PMC Commentary

"We all want this war to end"

Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, 18 June NATO press conference:

Russia’s war on Ukraine is a brutal assault on a peaceful democratic nation. This war is propped up by China, North Korea and Iran. They want to see the United States fail. They want to see NATO fail. If they succeed in Ukraine, it will make us more vulnerable and the world more dangerous. So our support for Ukraine is ... in our own security interest. We all want this war to end. But a Russian occupation of Ukraine offers no peace, And capitulation to Putin offers no security. The stronger our support, the sooner the war will end.

The key passages: "our support for Ukraine ... is in our own security interest" and "the stronger our support, the sooner the war will end." 

What reasonable conclusion might one draw from those words? 

Mine is in agreement with the secretary general's (unexploited) strategy and undisputed objective: "the stronger our support, the sooner the war will end." Yet the only option of our strongest support for ending the war soon — logic dictating that strongest leads to soonest — remains out of the question: American, America and a few allies or NATO's military intervention.

The least acceptable option is Russia's continuing occupation of Ukraine, which, as Stoltenberg noted, offers no peace and makes the world more dangerous. It also entails capitulating to Putin — an abhorrence the secretary general firmly rejected — for Russia's military assets will persist in exhausting Ukraine's in a prolonged war of the latter's attrition, climaxing in a Russian victory.

Thus the West's most contemplatable and subsequent exercised action would be direct intervention. Only that will end the war the soonest, which "we all want," as Stoltenberg observed — and we're doing all we can to circumvent that prime objective.

The economic wrecking ball of Trumpism in office

American voters' most consistent anxiety is expressed quadrennially. Throughout the long hauls of presidential campaigns the electorate tells pollsters the economy is their chief concern, coupled with unease and insecurity.

The paradox of these worries lies in the same electoral anxieties when the economy is faring quite well, as is most voters' personal standard-of-living contentment. All three phenomena are present in 2024, hence the Oval Office incumbent's accompanying anxiety and his challenger's "populist" appeal.  

Trump's appeal leads to another paradox. Voters attracted to his economic proposals would be more than a little mortified and immensely impoverished should he retake the White House. For Trump would guarantee both with one stroke of a pen by executing either version of his tariff "ideas."

As an American historian I'm captivated by our 235 years of tariffs, initially justifiable in establishing home industries. Most Americans find the politico-economic subject the least interesting. But they wouldn't when they discover just how catastrophic Trump's proposals would be in action. His tariffs would swiftly become the center of all family discussions, which reportedly take place only at the kitchen table.    

Let's imagine the reality of Trumpian economics. One tariff proposed is the replacement of income taxes with 100% tariffs. Sound inviting? If enacted, Americans sit helplessly as their livings costs soar consequent to the vastly increased cost of all imports; also the U.S. segment of those businesses involved in importing face ruin and workers' are plunged into unemployment.

Another consequence of the tariff's ravaging of the economy is a deep reduction in federal revenue, thus detonating even more mammoth deficits. Determined to win the global trade war Trump also detonated, federal spending is slashed across the board. Only defense outlays being spared, Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs now lie on Thanksgiving turkeys' chopping block.

Yet another consequence is what some Americans may recall reading about in a Charlie Sykes' Atlantic column of June 2024. Trump's all-tariff-no-income tax is the government's most extravagant gift ever to the superrich. Aside from the added desolation of America's lower class, Sykes noted, way back then, the Center for American Progress estimated that the 100% tax on imports will cost 20% of middle-class households $8,300 a year. 

Sykes further cited a now-prehistoric Twitter post from "conservative budget expert" Brian Riedl. "If a 20yo interviewing for a House internship suggested replacing the income tax with a massive tariff, they’d be laughed out of the interview," he wrote. And those "friendly CEOs" candidate Trump confabbed with — again, before the coming of America's economic Stone Age —  afterward observed that he left unexplained his tariff's "implementation."

Shockingly, some executives then present seemed shocked "by the realization that [his policy was] nonsense," added Sykes. Or, straight to the point, said one CEO, "Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about." Ah but now he reigns supreme in an authoritarian White House, which takes great care in silencing any such profoundly conspicuous truths.

Let us also imagine Trump's economic landscape under proposal No. Two: a 10% tariff on all imports and 60% on China's — yes that'll show 'em, said his supporters before the fall. Some remaining income taxes are reduced as the new income tax (that being the tariff) culminates in the suddenly birthed burden of a $2,500 hit on the average family. The Center for American Progress' antediluvian estimated the risen cost on items such as a $260 tax on the typical family's electronics," a $160 tax on clothing and a $120 tax on pharmacy drugs.

To that, in our 2024 days, Republican National Committee spokeswoman Anna Kelly says "the notion that tariffs are a tax on U.S. consumers is a lie pushed by outsourcers and the Chinese Communist Party." It's also pushed by every still-breathing economist, we gather. 

I'll close with only one modification of Sykes' closing. "Despite Trump’s insistence that he is the tribune of the forgotten common man, the former president’s economic incoherence could prove devastating to the very voters he claims to champion." There is no "could."

Does Musk ever think at least one move ahead?

Musk sprang on top advertising executives this week at the Cannes Lions festival, a self-flattering wingding of their marketing brilliance, inconceivably held annually anywhere but in southern France. And you pay for it through the higher cost of heavily advertised products.  

Sorry, back to Elon. He ventured there to appease roughly 200 of the largest advertisers after telling them last year "to fuck yourself." In the business world that's not commonly considered the most preferable way to acquire clients.  

But Elon chose it because he was incensed at the executives' business-withholding displeasure over his having endorsed an antisemitic Twitter screed. He flung more expletive-filled fulminations at the execs for what he saw as their attempt to "blackmail" him into silence. It seems ordinary decency as a possible motive went over his indecent, bigoted head.

DealBook reports "unnamed ad executives told Ad Age they remained wary, given Musk’s antagonism toward social issues they cared about." And so Musk's schmoozing may have been a flop.

On to this post's title, "Does Musk ever think at least one move ahead?" He sure didn't last year, and this year he repeated his lack of even the faintest forward-thinking when he boasted to the gathered that his social-media platform's artificial intelligence would considerably up their advertisements' success.

Do you smell the sour trouble his X-boasting of AI's wonders created in the executives' haeds? Mark Read did, and he happens to be CEO of the planet's largest advertising firm, Britain's WPP. "You’re supposed to inspire people, not tell them they’re not going to have a job," said Read.

Mr. Musk, maybe someday you'll get the hang of this "thinking-before-speaking" thing.

The easiest of all future quiz-show questions

"In June of 2024 the Supreme Court upheld government's authority to ban alleged domestic abusers from possessing firearms," says the quizmaster.

"Now, ladies and gentlemen of the panel, get your buzzers ready: Who was the only justice to dissent? Bonus points if you can also cite any case in which this justice made any sense."

America's enemies, outside and within

Last week The Atlantic's insightful journalist, commentator and European historian Anne Applebaum surveyed America's global shark waters, though not those Trump believes are swarming with there is no elected political figure in a European parliament who is as radical and as extreme as Donald Trump. with his name on their 18-centimeter-teeth. Her central point was that "communist China, nationalist Russia, theocratic Iran, Bolivarian socialist Venezuela, whatever North Korea is .. [share a] common interest is undermining ... America, Europe, the liberal world, the democratic world."

While that's a ubiquitous observation among Western foreign policy analysts, Applebaum's refinement is that authoritarian nations hope to undermine liberal societies not only because they use democratic language — which in global public relations casts their systems as inhuman and cruel — but that dictatorships also hope to undermine liberal societies because their internal opposition is "inspired by" the West's language of freedom and democracy.

With those two provocations in mind, autocrats have of late devised a rather ingenious and even central element to their global affairs, one insidiously subtle and, they believe, more effective than hammering their citizens with farcical tales of how miserable Westerners are with their raucous democracies and false freedoms. 

The subtlety (over just plain silliness) entails reconfiguring how liberal democracies' debate their political systems "in ways that benefit" the goons. "Increasingly," observes Applebaum, "they’ve concluded that what benefits them is the rise of illiberal, disruptive and radical parties [in] the Western world." With that it "loses its sense of community and solidarity" and its "ability to make group decisions." Think, e.g., NATO. Once the West is fragmented by extremist illiberal politics, "then we’re not very good at standing up to them." 

All of which leads us, of course, to our very own Donald J. Trump. Applebaum, an American living in Poland with her Minister of Foreign Affairs husband, notes "there is no elected political figure in a European parliament who is as radical and as extreme as Donald Trump." Though European radicals are at least articulate, Trump is also "incoherent," "rambling" and has a head full of "gibberish," adds Applebaum. And his American idolators love him. 

But let's put that aside. For as Applebaum further notes, that — the rambling etc. — is not "the dangerous stuff that he does." His most valuable danger in authoritarians' reasoning is that he "will be the person who destroys the United States, whether he makes it ungovernable" or wrecks its institutions or "creates so much division and chaos that the US can’t have a foreign policy anymore."

In a fascinating discussion Applebaum recently had with a now-exiled Russian journalist who was intimately acquainted with the country's top leaders, unveiled was the chilling and all-too real potential of our own authoritarian's return. Putin & Co. loves him as much as his far-right peeps, for "in the Kremlin, they talk about Trump as the American Gorbachev," said the journalist, "by which they don’t mean leader of the free democracy. They mean he’s the person who will take the system down, because in the Kremlin they remember Gorbachev as the person who destroyed the Soviet Union."

Trump slanders his political opponents as "vermin" and "the enemy within," double-barreled blasts pilfered from Adolf Hitler and Joseph McCarthy. Given Trump's political "merits," he could somewhat easily do what the second demagogue did, and do it better — fracture American society through phony witch hunts — which would prime the U.S. for what the first demagogue did — destroy his country.

Donald Trump is the enemy within.   

Biden assaults Trump's foreign policy, so to speak

President Biden delivered an address at the Normandy American Cemetery commemorating D-Day's 80th anniversary. Such laudatory speeches are ordinarily underreported because they're perfunctory and bland.

Biden's was anything but. His was "bracing, urgent, and clarifying," writes The New Yorker's Susan Glasser. He went after the twin threats of Vladimir Putin's European aggression and the reckless isolationism of his unnamed election opponent, who also detests NATO and astoundingly — though often not so, for Trump "benefits from our failure to be shocked all over again," notes Glasser — admires the Russian butcher and, more astoundingly, Adolf Hitler.   

"The autocrats of the world are watching closely," said Biden in reference to Trump's catastrophic foreign policy consequences. He loves and admires not only the "genius" Putin but corrupt dictators everywhere. These are Trump's kind of people. America's true foes, he recently sputtered to Fox News and repeated days after, is "the enemy within" —hyperpartisan McCarthyite coonshit from the 50s.

Of particular interest in Glasser's column is a letter written by then-Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley. It's a shame he didn't send it.

"It is my deeply held belief that you’re ruining the international order, and causing significant damage to our country overseas, that was fought for so hard by the Greatest Generation that they instituted in 1945," wrote Milley "It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order. You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against."

In relation to Milley's words were those of Biden in his anniversary speech. "Their generation, in their hour of trial—the Allied forces of D Day did their duty. Now the question for us is: In our hour of trial, will we do ours?"

I keep asking that question myself, Mr. President.

Less than 30 minutes of despondence to round out your otherwise happy day

If you have 25 minutes to spare, they'll be despairing but productive. In watching this first video you'll see a tour de force from the vampiric Daniel Dale, detailing more than a dozen lies Trump told at his last rally — a tour de force in that Dale squeezed not only every lie into a miraculous 3 minutes, but every obverse truth as well.

CNN goes through 30 false statements from today’s Trump rally pic.twitter.com/lrXy7MXaPu

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 19, 2024

In John Oliver's video of roughly 22 minutes, he itemizes a subject of far greater danger to those handwringing over MAGA's slimly possible mass violence, and to all anti-tyranny Americans. The subject is that of Project 25, a guidebook to "presidential" authoritarianism detailed by more than 80 right- and far-right organizations, most notably the Heritage Foundation.

You're likely familiar with Project 25, but, as a refresher, it's a bone-chilling compendium of the most unconstitutional, unAmerican and deeply threatening puddle of every rightist and neofascistic wet dream — just perfect for Donald Trump.

Oliver's rigorous itemization of this garbage may be further enlightening to you, as he digs into this looming monster of 2025 with his unique gallows humor.

John Oliver on Project 2025 and a second Trump term.

I was going to clip this segment out into shorter sections but decided to keep it together because it's too important and, frankly, it should terrify you. pic.twitter.com/Kaqo07lurB

— Blue Georgia (@BlueATLGeorgia) June 18, 2024

Be good and spread at least a few of these horrors to every family member and friend who may be living in darkness.

A boomeranging Democratic play

Dealer's choice: grimace, scream, or laugh.

Photo and quite the imaginative "news" story are from an apocryphal supermarket tabloid. But I'm persuaded the Democratic Party should, in fact and deed, traverse the story into the real world by suing itself for "$100 million, at least," inasmuch as the following story is all too real.  

If all goes as planned, Trump will have a George Soros–backed political committee and the Democrats’ top election-law firm to thank.

For months, Trump was criticized over his small staff and the Republican National Committee’s layoffs and shuttered field offices. But since May, his campaign has quietly been in talks with more than three dozen conservative groups to outsource parts of its voter turnout operation. This would be a first-of-its-kind effort.

Cost: $100 million, at least.

Total paid canvassers: 3,000, at least.

The twist: It can all be financed with unlimited corporate dollars and untraceable dark money from political nonprofits that are otherwise off-limits to a federal campaign.

This type of arrangement between federal campaigns and outside groups used to be forbidden, but the rules changed under a March 20 Federal Election Commission advisory opinion, sought by the Democratic group Texas Majority PAC and the Elias Law Group.... [It then became] a lifeline to the Trump campaign, which was hurting for cash and facing President Biden’s mammoth operation....  [Only this paragraph's bold, mine.]

"Everyone’s chasing the Biden shiny object of, 'We’re opening offices and hiring staff.' But they’re missing the big picture," [said Trump's field operations director James Blair]. "We’re going to beat them at their own game. They thought they were helping themselves, but they’re actually helping us."

To modify a 1920 H.L. Mencken quip, for every solution there is a problem — often, a really big one. The observation is but a variation on the theme of unintended consequences, and in Democrats' somehow overlooked solution to the problem of forbidden GOTV mobilization — by freeing up "unlimited corporate dollars and untraceable dark money from political nonprofits" — its consequence is (I'll choose) laughable.  

But laughingly bittersweet, for sure.

Back in my political days, I had some dreadful encounters with the national party's hired guns, as well as federal statewide and c.d. campaign staffs. They were too young to shave or new to lipstick, an exaggeration though not far off the mark. I presume they came cheaper than experienced, judicious hands.

(In one case, a good-old-boy state Democratic Party chose a rather seamy has-been yet fellow good-old-boy as its U.S. Senate candidate over the sitting congressman of a distinguished, retiring U.S. senator. That was bad enough, but not quite bad enough for Democrats. A campaign infant then promptly injured what little chance the nominee had by releasing to the press, after consulting no one, an even seamier Nixonite-dirty-trick photo of the GOP nominee, which just as promptly backfired in full-color pyrotechnics.)    

At any rate the party's young-gun, self-imagined political whizkids' notions about this or that were seldom anything but a pain in the ass — worse, counterproductive. They'd squander lots of valuable time by interfering with informed prudence in their flights of falsely assumed genius.             

Thus my heartfelt cockles suspect at least one of them lay at the origin of Democrats' boomeranging quest. 

The U.S.'s latest step in aiding Ukraine (updated)

Foreign Policy reports on the Biden administration's "doubling down on its support for Ukraine" via a 10-year security agreement. Under its terms the U.S. will continue provisioning Ukraine with weapons and training its military personnel.

"Importantly," observes Foreign Policy, "unlike NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense clause, the U.S.-Ukraine security pact does not require Washington to send U.S. forces to defend Ukraine in the event of a future attack."

Those last seven words are rather peculiar, in that Ukraine needn't anticipate an eventful future attack. For the past 845 days and counting the country has somehow sustained unimaginable barbarity dished out by an inhuman Russian autocrat.

But be of good cheer, for the security pact "does commit Washington to hold high-level consultations with Kyiv within 24 hours of any future attacks" — as in tomorrow's and guaranteed thousands more?

That's a whole lot of consultation but it also does very little in hurling the Russian barbarians back to their beloved, economically creaking homeland. 

My own security agreement is with Ukraine's quite logical contention that the new pact "can’t replace Kyiv's ultimate goal of joining NATO." Replace "ultimate" with "immediate" and you're onto something. Hungary's pro-Putin Viktor Orbán would just as immediately reject Ukraine's entry, which is a splendid reason for also replacing NATO's Hungary with Ukraine.  

Nor is the U.S.-Ukraine security agreement a binding treaty. That leaves the door open for Trump's unequaled ignorance and I-hate-everything Biden-Obama to pull out of the deal in a second term, Satan-willing. In his first he trashed every Obama foreign policy initiative, and he'll do the same to Biden's.

Most curious did I find this observation made by U.S.-security expert Kristine Berzina: "No one really wants to be fighting Russia 10 years from now, but a sense of short-termism or an ephemeral commitment from the United States should be banished through the format of this agreement."  

Any sense of a U.S. ephemeral commitment has, I agree, been banished by the agreement. But it also strongly tends to ensure what Berzina and her likeminded experts say "no one really wants" — "to be fighting Russia 1o years from now."

By 2034 and likely sooner the Russian military will be enormously better equipped, better trained and more technically advanced, all accompanied by a fierce determination to at last capably take on NATO.

Although Ms. Berzina correctly asserts that the U.S.'s commitment to Ukraine is no longer ephemeral  — again, barring Trump's witless interference — its banishment leaves in place the very real prospect of a coming wider, and bloodier, European war.

Addenda:

The United States could easily crush in short order the Russian autocrat's forces in Ukraine. Vlad would be humiliated — nice touch — but more critical is that his army would be devastatingly depleted, should he be foolish enough to tangle with the U.S.  

This translates into the impossible yet plenty doable dream of a swiftly dispatched Russian army from Ukraine, while also markedly inhibiting its rebuilding, thus further delaying Putin's aggression. Meanwhile, he's likely to drop dead.

I appreciate that some readers interpret this and related preceding posts as insipid warmongering. Nothing could be more foreign to my intent, which is to stop Russian aggression now, before it metastasizes into a major European war — by treaty necessitating U.S. troops — at a far costlier loss of human life. In short, these posts are deeply anti-war, not jingoistic.  

Brace

Here's a shocker:

Nine witnesses in the criminal cases against former President Donald Trump have received significant financial benefits, including large raises from his campaign, severance packages, new jobs, and a grant of shares and cash from Trump’s media company.

The benefits have flowed from Trump’s businesses and campaign committees, according to a ProPublica analysis of public disclosures, court records and securities filings. One campaign aide had his average monthly pay double, from $26,000 to $53,500. Another employee got a $2 million severance package barring him from voluntarily cooperating with law enforcement. And one of the campaign’s top officials had her daughter hired onto the campaign staff, where she is now the fourth-highest-paid employee.

If "businessman" Vito Corleone had also been a multi-indicted politician, he would have acted as Trump has. But to the world's regret, Trump is not a fictional character.

From Shark Central, an official statement on Trump's gustatory appeal

Sharks Deny Any Interest in Eating Trump

THE OCEAN DEEP (The Borowitz Report)—Calling his longstanding fear of being devoured by them “delusional thinking at its saddest,” the world’s sharks issued a statement on Tuesday disavowing “any interest whatsoever” in eating Donald J. Trump.....

“The very thought of biting into him is nauseating.”

The sharks said that Trump’s anxiety about being eaten by them demonstrates “an inflated sense of his appeal, to say the least”....

In perhaps their most withering comment, the sharks concluded, “We might consider eating Trump if the only other thing on the menu was Steve Bannon.”

A peek into the counterfeit manly mind of MAGA

There's a "class of people controlling the world" and they "have [an] evil plan to eliminate the population." Well that's rather unsettling.

But so says Andy Frisella, an immensely ego-swelled whackadoodle who routinely blasts lord-knows-how-many email accounts (among which mine is one) with his regrettably nonunique takes on said evil planners. Andy is also among that "class of people" who entertain no notion of what "class" itself denotes. He goes by the name of MFCEO.  

His latest Trumpian paranoia, seething hatred for President Biden and conspicuously racist personality arrived yesterday with this pictorial population-elimination lead-in. (Ask me not what in hell the world genocide he envisions is all about. I resisted clicking on his enlightenment.) 

This is merely one breed of the crap to which Andy's devotees respond with such pitiable admiration as "[MFCEO] gets it" and "you inspire me."

When I noted this clown's swelled ego, that was more than opinion. His staggeringly long online autobiography is a monument to unmitigated self-adoration — and it accrues more than 700k views each month. (My site, which at least harbors some rationality, numbers only about 2.3K.) Below is one bio segment that relates to another. 

"My dad had been financially successful with his own business, but he wasn’t about to cut me a check [to start a business]. He wanted me to learn the right way - the tough way - and if he had given me that money, you wouldn’t be reading this now." (My dear Andy, Trump's dad gave him oodles of money and we've been reading his deranged words for a seeming eternity.) 

Emphasis on tough. That's how Andy sees himself, as a tougher-than-Duke tough guy. But not always, oh no, not at all.  His courageous confession: "I got my face cut to ribbons [when a guy once] attacked me with a knife. I knew that society would want nothing to do with me now. [Really?] Better just to die. I then knew that I’d been acting like a wimp. That I was capable of so much more. Stitched up face or not, I could still own my life."

The "so much more" is captured in this short video featuring his toughest-anywhere-guy language. One, does Andy's face look "cut to ribbons"? Two, he castigates "wimps," those who've not suffered some form of, among other undesirables, "physical deformity," as he laughably labels his. And yet they whine to others, day after day, about their singular hardships. But see above: Andy did too.

Why is it that the majority of people always complain about the basic shit

When someone had it way harder just keeps going no matter what#75HARD #REALAF pic.twitter.com/w61aLpxSIh

— Andy Frisella MFCEO (@AndyFrisellaCEO) May 23, 2024

I am infinitely befuddled by the many Americans who see any level of wisdom contained in MAGA's many online offerings, such as Andy's "basic shit."

A further left-upsetting note on MAGA's potential violence

I can't seem to let go of this subject — the unremitting forecasts of a Trumpian civil war or mass violence disseminated daily by the internet left, hurling millions of its readers into a state of near-paralytic fear and loathing.  

Exhibits A-Z. A Guardian headline lifts a quoted phrase from a sad old MAGA male who wrote on social media after Trump's Manhattan conviction, "no way out without bloodshed." The story is from the paper's Rachel Leingang, whose reporting focuses, strangely enough, on "misinformation
."

The MAGA gentleman scribbled the words in response to a post by Trump lackey Dan Bongino on Truth Social: "Pick a side, or YOU are next." The "bloodshed" guy wrote a fortiori that "when you can rig an election, then weaponize the government and the courts against a former President, what other alternative is there? I’m almost 70 and would rather die than live in tyranny."

That, reports The Guardian's Leingang, is "a common version of how many people on the US right reacted to the ex-president’s verdict..... Calls for revenge, retribution and violence littered the rightwing internet as soon as Trump’s guilty verdict came down" (emphasis mine).

As evidence of the right's pervasive determination to ignite large-scale violence, Leingang cites posts from a QAnon Telegram channel and a Twitter blockhead with the tasteful handle of Catturd.   

Hence the left is panicked. It shouldn't be. Also with no little irony Leingang warned in an earlier piece about the same dire future that haunts us. Her evidence was a survey from the University of Chicago's Chicago Project on Security & Threats that showed "increased violent support for Trump" because of his fourfold indictments. 

It did indeed. "The percentage of people willing to use force to restore Trump to the presidency" was 6.5%, up two points from a year earlier. And yet, without the faintest acknowledgement of how powerfully and even comically countervailing this was, Leingang also noted "the percentage of people who believe using force would be justified to keep Trump from being president again" — that is, the left — stood at a higher 9.6%.  

At least statistically and theoretically, either way, a Trump loss or win, the squaring off of these opposing little armies would favor progressives' fighting brigades. I stress theoretically; the odds of either side hyperinflating to mass violence are essentially nil, as I've perhaps tediously argued regarding MAGA only.  

But of special note is that the internet left and its readers are freaking out over "how many people on the US right" are willing to unharness violence, while the left itself is populated by even more people contending they're prepped for such.

The publishing left's doomsdaying is a terrific way to increase clicks, though. I suppose if I had more than my half-brain of some unreasonable ethics, I'd join them. 

A Jewish-American commentator envisions the ultimate worst for Israel

Peter Beinart looks at what appears to be an imminent Israeli war on Hezbollah in Lebanon. "which," he writes, "is really terrifying."

I have not heard—just as I did not hear as Israel was going into Gaza—anyone offering a convincing explanation of how Israel was going to defeat and destroy Hamas. I haven’t heard anyone say that about how Israel is going to destroy Hezbollah."

What Beinart is hearing from his Israeli friends is the selfsame, earlier argument for an expanded war to the north: "If we don’t destroy Hamas, people will never feel safe living in the south of Israel again. And we will have lost that part of our country." 

This is now "playing out" in Israel's debate "vis-a-vis Hezbollah, but in some ways with even more frightening stakes.... Israelis cannot return to the north because all of these people have been displaced from their homes unless we push Hezbollah away from that border."

The argument starts "from a political necessity, and then assumes there’s a military solution," says Beibart, adding that "this suggests [how] Israeli Jewish leaders, and Israeli [and U.S.] Jewish political discourse ... can’t imagine political solutions that don’t require these military solutions."

The latter are "fantastical," he notes. which has been virtually axiomatic in the American military since Vietnam, a principle unnecessarily confirmed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Israel is doubtless capable of "destroy[ing] a lot of southern Lebanon and a lot of Lebanon period ... but at a massive cost."  

Beinart is "terrified" because "of what this would do in terms of Israel’s international isolation given what’s already happened." His terror lies in the granddaddy of all Jewish fears: "If you want to move Israel closer to a point where people can really imagine the country no longer being able to exist, it seems to me going to war in Lebanon would be a good way of doing that."

Yet in "mainstream" Jewish Israeli thinking there is no room for political solutions to the yearslong menace of Hamas and Hezbollah — solutions involving "substantial compromise and reimagining of the whole question of what brings security." Such a Jewish Israeli prospect is "basically off the table. And that’s part of what frightens me so much about this moment."

This is one ass-kicking Biden ad

It's titled "Character Matters."

You probably recall when good character was Republican Party dogma, most notably when the Grand Old Partiers insisted that nothing more than President Clinton's adulterous dalliances were cause for electoral frenzy and removal of the Arkansas scoundrel from office.

That was before its voters chose to support the lifelong swindler, confirmed-sexual abuser and versatile criminal Donald Trump; that, in addition to their long-running, blinkered embrace of more committed and truly sleazy sexual scoundrels like Newt Gingrich.

I myself recall arguing in the late '90s that "good character" — an attribute that varies in definition among world cultures, as does "morality" — is the least of presidential requirements as long as the gendered he (back then) is competent, intelligent, and performs his executive tasks responsibly.

I did not argue that a commander in chief with a good character-impaired history of sexual assault is suited for the job, assault being giantly incomparable to dalliance. Had Clinton also been a lifelong financial fraudster and chiseler of working people and their money, to say nothing of being a convicted felon, my defense of the 42nd POTUS would have surrendered in wholesale negation.    

Those very attributes of Trump's character are what this Biden campaign ad hopes to remind voters of — that fence-sitting electorate that's yet to recall how enormously squalid and crooked the GOP candidate is, and always has been.    

My thanks to an inveterate reader for the ad heads-up.