Joe Biden was the Democratic Party’s duct-tape solution to a national emergency, the compromise candidate who was almost everyone’s second (or third) choice. Given that, the duct tape held surprisingly well for a while, in increasingly precarious circumstances. Until it didn’t.
It would be foolish in the extreme to predict the outcome of an election that’s almost a year away, especially under these chaotic circumstances. In all likelihood, the 2024 presidential election will be decided by events that haven’t happened yet, both “known unknowns” such as Donald Trump’s criminal trials and unknown unknowns still to be revealed.
But we can clearly say that Biden and the Democrats, along with the rest of us, now face not just a national but a global emergency, one that threatens to expose the abundant contradictions underlying American politics and American foreign policy.
Biden’s literal and figurative embrace of Benjamin Netanyahu, and his unqualified support for Israel’s war in Gaza — which is, at minimum, already a humanitarian disaster and a PR disaster, without even getting into contested questions about “war crimes” and “ethnic cleansing” — feels like a turning point in present-tense history, and not in a good way.
Recent polling suggests the scale of political danger involved here for Biden and most of the Democrats in Congress, who risk blowing apart the already duct-taped electoral coalition that ousted Trump in 2020 and partly withstood the expected “red tsunami” of 2022. A new survey from Quinnipiac University finds that majorities of registered Democrats, voters under 35 and Black voters (along with pluralities of both independents and Hispanic voters) disapprove of Israel’s response to the appalling terrorist attack of Oct. 7. On a more ambiguously-phrased question about whether voters’ “sympathies” lie more with Israelis or Palestinians, pluralities of registered Democrats and Black voters (and a clear majority of voters under 35) favor the Palestinians….
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Patrick Lawrence: ‘The Hinge of History’
Some information for Israelis (and the rest of us)
Israel’s Colonial Revenge Genocide in Gaza is the latest in a Long History of such Massacres
Biden’s Historically Illiterate and Hypocritical Speech on Ukraine and Gaza
A real friend of Israel would be making it face up to some uncomfortable truths
What will the children who survive the onslaught of Gaza think of those who let it happen?
As Gaza War Wages On, Israeli Settlers Attack Palestinians and Create a New Reality in the West Bank
Do Palestinian lives matter to the world?
Chris Hedges: Letter to the Children of Gaza
Is it too much to ask people to view Palestinians as humans? Apparently so
Dogs of war / New acronym in Gaza: WCNSF – Wounded Child No Surviving Family
Patrick Lawrence: Deeper Into Depravity
A Conspiracy of Silence / The Killing Floor of Gaza
Michael Brenner: Europe-Jews-Muslims
After the truth-shower 