NefeshBarYochai
2024-05-08 00:48:40 UTC
President Biden has the stench of LBJ about him. For those of us old
enough to remember, that stink is recalled with sadness and
foreboding.
After President Kennedy was assassinated, President Johnson proved
himself adept at passing civil rights and other Great Society domestic
legislation that JFK couldnt. It would have been enough to make him
one of our great presidents. But he had a fatal flaw when it came to
Vietnam.
Johnson saw that war in geopolitical and personal terms. A struggle by
Vietnamese nationalists against French and then American oppressors
and their South Vietnamese puppets was, to Johnson, an American fight
against Communism, the Soviet Union, and China. Once he made that
fight his own, he couldnt back down despite the wars course and
the press and TV coverage which, over time, revealed to the American
people his mistaken framing and the horrific punishment he, and they,
were inflicting on their Vietnamese victims, who declined to submit
despite millions dead, more millions maimed, and much of the country
destroyed by bombs and napalm.
Personal defeat was anathema to LBJ, so he persevered in a war that
much of the country came to believe was immoral and wrong as the
anti-war movement, led by students and faculty on campus, rapidly
expanded and tore apart the country, creating divisions that remain
today. When the movement took its protest to the Chicago streets
outside the Democratic convention, the police ran amok in full view of
the TV cameras, which played a role in Richard Nixons narrow defeat
of Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 watershed election, which started the
country down the more Republican, more conservative path that has
largely characterized our politics to this day.
President Biden suffers the same flaws. He has been fine all his
political life with the Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Israel was
running an apartheid state all that time, but there was never so much
as a peep of criticism of it from him. AIPACs money was political
mothers milk for him. He has been the USAs foremost Christian
Zionist for a long time. As President, he preferred the Palestinians
docile and quiescent, so that his geopolitical vision of an
Israeli-Saudi Arabian pact, leading a Western-dominated Middle East
against Iran, could be born. When Hamas struck on October 7, Biden
couldnt see it as part of a resistance struggle against 75 years of
oppression. He saw it as a challenge to him and his hopes for
stabilizing the region to permit him to focus on his hot war against
Russia and his cold war against China. Palestinians be damned.
So he unleashed Israel, knowing it was going to lay waste to Gaza to
restore deterrence. Despite his issues with Benjamin Netanyahu, he
gave him his full support, never expecting that there might be an
uproar in America over an Israeli genocide of Palestinians. His
recent, tone-deaf visit to Michael Douglas and Katherine Zeta Jones to
raise a few million from well-heeled Democratic contributors
exemplifies the bubble in which Biden lives. He continues to support
the genocide with tens of billions because he does not really believe
that he can lose the country over it, and because he has no empathy
for the Palestinian victims of Zionism.
It is redolent of the same stench of arrogance that brought down LBJ.
Todays suppression of the rapidly expanding anti-genocide movement on
campuses mirrors what we endured back then, and strongly suggests that
we are looking at a repetition of 1968 at the upcoming Democratic
Convention in Chicago. His prospect of a narrow victory over Trump in
Michigan and the other few critical battleground states is already
endangered, and the anticipated reaction to the violence the
authorities will visit on American young people there will further
alienate more voters from Biden. Yet his support of the genocide
continues.
Hes content to gamble that he will prevail in the end because his
opponent is Trump. The protesters be damned. He may be right. But
Biden is gambling with American democracy, all to permit Israeli Jews,
at least two-thirds of whom support the genocide and oppose letting
any humanitarian aid enter Gaza, to continue to kill Palestinian women
and children by the thousands, and to use their own governments
failure to anticipate the Hamas attack to ratchet up their ethnic
cleansing of the Palestinian people from the land between the River
and the Sea.
As a civil rights lawyer who has investigated and prosecuted cases in
the International Criminal Tribunals, I can well understand the
dilemma faced by those Democratic voters in Michigan, Georgia,
Pennsylvania, and Arizona who hesitate to vote for a genocider, even
one running against an insurrectionist.
Jill Biden reportedly told her husband some time ago to Stop it, Joe,
stop it now. Good advice that he continues to ignore at his peril,
and ours.
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/05/genocide-joe-is-beginning-to-stink-like-lyndon-b-johnson/
enough to remember, that stink is recalled with sadness and
foreboding.
After President Kennedy was assassinated, President Johnson proved
himself adept at passing civil rights and other Great Society domestic
legislation that JFK couldnt. It would have been enough to make him
one of our great presidents. But he had a fatal flaw when it came to
Vietnam.
Johnson saw that war in geopolitical and personal terms. A struggle by
Vietnamese nationalists against French and then American oppressors
and their South Vietnamese puppets was, to Johnson, an American fight
against Communism, the Soviet Union, and China. Once he made that
fight his own, he couldnt back down despite the wars course and
the press and TV coverage which, over time, revealed to the American
people his mistaken framing and the horrific punishment he, and they,
were inflicting on their Vietnamese victims, who declined to submit
despite millions dead, more millions maimed, and much of the country
destroyed by bombs and napalm.
Personal defeat was anathema to LBJ, so he persevered in a war that
much of the country came to believe was immoral and wrong as the
anti-war movement, led by students and faculty on campus, rapidly
expanded and tore apart the country, creating divisions that remain
today. When the movement took its protest to the Chicago streets
outside the Democratic convention, the police ran amok in full view of
the TV cameras, which played a role in Richard Nixons narrow defeat
of Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 watershed election, which started the
country down the more Republican, more conservative path that has
largely characterized our politics to this day.
President Biden suffers the same flaws. He has been fine all his
political life with the Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Israel was
running an apartheid state all that time, but there was never so much
as a peep of criticism of it from him. AIPACs money was political
mothers milk for him. He has been the USAs foremost Christian
Zionist for a long time. As President, he preferred the Palestinians
docile and quiescent, so that his geopolitical vision of an
Israeli-Saudi Arabian pact, leading a Western-dominated Middle East
against Iran, could be born. When Hamas struck on October 7, Biden
couldnt see it as part of a resistance struggle against 75 years of
oppression. He saw it as a challenge to him and his hopes for
stabilizing the region to permit him to focus on his hot war against
Russia and his cold war against China. Palestinians be damned.
So he unleashed Israel, knowing it was going to lay waste to Gaza to
restore deterrence. Despite his issues with Benjamin Netanyahu, he
gave him his full support, never expecting that there might be an
uproar in America over an Israeli genocide of Palestinians. His
recent, tone-deaf visit to Michael Douglas and Katherine Zeta Jones to
raise a few million from well-heeled Democratic contributors
exemplifies the bubble in which Biden lives. He continues to support
the genocide with tens of billions because he does not really believe
that he can lose the country over it, and because he has no empathy
for the Palestinian victims of Zionism.
It is redolent of the same stench of arrogance that brought down LBJ.
Todays suppression of the rapidly expanding anti-genocide movement on
campuses mirrors what we endured back then, and strongly suggests that
we are looking at a repetition of 1968 at the upcoming Democratic
Convention in Chicago. His prospect of a narrow victory over Trump in
Michigan and the other few critical battleground states is already
endangered, and the anticipated reaction to the violence the
authorities will visit on American young people there will further
alienate more voters from Biden. Yet his support of the genocide
continues.
Hes content to gamble that he will prevail in the end because his
opponent is Trump. The protesters be damned. He may be right. But
Biden is gambling with American democracy, all to permit Israeli Jews,
at least two-thirds of whom support the genocide and oppose letting
any humanitarian aid enter Gaza, to continue to kill Palestinian women
and children by the thousands, and to use their own governments
failure to anticipate the Hamas attack to ratchet up their ethnic
cleansing of the Palestinian people from the land between the River
and the Sea.
As a civil rights lawyer who has investigated and prosecuted cases in
the International Criminal Tribunals, I can well understand the
dilemma faced by those Democratic voters in Michigan, Georgia,
Pennsylvania, and Arizona who hesitate to vote for a genocider, even
one running against an insurrectionist.
Jill Biden reportedly told her husband some time ago to Stop it, Joe,
stop it now. Good advice that he continues to ignore at his peril,
and ours.
https://mondoweiss.net/2024/05/genocide-joe-is-beginning-to-stink-like-lyndon-b-johnson/
