Netanyahu’s U.S. Visit: Political Theater Amid Gaza Crisis and Calls for Accountability

Even as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was addressing Congress, meeting with an outgoing Joe Biden and a potential incoming Kamala Harris and with Donald Trump, the thought kept popping up.

If stepping aside as a “patriotic act” of Biden is expected as a presidential candidate, and, for example, if Kimberly Cheatle was forced to resign after a Secret Service failure even before an investigation, why isn’t Netanyahu at 74 considering the same, since his insistence on continuing military campaign in Gaza started with his failures and has resulted in global scorching over its most ill effects? While we’re at it, the leaders of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority and the Ayatollah also should be stepping down in the current spirit of wiping away all the incumbents.

Of course, even as a hostage-for-ceasefire deal is reported to be near, it is not done, and from Netanyahu’s belligerent tone, it is difficult to see a lasting deal happening anytime soon. A promised “conciliatory” speech was a broadside attack on Americans and others who might protests any aspect of the Israeli war as being tools of Iran and Hamas.

Anyone hoping for news of a breakthrough might as well have joined those who chose to stay away.

Did We Learn Anything?

Netanyahu was fulfilling a somewhat political, somewhat diplomatic itch to re-cement ties in Washington for continuing financial, military, intelligence and diplomatic support from his closest American allies. But the visit, in which he lavished praise on both Biden and Trump, felt political, untimely, and maybe as about raising his profile at home — or just self-promotion.

In this sudden season of instant “accountability” as drawn particularly by Congressional Republicans for anyone not named Trump, here was Netanyahu to offer the case for open-ended and non-questioning support of an increasingly right-leaning agenda in Gaza, the West Bank, and even now into southern Lebanon without any real acknowledgment that things have not gone as planned or hoped in the Middle East.

It was Netanyahu who pulled security forces from the Gaza border, creating the opportunity for Hamas terrorism on Oct. 7 for their reassignment to Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank. It was Netanyahu who sent money to the UAE for Hamas to keep them from joining forces with the Palestinian Authority.

It has been Netanyahu who launched a strategy more focused on destroying Hamas than on freeing hostages that have targeted civilian hospitals and schools where Hamas operates, who has leveled more than half of Gaza and allowed only limited humanitarian aid, who is being charged with international war crimes for starving two million Palestinian civilians. It is Netanyahu who faces a hostility on his own streets from tens of thousands, even as he refuses investigation of what led to October 7, as well as charges now postponed.

It is Netanyahu who sees a future of a tamed Gaza with an international occupation force, not recognition of a Palestinian nation that is incented to be a partner nation.

Just Why the Visit?

Driving to the Capitol took him by thousands of protesters who see the manner of the Israeli military campaign to be unusually and legally harsh. Netanyahu asserted without fact that protesters are paid by Iran, which should come as news to many in the anti-war crowd. He once again linked an anti-war feeling with anti-Semitism.

The tumult over Netanyahu’s appearance in Washington came across, as increasingly seems to be the case, more of political theater — to no understood end. It seemed the doing of a Republican-majority Congress who wanted to help its partisan criticism of the Biden administration during the U.S. election season.

But for politics, we could have heard the same speech about Ukraine — except, of course, that Republicans see one world tie and ally different than the other.

There has never been a serious question about aid, despite a decision by Biden to delay one heavy munition that he found inappropriate for bombing in an urban area because civilians would be killed. Indeed, Biden himself has been criticized by progressives on the left for favoring Israeli military moves disproportionately over either hostage release, or humanitarian concern for Gazans. Republicans and some Democrats who criticize Biden, or now Kamala Harris, for being insufficiently supportive of Israel must be following some different kind of military progress reports than the rest of us.

If Netanyahu wanted to say thank you to his strongest ally, he could have used the phone. Agreeing to speak to a joint session of Congress, especially as a ceasefire deal looms, seems unnecessary unless he was ready to make news and agree to sign it.

What there has been is an open question about what is to happen when the military clashes end — a question asked repeatedly by the Israeli Defense Force leaders themselves. Biden/Harris have taken the current fighting as a goad toward pushing for recognition of a Palestinian state, along with an international force to secure Israel’s safety.

The fact remains that Netanyahu opposes a two-state idea, and his increasingly right-leaning cabinet coalition wants to occupy and create yet more Jewish settlements in Gaza, as well as the West Bank.

Without a ceasefire, there will be more fighting and humanitarian issues in Gaza, more missiles raining from inside Lebanon, a separate, recognized state where Hezbollah fighters dictate what attacks will launch, and now from Yemen, where Houthi rebels are acting within another separate state. Meanwhile, the families of hostages mourn the fact that Netanyahu does not put them first. And Iran is building its nuclear reserves toward weapons readiness.

It seems a long way to go to give a speech that underscores all the bad things we already know.

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I was marveling yesterday about how the Democratic Party managed to, in the space of just 24 hours, go from a state of anxious tissue twisting over the status of Joe Biden’s electability to near-universal unity over the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris, who was said to have made more than one hundred phone calls from the Vice President’s residence at the Naval Observatory to party leaders after Biden stepped aside on Sunday.  It occurred to me to wonder, would the Republican Party be able to pull off a similar mid-campaign switch if something untoward were to befall their similarly aging candidate for president?

And then I ran across a piece by Tim Alberta in The Atlantic that he wrote on Sunday almost immediately after Biden had announced the withdrawal of his candidacy.  The piece was based on a series of interviews he had had with Trump’s co-campaign managers, Suzie Wiles and Chris LaCivita, about their worries after Biden’s June 23 debate debacle that the Democrats would somehow pull it together to run someone younger and more dynamic and more attractive to younger voters…and then suddenly on Sunday, that day arrived.  The Trump managers’ main concern about the Democratic Party, it emerged in Alberta’s telling, was their fear of the power of “institutional Democrats” who run a “well organized and well-financed machine” that was being held back only by the Democrats’ then candidate, Joe Biden. 

The Trump campaign eminently prepared to run against the fading Biden in a campaign which would entail “each candidate needing to convince voters that he was less unqualified than his opponent.”  The withdrawal of Joe Biden on Sunday threatened all their plans, and at the time Alberta wrote his piece late on Sunday, Vice President Harris had not solidified the unanimity of support she has just three days later.

But it was an aside deep in the text of the Atlantic piece that caught my eye: “The selection of Ohio’s Senator J. D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, campaign officials acknowledged, was something of a luxury meant to run up margins with the base in a blowout rather than persuade swing voters in a nail-biter.”  In a post on TwitterX later, Alberta expanded on the Trump campaign concern, calling it the “second-guessing of JD Vance.”

Ooops.

On the fourth day after Vance-a-mania at the Republican Convention, the Wise Man and Wise Woman behind the Trump campaign were already having second thoughts.

It’s not hard to see why.  Donald Trump has been able ever since he announced his candidacy the first time in 2015 to equivocate on the abortion issue without doing much damage to himself.  He went from being pro-abortion when he was a New York Democrat who contributed twice to Kamala Harris’ campaigns, $5,000 in 2011 and another $1,000 in 2013.  Surely Trump was aware that he was contributing money to the campaign of a left-of center Democrat who proudly championed her support of Roe v. Wade, along with women’s rights to contraception in all forms and the use of the morning after pill as a form of contraception after sex if a woman’s regular birth control fails to work. 

Trump must know that the break he has gotten from the evangelical wing of the Republican Party over abortion will not extend to his running mate.  In March, NBC News published a report on Trump’s potential choices for a running mate, quoting a campaign source saying “Trump is laser-focused on the abortion issue, especially when it comes to his vice presidential pick.”  The Trump campaign realized even then they had to walk a fine line between pissing off the evangelicals by picking someone too soft on abortion and potentially losing even more of the independent and suburban mom vote they were already worried about by picking an abortion hard-liner.  Their solution?  Curiously, they picked JD Vance.

Equivocation on abortion isn’t in the JD Vance Bible, recently acquired from the Catholic Church after his conversion in 2019.  Vance has been proudly “100 percent pro-life,” a self-characterization that was bannered under the words, “END ABORTION” on his website right up to the day it was announced that Vance was Trump’s pick as his running mate.  Then Vance’s “100 percent” stand suddenly disappeared.

Vance can run, but he can’t hide. Vance supports the Ohio law that makes abortion illegal after 6 weeks of pregnancy with no exceptions for rape and incest.  CNN reported after Vance was picked as Trump’s running mate that as recently as 2022, when Vance was running for the Senate, he appeared on a podcast and said, “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally.”  Such a national ban on abortion would legislatively overturn the Dobbs decision returning laws concerning abortion to the states. 

But Vance didn’t stop there.  Vance told his podcast audience that he was “sympathetic” to “some federal response” that would prevent women from traveling across state lines to get abortions.  Vance described his position this way: “Okay, look here, here’s a situation — let’s say Roe vs. Wade is overruled. Ohio bans abortion, in 2022 or let’s say 2024. And then, you know, every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity — uh, that’s kind of creepy.” 

Vance was speaking in January of 2022, before the Trump Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in a 6-3 decision.  Since then, Vance has joined the chorus of Republicans calling for enforcement of the Comstock Act, the 1873 law that bans the shipment across state lines of any materials that could be used to perform abortions.  Recent Republican rhetoric has indicated that would include the abortifacient drug Mifepristone as well as any materials that might be used in a medical abortion, right down to and including surgical scrubs and medical face masks.

Vance has even gone so far as to oppose new medical privacy regulations under HIPPA that would prohibit “the disclosure of protected health information (PHI) related to lawful reproductive health care in certain circumstances.”  The regulation was passed after it became known that legislatures in red states that ban abortion have passed or were considering passing laws allowing the monitoring of women’s reproductive health. “Many Americans are scared their private medical information will be being shared, misused, and disclosed without permission. This has a chilling effect on women visiting a doctor, picking up a prescription from a pharmacy, or taking other necessary actions to support their health,” said HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra in announcing the publication of the Final Rule regarding women’s health records. 

JD Vance was one of eight senators to write a letter to Secretary Becerra urging him to “withdraw [the proposed rule] immediately.”  If Trump and Vance win in November, the rule protecting women’s reproductive health records will doubtlessly be withdrawn, allowing states to use police and other law enforcement sources to hunt down women who are trying to access Mifepristone by mail or planning to travel out of state to obtain an abortion.

Vance has sought to soften his virulent anti-abortion stance, even telling an interviewer recently that because his running mate supports women’s access to Mifepristone, he supports it, too. 

Yeah, and I’ve got a bridge over the Ohio River to sell you, too.  Earlier this month, the Department of Transportation announced an $87.5 million grant to replace a bridge between Steubenville, Ohio and Brooke County, West Virginia.  Senator JD Vance of Ohio and Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia both voted against the Democratic infrastructure law that will provide the funds to replace the decrepit Market Street Bridge that has been on the list of threatened bridges for years.

That’s JD Vance and Republicans for you in a nutshell.  He was against the infrastructure bill until he was for it.  He is (now) for softening the Republican position on restricting or outright banning Mifepristone until he’ll be against it.  It seems that JD Vance’s conversion to Catholicism has an exception for those anointed by Donald Trump.

Isn’t that convenient?

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I have to say, I’ve never heard of Tennessee comedian Trae Crowder before this week, and I’ll bet I’m not alone. I feel that I need to spread word of the man’s genius here, but try as I might, I cannot embed a video into the software that Juanita Jean uses from my phone. Can’t. Do. It.

But that should not deter me. This is about the best summary that I’ve ever heard of wannabe TFGVP JD.

And here you go. I share this video on “X” in the only way I know to do it.

Click HERE then tap on the frame similar to the one below to get sound.

Y’all are welcome.

Here are a few bumper sticker ideas for the 2024 campaign.  I’m taking suggestions.

“For Trump, This Is an Unmitigated Disaster.”

Trump had been cruising toward what increasingly seemed might be a return to the White House. However, with Joe Biden’s withdrawal, Trump now faces a formidable adversary: a much younger woman, skilled at debating, and more vigorous.

Kamala Harris instantly ignited enthusiasm among listless and worried Democrats.

She excited independents who were concerned about individual liberty, and fearful of Trump’s promises of an authoritarian regime. Harris also created a political lifeline for roughly one in five Republicans who are Never Trumpers.

Worst of all for Trump, Harris is seen by many as heroic, as someone who can pull America out of the divisive Trump politics built on fear, hate, intolerance, misogyny, racism, retribution and revenge. 

Trump promises mass roundups, prosecutions of his enemies, and pardons for insurrectionists — and others — who committed crimes on his behalf. 

Should voters return Trump to the White House, I would not be the least bit surprised if, immediately after taking the oath of office, he points to Biden, Harris and others, and orders the military to arrest them. After all, under the recent Supreme Court ruling, he is immune from any official act.

In contrast, Harris promises a new era focused on ennobling the human spirit, the ideal articulated in the preamble to our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence from a tyrannical British king. Harris pledges to work for a better tomorrow and to build on what America enjoys right now: the most robust, most vibrant economy in the world.

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Instead of facing off against an aging president with tremendous economic accomplishments but zero charisma, Trump now faces an experienced prosecutor with style, flair and courtroom experience, making a case against criminals who deny their crimes. Suddenly, it’s a real and fair fight, although House Speaker Mike Johnson has already said his party will try to keep Harris off the ballot in some states, and keep her from spending money Biden raised. Those are both legal losers, by the way.

Harris instantly rescued her party from the political doldrums. Instead of drifting, Democrats suddenly have a purpose, and see an opportunity with an exciting candidate.

Think of this abrupt change Sunday as the political version of Dinah Washington’s romantic song What A Difference A Day Makes. 

In just 24 little hours, Harris hauled in not only the widely reported $81 million — an astonishing achievement — but in total almost three times that much, according to the New York Daily News. It reported that Harris raised $231 million in cash and pledges, including a $150 million “money bomb” from big donors.

Not only are the campaign money spigots wide open, but Harris can more than reasonably expect the flood of greenbacks to continue over the next three months, unless she makes some colossal blunder.

Also revealing was a Zoom call among Black women in politics. The organizers expected hundreds of women, but 44,000 logged on Sunday instead. The size of the audience overwhelmed Zoom, with some people reporting that they had lost their connection.

The Internet is alive with positive comments by both men and women about restoring women’s right to control their bodies rather than be forced to submit to a Trumpian government, not unlike what Margaret Atwood portrayed in her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale.

For Trump, this is an unmitigated disaster. (It’s also terrible news for those who feed off Trump by selling anti-Biden caps, shirts and paraphernalia. Don’t you feel sad for them?)

Should Harris win both the popular vote — which is virtually assured — and the Electoral College vote, Trump will be utterly humiliated.

From Trump’s perspective, it’s one humiliation to lose to Joe Biden, a white man. That was so painful that Trump tried to overthrow our government. 

Imagine the humiliation Trump will feel if he loses to not just a woman, but a woman of color, half Black and half East Indian. To Trump, that would be far more humiliating than his fragile ego can handle. He lacks the psychological strength to deal with what now seems the likely outcome of the November election. 

He constantly lies that the 2020 election was stolen, even claiming he won all 50 states. 

Harris is sure to hammer home that in five dozen court cases, Team Trump couldn’t produce a scintilla of evidence of wrongdoing. Trump has told this big lie so often, and has so many acolytes repeating it, that tens of millions of Americans believe this nonsense — even though Republican election officials and governors certified Biden’s victory.

Harris has the skill to weaken and perhaps destroy this facade of bald-faced lies. And she will undoubtedly go after Trump’s nonsense claims that his economy was better — it was below the post-World War II average — and that he created more jobs than Biden. In actuality, Trump lost jobs, while a record 15 million jobs have been added under Biden.

Trump also showed how he was scared, even terrified, within hours after Biden withdrew and endorsed Harris by pulling out of the September presidential debate.

On Sunday, Trump declared he won’t debate unless it’s Biden.

The fact is, Donald’s afraid to debate a woman. 

Trump brags about sexual assaults, is a rapist under New York law, and paid off porn star Stormy Daniels over their less than one-minute encounter to corrupt the 2016 election. That last crime is why he is a felon with 34 convictions.

Emotionally, Trump has been trapped his entire life in confused junior high school boy emotions. He likes women — so long as they are subservient to him.

Women who stand up to him are vilified, called “dogs,” “fat pigs,” “ugly,” and many vile words, all of which are accentuated in Trump’s hateful mind when the person standing up to him is a woman of color.

A rude story that’s circulated for decades among Trump’s executives and casino competitors goes to his extreme selfishness, sinful lust for money and complete lack of regard for anyone else, even his wives and children.  

The story goes that Trump is alone in an elevator. A gorgeous woman steps in, drops to her knees and offers oral sex.

Trump’s reply: “What’s in it for me?”

Trump’s total self-absorption contrasts with Biden’s focus on reviving the economy, reaching out to distressed people and ending his campaign. Harris promises to continue that.

In Harris, Trump faces someone who knows how to get under his skin. Harris knows how effective it is to mock Trump, to belittle his self-aggrandizing, to counter his lies that the economy is in shambles when it’s the strongest in the world.

Jekyll and Hyde

If Harris does it just right, she will make Trump so apoplectic, that his inner Edward Hyde will come out from under the orange facial makeup of this modern Dr. Henry Jekyll. 

While Trump poses as a strong man, inside, he is still that scared 13-year-old boy who daddy sent off to a military academy known for physically and sexually humiliating newcomers. 

Trump’s life has been a nightmare version of Groundhog Day. But instead of making himself over into a decent and talented human being, as the character played by Bill Murray did, Trump chose to become a con man. He has enjoyed extraordinary success, bluffing his way through business deals and politics, knowing all the time that there is no substance inside him, only the empty vessel he tries to fill with money and applause.

But that was his choice. He chose how to deal with his tyrannical father and cold, distant mother. 

Be glad you are not Donald Trump. It is better to pity him and mock his pathetic and often juvenile behavior.

Insurrection Redux

Trump made clear, while Biden was still in the race, that unless he wins, we should expect another insurrection — even a civil war.

“The most important day in the history of our country is going to be November 5,” Trump told Fox’s Brian Kilmeade in March. “Our country is going bad. And it’s going to be changed on November 5, and if it’s not changed we’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Those last quoted words show how entirely self-centered Donald Trump is. In his mind, America is not a country with multiple viewpoints among people who go to the ballot box to choose who will represent them and shape our destiny. To Donald, it’s his country. He even refers to “his people,” and it’s all about just one thing: Donald Trump.

Don’t forget that.

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