PMC Commentary

The right wants just about everyone to "go fuck themselves"; even themselves

Elon Musk's dubious performance at the Dealbook summit yesterday was scarcely a one-0ff in the irascible world of neofascists, which is to say, those in the Republican Party and those who adore it.

Vice President Dick Cheney may have set the slangy trend when, in 2004, he told Democratic Sen. Pat Leahy — on the Senate floor, no less — to go "fuck yourself." This rather direct expression of disapproval — or some variation of it — has now become so common in the vicious Trumpian universe of politics that even mainstream newspapers often no longer bother to bowdlerize it.

The latest incident comes from not an unusual source of mercurial profanity, just one — in somewhat typical Republican fashion — who flips and flops on most everything with uncommon velocity and frequency. In short, whatever the moment calls for.

I write, as you may have guessed, about the aways quotable Kevin McCarthy. He's seemingly done with kidney-punching his partisan colleagues; he has moved on to bigger targets more deserving of a blow to some vital organ. Alas, his most recent experience with over-the-top, spur-of-the-moment emotion came on a bodily separated phone call. So a verbal assault was all he had. From The Washington Post:      

During a phone call with McCarthy weeks after his historic Oct. 3 removal as House speaker, Trump detailed the reasons he had declined to ask Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and other hard-right lawmakers to back off their campaign to oust the California Republican from his leadership position.

During the call, Trump lambasted McCarthy for not expunging his two impeachments and not endorsing him in the 2024 presidential campaign, according to people familiar with the conversation.

"F--- you," McCarthy claimed to have then told Trump, when he rehashed the call later to other people in two separate conversations, according to the people. A spokesperson for McCarthy said that he did not swear at the former president and that they have a good relationship. A spokesperson for Trump declined to comment.

Aside from the Post's unwarranted expurgation of a Merriam-Webster entry, there is, conspicuously, a problem with McCarthy's story (as with all his stories). He claimed to have said "Fuck you" to Trump, just as we might claim to others that brilliantly comical remark we made to a cop who ticketed us; a remark that, in actuality, came to us only five miles later.

This rather spoils the story. Nevertheless, in the retelling its spirit is there — the right's unending pursuit of reducing the beautifully kaleidoscopic English language to monosyllabic Trumpian bile. 

A half-day in the life of Truth Social

Yesterday afternoon, in a moment of feeling masochistically deprived, I dropped by Trump's online asylum, Truth Social. That should get me caught up with torturing myself, I figured. Boy was I right. I didn't read all of his midday posts — c'mon, man, I'm not suicidal — but enough to stumble across a harmoniously deranged triad of the laughable, the frightening, and the typically absurd, in that order.

I believe we heard this before: 

"Getting much better Healthcare than Obamacare for the American people will be a priority of the Trump Administration. It is not a matter of cost, it is a matter of HEALTH. America will have one of the best Healthcare Plans anywhere in the world. Right now it has one of the WORST!" 

Ask not what he means by "It is not a matter of cost, it is a matter of HEALTH." Neither he, I, nor anyone else could possibly explain it; good health is, in one way or another, unavoidably and almost entirely a matter of cost. It should go without saying that Trump would never actually get around to implementing or even trying to pass whatever he might have in mind healthcare-wise, which is nothing. He may be unaware, however, that "Obamacare" no longer carries a negative connotation. Last year, the Kaiser Family Foundation surveyed the public, carefully including the once-derided word. It asked, "In general, do you have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the health reform bill signed into law in 2010, known commonly as the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare?" The result, as you can see, was 60-40 in favor of Obamacare. So as a general-election pitch, Trump might want to rethink his healthcare bullshit. 

Next I was greeted by Trump's unequivocally fascistic chief executive view of the Fourth Estate and U.S. Constitution:   

"MSNBC (MSDNC) uses FREE government approved airwaves [wrong, of course; it's cable or satellite], and yet it is nothing but a 24 hour hit job on Donald J. Trump and the Republican Party for purposes of ELECTION INTERFERENCE. Brian Roberts, its Chairman and CEO, is a slimeball who has been able to get away with these constant attacks for years.... Our so-called 'government' should come down hard on them and make them pay for their illegal political activity. Much more to come, watch!" 

You'll notice he doesn't say MSNBC lies, as do Fox News, Newsmax and OAN. And speaking of the media's "slimeballs" — real presidential verbiage, that — can anyone ever outdo the recently retired Rupert Murdoch in veritable slimeballsiness? Even he knew Trump is a threat to democracy and the rule of law, but the once and possibly future king was profitable, Rupert always reckoned, and Rupert's profits consistently outweighed such petty civic concerns. But above and threateningly beyond Trump's characteristic prattle about a biased news network is his promise to "come down hard" on "MSDNC" (so clever) — and by extension, any other outlet he finds offensive. When he writes "Watch!" he means the First Amendment should watch out.  

Finally: "Spoke with Mark Fisher yesterday, a great guy, very honored to have his and BLM’s support. I have done more for Black people than any other President (Lincoln?)."

Sorry, but Fisher's video remarks are so breathtakingly idiotic — as is Trump's self-comparison to Abraham Lincoln — they leave me speechless. (I will say, as reported by MTN.com, that Fisher "hasn't been a member of BLM Rhode Island for over a year." Just another Trump falsification: that he has "BLM's support.")

So there you have it; a brief tour of Trump's online asylum — the faintly preferable alternative to sticking pins in your eyes. Still, I have to admit, there one can find some of the entertainingly dumbest thoughts ever to traverse American politics; the vague and indescribable thrill that comes with being frightened half to death; and the fascinating theatre of the insanely absurd.       

Mr. K is no more

I can't say I have anything fresh to say about Henry Kissinger. Hosannas and obloquies will fill newspaper columns for 24-48 hours, and then he'll be forgotten by Americans just as most of our history is. So my having little to say is hardly a loss to future humanity.

I lean to the obloquy camp. Fresh or not, I will say that Kissinger tried to divorce human ethics from all human activity in the foreign affairs realm. He succeeded brilliantly. From orchestrating the cruel regime of Chili's Pinochet to assisting Nixon in his vastly dishonorable, mass-murdering ways in Vietnam and Cambodia, few have triumphed so amorally as Mr. Kissinger did.

Ben Rhodes, President Obama's deputy national security adviser, has written much the same now that Kissinger is no more. "[He] exemplified the gap between the story that America, the superpower, tells and the way that we can act in the world. At turns opportunistic and reactive, his was a foreign policy enamored with the exercise of power and drained of concern for the human beings left in its wake.... [Kissinger mistook] cynicism — or realism — with wisdom."

But, as with everything in life, it's complicated, which is why I qualify my sentiment as one of leaning to the critical camp. From Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy to cracking open China's closed doors there's no question that he accomplished some good, some of it worthy of emulation. SoS Antony Blinken said from Tel Aviv that Kissinger "really set the standard for everyone who followed in this job."

That could be read cynically, I suppose. 

Elon Musk is the world's most offensive jerk, and he just proved it, again

This, from the MeidasTouch Network:

"Today, in a public conversation with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times DealBook Summit, Twitter [I love that] CEO Elon Musk was asked about his thoughts about the many companies and brands that have stopped advertising on Twitter [love it again] following Musk's antisemitic comments on the platform recently. His response was simple: ..."

I refused to quote MTN's version of what Musk said. He did not say the boycotting firms "can go f-asterisk-ck themselves." And I apologize for running this video version, too — he also did not say they "can go [expletive deleted] themselves" — but this was the shortest clip I could find this early in the reporting. I'm sure more literal, honest versions will appear soon, but I wanted to get something up now.

Because there's not a minute to waste when it comes to further demonstrating that Musk is the most offensive jerk — in every way imaginable — on earth. Doubtless his toothless redneck fans on "Twitter" will roll in the aisles with much gaiety and delight, as will your average middle-school male. Beyond that emotionally stunted crowd, I cannot envision anyone with any taste, class or mental sophistication thinking that Elon Musk is an admirable human being.

***

Yep.

MAGA morons with monetized accounts and ad revenue sharing cheering on Elon while he tells advertisers to go f*ck themselves is peak MAGA.

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 30, 2023

Voters, Trump, and a possibly dystopian economic future

I'm not as confident that "Donald Trump is on pace to win back the White House" as Eric Levitz of New York Magazine is. It's true that His Indictedness recently showed polling leads over President Biden in several battleground states. But those statistics have gripped too many political journalists with sense of permanency. Hey guys, it's November 2023, not 2024.

What will probably last is voters' preference for Republicans — hence Trump — when it comes to handling the economy. Real 'Ripley's Believe It Or Not' stuff, for sure. But let's face it, the average American voter has the memory capacity and macroeconomic understanding of a dung beetle.   

Still, the electorate is what it is. And should it carry out its suicidal preference for an unhinged, criminal ignoramus in the White House, this, as Levitz notes, is what they can expect:  

"[Trump's] agenda includes imposing a 10 percent tariff on all foreign-made goods, enacting large deficit-financed tax cuts, and slashing America’s foreign-born labor force through mass deportations and immigration restriction. Taken together, this constitutes a recipe for a drastic increase in U.S. consumer prices."

Which is to say, inflation — the biggest albatross the electorate has foolishly hung around Biden's neck. The poor creature is only a third the size it was not long ago, but since when did American voters start reading newspapers?    

Last summer, an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that 69% of Americans believe in angels. "People turn to angels for comfort," said a nondenominational pastor in California. He neglected to mention religious faith — the antithesis of empirical reason.  

These must also be the voters who believe Trump and Republicans and their thoroughly irrational, wholly discredited macroeconomic policies will somehow benefit them. Their political beliefs are grounded only in faith and whatever they find comforting. The empirical economic record of these GOP nincompoops is either unknown to them or it's simply dismissed.  

Their belief in angels hurts no one, however. If only we could say that of their politics. 

Hamas is thanking Israel for all the death and destruction

As Israeli military forces have reduced Hamas's size, the group has only grown in respect.

"Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and the elation over the prisoners’ release have deepened support for Hamas in the Israeli-occupied West Bank," reports The Times. "For some Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank, the freed prisoners have become a potent symbol of Hamas’s ability to achieve tangible results and its willingness to fight for the Palestinian cause."

Prime Minister Netanyahu's pledge to "eradicate" Hamas is a worthy ambition. But, with depressing predictably, his exceptionally violent efforts to do so have had a boomeranging, self-destructive effect.

The more Palestinians killed by the IDF — for the moment, estimates range from 13,000 to more than 15,000, roughy 10,000 of whom were women and children — the deeper the livings' resentment against the occupying killer and, understandably, the greater the admiration for Hamas the avenger. Violence may deplorably beget violence, but in this case it was only violence that secured the release of Palestinians detained without trials (again, women and children). 

In addition to Hamas's reduction in size by the Israeli military is a terrorist-incubation period in progress. As youthful Palestinian males watch their family and friends being annihilated by 2,000-pound Israeli bombs, these youngsters are being radicalized. In short order they'll replace Hamas's dead, possibly in greater numbers than the group's entirety before 7 October.

Thus while Netanyahu's ambition is a worthy one, his methodology in achieving it will likely result only in a larger, stronger, even more determined enemy. And then there's Iran, which could not be more pleased with the prime minister's overall strategy and self-destructive tactics.

Analysts "caution that support for [Hamas] is limited to a minority of residents." (The analysts are speaking of the West Bank's population; here I'm assuming the same for residents of Gaza.) I'm a trifle puzzled by The Times' wording of caution, since its verb form means warn. I doubt that's the pro-Hamas impression the Grey Lady intended to make. At any rate, it's the wording of "a minority" that's essentially meaningless — 10%, 35%, 49%? — but still worrisome. 

Even 10% of just Gaza's population is about 220,000. Forty-seven percent of that is under the age of 18 — 103,400. The male percentage of the 10-19 age group is 23. That would mean nearly 24,000 young men either now or will, when older, harbor some form of "support for Hamas" — roughly the group's total size in early October. 

For now, as Ghassan Khatib, director of the Jerusalem Media and Communication Center, has noted, Palestinians are increasingly fearful about their vulnerability and feel they "don’t have any alternative. The only game in town is Hamas."

The old saw about unintended consequences was ideated for this very moment. 

Biden, haunted by history, is taking heat from Arab and Jewish Americans alike

From The Times:

Just weeks after the start of the Israel-Hamas war, Mr. Biden had invited a small group of prominent Muslim Americans to the White House to discuss Islamophobia in America. The participants were blunt with him.

They told him that his embrace of Israel after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks was seen by many as permission for Israel’s bombing in Gaza. They said the president’s statement casting doubt on the death toll among Palestinians was insulting. And they said the fatal stabbing of a 6-year-old Muslim boy outside Chicago was just one devastating result of the dehumanization of their community....

Some younger [WH] staff members, particularly those with Arab or Muslim backgrounds, have said they feel disenchanted with the president they serve....

"There’s this sense that the trauma of one people counts more than the trauma of another," said James Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, which has been polling the community for 27 years. "It’s like there are two intolerables, and they’ve decided which one they’re going to accept."

Peter Beinart, the incisive Jewish-American commentator I quoted two days ago, is also displeased with the White House:

"I will vote for Joe Biden... but I’m not going to lie about what he did.... And the truth is that Joe Biden bears a lot of blame for this continuing pattern of defeating ethical Palestinian resistance and making it easier for Hamas to make the argument that the Palestinians get better results when they kill Israelis. And Biden did this by never using America’s leverage with its $3.8 billion in military aid or its protection of Israel in international forums; never using that to stop settlement growth even as it ramped up under this radical government...; and sticking with this kind of corrupt, discredited Mahmoud Abbas by moving towards a Saudi normalization deal that essentially was going to sideline Palestinians except maybe with the barest of fig leaves."

Again, The Times:

Dr. [James] Zogby, who has advised several Democratic campaigns on their Palestinian platforms, including Mr. Biden’s in 2020, said he believed the repercussions of the war would span generations.

Just as the Hamas attacks evoked the vulnerability and trauma of the Holocaust, Dr. Zogby said, Israel’s response evoked what Palestinians call the Nakba, or "catastrophe," the 1948 displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the war surrounding the creation of Israel 75 years ago.

"It’s not as if, from the earliest days, that we didn’t know how this was going to end," he said of the war in Gaza [bold added]. "When the dust settles, and the tears dry, what we’re going to have is more dead bodies, more anger and more extremism."

Which is why, to repeat the history of this conflict — its genesis, now inexorably haunting Biden — Secretary of State George Marshall and Defense Secretary Robert Lovett intensely opposed President Truman's actions in 1948, instead strongly advocating that the U.S. not choose sides. Let the United Nations handle the Palestinian-Jewish question, they insisted, just as the organization was in the process of doing. It's that, said Marshall and Lovett, or face the wrath of the Arab world — and all that comes with it — for generations to come.

The two presidential advisers were not playing 900-number psychics; they were simply addressing the conflict from a logical, national security point of view. But Truman, as he was wont to do, went with impetuosity.   

Speaker Johnson is already on this, Dr. Glashow

My dear, Nobel Prize-winning Dr. Sheldon: Why all the needless curiosity and questions? Just ask God's vicar, Mike Johnson, sometimes known as the speaker of the House.

“I am a Bible-believing Christian," said Johnson in a Fox News interview. "Someone asked me today in the media, they said, 'It’s curious, people are curious: What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?' I said, 'Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.'" 

That makes quick work of the physicist's questions. It whisks them aside and then straight into the ashbin of ill-informed heresy. From Mike's deep reading of one ancient book, he can tell you that a Christian God created everything from beach sand to galaxies in a bang-less six days, a mere 6,000 years ago. On this, good-Christian opinions do not vary. Indeed they're not even opinions. They're facts.  

Only infidels would squander their time asking silly questions like Sheldon's.     

With God's vicar in charge of the U.S. House, I do rather wonder how its Committee on Science, Space and Technology will fare over the coming year. What great strides will it make inquiring into, for instance, Noah's Ark, the Red Sea's separability and the Shroud of Turin? 

What's The Matter With Kansas? - and the other 49 states

The Bulwark's Jonathan Last has been on the same protracted quest as I have: trying to comprehend the titanic gap between the real economy and the economy imagined by voters. He not-too-jokingly calls his latest exploration of this mysterious mismatch "Part 174 of my continuing series." My numbered entries on this seemingly unchanging topic are somewhere in the same neighborhood. 

But in Last's latest, I learned something new — surprisingly new, but also something that confirmed my suspicion all along.

For two years we've been informed by various surveys that voters believe the nation's economy is bad and likely getting worse, even though there are millions of new jobs, wages are increasing, wages have surpassed the steadily falling rate of inflation, and consumer spending is strong.

Yet economists, politicians and journalists have explained repeatedly that voters are down on the national economy — thus President Biden and congressional Democrats as well — because they're seeing no improvement in their personal lives. (The graph shows the collective answers to a Sept. 2023 NBC News poll that asked, "Which party deals with economy better?") But here's the kicker — that is, the shockingly new twist, as passed along by Mr. Last:   

"The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment survey released its October numbers last week and The People not only think that the economy is bad, but that it’s getting worse." Nothing new there. But get this: "[Michigan’s survey also asked] people how they feel about their own lives.... The survey’s director, Joanne Hsu, notes that the October numbers showed that people feel pretty good about their personal finances." 

Hence the mystery is somewhat solved. Voters aren't gloomy about the thriving national economy because (as we have been told ad infinitum) they're feeling some personal pain. They're gloomy because they haven't the faintest notion of how the economy is actually doing. They're gloomy because they're ignorant (my aforementioned suspicion). Or, as Last sarcastically puts it:

So let’s get this straight: People think their personal financial situations are pretty good. But they think the broader economy is terrible. They also expect the broader economy to deteriorate further. And they expect inflation to get worse. Even though inflation has been abating pretty continuously and is now in a good place.

Sounds like a citizenry well equipped to make serious decisions about the future of democracy!

I happened to read Tom Nichols' Atlantic newsletter right after reading Last's piece. The timing was serendipitous. Nichols had looked at some NY Times focus group interviews with Democratic voters only, and what he saw were answers of unsettling incoherence.  

"One respondent," wrote Nichols, "a lifelong Democrat, said in the poll that 'she would vote for Mr. Trump over Mr. Biden, whom she called 'too old and a bit out of touch' and 'a bit of a doofus.' By the end of the interview, she said she’d probably vote for Biden again."

It gets worse. Another Democrat said "she strongly supports abortion rights—and did not realize that Mr. Biden does, too. She said that because states’ abortion bans had gone into effect during his presidency, she assumed it was because of him." 

Oh dear. Oh my God. Heaven help us. Nichols observed that ignorant voters — what he still charitably called "low-information voters"— are "a natural advantage for Trump," which of course is true. And ignorance seems to have reached epidemic proportions, not only throughout the usual, self-cloistered crowd of right-wing clowns, but among Democratic voters, too.   

If Donald J. triumphs next year, it won't be because of any extraordinary political talents on his part. It will be because the American electorate put a loaded gun to its already mostly empty, incoherent head, and somewhat superfluously pulled the trigger.  

Steve Bannon, thinking just like a Hamas fighter

In an Esquire interview with the caliginous Steve Bannon, he says "Donald Trump won the 2020 election. Of that there is not even a question." The interviewer replies, "Obviously you expect me not to agree with you." To that Bannon responds, "Of course I expect you not to agree with me. And I’m also not looking for you to agree with me. And I also don’t give a fuck who in the mainstream media agrees or disagrees with me."

For a simple and rather logical reason. Listeners to Bannon's "War Room" never read or watch anything that responsible media report. They instead take at face value anything the Steve Bannons of America bamboozle them with.  

So far, pretty obvious. But then came a more interesting exchange between interviewer and Bannon:

At one point, he rhapsodizes about the range of information available to people these days.

Or misinformation, I say.

“A wide range of information," he counters. "One man’s misinformation may be somebody else’s Holy Grail, right?"

Here, Bannon is cheekily euphemizing disinformation, which, as I wrote yesterday, is not only the mother's milk of right-wing politics, its propagandists serve up oceans of the casual bullshit and they're doing it in record time.   

But whether it's dis- or misinformation, to Bannon the entire range of both is of exquisite value since he and his fellow bullshitters are the exclusive keepers of the Holy Grail. The mainstream media would be a nuisance to Bannon if his listeners paid any attention to the outlets. Because they don't, the War Roomer can peddle the grail's chosen contents in any fashion he wants.

Bannon's remark was, of course, just a reformulation of the old saying, "One's man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Much of today's political terrorism, if you will, springs from the right's notion — and sometimes even conviction — that their rhetorical violence and molestation of truth are indeed a fight for freedom. (From precisely what, we're not sure.)

That is to say, in Bannon's mind there's no difference between terrorism and freedom-fighting — perhaps not exactly what the old saying was saying; interpretively, it was more of a comforting salve for real terrorists — just as he believes there's no difference between truth and disinformation.

The actual chasms are parsecs wide. Terrorism is an abominably indiscriminate violation of all things humanly (as well as intellectually) decent, whereas legitimate political fights for freedom do no harm to innocents. The other can be quickly dispatched: truth is truth, disinformation is injurious rot.    

Bannon simply doesn't care that essentially he's defending Hamas's "freedom-fighting," scorched-earth approach to American "politics."          

The right now conjures fake evil in no time flat

It's as fascinating as it is dispiriting to watch how swiftly the far right converts truth into absurd disinformation. 

On 22 November an upscale, older couple driving a Bentley to a casino accidentally crashed at the Rainbow Bridge border crossing in Niagara Falls, causing the car to explode. Those, briefly, are the straightforward, undeniable and truthful facts of the matter.

But "conservative" commentator Benny Johnson — who has accumulated two million X followers — wasted no time in ignoring the story's unfolding developments. Instead, on the day of the accident he jumped on his laptop and immediately "reported" that ...

Mr. Johnson may have been the first to get the right's disinformation campaign rolling; if not the first, he was damn close to it. Because in no time — and I mean that literally — every other far-right crackpot on X was posting about America's terrorist attack. Not maybe, not speculatively, not even "rumor has it," but as fact.

His was the fastest bullshitting falsehood I have ever encountered. The right's conspiracy theories and related disinformation campaigns no longer require any time to simmer for flavor. They get dumped on the rabble's plate the very instant they're conceived, which now matches the time of the professed sinister event itself.

Fascinating, however dispiriting it is. We're witnessing America's birth of thousands of really quick-thinking, fast-acting Joseph Goebbelses.

While Elon is merely crazy, Bibi is shameless

As I'm sure you recall, in mid-November Elon Musk agreed with an X-posting moron that Jewish people hold a "dialectical hatred" of white people, an ancient antisemitic conspiracy theory. Elon expressed his agreement by counterposting that that was "the actual truth."

That was outrageous enough; in fact, or so we thought, impossible it would be to make it even more outrageous. But in this postmodern era of "truth"-doubting, anti-intellectualism-by-organized-chaos and rampant hypocrisy, Elon, with Israel's Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu's assistance, has done the impossible.    

Today, reports The Wall Street Journal, "Netanyahu’s office ... shared footage of Musk, accompanied by Netanyahu, walking through Kfar Aza, a kibbutz attacked on Oct 7."

The editor of Haaretz, among millions of aghast others, was a trifle less than pleased: 

Blatant antisemite & publisher of antisemitism Elon Musk should be persona non grata in Israel. Instead, Netanyahu - plumbing new depths of amoral sycophancy - gifts him a PR visit to the kibbutzim devastated by Hamas. Profane, venal, bilious, both of themhttps://t.co/zGc10w8Y9H pic.twitter.com/XMkitJclUt

— Esther Solomon (@EstherSolomon) November 27, 2023

The U.S. correspondent for Haaretz added that "Welcoming such a toxic mogul with open arms and taking him around sites of a massacre that has been belittled, demeaned and denied on his watch should be a stain on Netanyahu’s legacy." 

The toxic mogul is also to gather with Israel's president, Isaac Herzog. He "said the meeting would emphasize the need to halt 'the rising anti-Semitism on social-media networks.'"

Mr. Herzog will be emphasizing it only to the room's furniture. For trying to have a rational discourse with a nutjob like Musk is no easier than convincing an alcohol-drenched bar patron to not drive home. Both are self-convinced they are fully capable and perfectly clear-headed human beings.

In Israel-Palestine, one joy, six tragedies

In his weekly newsletter the insightful Peter Beinart is savoring what he calls "the first moment of joy" since the ungodly bloodletting of 7 October: the joy of watching Israeli hostages being released and also watching the release of Palestinian detainees.  

But, as Beinart goes on to itemize, the joy of this moment "comes against the backdrop" of several "immense traged[ies]"; five in all, the first being the "immorality of Hamas continuing to hold other people who they should release all of them immediately, unconditionally." Second is the tragedy of "Israel holding Palestinians in administrative detention without trial, maintaining a whole military court system that fundamentally violates the most basic notions of due process."

The third and fourth tragedies have been observed by millions for weeks, but not always fairly: "the fact that so many Israelis were killed on October 7," and that "so many Palestinians have been killed and their homes have been destroyed," in Beinart's balancing of accounts.

I've been dismayed by the seeming abundance of American bigotry about this — an inhumane, almost bloodthirsty dismissal of the barbaric disproportionality of Israel's response to Hamas's murderous terrorism. nearly 15,000 dead Palestinians so far, mostly women and children, and far more to come, versus Israel's loss of 1,200, a fixed number of deaths until peace is obtained. And yet many Americans decry only the latter.

Writer and war veteran Phil Klay remarked to The New York Times Magazine yesterday that "There are people who feel like you cannot acknowledge, or shouldn’t acknowledge too much, horrors that are not ideologically convenient.... [These] people urgently want you to feel the moral horror of what is happening, but within a circumscribed circle. I think that is morally blinkered." Which, of course, it is. And in the article's comment section, a stunning number of readers then demonstrated precisely what Klay had bemoaned. The commenters repeatedly conflated Palestinian civilians with members of Hamas. The prevailing attitude seemed to be, Kill 'em all; or at the very least, Don't ask us to weep for any dead Gazan, even woman or child.  

The fifth tragedy, writes Beinart, is that "in releasing some of these Palestinian prisoners, Hamas is growing politically stronger." Not perhaps in the Gaza Strip, where the violence that Hamas hath wrought has earned it only resentment. "But certainly in the West Bank ... they give Hamas credit. They give Hamas credit for fighting, even though it fought in a terribly immoral, unethical, evil way. And also, they give Hamas credit for getting results, for getting Palestinian prisoners released. The issue of Palestinian prisoners is a huge issue in Palestinian society because Israel has imprisoned so many Palestinians for such a long time ... under military law, in cases where they had no actual real due process."

Concludes Beinart: "It didn’t have to be this way" — i.e., the tragedy of "prisoner release strengthen[ing] Hamas." This leads to what I would count as the sixth, distinct and indeed greatest potential tragedy, whereas Beinart implicitly blends it into the fifth.

"Again and again and again," he notes, Israel has "given Palestinians more concessions when they have responded with violence, even violence against civilians that violates all the rules of war, than when Palestinians have responded ethically, nonviolently." In short, Israel's political leaders, especially Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, have made peace counterproductive for Palestinians.

When they're docile and acquiescent to Israeli hegemony, no problems; Netanyahu & Co. go right on impoverishing the Gaza Strip and looting more land in the West Bank. Only when terrorist groups like Hamas unleash inexpressible violence on Israeli citizens do average Palestinians get Israeli leaders' attention. The release of imprisoned Palestinian women and children would not have occurred had Hamas not taken 240 Israeli citizens as bargaining chips after slaughtering 1,200. That's one helluva grisly way to grab the notice of Israel's leadership.

The best possible outcome of all this grotesque behavior on both sides is that a genuine two-state solution might enter a sincere negotiation phase — more than half-century in the waiting. And here, paradoxically, we arrive at the sixth, potential tragedy.

It's vital that Netanyahu complete his promised mission of "eradicating" Hamas, since the terrorists are immovably opposed to even Israel's existence. But there's a pestilent fly in even that web of hope. If Netanyahu's armed forces are successful in abolishing Hamas and its sister organization, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, will Israel's leadership simply return to hegemonic complacency? — to further impoverishing Gaza and stealing more of the West Bank?

If so, then we shall reset the clock, wait for Palestinian terrorists to regenerate with cause, and watch for the next 7 October.     

Gaza's "Stone Age"

From a NY Times profile of neolithic life in 21st-century Gaza:

"To keep [his dozens of extended family members] alive, Mr. Mwafi says he wakes up at 4 a.m., spending hours waiting for water at a crowded filling station. Sometimes, he has to fight to keep his place in line and sometimes there is nothing left when his turn comes....

"There is practically no gas or other fuel left in Gaza.... Firewood and coal have also largely run out, so families are burning stripped-down doors, shutters and window frames, cardboard and grasses. Some simply do not cook, eating raw onions and eggplants instead." Northern Gaza is entirely without potable water, and the south is receiving enough for only 4% of its population.

The World Health Organization warned two weeks ago that diarrhea, scabies, upper respiratory diseases and lice were spreading throughout Gaza, "hitting younger children particularly hard."

Says Mwafi: "We went back to the Stone Age." Structurally speaking, that's almost literally true. With Israel's launching of thousands of airstrikes, Gaza is now largely a pile of rocks. It's as though the tiny strip of Palestinian territory was landscaped by Air Force Gen. Curtis LeMay, whose strategic air operations leveled Germany during WW II and threatened to do the same in then-North Vietnam.   

"Surviving has become a full-time, perilous undertaking," observes The Times — another rather unpleasant feature of human life 10,000 years ago. Tens days ago the World Food Programme reported that Gaza was receiving only 10% of its needed food and water, both of which were "practically non-existent in Gaza," and "civilians are facing the immediate possibility of starvation." As is Gaza's livestock, which farmers are slaughtering since they haven't sufficient fodder to keep the animals alive. "Crops are being increasingly abandoned and damaged," reports ReliefWeb, "due to lack of fuel required to pump irrigation water."

The amount of humanitarian aid entering Gaza since the temporary cease-fire began, such as "a total of 200 trucks of goods" delivered yesterday — a full accounting is available on the aforementioned site, ReliefWeb — looks impressive on paper. But even 200 loaded trucks remain a fraction of the number needed.  

The site's most ghastly statistic of all: "As of 18:00 on 23 November, more than 14,800 people have been killed in Gaza, including about 6,000 children and 4,000 women." Two days later, "the number of Israeli soldiers killed since the start of ground operations ... remained [at] 75." 

From another Times article: "Israel has cast the deaths of civilians in the Gaza Strip as a regrettable but unavoidable part of modern conflict.... But a review of past conflicts and interviews with casualty and weapons experts suggest that Israel’s assault is different.... Experts say that even a conservative reading of the casualty figures reported from Gaza shows that the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century" — in large part because of Israel's use of 2,000-pound bombs in residential areas. When fighting ISIS in urban settings, the U.S. military believed even 500-pound bombs were too powerful.

Awarded a college degree in computer engineering one month before the war commenced, Mr. Mwafi's social media posts were then "unreservedly upbeat," writes The Times, with "affirmations about positive living, love, friendship and hope."

Today, says Mwafi: "If before I had ambitions and hopes for a good future and fulfilling the dreams I had as a child, now my utmost ambition is to be able to eat, drink water, sleep" — and help keep his family alive in Gaza's Stone Age.

One of many George Santos tantrums to come

Friday, the Honorable George Santos conceded that his fate — a dishonorable discharge from the House — is imminent, bleak, and sealed. "I'm going to get expelled when this expulsion resolution goes to the floor," he predicted with a fresh, uncommon air of acceptance.

"I've done the math over and over, and it doesn't look really good," continued George. (When he still had the chance, Kevin McCarthy should have appointed him the unofficial majority whip. Santos can at least count, unlike McCarthy's bungling of elementary arithmetic.)

Parenthetically, Rep. George "Damocles" Santos made these statements on some sort of (paywalled?) X audio show, hosted by one Monica Matthews, whom I had not heard of but should have. Her online resume, "Meet Monica," is a vast admixture of secular self-aggrandizement and heavenly grandeur. She's a podcast and radio host, author, speaker, "Grammy-nominated vocal artist," musician, Christian, campaign manager, corporate and political consultant, speechwriter, minister, "mother of one amazing daughter," and herself "the daughter of the most High God."

With a divinely anointed background like that, unequaled since Sister Sharon Falconer, she's the one who should be racking up interviews.

Anyway, Mr. Santos may be resigned to his dreary fate, but he's still fighting mad.

On Monica's show he launched a withering assault on the House Ethics Committee and a widely indicting federal court for having accused him — family man, finance visionary and neighborhood philanthropist — of crimes, misdemeanors and breathtaking stupidities such as wire fraud, campaign-treasury theft, the falsification of campaign finance records, the faking of personal finance reports, money laundering and the pilfering of public funds.

He added a touch of the congressional vernacular by demanding that Ethics Committee Chairman Michael Guest "stop being a pussy." Call for a vote on expulsion already, will ya?

To that he cast a pox on virtually all his colleagues in the House, hissing that in it there are "felons galore," "people with all sorts of shiesty backgrounds," adulterers, drunkards and hypocrites. 

Indeed, George Santos has discovered that the politics profession is so filthy, disreputable and objectionable to anyone with any sense of honor whatsoever, "he plans to stay involved in politics," reports Axios.