PMC Commentary

OK, you can fight back, but just a little, and not like you mean it

This without a doubt is the most stupefying, mind-bending military injunction ever issued in a time of war — the U.S. condition attached to the long-range missiles (ATACMS) shipped to Ukraine within the last month. The condition is a familiar one, stemming from the Biden administration's yearslong fretting that Vladimir Putin might become displeased with the United States. 

The U.S. provided the missiles to the defending country being systematically leveled by invading Russian forces using missiles and drones with the firm stipulation that its missiles are to be used only inside Ukrainian territory, never on Russian soil, as Reuters reports. 

This stipulation still attached even after Russia used "North Korean-supplied long-range ballistic missiles against Ukraine in December and January, despite U.S. public and private warnings not to do so," said a U.S. official. 

Give this some thought. Then see if you're not as stupefied as I ...

Russia may import North Korean long-range missiles and then use them to obliterate Ukraine's energy structures, hospitals, schools and residential buildings, massacring untold numbers of civilians in the process, but Ukraine may not use imported missiles from the U.S. to strike military bases and logistics centers in Russia.

Because otherwise, Vladimir might be roused to unpleasantness.

Ukraine is fighting for its life against Putin's butchery, which he can execute because of his vast stores of war matériel parked inside his borders, then shipped to in-country forces or sent screaming through the night air. And all those munitions are safe as a babe in arms, no pun intended.

I won't be the only one whose mind is bent by this lunacy. Military historians will for ages look back on it and ask, Wha?

A bad poll, a bad primary, and for Trumpers, a really bad conclusion

I should have posted this chart along with the Marist polling results, which showed some interesting and possibly fundamental shifts in the presidential contest. The two together add up to some arrestingly bad news days for the Republican nominee. He's already having less than good days, as he sits in a New York courtroom listening to former political allies tell a jury what an adulterous sleaze of a book-cooking fraudster he is.

When you're 1) the winner and also 2) your party's de facto nominee who's 3) running unopposed in a 4) closed primary, you should 5) not be losing alarmingly close to one of every five voters, or 17.2% of the total vote, especially in a 6) key battleground state with a 7) whopping 20 Electoral Votes, twice as many as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri or Maryland's.

The beauty of Trump's predicament, or a large part of it, anyway, was crisply revealed by Republican strategist David La Torre when he told The Washington Post: "What the Trump people need to do is they need to get in Pennsylvania, they need to make their case, they need to talk about the economy, they need to run against Joe Biden’s record — and Donald Trump needs to stop talking about himself and how he’s a victim."

Most of what La Torre advised was straightforward, commonsensical campaigning 101, to which most politicians are faithful, and about half of them, successful. But Trump has added a decidedly novel twist to the tried-and-true, time-tested formula: Give the shortest possible shrift to subjects critical to voters' lives, and in place of their concerns talk endlessly about one's magnificent self and how a lot of very mean people are victimizing said magnificence. 

Many an aide, consultant, staffer and friend has apprised Trump of La Torre's assessment, according to insider reports. Your old routine is no longer appealing to voters, they have gently observed to the self-absorbed blowhard; you have exhausted its every potential. But what they either don't know or are reluctant to acknowledge in his presence lies far outside the mere, attempted correction of a campaign careening hither and yon. And it is this: Trump is psychotic.

Care to see a retouched group portrait of Adolf's BFFs?

You can make this stuff up, but there's no need to. 

So the RNC’s senior counsel for election integrity, Christina Bobb, is among those indicted in Arizona for allegedly conspiring to cheat the state’s voters. You cannot make this stuff up.

— Chris Bury (@ChrisBuryNews) April 25, 2024

Should the unfortunately "unindicted coconspirator 1" somehow tread a crooked path back to the Oval Office, what is vividly, transparently obvious is that his White House cronies will resemble to a t those of Hitler's Neue Reichskanzlei, the New Reich Chancellery, his Berlin office. Criminals, failures, mentally warped ideologues, the sadistically pompous and wheedling, soulfully vacuous idiots.  

So says the state of Arizona, piling on. 

The grand jury's indictment goes after "11 Arizona Republicans and seven top aides to Donald Trump" involved in his fake-electors scheme, relates the Arizona Republic. The paper notes that names are redacted, "as are the specific charges against them," yet the indictment's thrust makes "clear" that the newly honored defendants are the Rogues' Gallery with which we are so familiar:

Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Jenna Ellis, Christina Bobb and Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn, whom I once nominated, as I recall, as the meanest, lowest, dirtiest political adviser anywhere on earth, now that Goebbels is dead.

Such is the ant-FDR "Brain Trust" of the Republican Party's presidential nominee, who, at least in the state of New York, is more than an unindicted conspirator.

The first presidential poll taken when Trump was in court

Marist College conducted its latest poll on Tuesday through Thursday of last week, the first week of Trump's last days, if the law's as keen as his criminality. Marist is among 538's more reputable pollsters, scoring 2.9 out of a maximum 3.0. Its summary states: 

Trump’s support among white voters and independents has splintered. Biden is doing better than he did in 2020 among white voters, and he has eliminated the advantage that Trump had among independents earlier this month. Biden has a three-percentage point edge over Trump among registered voters nationally. In addition to independents, Trump has lost some ground among those who have an unfavorable view of both Biden and Trump. Among those who definitely plan to vote in November, Biden holds a six-percentage point lead. Biden is up five-percentage points in a multi-candidate field.

In gauging the effect of Trump's criminal proceedings on the presidential race, all we have to work with is correlation. But it's a happy correlation that includes significant upswings for Biden, significant enough to at least suggest causation.  

In breaking down the summary above, among those "who definitely plan to vote in November," Biden leads Trump, 53% to 47%. They're now tied among independents, yet Trump previously led by 7 points. As for voters who dislike both candidates, again it's a tie, Biden, 50-48. But, that represents a huge gain for Biden, for earlier Trump led among the double dislikers by 15 points, 54-39.  

It appears Kennedy is doing more injury to Trump, so I retract any and all unflattering comments I once made about him. I think Bobby is just peachy. Again let's pass over registered voters for now and see where the two major candidates land among the likely when RFK Jr. is tossed in the mix: Biden, 46%; Trump, 39%. In short, where Kennedy gains, Trump slips. The former 's support among independents, for example, increased by 6 points, while Trump's dropped by 8 points.      

Looking at all candidates and registered voters, Biden has 43%, Trump has 38%, Kennedy, 14%, West and Stein, 2% each. Biden's lead was only 2 points in early April. The single variable introduced between then and last week was Trump's trial. Correlation only? 

Otherwise, most Americans are still unhappy with Biden. His job approval rating among that largest of groups is 43%, same as before. About his thriving economy, 54% disapprove — evidently they'd prefer high unemployment, lower wages and stagnant economic growth.

His tolerance of Israel's war on Palestinians is causing his greatest electoral drag: 57% disapprove of his actions, while barely a third (35%) approve. Biden should rethink his position not to recover votes, but to do what's right.

Meanwhile, Trump's having done everything wrong, much of which has him cooling his criminal heels in a NY court, is President Biden's wonderfully passive advantage. 

Ukraine is now pummeling Russian forces with long-range missiles

Well that was quick. Here it is, only April 2024, and Ukraine already has several U.S.-made Army Tactical Missile Systems with a 200-mile range, reports Politico. They arrived in the bleeding, battered nation last month after the Biden administration made its lightning decision to arm Ukraine with ATACMS over a mere two years and one month. More are on the way, since the Republican House also took the fast-and-furious route to saving millions of free Ukrainians from being annihilated by a genocidal Russian tyrant.

The bleeding and battered put the ATACMS to good and immediate use, striking a Russian airbase in northern Crimea, which itself is now bleeding and battered. Dmitri had a bit of fun with the Russian helicopter pilot's intercepted mini-disinformation campaign ("no aircraft were damaged"); in the left screen is the English translation.

Several Russian channels are reporting the use of ATACMS missiles in an attack on the airbase in Dzhankoy last night. Obviously, they didn’t hit anything, didn’t damage anything, apparently they just fired for no reason. pic.twitter.com/DIVYp0x6rw

— WarTranslated (Dmitri) (@wartranslated) April 17, 2024

Mr. Trofimov seems also to have disagreed with the Russian pilot. (Incidentally, Trofimov's bio states that he's The Wall Street Journal's chief foreign affairs correspondent. I do hope he wasn't the person shooting this video in Russia-occupied Crimea. I know I wouldn't be there.)

The Russian air base and logistics hub in Dzhankoy, in northern occupied Crimea, was hit by Ukrainian missiles overnight. Details of damage not yet known, but judging by this video considerable. pic.twitter.com/IYmXYNdwO9

— Yaroslav Trofimov (@yarotrof) April 17, 2024

The U.S. delivery of ATACMS is both inspiring and heartbreaking.

I'm not a military enthusiast and I'm certainly no warmonger. But the sight of Putin's air and command bases being blown to the troposphere makes my everyday tachycardia pulsate even faster with joy. But with that invariably comes this remembrance: If Ukrainian forces had had long-range missiles, fighter jets, Leopard and U.S. tanks and enough artillery shells de novo to make massive craters of Donetsk province and Crimea when full of Russia's convicts and Schutzstaffel, the few survivors would have straggled their way home within six months of the satanic tyrant's invasion.

An unobjectionable ending of red-district careers

Politico just reported that "the Arizona House [has] voted to repeal a 19th-century abortion ban that the state Supreme Court revived earlier this month." It's expected to sail through the Senate. 

Naturally I'm delighted on behalf of women's rights. Yet my delight is bittersweet, in that with the ban in place, "We [Republicans] lose too much in November: the presidency, a Senate seat, and the legislature," said an anti-choice advocate last week. 

He was particularly worried about the White House. "We know Trump. We trusted Trump. He got Roe repealed," he said. But "this law is too harsh."

The anti-women's rights, pro-evangelical voters activist then had the most splendid, Trumplike epiphany on how to handle recalcitrant Arizona House members; those who then were willing to cost their party some congressional seats and maybe the presidency based only on principle:

"The fact is these small-town lawmakers need to get with the program or their career is going to wind up in the trunk of a car."

I grew up in Kansas City, Mo. once the home of Urban Machinist Tom Pendergast and mob boss John Lazia; and later, in my youth, the city became the Mafia's central connection between skimmed Las Vegas cash and the pockets of latter-day mob bosses in New York and Chicago.

(Kansas City's mob wasn't the brightest among organized crime; its capos chattered away into FBI mics as though they had never heard of surveillance and wiretapping.)

And there, in quite, peaceful, sleepily lazy KCMO, one would regularly read of a recalcitrant somebody found in the trunk of a car.                   

I just didn't know that evangelical anti-choicers embraced the same upper-management style.  

Will Judge Merchan ever slam that cold iron door on Trump?

"Just Security" is a publication of New York University Law, and one of its publications is titled "Why Trump Will Likely Be Held in Contempt and What Then." It's a long piece, forbiddingly long to do it any real justice here. I do offer its wrap-up, and even that I have bite-sized into safer manageability.

(This Age of Twitter and Instagram and Tik-Tok has inflicted upon me a morbid case of anxiety whenever I contemplate a lengthy post. Don't go there, says the astute Goddess of Internet Reading Modes on my one shoulder, and on the other, Do it Do it! whispers the ever-present Beelzebub trying to throttle even the dwarfish readership I have. Sometimes I give in to temptation and asphyxiate it a bit more; other times I am blessed.)        

The five contributors to Just Security's piece are an impressive lot of legal minds, including, for instance, Norman Eisen, whom you'll likely recall as the House Judiciary Committee's special counsel throughout Trump's dozen impeachment proceedings. Conclude the authors:

We expect the court to impose fines against Trump for a substantial number of the violations and to warn him that future violations will result in additional fines and potentially jail time. The most difficult question to answer, however, is whether any finding of contempt and resulting punishment will deter this particular defendant from future violations. Prior history suggests it may. As noted above, as the fines increased together with the risk of incarceration in the civil fraud matter, Trump finally stopped. On the other hand, he may view a short confinement as politically beneficial.... And the amounts of the fines here at issue will not give him pause if he is determined to continue his extrajudicial statements. 

I haven't the legal brain of the five contributors, but I too expect fines — that's a given — and then nothing beyond a warning. This strikes me as tantamount to a 1933 judge admonishing John Dillinger for all those disagreeable bank robberies. That judge would have said, and this judge will say, Go with God and sin no more. Whereupon Donald John smiles.     

I also agree with the contributors' "on the other hand" — except: not may, he will "view a short confinement as politically beneficial." The only question, I think, is whether this or any judge will view Trump's confinement as tolerably feasible. The American system of justice has so far demonstrated quite vividly that there is law for us and there's law for Trump.  

With luck, tremendous amounts of Reason and perhaps some divine intervention, Judge Juan Merchan will view Trump's confinement as necessarily feasible.

Lock him up!

College protests = "college is a scam." My journeys into the hearts of darkness.

Sometimes, in fact too often, I just can't resist.

This gal has nearly 200,000 followers. She was commenting on a Charlie Kirk post — he has 2.9 million followers — that noted the cost of Columbia University's tuition ($89,000) and then unconditionally declared that "College is a scam." That's pretty typical of Charlie's probing analyses of whatever he's hating on any given day. Before posting her thoughtful agreement with Kirk, Ms. Sassafrass84 (her IQ, maybe?) reposted another tweeter's remark that all protesters shouting "Death to America" will have their student loan debt forgiven by the Biden administration. I assume that's what passes for wit among these sad, pathetic human beings, but for all I know the poster might have been serious.    

ABSOLUTELY! Down with colleges and universities! Which would also mean down with doctors, engineers, the underpaid educators who try to teach the spawned little neoNazi brats to read ...

— P.M. Carpenter (@CarpenterPM) April 23, 2024

I find this herd mentality, as it's commonly known, endlessly fascinating and therefore irresistible, which is to say, I'm positively compelled to respond. I'm quite aware that my responses will have no positive effect in return; the herd brooks no dissent, although in my experience it does so silently. By that I mean I never get a rise from any of these imbeciles, and that puzzles me.

These are the loudest, most opinionated, agitated and argumentative crackpots on earth, and yet — do they denounce me as the real crackpot? No. Never. This is partly responsible for my lack of resistance when it comes responding. Surely, I keep thinking, surely someday at least one of them will explode and plaster me with all manner of invective. Is that too much to ask? Do I stand alone in unworthiness of their lib ownership?

What I seek from this crowd is some clue as to what constitutes Trump Derangement Syndrome, according to their diagnostic manual of political disorders. I should note that from time to time I do receive that as a response — "You have TDS" — although it's not really a response; just a quick, lazy comeback. What symptoms of TDS do I display? This, I wish to know. Is it my citation of some fact? Is it bloody obvious logic? Mere revulsion at their idol's contemptible behavior? What, precisely, defines TDS? I await answers, indeed I beg for answers, hence my compulsive comments to their comments.   

But I'm also intrigued by the kind of mind that spews the asinine garbage these people spew. "College is a scam" — period. "Absolutely" — period. What could possibly possess the first poster to declare such an idiocy and the second poster to instantly affirm? This I think is the greater part of my addiction. I genuinely wish to know the mental workings, or rather malfunctions and integrated dysfunctions, of such psyches. I can't even begin to put myself in their place, that generally being a good place to start. I'm simply clueless, I've not the faintest idea of the whys and wherefores behind such visceral abnormalities.

And so I keep responding to them, hoping that someday I'm enlightened about their dark musings, their evidently concealed conceptions of TDS, and the whirling propellants in their grey matter — the causations, that is, of their garbage spewing. Mine is a courageous expedition — don't you think? — for their online territory is perilous. There, it seems to me, madness reigns. And I'm only trusting it's not contagious.  

Might MTG bungle her way to a Jeffries speakership?

The U.S. House has gone to the dogs. It’s downright embarrassing.

That, from one of the dogs, Thomas Massie, Kentucky Republican and Beta cur among the cannibalistic pack led by Marjorie Taylor Greene, the top dog in every respect.

The two are flexible, though. Tuesday morning they were monkeys, as in, monkey see, monkey do. By which I mean, at 6:53: a.m., Massie posted on Twitter, "[We] won’t tolerate complete & total surrender," and 35 minutes later, Marge posted, "Complete surrender is not acceptable and will not be tolerated."

Aside from aping Mr. Massie, Ms. Greene did manage to make a valid point. She wrote: "It’s baffling hearing the establishment complain that it’s too much drama, too hard, and too risky to go through another Speaker race."  

She's right. And lucky for us there's an easy and certainly risk-free alternative to another Kevin McCarthy debacle or the uncertain elevation of another obscure backbencher to the speakership. Should Marge blunder ahead and move to remove, by my count only three Republicans would be needed to vote with the Democrats. Thus Minority Leader Jeffries becomes Speaker Jeffries.  

I can almost hear your snickering, and I'm tempted to join you. On the other hand, the American political landscape has rarely looked so bizarre. Who knows, there might be a threesome who see what Marge saw earlier this week: "Voters are so angry ... they're not going to give us the majority back in 2025."  In the House it's never fun being in the minority, and just about now would be an excellent time for three moderates from 50-50 districts to get the hell out of Republican Dodge.

Barring partisan defections, the trio could go really wild and actually put America first, to coin a term, by casting a vote for Hakeem Jeffries. As noted, he's anything but risky; his strategic handling of the foreign aid bills was equal in deftness to Nancy Pelosi's. And for members weary of drama, he seems delightfully Obamian, cool and reserved.  

On the Hill Jeffries is already known as the "shadow speaker." In that vein Texas Democrat Greg Casar told Axios that Mike Johnson "should just pack up and resign and hand the gavel over to Leader Jeffries." Not snark; sound advice. A Republican speakership that must rely on the opposition's support is a profoundly untenable speakership. 

And there, again, lies Marjorie Taylor Greene's valid point, Thomas Massie's, too. The House has gone to the dogs, it is embarrassing, it can't be tolerated. They should get on with "another Speaker race," as Marge urged.

And as long as there's even the slimmest, most gossamer chance that her cannibalistic pack of hotheads and firebrands could finish the race with Hakeem Jeffries as speaker, I'm behind her all the way.

Two prospective jurors who didn't make the cut

The Times spoke with two potentially empaneled jurors in Trump's New York trial — more accurately, they called the Times — to get a feel for the historic experience: a mobster-cum-ex-president facing 34 counts of fraud.

Their tribulation was different from others', though, for personal information gathered from court questionnaires they completed had been publicly released. Presiding Judge Juan Merchan has since redacted much of this material.

Too late for the man and woman who talked to The Times. Once in the courtroom along with 94 other potential panelists "they were made to [again] answer those questions by speaking into a microphone in open court; soon, both were blindsided as details of their lives ricocheted around the internet."  

So much for the "sense of calm" the man said he felt for the first five minutes. He viewed the situation as one of normality. "Trump was simply a defendant, he thought. It was a business-records trial. Prosecutors were on one side, the defense lawyers on the other."

The woman noted that when she and the others entered the courtroom Trump behaved as would any baby-kissing politico; he "stood and waved to prospective jurors." For the criminal defendant, it wasn't yet nap time.  

Both were then treated to the oleaginous swarm of Trump's lead lawyer, Todd Blanche. Beware of defense attorneys who open by acting as though ya'll have been pals for years. The man was appropriately prepared.

He said Blanche's shtick was "folksy" and sure-enough "disingenuous." The woman's critique was more pointed, observed The Times. She sensed "a 'witch hunt' to root out people sympathetic to Democrats on the panel." Nice touch, lady. 

Blanche grilled the man about some less than Trump-friendly social media remarks he had posted years earlier. They got him bounced from the case. He protested to The Times that "he could have been fair and resented the implication that he could not have been."

This goes to the question asked here a few days ago: "Could you be fair juror in Trump's trial?" I believe even the most rabid Trump hater could separate that from a verdict. I spell out the why and how in the post.

Or, you can settle for this: "Both he and the woman, who said they believed in the system of jury service, noted that they had begun the day taking sworn oaths vowing to render a fair and impartial judgment on the evidence. The man believed his own views — especially views from years ago — had no bearing on his ability to judge the evidence. If anything, he said, he would have been hyper-conscious in doing so." 

The man and woman were in agreement about their jury-duty fate: Their rejection was likely a good denouement. They were "conscious of the threats and blowback that could come with weighing evidence against Mr. Trump — particularly with their personal details traceable in public."  

Ha! I can assure you that not for even a moment would I think about the threats to come. I'd go straight to terrified. The prospect of Trump's psychotically fanatical, gun-toting followers knowing who I am and where I live would throw me into a paralytic nightmare from which I'd never recover. 

I do, however, think of the possibly perilous future of the jurors. There is no criminal act beneath the colossal indignity of Donald J. Trump, which goes for his fanatical followers as well. If there is a way for the mob boss and his crews of street hoodlums to get at the jurors' identities, they'll find it.   

I wish them godspeed in their deliberations' fair-mindedness, which I've no doubt they possess (save for a Trump mole who might have dissembled his way onto the jury). And I hope confidentiality forever reigns for those who chose it instead of a book deal.

How a British film director lost the "Civil War"

I've been curious about the film "Civil War," written and directed by Alex Garland, a Brit who's attracted to the genres of disaster and dystopia. The movie's premise is that of a second American Civil War, which to political junkies is like honey to a bear.

I've now read two reviews, one from The Guardian, whose headline is "Civil War is an empty B-movie masquerading as something of substance." You might think that alone would satisfy my curiosity, and put an end to it. But when it comes to films, there's no punishment on which I can't gluttonously stuff. Thus did I read another review, titled "How to Both-Sides a Civil War." Again, panned from the get-go, but off I went to read the entire thing. It was brutal.          

The reviewer, Andrew Marantz, prefaces his cinematic assassination with this: "Like an erupting supervolcano or a catastrophic solar flare, a second American Civil War is something that really could happen—an unlikely prospect but, still, terrifying enough to be worth worrying about."

I can't say I'm worried about it, nor should anyone be. Still, anything's possible in today's politics; since 2015-16, nearly half the electorate has been entirely innocent of human decency and volcanically responsive to the most reckless among us. 

Marantz's review is quite long, much longer than the director's awful excuse for filmmaking deserves. I don't ordinarily bash books I haven't read and movies I haven't seen, but this flick leaps out as one I choose to never see, hence I've no choice. I've reduced the review to a passable minimum (which should have sufficed for the reviewer).  

"When the action of 'Civil War' begins, nineteen states have seceded."

Let's stop here for a moment, as you would have in the theatre just before exiting because you just learned that the secessionist states include "California and Texas; the loyalist states include New York, South Carolina, Kansas, and Arizona." Marantz is gentle, noting only that "as many viewers have pointed out, this makes no sense."

Moving along, against our will, "Garland had imagined the mechanics of an American Civil War 2.0 in minute detail, but he had left its causes deliberately obscure, he said, because 'at a certain point, the specifics stop mattering.... It stops being, in a way, issue-driven, and it just becomes anger.'" This, too, makes no sense. We're to believe that Americans are engaged in a great civil war whose cause and issues have stopped mattering?  

We do learn this much, causationally speaking: "A tyrannical President in his third term (Nick Offerman, who doesn’t go out of his way to act like Donald Trump, but also doesn’t go out of his way not to) is clinging to power."

For Trump to cling powerfully is believable. But ... Offerman improbably told Forbes that "former President Donald Trump didn’t even cross his mind while playing the divisive president." This has nothing to do with the film itself; I just found it noteworthy in a clinically dissociative kind of way. 

With no little regularity the reviewer emphasizes the film's principal downfall: "In the world of 'Civil War,' we get no hint about what has pushed the country beyond the breaking point, or what makes conditions in the secessionist states different from those in the loyalist states" — which is akin to making a movie about the real Civil War and never mentioning slavery. 

Marantz's wrap-up: "Garland has said that his goal was to make an 'emphatically antiwar' movie. Yet 'Civil War' remains resolutely incurious about what might cause a contemporary civil war in America—and thus how one might be prevented....

"He seems to be trying to have it both ways, using our dire politics as topical I.P. ['intellectual property' or 'irresistible poison'? I really don't know] while tap-dancing around frank conversations that might get him in trouble with portions of his potential audience.... It’s hard to say anything meaningful about a country on the brink of collapse without addressing what brought it there."

This — all of it — is a letdown, a missed opportunity. A truly "meaningful [film] about a country on the brink of collapse" is sitting there, somewhere, like a diamond in the rough. But the writer-director refused to pick it up, cleave it into scintillating parts and put them on screen for millions of thoughtful moviegoers. That in itself would have been one way to demonstrate "how [a second American Civil War] might be prevented"; i.e., a forewarning. 

Show the blood-soaked ghastliness to emerge from "a tyrannical president in his third term ... clinging to power" with small armies of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers roaming the streets in search of resisting infidels, as lost-cause S.S. goons did in the Third Reich's final days. Its potential may be extraordinarily remote, but remoteness is not impossibility.

The Right's latest lollapalooza of assbackwardness

"Conservatives" — read: radicals, fascists, reactionaries, extremists, misogynists, racists, provocateurs, xenophobes and ideologues; anything but conservatives — have constructed a new hobbyhorse from the campus protests going on.

Here is just one of them, the disreputable Marc Thiessen, whom the reputable Washington Post inexplicably believes is worthy of column space twice a week:  

Joe Biden condemned what he called the "antisemitic bile" of right-wing marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, and called it a "defining moment" for America. Today we're witnessing Charlottesville happening on the campus of Columbia University but Biden is silent. This is a defining moment for this presidency. Will he keep pandering to the antisemitic left or confront it the way he did the antisemitic right?

As others are pointing out, pro-Palestinian groups have been enraged at President Biden for months because of his unyielding support of the Israeli government as it carries out the systematic destruction of Gaza while starving, displacing and killing its inhabitants. And yet ...

With college-campus unrest as a pretext, the far right is now assaulting Biden for being some sort of puppet of not only far-left but pro-Palestinian factions. The absurdity of these knee-jerk demagogues is all too familiar, so perhaps we should be indifferent to the whole wretched bunch. Nevertheless, their tediousness persists in grating one's nerves.  

What's more, there's the naked lying and deliberate distortion of these clowns. "Biden is silent," moans Thiessen and his feral pack. Silent? As in this?

"Even in recent days, we’ve seen harassment and calls for violence against Jews. This blatant antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous—and it has absolutely no place on college campuses or anywhere in our country.... We must speak out against the alarming surge of antisemitism—in our schools, communities, and online. Silence is complicity." And which Biden repeated only yesterday? "I condemn the antisemitic protests." 

The far right's agitpoop game of cretinous contradictions is, as noted, quite familiar to us. One of their all-time keepers came when Barrack Obama was in the White House, and pretty much every day we'd hear from these jackanapes that the sitting president was both a certified moron and a powerfully cruel, ingenious dictator of Hitlerian proportions.

Well, let 'em wail, I suppose, while we don as much indifference as we can. After all, they're only squealing at the swinish Trumpian base.

A powerful piece on a GOP House committee's petty indignation

I nearly always avoid simply reposting long stretches of another writer's opinions or an item from WaPo or The Times or some other journalistic outlet. This is a commentary site, not a news clipping service, and so it strikes me as eminently logical that I should post commentary, emphasis on mine. The work is more laborious, yet it's a labor of love — excuse the cliché (something else I avoid like the plague, as William Safire quipped in his 1968 volume, Political Dictionary.)

From the above rule of "P.M.C." exclusivity I exempt Jewish-American commentator Peter Beinart. I confess I'm not entirely sure why. I began reposting segments of his online talks, from The Beinart Notebook, when the Israeli government chose to annihilate not Hamas so much as thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, mostly women and children. The Israel-Palestine War — not the Israel-Hamas War — or better yet "The Israeli War on Palestinians" will perhaps be recorded by history as the darkest stain on the 21st century. Israel's murderous ignominy will also be a monumental disgrace not only because of what it did in, and to, Gaza, but because its unspeakable acts there will forever overshadow the unspeakable acts of Hamas, 7 October 2023. The 1,200 victims of that appalling day did not deserve to have it remembered for what followed.

What followed and persists in following have been the weekly concern of Prof. Beinart's online commentary, segments of which I select for reposting (today, all of it). I strive to reduce his remarks to their absolute core, since, as noted, I'm averse to burdening you the reader with streams of material you haven't time for; moreover, I'm not "into" merely reprinting what others have so thoughtfully produced. I suppose that largely clears up my uncertainty as to why I exempt Beinart from my general rule: What he has to say is consistently sharp -- so sharp, my interventions would be but nuisances, and wholly superfluous. This week he addressed testimony given before the education and workforce committee of the Republican House, itself a stain on the 21st century.

***

I watched a good chunk of last week’s hearings with the president of Columbia, and the heads of the Board of Trustees, and one of the people leading their antisemitism commission. And there was one moment in particular that stuck out to me. A congressman named [Jim Banks, R-Ind.] got a hold of some kind of pamphlet that had been put out I think by students of the School the Social Work, which referenced the term, Ashkenormativity.

Ashkenormativity, I guess, is the idea that you kind of make Ashkenazi Judaism normative, and you don’t pay attention to the fact that many Jews are not Ashkenazi and not from European heritage. So, this congressman was very upset that the term Askanormativity had showed up in some document that was given out to Columbia students and went around and asked the people on the panel what they thought. And one of the heads of the Board of Trustees said the phrase Ashkenormativity was "shockingly offensive."

Now, I don’t really see what’s shockingly offensive about a term which tries to suggest that people tend to assume that the culture of Ashkenazi Jews is the culture of all Jews. But what bothered me—and deeply, deeply depressed me—was this discourse of the use of a phrase, Askanormativity, in some pamphlet at Columbia University as being shockingly offensive when in this entire hearing—at least the long stretches that I watched—there was not a single reference to Palestinians being killed in Gaza. Not a single reference. You could watch that and literally not know that a single child in Gaza had died. Shockingly offensive? The term Askanormativity in a pamphlet is shockingly offensive? What about the fact that 26,000 children in Gaza, 2% of the children in Gaza, have either been killed or injured; that 1,000 children in Gaza have had one or both of their legs amputated; that all of the universities have been partially or entirely destroyed; that 30 of the 36 hospitals have been destroyed?

Listening to one member after another basically talk about how they decry antisemitism, how they hate antisemitism, and what a huge problem it is, and then finding these kinds of absurd examples of what they claim is antisemitism — I was revolted. I hate a discourse of antisemitism which makes it seem like our lives matter and Palestinian lives don’t matter. That’s not the fight against antisemitism that I want to be part of. It’s also not a fight against antisemitism that I think will be effective because it’s essentially a discourse led by Republicans who want to enlist Jews in a project of white Christian supremacism in the United States. I think they’re using American Jews as part of their project of trying to establish, or re-establish, certain kinds of hierarchies in the United States about which lives matter and which lives don’t. And they’re inviting us to be on the dominant side, on the powerful side, a Judeo-Christian nation, i.e., not a Muslim nation. Those Republican members of Congress who talked about how upset they are about the antisemitism of Columbia, they are the same people who are gonna enthusiastically vote for Donald Trump, who hangs out with white nationalists.

So, perhaps one thing we might remember this Pesach, this Passover, as we hold our seders, is that we believe in a G-d who hears all people, a G-d who sees all people, who sees the cries and the pain of all people, and we do not believe that it is only Jewish pain, that it’s only Jewish suffering, that it’s only Jewish oppression, that matters. There is a voice in our tradition, a very, very powerful voice, which says that G-d hears, that G-d sees the oppression of all people — and for goodness’ sake, in this moment, nowhere more than the suffering of the people in Gaza. And so, those members of Congress, those right-wing Republican members of Congress, they may not hear, they may not see the suffering in Gaza. And those leaders at Columbia who are just prostrating themselves to say whatever these members of Congress wanted, they may not hear, they may not see the suffering of people in Gaza. But G-d, our G-d, sees, and hears, and that seems to me something for us to say this Pesach.

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About Peter Beinart

Editor-at-Large, Jewish Currents. MSNBC Contributor. Professor of Journalism and Political Science, Newmark School of Journalism, CUNY. Fellow, Foundation for Middle East Peace. Frequent contributor to the New York Times.

 

Note: If you're unfamiliar with "G-d," there's this, from Chabad.org: "Following the Torah’s instruction to 'obliterate the name' of idolatry in the Land of Israel, the Torah warns us not to do the same to G-d."

A vastly successful government program vital to millions, killed by you-know-who

Since 2021 the FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program has helped tens of millions low-income Americans pay for internet service. I am one of them. The ACP has been of much welcomed assistance, providing a $30 monthly subsidy to participating broadband companies. The program cut my broadband bill in half. (I have no cable or satellite service, only internet, so $30 is also my total monthly bill. Correction: has been my total monthly bill.)

The federal government created the ACP during the covid pandemic to increase internet accessibility. It helped eligible recipients search for jobs, access virtual classrooms and seek online medical care, among other uses. 

And it's about to die. This month, it appears, will be the program's last. The FCC announced in March that its funding will be depleted by the end of April, affecting more than 23 million households. "The end of the ACP will undo the significant progress this program has made towards closing the digital divide," wrote the FCC. A technology site reports that "several initiatives are underway to bridge the funding gap for the Affordable Connectivity Program, but 'the odds of an ACP extension remain low,' says New Street Research policy analyst Blair Levin."

Chris Winfrey. of Charter Communications, said "the end of the program will cause significant harm to low-income families. We don't think, however, that matters to program critics who we think are interested in using their opposition as part of a broader critique of government funding." 

This is the nation's Republican Party at work— so to speak. It's what it does. An FCC study found that roughly half of all ACP benefit recipients — 11.5 million American households — will be without internet service once the program closes its doors. That group I can never join, come a Trump redux or high water; I can't afford not to pay $60 for internet service, for at least one obvious reason: maintaining this site.     

But more than 10 million families will have no choice but to go dark — no choice but to lose access to their schools and job opportunities, online medical assistance and merely staying in touch with friends and loved ones.

I hope they're voters, and on 5 November I hope they remember what congressional  Republicans thought them back in April, which was something along the lines of a four-letter word followed by a three-letter word. Modern life stripped of "connectivity" is now almost inconceivable. But the GOP prefers they go back to the modern-day equivalent of the Stone Age. Once more: This is the Republican Party at work.  

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P.S. This post was inspired by an email I received this afternoon from the ACP, ominously titled: "Changes are coming to your internet bill." Well that can't be good, I thought, before reading on. 

$38 billion, tops, no more, that's it, don't ever ask for extra. In 2016, Israel agreed.

​​​​​I thought I'd pop back to 2016, the year the United States decided to give Israel $38 billion in military aid over the next 10 years — $3.8 billion a year — which, as Reuters reported, was at the time the "largest such aid package in U.S. history."

Straight to the point: "The package ... entails concessions by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu." One concession was that Israel "promise[s] not to seek additional funds from Congress beyond what will be guaranteed annually in the new package."

But what's a little $38 billion agreement between friends, especially when one is depleting its supply of weaponry to use on Palestinian women and children. (Plus 33 F-35 "single- seat, single-engine, all-weather stealth multirole combat" jets to deliver it.)

Ergo, on Saturday the House voted 366-58 to fork over another $26 billion to Israel's military; everything from "advanced weapons systems" to a cool billion to "enhance weapons production," explains The Times of Israel. (Italics mine, to emphasize the insanity of facilitating even more child-killing machines — faster.)

With that I thought I had seen it all, heard it all, that I had read the full, worst force of all possible worlds. I was Dr. Pangloss defeated, my Weltanschauung, rubble. But then came this from The Times of Israel:

"The bill will also prohibit funds going to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides support to Palestinian refugees."

UNRWA was the most effective relief agency in Gaza, until Israel, with no evidence of misuse, persuaded the West to cut off its funding. But just in case the U.S. might consider reinstating funds for starving, homeless, disease-ridden Gazans — a preemptive strike.

Voltaire would look on this madness and say, I told you so.