Blinken told Congress, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting” aid, even though the U.S. Agency for International Development and others had determined that Israel had broken the law.
You’re right, and none of that gives me hope that Harris will pivot.
The re-elect Harris campaign will start on January 20th, and the political reality you just described will still exist.
Changing stances on Israel’s genocide will take leadership, which is something we haven’t seen from the Harris campaign. It is not Harris leading a campaign on principle, it is the polls leading the Harris campaign, just as you described it.
Those suburban moderates’ views can be changed, they just have never been exposed to an opposing message. The news says Israel is the good guys and Hamas is the bad guys; only those on the fringes say otherwise. If Harris would show leadership and take a principled stance on the side of humanity, she could bring most of these low information moderate voters with her.
This is a false hope every single time. Once she is in office, the structures she will face - Pentagon, Congress, “deep state” (long-standing war-on-terror era bureaucracy) will constrain her even harder. ASSUMING she isn’t another ideological and moral Israeli loyalist, which is a little hard to believe about someone who celebrated Seder in the White House with her Israeli-American husband by serving wine from a West Bank settlement.
It isn’t “Trumpian”, it predates Trump and is an actual phrase that comes from the social sciences and was then adopted and abused by conspiracy theorists. In the American context, it’s a useful concept because it helps to explain the continuity in unpopular or discredited policies between administration that tout different outlooks, but end up railroaded into these policies. It’s just a different name for what Obama called “the blob.”
Yeah, there is a large bureaucracy that implements policy, no question. That policy was initiated democratically though, and can be similarly reversed. Just not unilaterally by a President, who is not supposed to be a king, especially if Congress decided it.
And the blob term to describe the bureaucracy was used by an Obama aide, not Obama btw. Not that I expect honesty out of Trumpets.
I don’t know what you mean by “technical” here. There are several contexts where it is used academically. For example, here in Turkey the term is pretty ubiquitous when discussing the 80s ultranationalist, anti-communist state bureaucracy. It’s certainly in several of the English language political and international relations glossaries I’ve read.
I don’t dispute that US politics is complicated and has many democratically elected players who shape policy. That’s why I put “deep state” in quotations, because the concept fits much more loosely when discussing US foreign policy bureaucracy.
After all, when Trump got in, he fired a whole lot of State Department workers, raising fears that he was crippling it by removing indispensable experts. But what’s interesting is that his move was considered unprecedented, which sort of goes to prove the point that these individuals are embedded into US foreign policy and kept on as a matter of necessity or simplicity even if their overall strategic and moral outlook is detrimental to US interests and the world.
Not that Trump made any improvements, he just replaced them with incompetents, extremists and yes-men.
And you’re right, it was Ben Rhodes who coined “the blob”. No need to be rude, my point still stands. I am not a Trump supporter at all. His administration was a collosal failure for the Mid East’s future, but unfortunately the current crop of Democrats have taken after him on nearly all issues - from JCPOA to normalizing MBS to letting Israel run amok.
Ah, I didn’t realize you were coming from a non-American perspective. I can’t speak for the usage of the term in other places, but here in America it was not in academic usage outside of discussions on conspiracy theories, where people in those circles would use it to refer to the part of the US government they suspected of orchestrating the assassination of JFK.
Trump’s firings were not exactly unprecedented, either. Gerald Ford presided over an event that became known as the Holloween Massacre, where he did significant reshuffling within the DoD. Nixon, Reagan and Clinton also did their fair share of firings when they felt it was necessary. What made Trump special was the sheer hostility he demonstrated to the government he was supposed to be running, preferring to make decisions directly instead of delegating by frequently leaving leadership positions unfilled, and installing sycophants when necessary.
The idea that there was some entrenched resistance to him is his propagandistic spin on the idea that our Separation of Powers restrain the President, preventing him from performing any actions that would be deemed illegal by Congressional law, of which there were many. Until the recent SC ruling that granted our President a king-like immunity anyway.
He’s a professional salesman, though, it’s best not to fall for his bullshit and thinly veiled desire to run the country like a family business or cartel, with concentrated power in a single figure.
Trust me, we in this region know exactly what Trump means by “run the government like a business” - it means superficial transactionalism. I was living in the Gulf during his presidency, and everyone knew the Saudis were trying to buy him on the cheap LOL! In fact, that’s why some people in the region want him back, hoping that his unpredictablility, stubbornness, contempt and seeming aversion to getting the US into a war may actually lead him to snub Israel or at the least make it reconsider whether the US would follow it into a regional war. As it stands, I can’t blame them for thinking that. You cannot imagine the rage and anxiety that this latest massacre of Lebanese by Israel has created.
Yeah, that’s unlikely when such a high percentage of his fanbase is Christian Nationalist, doing their best to fight back against their perceived evils in favor of Judeo-Christian rulership, while very conveniently forgetting that Islam is part of that same religious tree.
They’re probably right that he wouldn’t follow Israel into a regional war, but I doubt Biden would either. Someone should remind them that despite Israel fighting many, many wars with US support, we have never deployed ground forces alongside them. We simply have no obligation to do so.
Shooting down some missiles is one thing, sending arms sure, some drone strikes whatever, a lot of Americans still strongly support Israel and don’t mind all that. But putting our forces into ground combat would be broadly unpopular here.
But she also didn’t attend Netanyahu’s speech and actually has been quite critical of the war in Gaza. But yes, don’t expect miracles. I still think she will be more critical of the Israelian government and whether this leads to a ceasefire or not is to be seen.
She met with Netanyahu regardless, and did a photo op with him. Every since her poll numbers drastically improved, she has become less and less pensive about her unconditional support for Netanyahu’s Israel.
It’s really silly to point to the provocations and one-sided policy of the Trump administration at this point. Biden not only kept to them, he doubled down on them, and none of them were as monstrously deterimental to the Palestinian people than what Blinken and Biden have done.
They have jettisoned the entire domestic and international humanitarian framework to allow Israel to punish, slaughter, herd and humiliate millions of civilians. And Harris sees no reason to contradict them or abandon this policy. She has made it unequivocally clear that she is with them on this. They’ve really gona above and beyond in doing so. And at the end of the day, a majority of Democratic senators gave Netanyahu a standing ovation in Congress. Her party, her president, her position.
We’ll see. I’m not so sure that 4 years from now the electorate will look just like how it looks today. I also suspect she can make a bolder move in the first year than she can in the latter half. Biden doesn’t draw nearly the level of heat over the Afghanistan pullout as he did a couple years ago, after all. The electorate has a notoriously short memory.
So, she does have some space to demonstrate that exact sort of leadership, and it could very much benefit her in the long run. It’ll have to outweigh all the AIPAC money on the other side, though, that’s another consideration balanced against how successful she has been with small dollar donations. So, remains to be seen how the calculus all falls out.
You’re right, and none of that gives me hope that Harris will pivot.
The re-elect Harris campaign will start on January 20th, and the political reality you just described will still exist.
Changing stances on Israel’s genocide will take leadership, which is something we haven’t seen from the Harris campaign. It is not Harris leading a campaign on principle, it is the polls leading the Harris campaign, just as you described it.
Those suburban moderates’ views can be changed, they just have never been exposed to an opposing message. The news says Israel is the good guys and Hamas is the bad guys; only those on the fringes say otherwise. If Harris would show leadership and take a principled stance on the side of humanity, she could bring most of these low information moderate voters with her.
This is a false hope every single time. Once she is in office, the structures she will face - Pentagon, Congress, “deep state” (long-standing war-on-terror era bureaucracy) will constrain her even harder. ASSUMING she isn’t another ideological and moral Israeli loyalist, which is a little hard to believe about someone who celebrated Seder in the White House with her Israeli-American husband by serving wine from a West Bank settlement.
I swear this Trumpian deep state crap somehow seeps into everything.
It isn’t “Trumpian”, it predates Trump and is an actual phrase that comes from the social sciences and was then adopted and abused by conspiracy theorists. In the American context, it’s a useful concept because it helps to explain the continuity in unpopular or discredited policies between administration that tout different outlooks, but end up railroaded into these policies. It’s just a different name for what Obama called “the blob.”
Uh, no it’s not a technical term.
Yeah, there is a large bureaucracy that implements policy, no question. That policy was initiated democratically though, and can be similarly reversed. Just not unilaterally by a President, who is not supposed to be a king, especially if Congress decided it.
And the blob term to describe the bureaucracy was used by an Obama aide, not Obama btw. Not that I expect honesty out of Trumpets.
edit for clarity
I don’t know what you mean by “technical” here. There are several contexts where it is used academically. For example, here in Turkey the term is pretty ubiquitous when discussing the 80s ultranationalist, anti-communist state bureaucracy. It’s certainly in several of the English language political and international relations glossaries I’ve read.
I don’t dispute that US politics is complicated and has many democratically elected players who shape policy. That’s why I put “deep state” in quotations, because the concept fits much more loosely when discussing US foreign policy bureaucracy.
After all, when Trump got in, he fired a whole lot of State Department workers, raising fears that he was crippling it by removing indispensable experts. But what’s interesting is that his move was considered unprecedented, which sort of goes to prove the point that these individuals are embedded into US foreign policy and kept on as a matter of necessity or simplicity even if their overall strategic and moral outlook is detrimental to US interests and the world.
Not that Trump made any improvements, he just replaced them with incompetents, extremists and yes-men.
And you’re right, it was Ben Rhodes who coined “the blob”. No need to be rude, my point still stands. I am not a Trump supporter at all. His administration was a collosal failure for the Mid East’s future, but unfortunately the current crop of Democrats have taken after him on nearly all issues - from JCPOA to normalizing MBS to letting Israel run amok.
Ah, I didn’t realize you were coming from a non-American perspective. I can’t speak for the usage of the term in other places, but here in America it was not in academic usage outside of discussions on conspiracy theories, where people in those circles would use it to refer to the part of the US government they suspected of orchestrating the assassination of JFK.
Trump’s firings were not exactly unprecedented, either. Gerald Ford presided over an event that became known as the Holloween Massacre, where he did significant reshuffling within the DoD. Nixon, Reagan and Clinton also did their fair share of firings when they felt it was necessary. What made Trump special was the sheer hostility he demonstrated to the government he was supposed to be running, preferring to make decisions directly instead of delegating by frequently leaving leadership positions unfilled, and installing sycophants when necessary.
The idea that there was some entrenched resistance to him is his propagandistic spin on the idea that our Separation of Powers restrain the President, preventing him from performing any actions that would be deemed illegal by Congressional law, of which there were many. Until the recent SC ruling that granted our President a king-like immunity anyway.
He’s a professional salesman, though, it’s best not to fall for his bullshit and thinly veiled desire to run the country like a family business or cartel, with concentrated power in a single figure.
Trust me, we in this region know exactly what Trump means by “run the government like a business” - it means superficial transactionalism. I was living in the Gulf during his presidency, and everyone knew the Saudis were trying to buy him on the cheap LOL! In fact, that’s why some people in the region want him back, hoping that his unpredictablility, stubbornness, contempt and seeming aversion to getting the US into a war may actually lead him to snub Israel or at the least make it reconsider whether the US would follow it into a regional war. As it stands, I can’t blame them for thinking that. You cannot imagine the rage and anxiety that this latest massacre of Lebanese by Israel has created.
Yeah, that’s unlikely when such a high percentage of his fanbase is Christian Nationalist, doing their best to fight back against their perceived evils in favor of Judeo-Christian rulership, while very conveniently forgetting that Islam is part of that same religious tree.
They’re probably right that he wouldn’t follow Israel into a regional war, but I doubt Biden would either. Someone should remind them that despite Israel fighting many, many wars with US support, we have never deployed ground forces alongside them. We simply have no obligation to do so.
Shooting down some missiles is one thing, sending arms sure, some drone strikes whatever, a lot of Americans still strongly support Israel and don’t mind all that. But putting our forces into ground combat would be broadly unpopular here.
But she also didn’t attend Netanyahu’s speech and actually has been quite critical of the war in Gaza. But yes, don’t expect miracles. I still think she will be more critical of the Israelian government and whether this leads to a ceasefire or not is to be seen.
But in any case she will be harder on them than Trump, who moved the US embassy to Jerusalem during his presidency and offered the “peace deal of the century”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_peace_plan#:~:text=The stated purpose of the,both parties to the conflict.
She met with Netanyahu regardless, and did a photo op with him. Every since her poll numbers drastically improved, she has become less and less pensive about her unconditional support for Netanyahu’s Israel.
It’s really silly to point to the provocations and one-sided policy of the Trump administration at this point. Biden not only kept to them, he doubled down on them, and none of them were as monstrously deterimental to the Palestinian people than what Blinken and Biden have done.
They have jettisoned the entire domestic and international humanitarian framework to allow Israel to punish, slaughter, herd and humiliate millions of civilians. And Harris sees no reason to contradict them or abandon this policy. She has made it unequivocally clear that she is with them on this. They’ve really gona above and beyond in doing so. And at the end of the day, a majority of Democratic senators gave Netanyahu a standing ovation in Congress. Her party, her president, her position.
We’ll see. I’m not so sure that 4 years from now the electorate will look just like how it looks today. I also suspect she can make a bolder move in the first year than she can in the latter half. Biden doesn’t draw nearly the level of heat over the Afghanistan pullout as he did a couple years ago, after all. The electorate has a notoriously short memory.
So, she does have some space to demonstrate that exact sort of leadership, and it could very much benefit her in the long run. It’ll have to outweigh all the AIPAC money on the other side, though, that’s another consideration balanced against how successful she has been with small dollar donations. So, remains to be seen how the calculus all falls out.