Chaos, Inc.

 There are many reasons to criticize Benjamin Netanyahu over the attack of last Saturday and the atrocities which followed -- Israeli papers like Haaretz have done so even as the first rockets fell.  Did he ignore intelligence shared by Egypt about an impending attack from Gaza, or even move forces to the West Bank?  Did he secretly welcome the attack as a distraction from his own legal troubles, underestimating the ferocity of it?  These are questions that will have to be gone into after the shooting stops.  For now all parties have joined in a unity government, so grave is the situation.

Of course, thanks to the GOP (Gang of Putin), we barely have a government at all.  The House Republicans -- what Charlie Pierce calls the Angry Children's Caucus -- can't agree on which awful choice they want to succeed awful Kevin McCarthy as Speaker.  As the Gerald R. Ford carrier group steams toward the Middle East there is no Chief of Naval Operations thanks to the idiot football coach Tuberville, and no US ambassador in Israel thanks to the self-certified ophthalmologist Rand Paul (something about Anthony Fauci inventing covid, don't waste any thought on it).  Josh "Run Like Hell" Hawley demands we stop supporting Ukraine and give the money to Israel, just as Putin coached him to say.  George Santos has been indicted again -- credit card fraud -- and New York Republicans beg the House to expel him, which won't happen because the A.C.C. need his vote.  They would happily expel Rashida Tlaib for suggesting that there might be two sides to the conflict, although she condemned Hamas's actions as "war crimes."  

And then there's Trump.  If I were religious I might believe that some deity was punishing America for the Native American genocide or the ongoing crime of racism by allowing this creature to live among us.  He paused his personal jihad against Forbes magazine to deliver a policy address to some Florida mouth-breathers, and it should have its own supplement to the DSM.  The self-proclaimed "greatest friend Israel ever had" has decided that Hamas is "very smart."  He'll "never forget that Bibi let us down."  How?  "The first person that congratulated Biden was Bibi Netanyahu, the man that I did more for than any other person I dealt with...He has made a terrible mistake."  Yes, the mistake so many Jews make, disloyalty.   Only Trump would obsess about a phone call from 2020 at a time like this.  Wait till he sees this billboard:

 

Where's the billboard thanking him for personally moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem?  He even lent them boxes from his bathrooms to pack documents.

The official Republican line today is that Biden actually bankrolled Hamas with the Iranian oil money unfrozen in South Korea, still waiting to be released by Qatar for humanitarian purposes only.  Trump has already decided that Iran goaded Hamas into the attack, ignoring all the evidence that his favorite strongman Putin has courted the Palestinian leadership.  (Bibi also let him down when he assassinated the Iranian general Soleimani, a great foreign policy triumph.  In Trump's mind, a greater achievement than killing Osama bin Laden.)  And just like the invasion of Ukraine, this war would never have happened if he hadn't lost -- no, if the 2020 election hadn't been rigged.  By whom?  "Barack HUSSEIN Obama!"  Consider the circle squared.

According to Trump, Israel is "weak" and needs to "strengthen themselves up."  The people trapped in Gaza right now, with no water, food or electricity and no way out, getting the living daylights bombed out of them, would not agree.  It's impossible to say how many support Hamas or Hezbollah or some other terrorist entity, but they are now helpless pawns in a game of chess with no clear end game, just an endless tournament of hellish destruction.  

You don't have to like the increasingly authoritarian Netanyahu and his attempts to weaken the courts, efforts opposed by many Israelis, not to mention his personal corruption.  We managed to fight alongside the Soviet Union for four years in spite of Stalin, a far worse leader.   Uncle Joe's current successor is an implacable enemy of Israel, as he is of all democracy, and that alone is a reason to stand by Israel.  And Ukraine.  And anyone else who keeps the fragile plant of self-government alive in this inhospitable climate.  There is nothing inevitable about democracy.  It's a lot of hard, frustrating work, with gains often measured in inches.  But consider the alternative.