Current Things

comments on issues I should not comment on

This is an experiment in writing a post I shouldn’t post and a post you shouldn’t read. It is a take on “current things.” For me, it can serve the purpose of getting things off my chest, so that maybe I’ll keep my other posts more clear-headed. It also can serve as filler in case nothing else comes up, and I want to maintain my daily cadence. For you, it can serve the purpose of reading comments from me on things that I should not comment on.

If you’re reading this, I decided to go ahead and post it. If I do something like this again, it will also show up under a “current things” heading.

Israel

I am outraged at the suggestion for a Palestinian state, supposedly with some third-party guardian. I have seen where Saudi Arabia gets mentioned as a possible guardian.

What is the track record of third parties ensuring peace with Israel? Hamas built a massive tunnel network and a huge weapons arsenal with the full cooperation of the UNRWA. [Note that I wrote this before yesterday’s news about UNWRA.] The United Nations also was supposed to supervise a resolution that demilitarized the border between Israel and Lebanon. Gigantic fail.

I realize that the alternatives for Israel are not good. Keeping Israel’s military in charge of Gaza means having to overcome guerilla warfare. Deporting anybody deemed dangerous means having to deal with the “ethnic cleansing” canard.

But trusting any third party to maintain the peace when there are so many organized armed groups dedicated to breaking the peace is just setting yourself up for failure. It’s not just Netanyahu who won’t go along with the two-state (non-)solution. No Israeli leader in their right mind should go along with it.

And speaking of Netanyahu, we have the Biden Administration getting mad at him for Gaza civilian deaths and then criticizing him because so many Hamas fighters are still alive. Am I the only one who sees this as damned if you do, damned if you don’t? The Biden Administration may be wobbly about the goal of defeating Hamas, but it is absolutely firm in its goal to defeat Netanyahu.

Yellow Ribbonism

Ed West writes,

While the playing of ‘Imagine’ after the Paris massacre in 2015 was mawkish, the mood of ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ after Manchester felt completely wrong. Songs of comfort are helpful, but they are what a community sings in the face of natural disaster; children died in Manchester because of gross incompetence by the authorities, and a political climate that discourages honest truths.

What happens is that Muslims commit murder, and instead of focusing on punishment and prevention, we focus on mourning, “healing,” and fending off Islamophobia. I think this goes all the way back to 1979.

There was once an insipid, treacly love song called Tie a Yellow Ribbon (“Tie a yellow ribbon ‘round the old oak tree. It’s been three long years, do you still love me?”). I hated it when I first heard it, and I grew to hate it even more.

What happened is that when the Iranian revolution took place and the new government took Americans hostage, Tie a Yellow Ribbon became something like our national anthem. Everywhere, people put up yellow ribbons to show their sympathy for the hostages.

So here was a foreign government committing an act of war, and at home we were putting up ribbons. It made me sick.

What Ed West points out is that governments have an interest in promoting Yellow Ribbonism. He even points to evidence that recent instances of Yellow Ribbonism were astroturfed. Yellow Ribbonism serves to deflect attention from intelligence failures, from security failures, and from the dishonesty of multiculturalism.

Blue Ribbonism

I am not going to criticize Israelis or their government for how their values apply to the hostages. But what we are seeing out of Israel is the equivalent of Yellow Ribbonism. Call it Blue Ribbonism.

If Americans were taken hostage, I would not want the President to spend two seconds thinking about how to free them. Don’t risk soldiers trying to rescue them, and don’t negotiate to have them released.

You want to punish hostage-takers, not reward them. You kill as many of the enemy as you can. If they hide behind their own civilians, kill them anyway. If they hide behind our civilians, kill them anyway.

You can throw at me “What if it were your own family taken hostage?” I would be very sad and intensely angry if that happened. But the principle is this: if you as a government leader make a big deal out of the lives of hostages, you reward hostage-taking. Don’t do that. Don’t prioritize the families suffering today at the expense of families who will suffer in the future because you reward hostage-taking.

Houthis

We cannot fight them hard enough for my taste. We need to go full Conan on them.

The other attacks in the region may or may not deserve a response from us. If your reaction to attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq or Syria is to think Why do we keep bases there in the first place?, you’re not the only one. [Again, I wrote this several days ago.]

But freedom of the seas is something that we are entitled to care about and to try to enforce. It was that great founding neocon Thomas Jefferson who sent our navy against the Barbary Pirates.

I want us to be very leery of intervening in foreign wars. But I want our navy to be respected and feared. We need to make an example of the Houthis.

The Presidential Race

Why is defeating Donald Trump so hard? Governor DeSantis had a much better record than President Trump, especially concerning the pandemic.

But I feel like you could not locate Ron DeSantis the person. What was his problem? Was he hidden under a haze of McKinsey consultants? And does he really have a transmission that only can shift into either wooden or loony?

Vivek? High on his own supply. I don’t know if that line got used on him in any of the debates, but it should have been.

Nikki Haley gets branded as The Candidate of The Establishment(TM). Establishment, Shmestablishment. Haley has 99 percent of the enemies that Trump has. The difference is that Trump does not have enough friends to overcome those enemies. He is like a coach who can give an entertaining pre-game press conference trash-taking the other team—and then proceeds to lose the game.

As a politician, Mr. Trump knows how to shock. He knows how to mock. But that is his entire repertoire. My prediction is that by November most voters will be tired of it. We’ll be stuck with Mr. Biden until 2028 or until his dementia makes his staying in office unsustainable.

How do you peel voters away from Trump? Are people drawn to his self-centered and pugilistic personal characteristics? Or are they drawn to the fact that he at least shows some personal characteristics? I would hope that it is merely the latter.

I don’t think you have to be like Mr. Trump to appeal to people. But I do think you have to pass the Turing test. You have to risk running as yourself, with whatever flaws and mistakes come out, rather than as packaged merchandise.

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Lessons won't be learned