Biden Demands Israeli Changes on Aid—And Gets Some
Plus: No Labels calls it quits.
Anyone making path-of-totality pilgrimages this weekend ahead of the birth of the new gods Monday? Don’t burn any holes in your corneas and don’t miss Clevelander Daniel McGraw’s great piece on the faint hysteria of local media’s eclipse coverage.
Also qualifying for don’t-miss discussion: women’s Final Four games tonight and men’s Final Four games tomorrow. It’s not all bad out there. Happy Friday.
‘The Risk to Aid Workers is Unacceptable’
In the wake of the disastrous Israeli strike that killed a convoy of aid workers in Gaza Monday, the White House’s first serious threat that its staunch six-month support of Israel in its war against Hamas might be on thin ice:
President Joe Biden threatened on Thursday to condition support for Israel's offensive in Gaza on it taking concrete steps to protect aid workers and civilians, seeking for the first time to leverage U.S. aid to influence Israeli military behavior.
Biden's warning, relayed in a call with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday, followed a deadly Israeli attack on World Central Kitchen aid workers that spurred new calls from Biden's fellow Democrats to place conditions on U.S. aid to Israel. Israel said the attack was a mistake.
The U.S. president, a lifelong supporter of Israel, has resisted pressure to withhold aid or halt the shipment of weapons to the country. His warning marked the first time he has threatened to potentially condition aid, a development that could change the dynamic of the nearly six-month-old war.
The White House hasn’t announced any policy changes, but the sudden shift in tone is remarkable. For months, spokesmen like John Kirby have answered a daily barrage of reporters’ questions about the humanitarian toll in Gaza with versions of the same response: Even one civilian death is a tragedy, and America urges Israel to do all it can to minimize the loss of innocents, but the ultimate responsibility for collateral damage in Gaza lies with Hamas—a terror group that still refuses to release many of the hostages it took on October 7, whose battlefield strategy is based on blending into the civilian population.
Speaking to reporters Thursday, Kirby continued to insist that “United States support for Israel’s ability to defend itself from a range of threats, not just Hamas, remains ironclad.” But for what seemed the first time, he laid direct blame for civilian casualties on Israel’s battlefield policy.
“What we’re looking to see here,” Kirby said, “is a dramatic increase in humanitarian assistance getting in, additional crossings opened up, and a reduction in the violence against civilians and certainly aid workers . . . There are things that need to be done. There are too many civilians being killed. The risk to aid workers is unacceptable.”
“If there’s no changes to their policy and their approaches,” Kirby added, “then there’s going to have to be changes to ours.”
Some changes are already coming. Israel this morning released preliminary findings from its investigation of the deadly strikes, calling it “a grave mistake stemming from a serious failure due to a mistaken identification, errors in decision-making, and an attack contrary to the Standard Operating Procedures.” Two officers have been dismissed from the Israeli military. And Israel has agreed to permit the opening of a third crossing into Gaza for humanitarian aid.
—Andrew Egger
The No-Labels Whack-a-Mole
Yesterday, No Labels ended its effort to field a ticket in the 2024 election. The group was unable to convince a credible candidate to run under its label, despite the fact that it had secured ballot access in many states and had amassed significant resources.
I wouldn’t have predicted that No Labels would fail. In fact, I didn’t predict it. I was a small part of the anti–No Labels efforts, and was happy to help. But I was the resident pessimist about our ability to discourage every credible candidate whom No Labels approached. With two-thirds of Americans telling pollsters they were dissatisfied with a choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, someone’s going to do it, I believed.
With the guidance of savvy Democratic strategist Matt Bennett, we were doing our best to whack all the potential independent candidate moles who stuck their heads up. But I’ve played whack-a-mole on the boardwalk in Rehoboth. It’s hard to win. And so I figured that eventually some mole would evade our whacking. But we whacked away, and the moles went back underground. The effort worked.
This is good news. Most of the obvious No Labels candidates would have been more likely to take votes from Biden than Trump. Now they won’t.
Now, it’s still true that there’s still plenty of time for someone to run as an independent in many states, even if not on a No Labels ticket. And of course Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running, along with other minor candidates. So the No Labels news doesn’t mean all is well on the third-party front—to say nothing of the fact that the main event, the Biden-Trump contest, is itself a jump ball right now. But one step at a time.
There’s a lesson, I think, in the error of my pessimism. It’s this: Don’t let the big picture overly dominate your thinking or determine your actions. Because the big picture was one of unhappiness with the Biden-Trump choice, I thought we’d fail. Obviously you can’t ignore the big picture. But retail efforts can work even in an unfriendly wholesale environment.
In other words, in politics, you shouldn’t be too deterministic.
This is a massive country. There are big underlying forces, deep-seated socio-economic factors, major demographic trends are at play. But the actual results in our two most recent presidential elections have been so close that all kinds of small efforts have made a difference.
I’ve always liked politics, and like many people who like politics, I’ve always liked sports.
You can play a 162-game baseball season, end up tied for the league championship, play a closely-contested tie-breaker game, and lose on a home run by a shortstop who had five homers all season. (My apologies to Red Sox fans for bringing up painful 1978 Bucky Dent memories.)
Or, as a four-time all-star pitcher of that era, Joaquín Andújar, famously said, “There is one word in America that says it all, and that one word is: ‘You never know.’”
—William Kristol
Catching up . . .
IDF forces involved in strike on aid convoy mistook bag for weapon: CNN
U.S. jobs report shows another burst of hiring: New York Times
Biden to visit Baltimore today after deadly bridge collapse: NBC News
Biden is pumping billions in federal funding in Republican and swing states: Axios
Tensions flare between special counsel Jack Smith and Judge Aileen Cannon: Politico
Quick Hits
1. Running Out the Clock
A relatively bad week in court for Donald Trump, per Axios:
Three judges this week rejected attempts by former President Trump to toss out or further delay his criminal cases, delivering a blow to the GOP frontrunner barreling closer toward his first criminal trial.
Trump has had success in delaying his four criminal indictments, injecting uncertainty into his legal calendar, but the rulings this week allow his trial proceedings, at least for now, to continue.
Be smart: Axios describes the rulings—one each in Florida, Georgia, and New York—as a “blow” to Trump, but they’re really another case of his legal strategy working as intended. Trump’s team has continued to throw out spurious motions across his various criminal and civil cases. For the most part, they aren’t intended to succeed; they’re just intended to gum up the works, slowing the courts down and pushing as many of his trials as possible up to or beyond the 2024 election.
2. Mike Johnson’s Apology Tour
The political situation in which House Speaker Mike Johnson finds himself is, objectively, one of the funniest in recent political memory. Possessed of a minuscule and insanely fractious majority, he doesn’t have a prayer of passing a single piece of important legislation without some Democratic buy-in. And because getting some Democratic buy-in on any given piece of legislation is a recipe for half his caucus to head for the exits, what he usually ends up needing is lots of Democratic buy-in. But his political survival depends on keeping GOP base voters convinced he’s still a hard-charging right-wing zealot who’s never happy unless he’s making Democrats cry. It’s a pickle!
Over the last week, Johnson’s been hitting the conservative-media circuit, making soothing noises to the effect that he’s still their wild and crazy guy. Over at the site, Will Saletan’s got an excellent piece curating Johnson’s constellation of alibis, from “I inherited a mess” to “we’ve won some concessions” to “I tried to save George Santos.” Will writes:
Two moments from the apology tour are particularly disconcerting. One happened on Newsmax, when Bolling asked Johnson to address a rumor. “I’ve had two congressmen . . . call me, saying there’s someone on the Democrat side that’s paying off some of these [Republican] members to leave, to leave you with less of a majority,” said Bolling. Johnson said he didn’t think the rumor was true. But the circulation of this conspiracy theory among Republican lawmakers—and the fact that Bolling took it seriously, or at least thought his audience would—shows the extent of the party’s illness. Instead of facing the real problem—Republican lawmakers hate their jobs so much that they’re abandoning Johnson and the conference—the Republican base is sinking deeper into paranoia.
The other exchange took place in Johnson’s interview with Kirk. The speaker worried that a shutdown would go on for a long time because lawmakers who think they way he does would refuse to end it. “I come from the conservative movement myself. I’m a hardliner myself,” Johnson told Kirk. “A bunch of my friends would never join in the vote to reopen the government.”
That’s how derelict and dangerous the House GOP has become. The speaker is afraid to leave the fate of the nation to people like himself.
The whole thing’s money. Give it a read.
Cheap Shots
Remember when the right hated Rosanne due to her sacrilegious crotch-grabbing rendition of the Anthem?
Ah, good times
As to Mike Johnson and the dysfunctional Republicans, the real shame is that there does not seem to be any blowback to their lack of productivity. Why is there not any accountability for the fact that they wouldn’t fund a bill to help things at the border. They just tanked a bill to reduce taxes for the middle class. They refuse to do anything to insure the continued social security and Medicare programs.
Why is there no outcry to the millions of dollars wasted on the so-called Biden impeachment? Why is there no indictment or outcry over the fact that Comer and Jordan tried to use perjured testimony of Russian agents to support unfounded allegations? It is clear that Trump and Jared were bribed or “influence” by foreign governments, yet no out cry ?
MTG clearly is pushing a Russian narrative. No pushback?
Truth Social survived because of Russian money laundering. You don’t think they won’t collect from Trump if he is again in office? Still no outcry from the freedom loving commie hating right?
Blame our population not our politicians. They created this idiocracy. They choose to believe the blatant lies. They not only tolerate them but demand more.
Alex Jones v The Truth is a prime example. Grieving parents are harassed and threatened because the electorate literally believes something that is patently false. That is the state of our country.
Are there enough citizens in this country going to actually fight this nonsense, not just whine about it? Or, like the Republican politicians, simply run from the fight?