We all remember the chaos we saw in the final week of August, 2021 – infants being tossed over razor wire, thousands of people crashing the perimeter of Hamid Karzai International Airport, trying to stop a moving C-17 cargo plane on the tarmac trying to evac the lottery winners that won a seat, and the falling body of someone so terrified of life in Afghanistan reverting to the control of the Taliban that he figured a better option was to hang onto the wheel well as the plane took off, only to black out once airspeed, lack of oxygen at altitude, air temperatures, and retracting landing gear conspired to plunge him to his death.
It was without doubt the worst foreign policy debacle this country has gone through, and it was one that did not have to happen. We had a perfectly defensible air base at Bagram, Biden decided to move out the military before getting all the civilians out, did not care a whit about any allies or personnel of interest that assisted us in the Global War on Terror for 20 years, leaving them behind. It was truly disastrous.
It was such a catastrophe that it seems unfathomable that Joe Biden could match that feat in such a short period of time in one presidency. But 50 years of adopting exactly the wrong approach on every foreign policy decision facing the United States has led to this moment of abandoning Israel just at the point when the final battle against Hamas begins.
Keep in mind what Joe Biden said just six months ago on 60 Minutes with Scott Pelley.
And when Joe Biden says Israel should completely eliminate Hamas, he of course would come to mean not eliminate Hamas at all, and instead, we’ll make sure when there’s literally nowhere else for Hamas to go, we’ll withhold the very guidance systems on weapons that reduce collateral damage.
48 hours ago, Joe Biden spoke at the Holocaust Memorial Museum on the Day of Remembrance ceremony. This is what he said then.
Ironclad. Used as an adjective, meaning very rigid or exacting; inflexible; unbreakable. The inflexibility part of his support – the rigid, exacting, unbreakable standing by our only true ally in the Middle East lasted a day.
It actually caught everyone off guard, because even though voices like Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Council spokesman John Kirby had floated that trial balloon a week ago, most observers believed the blowback to those two test threats was sufficient that Biden himself would never actually say it.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, Gen. Charles Brown, were previously scheduled to testify to the Senate Armed Services Committee Wednesday morning. Here’s what South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham did to them.
It’s pretty clear from their body language and how they’re answering that they were not consulted, nor were they aware before that morning that the President was going to move in that direction. I’m sure they both, in their heart of hearts, are not in support of this decision by Biden, but have to figure out a way to put lipstick on this pig. That’s happening all over Washington right now.
From a political and tactical standpoint, this decision by the President may be the dumbest one he’s committed to date, and that’s saying something with Joe Biden, because there is literally no upside, and only downside. If you are a Democratic member of the House or Senate who voted for the aid package last week that the President signed, a vote that was fraught with political peril considering a third of the Democratic base is abjectly antisemitic, Biden has now forced you to walk the plank and accept the negatives, without being able to reap any of the benefits by helping possibly end the war sooner, defeat terrorists without U.S. personnel having to be in harm’s way more than necessary, and possibly get American hostages back sooner, assuming they’re still alive. All that is now gone, and you only have the fever swamp trying to primary and/or harass you wherever you go. You’re pretty ticked off.
If you’re a NeverTrumper, one who made the case in 2020 that Joe Biden was by far the better option, and until this week still tried to stake out that ground in 2024, Wednesday’s interview from Wisconsin with CNN’s Erin Burnett stabbing Israel in the back was the final straw. John Podhoretz tweeted out that he’s done now with Biden. He wrote it up at Commentary.
I’m done.https://t.co/KfparzSeVh
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) May 9, 2024
Joe Biden deserves nothing but condemnation, censure, and withering contempt for his announcement tonight that he will withhold significant amounts of the recently approved aid to Israel should the government begin a full-on siege of the last Hamas redoubt in, around, and under Rafah.
For seven months now, I have defended Joe Biden. On our podcast and on this website, I have repeatedly said that while the president may have felt—wrongly, in my view—that he needed to maintain some rhetorical space from Israel because of the imagined need to keep young people and Arab-Americans in his electoral camp, the actual policies and support he was offering and providing the Jewish state were consistent and solid. For months, for example, he pushed for a significant aid package even as he criticized tactics and strategies employed by the IDF to fight in Gaza. And he supplied important logistical support to protect Israel—first by deploying ships to the Lebanese coast to deter Hezbollah and then in the air campaign that rendered the direct Iranian attack all but harmless.
That was then, this is now. That aid package he fought for? He’s now blocking much of it himself—and is promising to do worse in days to come. That support for Israel? He is now pursuing policies that are designed to keep Hamas alive. This long-time friend of Israel? At an incredibly critical moment, he is giving Barack Obama a run for his money as a singularly destructive American “ally.” We’re told the decision to act this way came last week but that Biden wanted to keep it quiet until he delivered his speech commemorating the Holocaust.
That disgraceful and two-faced effort to earn emotional plaudits from speaking strongly about the greatest historical tragedy of the Jewish people even as he was working to cripple the Jewish state suggests Biden possesses a level of chutzpah that would make even the man who kills his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court for being an orphan say “Now you’ve gone too far.”
Jonah Goldberg of the Dispatch, another charter member of NeverTrump, tweeted this last night.
Fwiw. I’ve heard from a LOT of reliably anti-Trump people – I mean really, really, anti-Trump people – who have had it with Biden tonight. Anecdotal, to be sure. But very telling in my circle.
— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahDispatch) May 9, 2024
The youth vote that Joe Biden allegedly is formulating whatever coherence one can attribute this policy of betrayal towards our ally is gone. Nancy Cordes on the CBS Early Show Wednesday morning.
At best, people that are otherwise conservative but cannot pull the lever for Trump were going to vote for Biden, even being an economic disaster as president. After yesterday, many are now people without a party. They probably still will not vote for Trump, but they’ll write in someone. They might leave the top line blank. Here’s former Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan.
That’s electoral death for an incumbent.
Do you remember the premise behind the first impeachment of Donald Trump by Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, and a bunch of House Democratic crazies? It was an accusation that the President withheld aid passed by statute in the Congress for political purposes. Remember the perfect phone call with Ukraine? Of course, there was only the accusation, and Trump did not actually do what he was alleged to have done. Here, we actually have the president of the United States admitting on television that he’s withholding aid for what everyone knows is political reasons, coming on the heels of an aid package just passed by Congress and signed into law by him. He’s actually committing and confessing to the impeachable act that Democrats used against his predecessor.
From a strategy standpoint, does this stunt by Biden make Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, want to consider surrendering anytime soon? How does Ayatollah Khamenei in Tehran think about this?
Now think about how Xi Jinping is going to school on this. You know he wants to make a move on Taiwan, and up to this point in the Indopacom, Biden has actually been relatively solid. Certainly more solid than he’s been in Europe or the Middle East. How hard do you think it would be for the ChiComs to begin a protest campaign turning the Democratic tide against Taiwan, poisoning support for them with college kids, and forcing the President to abandon them with weaponry and support once China started their move?
Inside the White House currently, there are factions that are pro-Israel, and there are factions that are virulently anti-Israel. Joe Biden has taken every side of the issue this week. No one inside the White House knows what Biden firmly believes, or what political game he’s playing, and believes he’s malleable to pressure. They’ve got good reason to think that. I’m sure there is a turf battle going on in the West Wing and Old Executive Office Building to try to sway the President back like a pendulum. It’s got to be beyond chaotic.
None of this had to be. This issue is not a difficult moral issue at all. Hamas is 100% responsible for every drop of blood that’s been spilled in the region since October 7th. They could end the carnage today. They won’t, because they’re in it to win it. And winning, to them, is a Jew-free world. And every day that Joe Biden dithers, waffles, and takes time to study the issue so that he can make the worst calculation possible for America and its allies, it’s a day the terrorists are closer to victory. It’s also a day that feeds into the growth of the antisemitic wing of the Democratic Party.
While this disgust was unfolding, very quietly at the House Education Committee, testimony was taken from Berkeley, California’s Superintendent of Schools, Enikia Morthel. She was shown curriculum slides being taught to grade schoolers that displayed the antisemitic mantra, ‘From the river to the sea…” Her response to Rep. Kevin Kiley? To some Palestinians, that’s just a call for peace.
That’s not a call for peace for anyone inside Israel. It’s not a call for peace with the Squad. It’s not a call for peace for the protesters. And it’s not a call for peace from Hamas. The eastern border of Israel is the Jordan River. The western border is the Mediterranean Sea. From the river to the sea means that there is exactly no land whatsoever for the Jews. No Israel in the Middle East. That’s a one-state solution. The Hamas solution.
Joe Biden, among every other bad outcome mentioned above, has always been condoning this with his actions. Until Wednesday, at least his words remained in support of Israel and against the hatred. That’s no longer the case.