism and eschatology (wish I didn't!) and did you know I'm already writing one poem a day as a November challenge to myself? But I digress--this is important.

And also, when I've been hearing the Palestinian rights protesters call my president "Genocide Joe" and going after liberal politicians for their support of Israel, I've been incensed: You don't know what is happening behind the scenes, what Biden is working towards, or how maintaining aid is a kind of leverage to accomplish that. Those things aren't going to take place wholly transparently, because that isn't how such negotiations do. Biden isn't in charge of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu is. There is an assumption that withdrawal of support necessarily makes Israel "make nice" as it were--and then nothing else fucking horrible happens. 

This isn't the assumption I would roll with. 

This is Stupid. Don't be This.

 

There's simply no condemnation of Hamas that is not at the same time a condemnation of the Palestinian resistance. pic.twitter.com/FzZmsqUlQO

— Vijay Prashad (@vijayprashad) November 9, 2023

No, actually, you can condemn Hamas because they have not accomplished shit. If being a terrorist entity that lobs missiles all over the place, and most recently did a pogram and raped and mutilated Israeli and other people and went on to kidnap hostages and are the kinds of unstable fucks who don't care if literally tens of thousands of Palestinians die as a result because it's all GOOD PRESS, then actually, I would not call this shit "resistance" but "sociopathy."

If one was really interested in the cause of Palestinian liberation but didn't care if the people lived or died, I'd be skeptical. So let's talk stupid numbers: if the IDF has killed 10,000 people to get to 60 Hamas fighters (and they've killed more UN aides and journalists including their families) you probably see 500K Gazans dead before the government thought they were done routing out Hamas. MAYBE.

Don't ask what number of Gazan dead is OK for the Israel government: what is OK for the supposed liberators of Palestine? What the fuck are they doing? I condemn what is supposedly a "Palestinian resistance" because they aren't shit. They are not shit. The Palestinians dying all over the place? The way Hamas has fuel for rockets but not generators and all that? The way there is tunnels for terror, not to save lives? 

One War

 

BREAKING:
Pentagon: U.S. military hit two facilities in eastern Syria used by Iran in “self defense strikes.”

Secy of Defense Austin warns “If attacks by Iran’s proxies against U.S. forces continue, we will not hesitate to take further necessary measures.” pic.twitter.com/SI6jSUcUhd

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) October 27, 2023

Having considered the Israeli massacre by Hamas occurring on Putin's birthday and the way it directed attention away from Ukraine, I really can't count out the idea that there is one war. When I see Putin using Iran materiel, I see one war. When I see a Hamas delegation going to the Kremlin, I see one war.  International conditions, conceived in fuckery, owing to one guy who is probably chronically if not terminally ill and mentally unfit--Putin. Trying to make his former Soviet something again. 

I get how trying to make a country something again can be the most misplaced nostalgia in the world. All the more reason why I see a petrostate hand funneling money to support the assbackwards dreams of MAGA right here, funding the Civil War or Revolutionary ideation of the NRA via guns. As one pretty obvious example. Or more lowkey: they just own the right because of bigotry and authoritarianism. 

This nation (the US) started by overthrowing the right of kings to rule--a religious right to a chosen few sanctioning an abrogation of individual rights. The idea of God-appointed rulers should appall people living in our representational republic. And yet some want to install Trump and call him "chosen", As Putin got installed by various forms of unfreedom and leverage. As a Bashar al-Assad represents massive unfreedom so authoritarian right-wingers will approve.  It's not hard to understand. It is also not hard to understand that their support of this travesty of freedom isn't about liberation at all, but force. 

Force they want to use on the US to scare us away from the one war. The war against democracy and rule of law. 

The Flog of War

 

Tom Cotton on Fox News Sunday: "As far as I'm concerned, Israel can bounce the rubble in Gaza. Anything that happens in Gaza is the responsibility of Hamas. Hamas killed women and children in Israel last weekend." pic.twitter.com/j1BiV7yjab

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 15, 2023

Sure. Make the rubble bounce.  As far as Tom Cotton is concerned. But I'm not Tom Cotton (thanks be) and I have a conscience and understand that just because Hamas sucks, doesn't mean responsible people get to be comfortable that innocent humans become collateral damage. This is why someone like Tom Cotton shouldn't really be a senator. One of my absolutes in a very small basket of them is sociopaths shouldn't be in office. If you have no empathy for other people, go be elsewhere. Sell patent drugs to gym rats. Produce reality television. Design hideous clothes for plus size people. You'd still be a horror-show, but you wouldn't this fucking dead-eyed horror-show, talking about how Palestinian kids are bearing responsibility for shit they never did to the extent that bricks should fall around their ears. 

He thinks he's talking about "rubble". He doesn't see that people, real humans, live in and around that. Kids are in, around, and under the rubble. They are starved and thirsty when supplies are denied them. He's a father. He isn't thinking about the rubble bouncing on his own kid. It never would. 

I'm a little sorry for my delinquent posting--but I took a couple days to think about why anyone needed to demand pictures of beheaded babies on Twitter to believe the Hamas massacre against Israelis existed, and why I saw so many pictures of Syrian dead babies I remembered from 10 years ago being called Palestinian dead babies. I'm having a hard, hard time understanding who is satisfied by pictures of dead babies at all. (This sort of thing isn't new at all and is for shock value.) 

TWGB: You Don't Have to Hand it to Hezbollah

Trump's reckless stream-of-consciousness diatribes are sometimes more revealing than he thinks they are. What does it say about the man when he feels the need to say that "Hezbollah is very smart" and that he has some beef with Netanyahu going back to the US strike on Iran's General Soleimani? You have to wind of the tangled thread of his speech; he might not know that Hezbollah is based in Lebanon making striking Israel in the north sort of logical: what should they do, go around?  He mentions the failure of Iran's intelligence. He says Netanyahu was unprepared...

Many people are saying, as the formulation goes, that Trump is really actually made at Netanyahu for acknowledging Biden's win over him in 2020 and for his gratitude at US support now. Trump is, in other words, jealous and feeling upstaged. This might make sense of another weird detail of Trump's ramblings lately, his insistence that Barack Obama is Joe Biden's boss. He needs to credit the competence of his political rival to someone else.