Among the worst takes on the impeachment: “Biden’s words from 2020 fuel GOP’s impeachment push” (Axios); and on Hunter Biden’s indictment: “Biden allies worry son Hunter’s indictment could strain the president’s 2024 focus” (NBC News). The worst of the worst was from the Wall Street Journal: “Biden’s Rough September: Auto Strike, Son’s Indictment, Inflation, Impeachment Inquiry.” (Inflation is actually down, and there is no sign anything involving his son is a drag on his reelection.)
These fit a common media pattern: Hammer an item and then castigate Democrats for getting distracted by or worrying about it. I find it hard to believe any significant number of people willing to vote for Biden would say, “Nope, his kid is being indicted, so I will go with Donald Trump” or “Even if there’s no evidence, Biden’s impeachment is as bad as Trump’s two.” Both the amount of and hysterical tone of coverage remind us how little self-awareness the media gained during the Trump years.
If it were not so infuriating, it would be comical. The political media’s obsession with alleged problems for Biden frankly smacks of attempting to make its own coverage a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then, the media can safely claim “both sides have problems,” even though no negative issue on Biden’s side remotely matches the danger and lunacy in inviting an accused felon and twice-impeached former president back to the White House.
As for the impeachment based on the utterly baseless charge that President Biden helped his son and/or benefited from his foreign business dealings, an unlikely source provided the definitive take on the entire gambit. Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) wrote for The Post: “What’s missing, despite years of investigation, is the smoking gun that connects Joe Biden to his ne’er-do-well son’s corruption.” That’s a simple statement of fact, one that should have been the news headline for the episode, not endless speculating about the “problem” it supposedly poses for the president.
Moreover, as the media attempts to even the scales, it diverts from a near-collapse in House leadership as Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) can find no feasible escape hatch from a shutdown that he knows will work to his and his party’s detriment. Maybe the most pressing story is not Hunter Biden’s gun charge but the utter incapacity of Republicans to govern.
Distinguished person of the week
Brett McGurk, the National Security Council’s coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa, this week successfully negotiated the release of five Americans imprisoned without justification in Iran. While Republicans rant that we paid “ransom,” McGurk, in an interview with my colleague Jason Rezaian (previously held captive in Iran for 544 days), explained, “These are funds that South Korea deposited into Iranian accounts during past administrations for the purchase of Iranian oil. Under U.S. sanctions regulations, these funds have been legally available for certain forms of bilateral and humanitarian trade.” Moreover, the funds do not go to Iran directly but are used to pay vendors for a “limited category of humanitarian trade: food, medicine and agricultural products.”
“It’s easy in the work that we do every day sometimes to get lost in the abstractions of foreign policy and relations with other countries, and forgetting the human element that’s at the heart of everything we do,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken observed in emotional remarks to the media. “But today, their freedom, the freedom of these Americans for so long unjustly imprisoned and detained in Iran, means some pretty basic things. It means that husbands and wives, fathers and children, grandparents, can hug each other again, can see each other again, can be with each other again.”
The notion that we can simply stamp our foot, demanding wrongly held Americans be released, defies logic and history. If it were so easy, why did the former administration not free all of the Americans wrongly held around the world?
The painstaking negotiations conducted over many months highlight two strengths of this administration.
First, it has rebuilt the diplomatic muscle of the State Department ravaged during the Trump presidency. “At the core of our strategy is re-engaging, revitalizing and reimagining our greatest strategic asset: America’s alliances and partnerships,” Blinken said last week at a speech at Johns Hopkins University Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He continued: “We’re doing this through what I like to call diplomatic variable geometry. We start with the problem that we need to solve and we work back from there — assembling the group of partners that’s the right size and the right shape to address it. We’re intentional about determining the combination that’s truly fit for purpose.”
Diplomacy is not a cure-all to every problem. However, with careful, detailed, patient diplomacy, difficult problems can be addressed and our national interests advanced.
Second, we have learned to extricate our people without diminishing our ability to confront enemies. The Biden administration freed Brittney Griner from Russia but has maintained the alliance supporting Ukraine and consistently increased sanctions on Russia. We got our five Americans out of Iran, but the sanctions against Iran remain, and we continue to combat Iran’s malicious intervention in the region.
Recovering five Americans is worthy of celebration. Appreciation for McGurk, Blinken and the other professionals at the State Department is in order.
This year marks the 50 years since the Yom Kippur War between Israel and its Arab neighbors. (I remember vividly our rabbi informing the congregation on the holiest day of the Jewish year. Most had come to synagogue without having read or heard the news.) I recently saw the movie “Golda,” about former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, who was prime minister during the war. That prompted me to read “Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel” by Francine Klagsbrun.
The movie has its pluses (Helen Mirren, certainly) and minuses, but the book is a revelation. Thanks to the newly available national archive material, the book explores the painful path she and many Jews followed in the early 20th century (in her case, from Ukraine to Milwaukee to Israel), the struggles to launch the state of Israel and the incessant wars and the internal politics that have been part and parcel of the Jewish state from the start.
She was both the quick-witted grandmother with a thousand quips and the dogged political schemer who frequently worked herself to the point of illness and collapse. She was a groundbreaking female leader who eschewed feminism (sometimes cruelly and thoughtlessly), a skilled negotiator who nevertheless exasperated U.S. presidents of both parties and a personally and culturally conservative person put off by the youth movement of the 1960s but deeply committed to bringing about a radical vision of socialism. She mothered her country but badly neglected her children. She was open to negotiating the 1967 borders (unlike the then-ascending Likud Party) but never managed to launch talks before the 1973 war.
She was, in other words, a bundle of contradictions. But, most of all, she was a doer, an activist, a planner and cajoler — and a leader of uncommon strength. The book is a delight, if only to remind us of the economic deprivation that afflicted Israel before it became a start-up nation and that political infighting is nothing new in Israel.
The movie gets a B, the book an A-plus.
Every Wednesday at noon, I host a live Q&A with readers. Read a transcript of this week’s Q&A, or submit a question for the next one.
Steve: Why is Trump’s mental state not a bigger issue? Every time I see or read someone questioning the clearly competent mental state of Biden, I scream inside over the insanity of not mentioning the fact that an accused seditionist and liar is leading the GOP primaries. I know you have written about this over and over, but what will finally make this point break through our national media?
Jennifer Rubin: This is a perfect example of media’s fixation with creating a nonissue for Biden while normalizing Trump. This deceives the American people. Trump’s rambling and incoherent speeches are akin to what a crazy uncle says at the dinner table. You wouldn’t give either responsibility for much of anything. Democrats should focus on Trump’s unfitness for office; it’s long overdue.
Credit: Source link
