Trump and the press

Posted on July 13, 2026 by Joe Weber

We’re getting a master class in would-be autocracy

Nearly a decade ago, during his first presidential term, Donald J. Trump infamously tweeted that major media outlets were “the enemy of the American people.” That drew an intriguing response from a fellow Republican, Sen. John McCain.

“I hate the press,” the Arizona war hero sarcastically told NBC News’ Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press.” “I hate you especially. But the fact is we need you. We need a free press. We must have it. It’s vital.”

And McCain – whom Trump had derided as “a loser” — made the risks of losing an unfettered press all too clear.

“If you want to preserve – I’m very serious now – if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press,” McCain said. “And without it, I am afraid that we would lose so much of our individual liberties over time. That’s how dictators get started.”

So, now – after he has coopted Congress, the Senate and much of the Judiciary, and weaponized parts of the military against Americans – Trump and his minions are going after the press anew. The administration subpoenaed five New York Times reporters after they reported that the new Air Force One, a Qatari-donated Boeing 747-8, lacked advanced security features, including antimissile capabilities. The journalists cited sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity, a common technique when sensitive matters are involved.

Chillingly, federal agents showed up at the homes of some of the reporters to serve the documents on them. “The appearance of federal law enforcement agents on the doorstep of news reporters should shock the conscience of any American who believes in the Constitution and the press freedom it protects,” David McCraw, a lawyer for the Times, said in a statement.

The administration will likely try to force the reporters to name their sources, who presumably would be prosecuted for divulging information this leak-wary White House seeks to suppress. The DOJ insisted that the reporters are not the targets, but rather those leaking classified information are.

What seems more likely is that l’affaire Air Force One is simply embarrassing to Trump, one of a string of incidents that have been leaving the president red-faced. After all, how could his much-adored “flying palace” be ill-equipped? The reports coincide with his repeated failures to resolve the ill-conceived Iran War, the Reflecting Pool “Algaegate,” and his bizarre misstatements during a NATO meeting (for the record, there’s no “Islamic Republic of Japan.”)

The New York Times is expected in the first instance to fight the subpoenas in court. Taking such a stance paid off earlier this year when the Justice Department sought to compel testimony from journalists at The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. The feds withdrew the subpoenas after both news organizations fought back in sealed filings.

As the Times reported, the Justice Department had sought information from three reporters at The Journal about an article detailing how top officials warned Trump of the risks of a military campaign against Iran. It also sought information from a reporter at The Post about reporting related to U.S. military action in Venezuela.

Whether Justice is on firmer legal ground in the Air Force One case could prove to be a crucial matter for journalists. The stakes are every bit as high as McCain suggested they could be so many years ago, as several journalism organizations have contended:

“The National Press Club calls on the Justice Department to immediately withdraw these subpoenas and reaffirm a principle that has long distinguished the United States: a free and independent press serves the people, not the government,” National Press Club President Mark Schoeff Jr. said in a statement.

White House Correspondents’ Association President Weijia Jiang said the organization stands with the Times reporters, saying they were “targeted for doing their jobs to uphold the public’s right to know how its government operates.”

“The WHCA condemns any act of intimidation against journalists, including attempts to pressure them into revealing sources,” Jiang added.

And Stephen J. Adler, chair of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said, “When the public’s right to know is crushed, as the Trump Administration is trying to do with its subpoenas against The New York Times, all of us suffer irreparable harm, as does the freedom upon which this nation is built.”

Of course, if the journalists do get hauled up to testify before a grand jury, they likely would refuse to disclose their sources. That could set up a painful and costly time for those reporters, as several cases over the last quarter-century have shown.

In 2001, a Houston-based author writing a book about a local murder spent 168 days in jail because she would not identify sources or give her notes to law enforcement. Four years later, New York Times reporter Judith Miller was sentenced to jail because she refused to reveal who told her that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA agent and Miller served 85 days, testifying ultimately because her source gave his permission. Then, in 2008, a subpoenaed USA Today reporter in an anthrax-by-mail case was held in contempt of court and ordered to pay $500 per day for the first seven days in which she refused to comply, $1,000 per day for the next seven days, and $5,000 a day for the next seven days after that – all from her own pocket, not her employer’s. That contempt charge was later thrown out.

The orders for the Times journalists to testify could put the DOJ official who issued them into interesting political crosshairs. Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York who issued the subpoenas, was recently nominated by Trump to serve as director of national intelligence, succeeding Tulsi Gabbard. Clayton, who had chaired the federal Securities & Exchange Commission in Trump’s first term, appears to be one of Trump’s most devoted toadies.

For instance, Clayton did not object when the Trump Administration fired Maurene Comey as a prosecutor in the Southern District office in 2025 in a vindictive political move. Comey’s main problem: she is a daughter of James B. Comey, the former FBI director who is one of Trump’s most prominent adversaries. She also handled cases against Trump’s longtime friend, child molester Jeffrey Epstein.

Clayton is to testify on July 15 before the Senate Intelligence Committee and journalism advocates are calling on committee members to press him on the administration’s latest assault on journalists.

“Donald Trump’s war on the press is looking for another victim, this time the storied federal prosecutors office in Manhattan,” Bruce D. Brown, president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a statement. “The subpoenas it issued to journalists at The New York Times break from longstanding Justice Department practice to protect the public interest and press independence by requiring prosecutors to only seek information from reporters as a last resort when all other avenues have been exhausted. When Jay Clayton appears before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, members of both parties must not let him escape accountability.”

Thankfully for journalists and the public, Trump and his minions have been set back on some of their anti-press efforts.

In January, FBI agents descended on the home of a Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, as part of an investigation into a government contractor’s handling of classified material. The agents seized phones, laptops and a smartwatch after executing a search warrant.

But, in the following month, a federal judge ruled that he – not Justice – would review her materials.

“Given the documented reporting on government leak investigations and the government’s well-chronicled efforts to stop them, allowing the government’s filter team to search a reporter’s work product — most of which consists of unrelated information from confidential sources — is the equivalent of leaving the government’s fox in charge of the Washington Post’s henhouse,” Magistrate Judge William B. Porter wrote in his opinion.

Not surprisingly in this appeals-happy administration, the judge’s order is under appeal.

Of course, Trump and his lapdogs have also scored some victories in high-profile assaults on the press. They’ve sued TV networks that have produced critical coverage of Trump’s actions, including ABC, they’ve made them the target of regulatory pressure from the once-independent Federal Communications Commission; and they’ve cut press access or significantly curtailed it at both the White House and Pentagon.

Under CBS News Editor in Chief Bari Weiss, “60 Minutes” bowed to Trumpian pressure in killing a story involving deportation. The network also heavily edited an interview with Trump on the program, including omitting comments about whether the 2020 election was rigged. Weiss was hired by David Ellison and his father, Larry, the Trump-backing billionaires who own CBS parent Paramount. Trump praised her as “a great new leader.”

Trump’s administration has even used labor law to pressure The New York Times via an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit that was decried by the newspaper as “politically motivated.”

As Trump continues to try to cow the press, the work of the Times, the Journal, the Post and other outlets has grown more important than ever. And, given the largely supine Congress, courts have emerged as the last bastions in helping them fight on behalf of the public.

Ultimately, however, the largely Trump-friendly Supreme Court will likely have to weigh in on some of the press cases. And, so far, the prospects look poor for the press.

For instance, the Supreme Court recently declined to intervene to halt an $800-a-day fine imposed on former Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge involving her coverage in 2017 of a Chinese American scientist who was investigated by the FBI but never charged. The issue: Herridge has refused to disclose a confidential source.

If Sen. McCain were around today, he would likely be appalled at how the system lately is ill-serving the press and, by extension, the public. Of course, he was onto Trump long before many others. He once excoriated the president for “naivete, egotism, false equivalence, and sympathy for autocrats.”

Lately, the last charge seems the most resonant.

An age-old hatred revived

Posted on June 26, 2026 by Joe Weber

Or, perhaps, never-departed antisemitism is just convenient again

Joseph Weber

The “Jewish Hat,” on the right, became mandatory in some European countries in the 12th century. Source: The Public Medievalist

It’s well-trod ground, an often told and always ugly tale. When political leaders want a scapegoat to either gain or hold power, some resort to an age-old trope: blame the Jews.

Thus, Edward I exiled Jews from England in 1290, as The Public Medievalist tells us. Philip II of France—in serious debt at the age of 15—kidnapped Jews and held them for ransom, then confiscated Jewish property and expelled them from France. Phillip II let Jews return to France in 1198 but imposed heavy taxes on them. In 1306, Philip IV of France arrested 100,000 Jews, seized their property, and expelled them on the grounds that they represented “a state within a state.” French Jews were banished and then readmitted in repeated cycles for nearly 200 years.

Are we seeing much of the same sentiment — albeit toned down and dressed in different clothing — today? Are traditional friends of the Jews in the Democratic Party, for instance, spurning them as they seek power? Consider the election in New York City in which the whipping boys are wearing yarmulkes. In the city’s congressional primaries, three candidates backed by anti-Zionist Mayor Zohran Mamdani vaulted to victory by attacking Israel.

One, Darializa Avila Chevalier, had attended a pro-Palestinian rally in the city on Oct. 8, 2023, where some cheered the Hamas savagery of the prior day. As The Times of Israel reported, near the end of her victory speech this week, her supporters started chanting “free, free Palestine.” Chevalier, who had helped organize pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University, won in a district that includes Jewish institutions, including Yeshiva University. She defeated a steadfast supporter of Israel who served as a congressman for a decade.

Another Mamdani ally, state Assembly Member Claire Valdez, beat the handpicked successor of a retiring congresswoman. As she addressed backers, Valdez promised, “We will stand up to the genocide.”

And the third, former city Comptroller Brad Lander, bested U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman, a two-term incumbent, after lambasting Goldman as insufficiently critical of Israel, as The New York Times reported. Lander slammed Goldman for not backing legislation to block arms sales to Israel and for refusing to call its war in Gaza a “genocide.” Both men are Jews and Lander calls himself a “liberal Zionist” who just opposes Israeli government policy.

While there’s little question that these pols advanced in large part by pillorying Israel, the bigger question is to what extent they represent an anti-Israel swing among Democrats. Indeed, to what degree do they mirror such a swing among young people in both parties, something polls suggest is widespread?

Certainly, in many respects New York is an outlier, the bluest of the blue cities on the East Coast, one where Democrats vie to be further left of one another. All three victorious candidates, for instance, embrace Mamdani’s Democratic socialism, though Lander quit the Democratic Socialists of America after the Oct. 7th massacre.

And it may be that the relatively small numbers of primary voters who chose them reflect only a fraction of voters (though in New York a primary win is tantamount to a general election victory). As the New York Post chortled, just 7 percent of voters cast ballots for the trio and the backers were predominantly under 30, folks it called “The Young and The Clueless.”

But such candidates are not alone. In Denver, voters on June 30 will choose among candidates including Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old political naif who is leading in the polls against veteran incumbent Diana DeGette, 68. DeGette is Colorado’s longest-serving congresswoman, taking office in 1997, four months before Kiros was born. While DeGette has taken a pro-Israel stance, she tempered it with opposition to selling offensive weapons to Israel.

Kiros’s main qualification for office seems to be that, in 2023, she was fired from her job as a lawyer at New York’s Sidley Austin firm after she wrote an open letter in response to such firms signing a letter of support for Israel. In her response, she garnered attention by calling Israel an apartheid state while rebuking antisemitism alongside Islamophobia. Calls to eliminate Israel are anti-Zionist, not antisemitic, she insisted, as she accused Israel of a “colonial role in Palestine.”

Kiros, who was born in Ethiopia and came to the U.S. as an infant, earned a law degree from the University of Notre Dame. Most recently, she worked as a barista while studying for a doctorate in public policy.

Some in Colorado’s Jewish community have blasted her for her comments about Israel. In May, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Colorado released an open letter accusing her of reinforcing “many of the same reductive and dehumanizing dynamics that are making many Jews feel increasingly unsafe and alienated,” as The Colorado Sun reported.

More recently, in an interview with a local TV station, Kiros declined to call a deadly 2025 firebombing of a group of Jewish demonstrators in Boulder an act of antisemitism. Asked about the Oct. 7^th assault in Israel, she said the attack, which left about 1,200 mostly civilians dead, was an “inevitable consequence.” And she also said the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S. were similarly inevitable.

Liberal Denver Rabbi Rachel Kobrin, who has little use for Israel’s current government and publicly prays weekly for the safety of both Israelis and Palestinians, wrote in The Denver Post that, nonetheless, she is “deeply troubled” by Kiros.

“When she can’t even name the antisemitism Jews in Colorado are experiencing every day, how can we believe that she will work for our safety?” the rabbi asked. “I have deep concerns that the ‘just’ world she claims to want to create does not include Jews like me and my community. She considers Israel an illegitimate, colonialist state and appears to have closed her mind to all other opinions and, indeed, to the human consequences of her rhetoric.”

The rabbi added: “When Kiros speaks about dignity and justice for all people, I want to believe she means it. But dignity that excludes Jews and denies the safety of Israelis is not universal dignity.”

Still, the question remains: to what extent are Kiros and the New York Democrats representative of their party? High profile as they are, they are outnumbered by pro-Israel candidates whom voters backed. These include House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries (who ran unopposed in New York) and Adrian Boafo in Maryland, as well as New Yorkers Yvette Clark, Laura Gillen, Gregory Meeks, Tim Kennedy and others, along with several other incumbents from Maryland, all backed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

An incumbent congressman from New Jersey who ran unopposed in early June, Josh Gottheimer, has been unsparing in criticizing fellow Democrats for their blinkered approaches to Israel.

“The Democratic condemnation piled on Israel’s government is overwhelming in comparison to other allies,” he wrote in a May commentary in The New York Times. “It’s also louder than Democrats’ condemnation of Iran’s regime for the slaughter of thousands of Iranians in December and January. Israel has been decried by some leading Democrats as an ‘apartheid’ state. But I haven’t heard any of them claim apartheid when it comes to how women and L.G.B.T.Q. people are treated across the Middle East.”

He continued: “Democrats have justly denounced the Trump administration for its broadsides — in some cases, threats — toward some of America’s closest allies. But many increasingly excuse, or join, feverish denunciations of Israel, our longstanding, democratic and strategic ally.”

No doubt, such incumbents will be taken to task in some quarters for their support of Israel as the general election approaches. Consider some observations by Brad Goverman, the Boston-area former technology consultant and college lecturer who runs The Jew News Review. This longtime Democrat says he has “no difficulty criticizing Israeli governments,” as he says most Israelis do, but …

“For decades, support for Israel occupied a secure place within the Democratic coalition,” Goverman wrote in a recent piece bemoaning changes in his party. “Today, criticism of Israel has become not merely acceptable but, in some circles, politically advantageous. Positions that would once have been considered well outside the party’s mainstream increasingly shape primary campaigns, activist organizations, and the language of rising political leaders.”

To be sure, some candidates may have a point in slamming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as many of his countrymen do. After all, a government responsible for the deaths of more than 70,000 people in Gaza -– even if in response to the massacre of 1,200 of its own citizens — has much to account for. This is especially true because Israel has failed to vanquish Hamas, as it aimed to do.

And yet, it all seems terribly convenient for politicians who have no difficulty assailing Zionists – read Jews – and suggesting that Jews, unlike other peoples of the world, don’t deserve a state of their own after all. Do we hear echoes of those medieval rulers who loved to whip their populations up into frenzies with attacks on those they deemed to be foreigners in their midst?

Sadly — tragically — it all seems too familiar.

Paranoia abounds

Posted on June 9, 2026 by Joe Weber

The left has taken up the mantle from the wackos on the right

Joseph Weber

When he was an up-and-coming singer in 1963, but hadn’t hit the big time, Bob Dylan famously walked off the set of the Ed Sullivan Show during a rehearsal because a network exec wouldn’t let him sing the “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” Rich with biting cracks about right-wing fear, the tune mocked the anti-Communist sentiments of the day, but CBS feared a libel suit.

Here are a few of the lyrics:

Well, I was feelin’ sad and feelin’ blue
I didn’t know what in the world I wus gonna do
Them Communists they wus comin’ around
They wus in the air
They wus on the ground
They wouldn’t gimme no peace . . .

So I run down most hurriedly
And joined up with the John Birch Society
I got me a secret membership card
And started off a-walkin’ down the road
Yee-hoo, I’m a real John Bircher now!
Look out you Commies!

Now we all agree with Hitler’s views
Although he killed six million Jews
It don’t matter too much that he was a Fascist
At least you can’t say he was a Communist!
That’s to say like if you got a cold you take a shot of malaria

Well, I wus lookin’ everywhere for them gol-darned Reds
I got up in the mornin’ ’n’ looked under my bed
Looked in the sink, behind the door
Looked in the glove compartment of my car
Couldn’t find ’em . . .

I wus lookin’ high an’ low for them Reds everywhere
I wus lookin’ in the sink an’ underneath the chair
I looked way up my chimney hole
I even looked deep down inside my toilet bowl
They got away . . .

Today, some of the more troublesome paranoia comes from the left, particularly about the media coverage of Graham Platner, a Senatorial hopeful in Maine. For instance, a very bright progressive friend shared a Facebook post, seemingly oblivious to its paranoia, journalistic ignorance and borderline antisemitism.

Platner, with the tattoo that covers the skull and crossbones; source: WGME

Platner, readers of this Substack may recall, is a deeply flawed Democratic candidate who also is an outspoken critic of Israel. Recall that for years, until he covered it up, he sported a tattoo linked to Nazis, a skull and crossbones image resembling a specific symbol of Hitler’s paramilitary Schutzstaffel, or SS. And he appeared on a podcast whose host had basked in antisemitic conspiracy theories; Platner said he was a longtime fan of the host.

In 2014, combat veteran Platner praised the tactics of a Hamas raid that killed Israeli soldiers.

The Facebook entry, attempting parody or satire, gives us a fictitious letter from the New York Times to “it’s [sic] readership,” explaining the paper’s critical coverage of Platner.

“OK, we sent a team of reporters to Maine, led by crack reporter Katie Gluek [sic, it’s actually Glueck], an ardent Zionist whose parents are part of the Israeli settler movement, to scour the state for anything that might derail the Platner campaign,” the piece begins. “We’ve been there for months and have spent thousands of dollars on the story.

“We are now publishing a lengthy piece of ‘investigative’ journalism which introduces no new facts at all. But we do have some juicy gossip for you. We found three ex-girlfriends that told us he drank too much, was ‘volatile,’ and sexist, even misogynistic at times. We also found bunch of exes that said he was loving and that they felt safe with him.

“The most damning allegation is that he was physically threatening, and that he knew that the skull and crossbones tattoo on his chest was a Nazi tattoo. These allegations come from a Republican political operative, which we mention.”

So, let’s break that down a bit. Glueck, it turns out, has covered politics for more than a decade. By her own description, she wrote “about extraordinary presidential elections, battles for control of Congress and governor’s mansions across the country, and two wild New York City mayor’s races, serving as the chief metro political correspondent in 2021.”

Glueck covered Ted Cruz for Politico in 2016 and was the Biden beat reporter for The Times during the 2020 presidential campaign. She graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, worked in Washington at Politico and in McClatchy’s D.C. bureau before moving to New York. Before joining the Times in 2019 as a politics reporter, Glueck had been published in The Wall Street Journal, Washingtonian magazine and the Austin American-Statesman.

So, in other words, Glueck is a seasoned reporter.

But, to the critic, she is “an ardent Zionist.” The evidence of that? Well, at Northwestern 17 years ago, she was a co-president of Students for Israel. Is she still a supporter of Israel or, more precisely, the Netanyahu government? Guess we don’t really know that, do we? No real evidence there.

Of course, she is a Jew, though. For the critics, that seems to be enough. That’s enough to disqualify her from covering a Maine Democrat, apparently.

As for her parents being part of the Israeli settler movement, well, turns out there’s no evidence of that either, even though this claim and the “Zionist” charge against the reporter have spread across the Net like a virus. In fact, at last report, in 2018, her parents – Dr. Robert M. Glueck, a cardiologist, and Miriam Glueck – lived in Haifa, where he directed the clinical operations at the Technion American Medical Program and Mrs. Glueck was a volunteer fundraiser for a health program.

The critics readily found that info, drawn from the journalist’s marriage announcement years ago. But are the parents settlers? Perhaps in some antisemite’s imagination.

Still, the attacks on Glueck and the Times can be found in a bevy of sites. And some of the posts go well beyond the Facebook poster in their slams, damning Israel and “the Israel lobby” for Glueck’s work on Platner.

The post my friend cited is particularly pernicious in a way that, despite its leftist cast, is reminiscent of the Birch Society attacks from the right. They were fear-filled, laced with unsubstantiated innuendo, and ultimately baseless.

The FB comment contends that Glueck’s reporting on Platner is “basically a gossip column dressed up as news. Shameful,” for instance. It goes on to attack the Times as “a ruling class, pro-capitalist, pro-imperialist institution. Have we forgotten their coverage leading up to the Iraq war, or the [sic] their long record of coverage on Israel-Palestine?”

First, can anyone seriously call the coverage in the Times pro-Israel? Perhaps such folks have missed all the Gaza coverage, as well as the Lebanon coverage of late. Guess they missed headlines such as “Gazans are dying of starvation” and “As Israel Pounds Gaza City, and Overwhelming Exodus.” Maybe they were absent when the paper ran “Israeli Expansionism is Shaking the Middle East.”

Certainly, many of the editors at the Times would consider themselves “pro-capitalist,” as most Americans would. “Pro-imperialist?” That’s a hard one to prove and the poster doesn’t bother to offer any backing for that.

And then, is it gossip when a political journalist digs into a candidate’s background and finds some disturbing stuff? Is it gossip when other media outlets find similar problems, such as the sexually explicit texts Platner exchanged with numerous women while he was married, as the Wall Street Journal reported? Or that various women came to Platner’s former campaign political director to share what she called “their own disturbing stories” about him, as she recounted in The Washington Post.

It’s the job of news outlets to uncover and report on the baggage politicians and would-be politicians carry. That’s not motivated by political bias, by Zionism, by partisanship or by capitalism even. It’s what reporters do so voters can see their candidates, warts and all – some of which Platner has acknowledged.

“Throughout this campaign, I’ve been open about what was a very dark period of my life where I struggled with undiagnosed PTSD, too often self medicated with alcohol, and was a far from perfect boyfriend,” Platner said in a statement to CNN. “I take responsibility for all of that, and wish I had been better. Any characterization beyond that is false, and I believe, politically motivated. I’m not proud of who I was then, but I am proud of the work I’ve done since, and the movement we are building in Maine.”

Despite the flaws slowly becoming apparent, voters very likely will choose Platner in the June 9 primary and he’ll likely run against Susan Collins in the fall. Then, it will be up to Mainers to make yet another choice. Will they see him as a flawed but reformed character? Or will they look at a 41-year-old political naif’s past and be unsettled?

If more voters had looked at Donald J. Trump’s sordid past more critically, would he have become president, twice? Lord knows, that was amply covered by the Times and the other publications. Was that “gossip?”

Some critics have suggested the best course for Democratic leaders would be to put as much distance between themselves and Platner as possible.

“To defend Platner, Democrats will have to choose between two strategies: denouncing as liars a possibly growing number of women—or else accepting the stories, but then arguing that twisting a woman’s arm and locking her in a room is not quite the same as beating her,” David Frum wrote in The Atlantic. “Do they want to haggle over just how inappropriate these romantic relationships were, even as they argue that wearing an SS tattoo throughout most of one’s adult life does not prove that one is a literal Nazi?”

In the meantime, we’ll likely hear lots from the conspiracists who don’t understand the role of the press, who feel free to attack reporters who happen to be Jews, and who warm to baseless information just because it floats around on the Net. To them, no doubt, there are plots everywhere “in the air, on the ground,” as Dylan might have said.

Instead of “gol-darned Reds,” however, the offenders whom these Birchers of the left see are journalists. They are reporters doing their jobs on behalf of voters.

Watch the parkin’ meters

Posted on June 6, 2026 by Joe Weber

Why do so many politicians disappoint us?

Joseph Weber

In 1965, Bob Dylan released “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” a nod to the Beats of the 1950s, particularly Jack Kerouac’s novel, The Subterraneans. The stream-of-consciousness autobiographical book explores a deeply flawed writer struggling in an ill-fated romance.

In Dylan’s hallucinatory, fast and wonderful song, many of the lyrics are memorable, but perhaps none more than these:

Look out kid
You’re gonna get hit
But users, cheaters
Six-time losers
Hang around the
theaters
Girl by the
whirlpool
Lookin’ for a new
fool
Don’t follow leaders
Watch the parkin’
meters

Let’s pounce on the “leaders” lines for a moment. When we look at the number of politicians – i.e., leaders – with serious personal flaws, Dylan’s libertarian final lines in that verse seem prescient and, sadly, all too enduring.

From awful presidents, such as Donald J. Trump, to accomplished ones, such as William J. Clinton, to many in lesser offices, we see people who use their power and various professional positions for sexual manipulation and dishonesty of all sorts. In some cases, we see financial misdealings and political malfeasance.

One key question is: why do such deeply flawed people – often individuals with tortured personal psyches — seek public office? What is it that they seek in politics? And, perhaps more important, why do voters elect them (though not always, as we’ll see below)?

Certainly, many of us are not paying mind to Dylan’s caution.

Everyone knows that the dirt in the lives of the people with feet of clay has a way of coming out. Surely, folks in media know that all too well.

Just as Trump and Clinton’s sometimes sordid misadventures with many women were front-page news, so, too, were those of John F. Kennedy (at least, after his presidency and assassination) and Ted Kennedy. Same with former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, whose presidential hopes were shattered by the “Monkey Business” scandal.

More recently, we had former Rep. George Santos, who was expelled from Congress in 2023 after repeated scandals came to light, including colorfully falsifying his background. A prodigious liar, the Republican congressman made up stories about his college education, his employment, his real estate, his religious background, his athletic achievements, his wealth and even his mother’s death (he claimed it was on 9/11). What nailed his career were convictions on wire fraud and aggravated identity theft.

Santos was sentenced to 87 months for his criminal convictions but served just three months because Trump commuted his sentence. Trump said the fraudster had been “horribly mistreated.” Birds of a feather, perhaps?

Recall that Trump is a felon, convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records. He was also civilly found to be liable for sexual abuse and defamation of the writer E. Jean Carroll, on whom he has sicced his Justice Department for alleged perjury. Trump is on the hook for more than $80 million in the Carroll affair.

Trump also just pardoned the unfortuitously named Stephen Buyer, a former Republican congressman from Indiana who served nearly two years in prison for making illegal stock trades based on inside information after he left office, as The Guardian reported. Buyer was sentenced in 2023 for trades he made while working as a consultant and lobbyist. He was released in 2025, and the Supreme Court in May rejected Buyer’s appeal without comment or noted dissent.

Even though three of the six conservative justices on the court are Trump appointees, the president in effect overruled them in granting a full, complete and unconditional pardon to this convicted felon.

Again, birds of a feather, it seems.

Of course, plenty of Democrats have much to answer for, too. Now, we have a Senatorial aspirant, Maine’s Graham Platner, a 41-year-old political naif who is expected to win the Democratic primary and to run in the fall against the 73-year-old Republican stalwart Susan Collins.

Platner brings a steamer trunk full of personal baggage. Among his offenses are making demeaning social media posts about women, sporting a since-covered up Nazi tattoo and alleged (but denied) reports of physical intimidation of at least one woman he dated. His wife has said he sexted with several women early in their marriage, as she suggested that “no marriage is perfect.”

For his part, Platner has said that recent reporting about him “struggling, not being a good boyfriend, certainly self-medicating with alcohol,” is something he’s been “very up front since the beginning of this campaign that that was a pretty dark period of my life after I came back from my combat service,” as Forbes noted. He added there are things in media reports that he “absolutely will take responsibility for…But those serious allegations are just not true.”

Nonetheless, his chances of beating Collins have “plummeted,” as the news outlet reported. “Bettors on Kalshi predict the race is now a toss up with the Democratic candidate’s odds falling from 72 percent last month to 54 percent early on Saturday [June 6]. On the crypto betting platform Polymarket, Platner’s odds have a similar drop, falling from 78 percent on May 23 to 60 percent …”

The stakes in the Maine fight are enormous, though. A win by Platner could tilt the balance in the Senate toward Democrats, putting party officials in a precarious position. Do they hold their noses and support a tainted candidate? Or do they shun him, offended by the stench of a senator sitting with them for the next six years (at least) with much to apologize for?

David Frum, writing in The Atlantic, posed the matter as a choice between “character and power.” He compared the Platner quandary to the choice Republicans faced in 2017 with Roy Moore, a Senatorial candidate from Alabama who, as a 32-year-old assistant district attorney had “initiated sexual contact” with a 14-year-old girl, as well as three other women, whom he pursued when they were underage.

GOP leaders including Sen. John McCain and two dozen other Republican senators as well as then-Senate Leader Mitch McConnell urged Moore to quit the race, even though the Republicans had hung onto the Senate by a thread. Moore refused to quit but ultimately lost the race to a Democrat.

“Not as paragons of moral virtue but as pragmatic politicians, the Senate Republicans of 2017 made and executed a calculation: We are better off sacrificing the Alabama Senate seat for three years than enduring Roy Moore as a Senate colleague for who knows how long,” Frum wrote. “To defend Platner, Democrats will have to choose between two strategies: denouncing as liars a possibly growing number of women—or else accepting the stories, but then arguing that twisting a woman’s arm and locking her in a room is not quite the same as beating her.”

Certainly, the l’affaire Platner knocks the Dems on the back foot.

“Do they want to haggle over just how inappropriate these romantic relationships were, even as they argue that wearing an SS tattoo throughout most of one’s adult life does not prove that one is a literal Nazi?,” Frum asked. “These are not conversations that Democrats should wish to prolong in a year that might otherwise deal with Trump’s abuses of power, corruption, and economic mismanagement.”

Whether Platner could serve as a perfectly fine legislator, despite his dubious past, is an open question. Some argue that personal foibles, especially sexual ones, are irrelevant to an elected official’s ability to do a decent job in office. After all, the argument goes, we’re not choosing someone for sainthood, but just to do a decent job for constituents.

But the problem is that character outs, it seems. It seems likely that the citizens of New Jersey would have been better off if Robert Menendez, now a felon residing in a prison in Pennsylvania, had not been elected. He was convicted in 2024 of multiple corruption and bribery charges involved gold bars, cash and luxury cars and is now serving an 11-year sentence.

And, certainly, the nation would have been better served if Vice President Spiro Agnew hadn’t accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes and kickbacks while serving in various offices before the White House. He resigned in disgrace but avoided jail time even as he paid back hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For Menendez and Agnew, their mendacity didn’t go public before they attained their electoral heights. It took a while for their dirty laundry to get aired. With others, such as Clinton and, certainly, Trump, the flaws were well known and apparently forgiven by the electorate. Now, with Platner, the smudges on his escutcheon are slowly becoming apparent.

But the question remains: why do such flawed people seek the limelight, even when it can sear them? Is there something in their tortured psyches about seeking redemption or justification? Do they turn to public adoration as a way to fill holes in their character and mental makeup?

Perhaps more important, though, why do voters look past their sometimes obvious faults? Have our standards plunged so much that character is irrelevant now?

For Dylan and for plenty of journalists long accustomed to covering political scandal, the lesson is clear. Keep a skeptical eye on all politicians and would-be politicians. Don’t fall in love with them, especially those whose views align with yours. Vote for those who seem to speak for you but recognize that they’ll usually disappoint you in the end.

And, even as you watch their often troubling antics, be sure to watch your parkin’ meters. Perhaps happily, there’s no doubt that the stuff of our ordinary workaday lives deserves more attention than many of the people we choose to represent us.

Moi, moi, moi

Posted on May 31, 2026 by Joe Weber

Trump apes a 17th century king – without his grace or taste

Joseph Weber

In 1655, King Louis XIV of France may or may not have uttered the aphorism widely credited to him: “L’État, c’est moi.” The phrase — meaning “I am the state” — has come to symbolize a national leader’s extraordinary egotism.

Whether he said that or not, there’s little dispute that Louis’s self-regard was exceptional. He saw himself as the direct representative of G-d, the personification of the divine right of kings, and even chose the sun as his emblem. At least in his own mind, he was the omniscient and infallible “Roi-Soleil” (“Sun King”) around whom the entire realm orbited, according to “History.”

But there’s also no doubt that Louis created remarkable monuments during his 72-year reign, the longest in monarchical history (he was anointed at age 4). Among his projects in Paris were the Les Invalides hospital and retirement complex, the Place Vendôme and the Place des Victoires, as well as the tree-lined avenues that later became the Champs-Élysées. He reigned over the creation of the 150-mile Canal du Midi, linking the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea. And he built the stunning Palace at Versailles.

Are we hearing echoes today in Washington, D.C., however pallid, thin and embattled they are? Are we seeing a leader’s massive ego (without the substance of a Louis XIV) in a display of cloddishness that looks like a parody of Louis’s grace? Are we seeing a cartoon caricature of a monarch trying to immortalize himself as he dodders toward an 80^th birthday?

It’s not only the gilding of the White House, the construction of a huge ballroom abutting the place or the planned 250-foot-tall Triumphal Arch near the Arlington National Cemetery that seems to be part of a pathetic parade of self-adulation by Donald J. Trump. It’s also festooning his image on passports, on banners that decorate federal buildings, on a proposed $250 bill, on commemorative coins and a national park pass, his name on the Kennedy Center (though that soon seems about to end, thanks to a judge). And, of course, we have the bluing of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, as contractors – whom he may or may not have picked — repaint it to look like a swimming pool at Mar-a-Lago.

Now, with a breathtakingly self-indulgent effort, we have Trump’s latest plan to cast his self-admiration across as big a canvas as possible. He plans to turn what was to have been a 250^th celebration of the history of the United States, on the National Mall in D.C., into rallies for himself — opening the fair with a MAGA rally and giving a July 4 keynote speech.

At least seven of nine musical artists have dropped out of the multiday celebration, slated to begin in late June, because of the partisan cast it was taking. So Trump posted this on his Truth Social:

“It’s difficult to read this without laughing, but it’s no joke,” wrote former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who served under Presidents Ford, Carter and Clinton. “His malignant narcissism is ramping up even higher than its usual galactic level.”

But the enduring mystery is why Trump’s devotees apparently see no flaws in their leader’s perverse psychology. To the extent that they are aware of history, why do they not see a man casting himself here as a tacky version of a 17th century French king? Or, more sinisterly, as a Stalin, Mussolini, or Kim Jong-Un, someone desperate to feel and seem all-powerful — but even that in a distorted fun-house mirror way — “a man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime.”

Pathetic? Perhaps the very definition of it. But do his followers really see his image-spreading as signs of strength that they applaud?

Certainly, Trump sucks up attention and flattery like a pampered puppy. Watching a Cabinet meeting, for instance, can be painful because of the way otherwise bright people prostrate themselves before him, as if they are supplicants before Pharoah.

The New York Times reviewed over a dozen hours of Cabinet meeting footage and found that, on average, at least one of every six sentences out of the mouths of his acolytes either flattered Trump, gave him credit or criticized his political opponents.

“You have saved this country,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said. “You have changed America and created the golden age,” crowed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. And the arch-flatterer, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, speaking bizarrely of the lingering Ukraine-Russia War, effused “… the country owes you a great debt of gratitude and the world, really, because I mean you’re the only leader in the planet that can bring the two sides together …”

Cynically, one might say that these Cabinet lapdogs are simply doing what foreign leaders have learned to do to try to stay in Trump’s good graces: speaking glowingly of him to his face, and in front of the cameras, in hopes of a friendly pat on the head. Japan’s prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, told him in February: “I firmly believe it is only you, Donald, who can achieve peace across the world.” Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has spoken of Trump’s “unmatched leadership.”

Indeed, one can imagine that such people — with their spouses or trusted advisers behind closed doors — dismiss Trump as, instead, a horse’s ass. Perhaps one day, when Trump is gone, and the memoirs come out, we’ll hear what they really think.

Certainly, the words some former associates have used are far different than those of today’s toadies.

As The Guardian reported, their terms have been “fascist,” “conman,” “predator” and “cheat.” Former White House Chief of Staff and former Gen. John Kelly called Trump an “idiot” and the head of a “Crazytown” administration. Another former General, Mark Milley, who chaired the Joint Chiefs of Staff called Trump a “fascist to the core” who was doing “great and irreparable harm.” And former National Security Adviser John Bolton has said Trump is “unfit to be president” and “hasn’t got the brains” for a dictatorship.

Still, when Trump assembles his crowds at the bizarrely low-end June 14 Ultimate Fighting Championship matches at the White House and later at the Great American State Fair, plenty of MAGA fans will show up. Recall that many showed up on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump beckoned them to the Capitol, where they rioted.

Trump, like monarchs and despots, is drawn to spectacle, especially when he is at the center of it. But, despite the crowds that will show up, there’s plenty of reason to believe that Trump’s act is wearing thin with many Americans.

About 58 percent of Americans now disapprove of Trump’s job performance, according to the latest polls. Just 21.7 percent strongly approve of the job he’s doing, while another 17.2 percent only somewhat approve and 48 percent “strongly disapprove.” As pollwatcher Nate Silver has reported, that’s less popular than Joe Biden was at this point in his term (-13.6) and less popular than Trump himself was during his first term (-10.6).

Whether such distaste for Trump shows up in the November midterm elections remains to be seen, of course. But, for now, with all his desperate self-promotion, this Sun King-wannabe is looking more like someone on whom the sun is going down and pretty fast.

“Losers” abound

Posted on May 28, 2026 by Joe Weber

But all of us are suffering for that

Joseph Weber

John Lennon in 1964; source: San Francisco Art Exchange

Sixty-two years ago, the Beatles released a song that, like so many others from that time, speaks to us today.

John Lennon wrote: I’m a loser/I’m a loser/And I’m not what I appear to be

The song resounds today because “loser” is one of Donald J. Trump’s favorite words. He has applied it to Democrats, to Republicans, to generals, to soldiers killed in battle, to CNN and other networks. He uses it for pretty much anyone who crosses him or sees the world differently – i.e., realistically.

For instance, leading members of his own party – including usually loyal toadies – are troubled by a potential deal Trump has tried to cook up to get Iran off his plate. The critics include Senators Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and Roger Wicker, who all worry about an undefeated Iran posing an ongoing threat to the world.

Trump’s response on Truth Social: “So don’t listen to the losers, who are critical about something they know nothing about.”

Of course, it now appears there is no deal, even though Trump claimed on May 23 — just before the senators raised their concerns — that one had been “largely negotiated.” The following day, in fact, reporters were briefed on the terms of a deal.

But all that gave way to the more recent Trump post: “… nobody has seen it, or knows what it is. It isn’t even fully negotiated yet.”

And then Trump followed up with a line suggesting that he’s a long way from settling anything with Iran. During a Cabinet meeting on May 27, he contended that the leaders of the Islamic Republic “thought they were going to out-wait me, you know. ‘We’ll out-wait him. He’s got the midterms.’ I don’t care about the midterms,” the president insisted, as The Hill reported.

The reality seems to be that the astonishingly self-contradictory Trump, in fact, is the loser in the war he started on Feb. 28. Recall that he initially suggested it would all be over in “four to five weeks,” though it has now stretched to three months with no end in sight.

Indeed, the shooting has continued, albeit at lower levels. And Trump has even now threatened a longstanding U.S. ally, Oman, against partnering with Iran to jointly control the Strait of Hormuz. “Oman will behave just like everybody else or we’ll have to blow them up,” he said during his Cabinet meeting.

Such bizarre comments reflect the inflated claims and contradictions Trump has made throughout the war.

The New York Times recounted many of them in “The War Is Over. The Strait is Open. We Totally Won. The Iran War According to Donald Trump.” As the piece reported, “[o]ften, there was a wide disconnect” between reality and Trump’s comments. It added: “Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened to use extreme force, only to hold his fire. In many cases he has made claims of major diplomatic progress that later proved unfounded, fueling criticism that he is trying to calm markets and relieve political pressure.”

Here’s a sampling of Trump’s remarks:

“There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER!” — Truth Social post on March 6

“… Iran, which is totally defeated and wants a deal …” — Truth Social post on March 13

“… VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS …” — Truth Social post on March 23

And more recently:

“I am fully aware that my Representatives are having very positive discussions with the Country of Iran, and that these discussions could lead to something very positive for all.” — Truth Social post on May 3

“I’m getting a letter supposedly tonight, so we’ll see how that goes.” — Press gaggle on May 8

“I don’t like it — TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!” — Truth Social post on May 10

“We were getting ready to do a very major attack tomorrow, and I put it off … because we’ve had very big discussions with Iran …” — Press gaggle on May 18

“Final aspects and details of the Deal are currently being discussed, and will be announced shortly.” — Truth Social post on May 23

“… I have informed my representatives not to rush into a deal in that time is on our side.” — Truth Social post on May 24

“It will only be a Great Deal for all or, no Deal at all …” — Truth Social post on May 25

Feeling a bit whipsawed? And, really, is there ever a reason to believe him?

“Only two questions remain regarding the U.S. war with Iran,” Times columnist Tom Friedman has written. “One, how big a plate of crow will President Trump have to eat to end this conflict with at least some achievements? And two, will he tell us the crow he’s eating is lobster or filet mignon?”

Depressingly, Friedman suggests that the war has just served to entrench “the vile, murderous Islamic republic regime.” His claim: “For starters, Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio will all be remembered as the team that gave the Islamic republic a second lease on life just when it was more on the ropes than ever with its own people.”

And David French, a former United States Army Reserve major, a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a Harvard-trained military lawyer who was awarded a Bronze Star, summed it up this way in a Times newsletter he writes:

“The Trump administration hasn’t accomplished any of its war aims. The Iranian regime is intact, perhaps even more hard-line than before the war now that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps appears to exert greater control. There has been no unconditional surrender; Iran still possesses substantial stocks of highly enriched uranium; it still possesses a formidable missile arsenal; and it still supports terrorist proxies that wage war against Israel.

“We have weakened the Iranian military, but the regime is unbeaten and unbowed. If anything, its regional and global position may even be stronger than it was before the war. Before the war, Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz was theoretical. Now it’s actual. And we don’t seem to possess a plan — or the will — to open it once again.”

In other words, Trump and his gang have blown it. They are the losers.

Of course, the president will never admit this; his narcissism won’t permit it. His reaction, instead, will be classic “projection,” with him making incendiary claims about his opponents that really apply to him.

His reaction will be consistent, as we can expect from a doddering nearly 80-year-old. Going back to his earliest years, Trump was known as a bully, according to his niece, psychologist Mary Trump. One can easily imagine him strutting about elementary school playgrounds, taunting classmates as “losers.”

When Mary Trump suggested early this year that her uncle was “losing control” and humiliating himself “on an almost daily basis and often in the most public ways imaginable,” the White House reaction was predictable. Parroting his boss, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung issued a statement to The Daily Beast, saying “Mary Trump is a stone-old [sic] loser who doesn’t have a clue about anything.”

Trump’s vocabulary has scarcely improved since his earliest days, it seems, though he has often added vile expletives. The sad reality today is that along with his bullying, cloddish and ill-informed actions in Iran serving as an echo of the John Lennon song, he has turned us all into losers along with him.

Zionism, unembarrassed

Posted on May 25, 2026 by Joe Weber

While Dems tear themselves apart about Israel, this seems a useful reminder

Joseph Weber

John Irving, an American who became a Canadian citizen and lives in Toronto, has long had his finger on the pulse of American culture – sometimes in opposition to trends in his native country. In The Cider House Rules he defends the right to abortion. In A Prayer for Owen Meany he slams conservative notions of patriotism.

So, it’s no surprise that Irving’s key themes in his latest novel, Queen Esther, are antisemitism and anti-Zionism. The book, he told one interviewer, sprang in part from the “criticism and disfavor” Zionism has fallen into. His character reminds readers that Israel is a place where Jews haven’t always been safe but, as he put it, you “could defend yourself.”

Irving, 84 and a non-Jew who has long admired and loved Israel, sets his book partly in the country. We meet his protagonist, the child Esther, however, near early 1900s Portland, Maine, where she is left an unadoptable orphan when antisemites kill her mother, an immigrant from Vienna. As Esther grows up, she makes her way to Europe to help Austrian Jews in the late 1930s and then moves to Israel, where she helps build the state through often-covert military actions that stretch into the 1980s.

For many in America today, particularly liberals, Irving’s book would probably seem ill-timed. Rather than defend Israel as it battles enemies on four fronts – Gaza, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen – it’s fashionable in many circles to denigrate Zionism, to deride Israel as a “settler-colonial state” and even to deny its right to exist.

“What began as a drop in support for Israel among younger Democrats has become a vertiginous, across-the-board collapse,” The Christian Science Monitor reported. “Today, an overwhelming majority of Democrats view Israel negatively, and AIPAC [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee] is itself a target for progressives seeking to purge the party’s pro-Israel ranks.”

The piece based that reporting on a recent poll by The New York Times and the Siena Research Institute. That poll found that 74 percent of Democratic voters opposed “providing additional economic and military support to Israel,” as the Times of Israel recounted. Only 20 percent of respondents favored continued aid to Israel.

And 60 percent said they sympathized more with the Palestinians, while only 15 percent sympathized more with Israel. The survey also found that 48 percent of Democrats said the party has been “too supportive of Israel,” while 8 percent said the party was not supportive enough, and 34 percent said U.S. backing was “about right.”

Surveys have repeatedly found that Democrats have become increasingly hostile to Israel, the Israeli newspaper noted. Like other recent U.S. polls, the new survey found that younger respondents, in particular, were more opposed to the Jewish state. In a March survey conducted by Pew, 80 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents expressed an unfavorable view of Israel:

Some of the country’s critics are rallying around candidates such as Michigan’s Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for a U.S. Senate seat in a party primary set for August. “Killing tens of thousands of people makes you pretty damn evil,” El-Sayed told CNN congressional reporter Manu Raja on the network’s Inside Politics program. “It’s not how evil is this one versus that one — Hamas: Evil, Israeli government: Evil. We can say both.”

While El-Sayed seems to straddle the matter by attacking both sides in the Gaza War, the Egyptian American has also allied himself with Hasan Piker, a fellow Muslim and popular streamer who has made repeated antisemitic comments. As the Forward has reported, Piker’s history of his comments includes denying or downplaying rape that took place during the Oct. 7 attacks and comparing Houthi rebels to Anne Frank.

Then there’s Chris Rabb, the Philadelphian poised to become a congressman. He is backed by Piker and another Israel critic, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He supports a complete embargo on arms sales to Israel, as The Times of Israel reported. Rabb recently posted on X that “the Nakba never ended,” and said he would co-sponsor a resolution with Minnesota Rep. Ihlan Omar and Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib to “recognize the Nakba and reaffirm Palestinian refugees’ right to return.”

Disappointingly, Rabb is backed by Rep. Jamie Raskin, one of the brighter lights in Congress who also happens to be Jewish. Raskin, who co-sponsored the Block the Bombs to Israel Act, sided with the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace and other leftist groups, including Democratic Socialists of America and the Working Families Party, as well as groups that work to counter AIPAC, such as Track AIPAC and PAL PAC.

While he says he is committed to Israel, Raskin has split with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the Gaza War.

“I continue to hear each day from my constituents stories of pain from their families and friends in both Israel and Gaza,” Raskin said in a release last fall marking the Oct. 7^th savagery. “They speak of the mutual descent into cruelty and savage violence and pray for the imperative of peace and reconciliation. All parties to the conflict must finally come to the negotiating table and put an end to the vicious and hopeless cycles of terror, occupation and war in the region and create a path towards lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians, for the sake of both these desperate peoples and all the people of the world.”

Far less even-handedly, we have Maureen Galindo, a Democratic House candidate in Texas who said she wanted to turn a local immigrant detention center into a facility to imprison and castrate “American Zionists,” as The Washington Post reported. Galindo, a sex therapist who has never held office, came in first in a four-way party primary in March and will compete in a two-person runoff race wrapping up May 26.

Perhaps surprisingly, Democratic leaders have condemned Galindo. Ocasio-Cortez described Galindo’s comments as “bigoted garbage and antisemitism.” She called for voters to support Johnny Garcia, a former sheriff’s deputy who said Republicans had “no shame” about supporting Galindo’s “antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

James Talarico, the Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate race in Texas, also backed Garcia and said he would not campaign with Galindo if she won, as the Post reported. So, too, did the Texas Democratic Party and the chairs of the parties in the 35th Congressional District condemn Galindo’s remarks.

Democratic House leader Hakeem Jefferies accused Republicans of secretly supporting Galindo as a way to undercut Democrats’ chances in November, according to The New York Times. Indeed, the GOP seems to be operating underhandedly, with a political action committee with links to Republicans spending nearly $1 million on TV ads and mailers backing Galindo. The PAC dishonestly calls itself Lead Left.

If she prevails, this antisemite wouldn’t be welcomed by all in Congress. Two Jewish members of the House vowed that if Galindo were elected, they would force a daily vote to expel her.

But the tortuous disputes over Israel have made for ugly twists in Democratic politics. For instance, AIPAC opposed the Democratic mayor of Evanston, Ill., Daniel Biss, in the race to succeed retiring U.S. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky. Biss, who is Jewish and the grandson of Holocaust survivors, was targeted with negative ads and mailers in a rare instance of AIPAC involving itself in a race with two Jewish candidates, as the Times reported.

Like some others, Biss tries to take a middle ground on Israel, refusing to call Israel’s actions in the war against Hamas a genocide, but saying that he opposes unconditional aid to the country. He defeated a Jewish rival, whom AIPAC supported, who had backed aid without strings. He was supported by Senators Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts; the Illinois attorney general, Kwame Raoul; and the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

“This is a guy who can’t possibly be considered anti-Israel — he is the quintessential American Jew,” J Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami told the Times. “He is at the 50-yard line of Jewish Americans, and AIPAC doesn’t want them anywhere near policy.”

The lobbying group has gotten such a black eye among some Democrats that it has hidden its name behind front outfits in backing or opposing campaigns. As The Washington Post reported, AIPAC cloaked its spending in Illinois in “a trio of innocuously named organizations” — Chicago Progressive Partnership, Affordable Chicago Now and Elect Chicago Women — and ran ads that attacked candidates including Biss for reasons other than his position on Israel.

What’s more, AIPAC, which some progressive Jewish organizations have labeled a Republican front group, shot itself in the foot in some efforts to back more pro-Israel candidates.

In April in New Jersey, for instance, AIPAC funded ads attacking Tom Malinowski, a moderate Democratic House candidate who supported Israel but – like Biss — said that aid should not be unconditional, as the Times reported. Instead of helping a more pro-Israel opponent, Tahesha Way, the attacks turned voters from Malinowski to a pro-Palestinian progressive, Analilia Mejia, who won the race.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a likely 2028 presidential candidate, said he “never will” accept money from AIPAC, according to the Times. And Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a billionaire who once was a major donor to AIPAC, told the newspaper that he “walked away” from the group around 2015, when it began to veer to the right. “I still believe it is significantly MAGA-influenced,” said Pritzker, who is Jewish and a Democrat.

So, while the GOP under Donald J. Trump has given Netanyahu almost carte blanche to move against Israel’s enemies, Democrats are tearing themselves apart over the Israel-Palestine conflict and risk losing some Jewish support with nuanced stances. The progressives want to rein in the Israeli prime minister – as some in Israel also do – even as Hezbollah, Hamas and other opponents similarly backed by Iran refuse to yield.

Nowadays, moreover, as the longstanding hope for a two-state solution seems like an impossible dream, some Democrats seem bent on relegating Zionism to the political dustbin. New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, for instance, in effect calls for an end to Israel as a Jewish state. While he has argued that Israel has a right to exist, he contends it should have nothing to do with religion – a repudiation of the state’s founding.

“I’m not comfortable supporting any state that has a hierarchy of citizenship on the basis of religion or anything else,” Mamdani said in one TV interview. “Equality should be enshrined in every country in the world. That’s my belief.”

Never mind that the 21 percent or so of Israel’s population is Arab and is entitled to vote in the country, just as Jews do. It’s true that Arab-majority parties have never held more than 15 seats in the 120-seat Knesset and are now down to about 10, but that may have to do more with low turnout among Arab voters.

After reaching peak in 2020, with 65 percent of Arab citizens of Israel casting ballots, the share fell in 2022 to 53 percent, compared to 71 percent of the total Israeli electorate.

In 2021, Ra’am, a conservative Islamist party led by Mansour Abbas, became the first Arab party to join a governing coalition in Israel. And, depending on participation, some in Israel believe Arabs may win as many as 17 seats in upcoming elections. Of course, full representation would mean they would hold at least 24 seats.

But some Democrats would have the Jewish character of the state disappear. Is that not, in essence, antisemitism? Is much of the opposition now to Israel merely a veil for Jew hatred? Or can leaders such as Raskin back the people and the state even as they slam Israel’s current government?

As antisemitism abounds in New York and elsewhere, it is scarcely helpful that Mamdani plans to shun the May 31 Israel Day parade. And slanderous statements the mayor has made, such as in a 2025 release on the second anniversary of the Oct. 7th massacre, do little to move the needle toward peaceful coexistence. “The occupation and apartheid must end,” he wrote then.

Irving’s book doesn’t make such distinctions. The antisemitism that shapes his “Queen Esther” from the time her family flees Vienna, through her times in the U.S. and into her years in Jerusalem turns her into “an uncompromising defender of Jews during a century of violence and oppression against them,” as a New York Times reviewer put it.

In the end, the book is a powerful reminder that Jews – like other peoples in multiethnic states – deserve their own country. Even as they oppose a particular government’s policies, Israel’s critics would do well to heed that. They might find Irving’s latest a useful read.

Preferring yesterday

Posted on May 15, 2026 by Joe Weber

To some, progress is so threatening that even bicycles are targets

Joseph Weber

Seventy-one years ago, Yale-educated William F. Buckley, Jr. launched what has been called “the intellectual beacon of the conservative movement,” the magazine National Review. In his publisher’s statement, he wrote of the new weekly: “It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

The comment is revealing about the nature of conservatism. Many in the movement, it seems, put stumbling blocks in the way of progress, holding that the good old ways are inevitably best.

But what if the old ways really aren’t so good? What if they pollute our waterways and endanger our health? Even conservative darling Richard M. Nixon recognized such problems when he created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

So why is it that the same EPA is now moving to roll back a three-year-old rule that requires coal-fired power plants to prevent the release of toxic heavy metals into streams and rivers through polluted groundwater? Do conservatives really want our waterways tainted with poisonous heavy metals?

“The AI and data center revolution is creating an electricity and baseload power demand that cannot be met under the overly restrictive policies of past administrations,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a statement quoted by the Associated Press. “The Trump EPA will continue doing its part to address these burdensome regulations on the coal-fired power plant sector that hold American communities back from the new opportunities presented by this new 21st century energy reality.”

As AP reported, this plan is the latest step that Donald J. Trump’s administration has taken to pull back regulations on coal mining and coal-fired power and to empower fossil fuels as a primary energy source to feed the rapid growth of artificial intelligence data centers. But one wonders: why do the Trumpies so love fossil fuels, despite the planet-wide threat they pose?

Their efforts go well beyond yelling “Stop.” They are assailing environmental progress, turning back the clock.

Whether this involves contempt for electric vehicles, shutting down offshore wind farms or dismantling federal efforts in climate science with such moves as shutting down the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, Trump and his minions are seeking to peel back any gains society has made in going green.

At times, their efforts plunge into the absurd. The Trumpists, for instance, don’t seem to like bikes.

Last year the Trump Administration canceled grants for street safety measures, pedestrian trails and bike lanes in communities around the country. As Bloomberg News reported, the problem for the Trumpies was that the projects weren’t designed for cars.

A San Diego County road project that included bike lanes “appears to reduce lane capacity and a road diet that is hostile to motor vehicles,” a U.S Department of Transportation official wrote, rescinding a $1.2 million grant it awarded nearly a year before, according to the news outlet. In Fairfield, Ala., converting street lanes to trail space on one road was also deemed “hostile” to cars, and “counter to DOT’s priority of preserving or increasing roadway capacity for motor vehicles.”

And in Boston, the administration pulled back a grant to improve walking, biking and transit in the Mattapan Square neighborhood in a way that would change the “current auto-centric configuration.”

With such bureaucratese, one wonders whether the officials also have trouble with basic English.

Sometimes, conservatives justify their moves by arguing the costs of protections are too high or thwart development. But sometimes, they just seem afflicted by a weird nostalgia, such as for gas-powered cars, or animus toward blue states. Such sentiments seem to underlay the recently filed Trump administration lawsuit against California over limits on tailpipe emissions.

“Gavin Newsom is determined to continue pushing Democrats’ radical E.V. fantasy — even if doing so is illegal,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement quoted by The New York Times. He referred, of course, to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat likely to run for president and a frequent critic of Trump.

As the newspaper reported, the Trump administration has moved to slash federal support for electric vehicles, which do not emit planet-warming pollution. The Environmental Protection Agency has erased limits on greenhouse gases from vehicle tailpipes, and Trump signed a law last year eliminating a tax credit of up to $7,500 that had been available to people who bought a new electric car.

As has long been true, rightists often point to economics justify their defenses of the status quo. The current crew pair that with a loathing for the Biden Administration.

“Oppressive, expensive electric vehicle mandates drive up costs for American consumers and violate federal law,” former Attorney General Pam Bondi said at the time the suit against California was filed. “California is using unlawful policies from the last administration to create exorbitant costs for their citizens.”

But their efforts often fly in the face of common sense and science. For instance, the Omaha Public Power District has long planned to retire three of five power plants in north Omaha and switch the other two from coal-fired to natural gas. Nebraska’s rightwing Attorney General filed suit last fall to block the moves, though.

As reported by the Nebraska Examiner, AG Mike Hilgers said, “we should not be taking one electron off the grid.”

Hilgers’ 46-page lawsuit seeks to stop the changes, as well as prevent OPPD from pursuing any policy that prioritizes considerations other than price or reliability, including “environmental justice.” Residents of predominantly Black north Omaha have long complained of health risks from the plants, including asthma and respiratory issues.

The OPPD is a publicly owned utility that serves more than 900,000 people across 13 counties in eastern Nebraska, a region that includes Omaha.

As the Examiner reported, in 2014 and 2016, OPPD directors agreed to a plan that, by 2023, OPPD would retire the three North Omaha units in operation since the 1950s and switch the other two in operation since the 1960s from coal to natural gas. The oldest three units switched to natural gas in 2016. The plan was delayed in 2022 and then made contingent upon the construction of two new power-producing stations.

Why this conservative attachment to coal? Why this penchant for sticking with the status quo when harms have long been known?

Encouragingly, the power district in overwhelmingly red Nebraska could be in for changes in leadership that could make for progress. Three renewable energy advocates are advancing toward a fall general election and if they win, they and two other like-minded incumbents, would dominate the district board.

As The Downballot reported, the trio includes former state Sen. Carol Blood, the Democrats’ unsuccessful nominee for governor in 2022 who also lost a run for Congress in the conservative 1st District last cycle. The other is education professor Mark Gudgel, who failed in running for Omaha mayor in 2021. The third is attorney and school administrator Sara Kohen, who narrowly lost a bid for the Omaha City Council in 2021.

When they are defeated in high-profile runs, going for lower-profile utility regulatory posts might give such progressives toeholds for bigger offices later on. But, more important in the short run, they also could help restore environmental gains.

Environmentalists cheered in another red state, Arizona, when renewable energy supporters won an election to take charge of a Phoenix electrical utility company. In Georgia, a couple Democrats scored landslide victories last year in special elections for their state’s Public Service Commission, and Democrats now have the opportunity to flip the third seat they need to win control of the body this fall, The Downballot reported.

It will take a couple major elections to unseat those on the federal level who out of sentiment, nostalgia or just ignorance irrationally cling to the often-flawed past. But as the Nebraska, Arizona and Georgia elections demonstrate, grassroots victories in sometimes little-noted posts can help.

Sometimes, people who stand athwart history get steamrolled. Perhaps the time for that is long overdue.

The Revolution is feasting on its own

Posted on May 13, 2026 by Joe Weber

Trump’s penchant for firing his loyalists defines his movement

Joseph Weber

Royalist and anti-revolutionary journalist Jacques Mallet du Pan, writing in 1793 about the French Revolution, coined a phrase that resounds today: “A l’exemple de Saturne, la révolution dévore ses enfants,” which translates to “Like Saturn, the revolution devours its children.”

We see this in Washington, where Donald J. Trump has been ruthless in metaphorically beheading acolytes.

So far, he has bounced three Cabinet members: Attorney General Pam Bondi, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Lower-level career fatalities include Border Patrol “commander at large” Gregory Bovino; Corey Lewandowski, an unpaid special staffer at the Department of Homeland Security, and Navy Secretary John Phelan.

More recently, Dr. Marty Makary quit as head of the Food and Drug Administration amid rumors that Trump was planning to can him. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. urged him to jump beforehand, it appears.

And Trump has pulled out all the stops — including a Justice Department probe — in trying to oust Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell from the Fed board. Powell, whom Trump had appointed during his first term, will be succeeded by Kevin Warsh at the Fed’s helm, but he intends to stay on the Fed board for a couple years yet.

In his first term, Trump loved to wield his guillotine. Casualties included FBI Director James Comey, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, National Security Adviser John Bolton and White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci – all of whom went on to disparage Trump (and some still do so).

Of course, such highly visible executions are nothing compared to over 200,000 firings of federal employees thanks to sometimes-Trump ally Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Makary’s FDA was gutted by the voluntary departures of some 4,000 staffers, apparently out of distaste with the agency’s tumult and redirection under Kennedy and Makary.

In a sorry twist, at least some federal employees who got the ax were very surprised Trumpists.

An attorney advisor for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, said he was “devastated” after voting for Trump and being assured that his job was safe. As CNN reported, he had moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, with his pregnant wife and toddler for the position. He said, “I was expecting to spend the rest of my life doing it.”

Some felt blindsided.

“I was thinking that there would be changes,” a two-time Trump voter and Department of Agriculture researcher told The Los Angeles Times. “But instead of being focused, this is just going completely off the rails, chopping and slicing up parts of the government that are protecting Americans.”

So much for loyalty. Trump, of course, is notorious for expecting it but rarely returning it.

Even more intriguing, though, is when voters are involved and believe that Trump backers aren’t Trumpy enough. That was the case in the May 12 primary defeat of two-term Nebraska Secretary of State Robert Evnen.

Evnen lost to Omaha businessman Scott Petersen, who challenged the integrity of Nebraska’s electoral system on the Lincoln resident’s watch. The incumbent tried to tie himself to Trump’s national election overhaul efforts, but wound up defending the state’s voting systems – something that apparently doesn’t suit the Trump narrative that many in the state’s GOP seem to buy.

“People don’t trust election systems … and whether right or wrong, it’s a problem,” Petersen told the Nebraska Examiner. “It needs to be addressed.”

Petersen targeted Evnen’s handling of vote counting, the news outlet reported. He questioned whether the ballot-counting machines can access the internet and be hacked, argued that voting by mail should be restricted to only special circumstances and promised to conduct full hand counts of races.

Like other secretaries of state, Evnen regularly audited election results, the news outlet reported. But, by raising the specter of taints — in Trump-like fashion —Petersen undermined the incumbent.

That was so even as Evnen in the past year has tried to tie himself even more tightly to Trump. He handed over data the Trump administration requested to the U.S. Department of Justice that his Republican predecessor didn’t, including parts that critics say are potentially sensitive, according to the Examiner. He also started echoing some of Trump’s concerns over elections.

Evnen had supported a state constitutional amendment in 2022 requiring voter ID, and said he’d like such systems rolled out nationally. He pressed for more efforts to ensure noncitizens aren’t voting – a Trump hobbyhorse, but a nonproblem, according to outfits such as the Brennan Center at NYU. In desperate-seeming emails in recent weeks, Evnen pleaded for votes by arguing that he and Trump were “completely in-sync” on mail-in voting, something Trump has labeled “mail-in cheating.”

But Petersen apparently put Evnen on his back foot with suggestions of flaws in the system, despite providing no evidence. As the Examiner reported, Evnen was cast onto the defensive, describing Nebraska’s elections system as the “gold standard.” And he conducted a “transparency tour” across several counties describing the accuracy testing of Nebraska’s ballot-counting machines.

With a GOP rank and file that has been convinced by Trump and his backers that voting systems nationwide are rigged, such rational approaches are nonstarters, it seems. With people conditioned to be suspicious, those dogs just don’t hunt.

Never mind that Petersen’s approach earned him the title of “President of the TinFoil Hat Club” from outgoing U.S. Rep. Don Bacon, one of many GOP establishment figures to back Evnen. The Lincoln resident had a laundry list of endorsements from Republican elected officials, including Gov. Jim Pillen, Sens. Deb Fischer and Pete Ricketts, and all three of the state’s House lawmakers.

Evnen had long paid his dues to the state GOP by serving such figures in one way or another. But Petersen prevailed by out-Trumping him.

In the end, the revolution that Evnen backed devoured him, much as it has gobbled up so many in Washington. And, with 2 ½ years remaining for Trump’s tenure in Washington, still more are likely to fall prey to it.

While some of Trump’s followers paint in him in messianic imagery, perhaps it is Saturn he resembles more.

“Am Yisrael Chai”

Posted on May 12, 2026 by Joe Weber

But, as for the current Israeli government approach, some disagree

Joseph Weber

A Polish newspaper in 1791 published a phrase since handed down to us in a lot of forms: “Gdzie dwóch Polaków, tam trzy zdania” means “where there are two Poles, there are three opinions.” A more modern version, perhaps from the Borscht Belt or the long history of Judaism in Poland, tells us “two Jews, three opinions.”

I was reminded of this by a rabbi of my acquaintance who recently discussed a decision by her synagogue to change a pro-Israel banner that has graced the building since shortly after Hamas massacred Jews on Oct. 7, 2023. Some congregants objected to the “We Stand with Israel” message, either out of fear because synagogues nowadays are being attacked or out of distress at Israel’s military actions. Others took pride in the message, since lately Israel needs friends when it has become the target of much heat.

Some members, the rabbi wrote, felt all three things at once. This version of “two Jews, three opinions” has a counterpart in longstanding rabbinic tradition, “davar acher” – Hebrew for “a different thing,” she suggested. The phrase separates often differing, sometimes contradictory, commentaries on various matters and suggests that both views could be correct. The text allows for diverse opinions.

There’s little doubt that Jews are split on crucial matters involving Israel now. The killings of more than 70,000 people in Gaza, still others in Lebanon and still others at the hands of Israeli settlers or soldiers in the West Bank have many asking a version of “Israel: What Went Wrong?,” the title of a new book by an Israeli-born scholar teaching at Brown University, Omer Bartov.

Many American Jews disapprove of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, with 61 percent saying Israel has committed war crimes, and about 4 in 10 saying the country is guilty of genocide against the Palestinians, according to a Washington Post poll from last fall. While more Israelis backed the Gaza actions, less than a third believe Israel won, and even fewer believe Hamas will lay down its arms, according to an Israeli poll published in January.

Among Jews in the U.S., opinions about Israel are particularly split by age. While 93 percent of those surveyed by Pew in the spring of 2024 condemned the Hamas attack that started the war, Jewish adults under 35 were divided over Israel’s military response: 52 percent said the way Israel carried out the war was acceptable, while 42 percent called it unacceptable, and 6 percent were unsure. Jews ages 50 and older were more likely to say Israel’s conduct of the war acceptable (68 percent).

So, lots of views. Can all be right? As it makes war so aggressively on its neighbors – albeit in response to real threats – can Israel’s actions be just and appropriate? Or has it lost the moral compass that once defined the nation along with its historically justified claims to the land, which underpinned Zionism?

Perhaps the most unsettling arguments come in Bartov’s new book. The work is especially troubling to defenders of Israeli because Bartov has a lot of street cred. A professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown, he grew up in a Zionist home and served as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. He argues that Zionism has morphed into an ideology of extremism that led in Gaza to genocide, a term he doesn’t use lightly.

Indeed, in the wake of the Oct. 7^th savagery, Bartov published an opinion essay in The New York Times about Israel’s military response. “I believe that there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza,” he wrote a month after the massacre, “although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening.”

But he has since then changed his view. Relying on a UN definition that says genocide involves acts carried out with the intent of destroying a particular group – whether national, ethnic, racial, or religious – he argues that Israel’s destruction in Gaza meets that tragic test.

As he told New Yorker editor David Remnick, Bartov notes that the population of Gaza lives in less than half of the territory now, with entire cities – such as Rafah – leveled. Unhoused, living in tents and with no infrastructure, the Gazans are “living there like dogs, and nobody is doing anything about it. The plan, the future of the genocide in Gaza seems to be to create a resort town for the rich and to have the Palestinians be the water carriers for that.”

But, long before the Gaza War, Bartov had doubts about how Zionism was evolving. “I served on the West Bank,” he said of his time in the IDF. “The sense, this question that you suddenly ask yourself, ‘What am I doing here? Why am I here? This is not my home.’ It would come up. I can’t say that it was a fully developed political understanding. It was a feeling that something was not right.”

Then, in the late 1980s with the outbreak of the first intifada when he was an officer in reserve, he was outraged by calls from the then-Minister of Defense, Yitzhak Rabin, to “go and break their bones.” He wrote Rabin a note comparing the IDF to the WWII Wehrmacht, referring to the process of brutalizing an army.

As many Israelis endorsed the idea of a two-state solution — or at least as Rabin saw it, a self-governing entity for Palestinians that was short of a full state – Bartov was more hopeful. That time, he recalled, was “the last moment of realism as opposed to messianism, which is what has taken over Israel now.”

But that ended with the assassination of Rabin in November 1995. “I remember it well because I was sitting there and holding my six-month-old daughter and crying, and I didn’t even like Rabin,” Bartov said. “He was the last hope, and he could have accomplished something because of his own record, because of his standing in Israeli society. I thought this is over for a generation. I was wrong because it’s more than a generation now, and things are only going the wrong way.”

Any chance of a course correction?

Bartov is pessimistic about change coming from within. As a New York Times reviewer noted, “he says that the leadership, whether Jewish or Palestinian, just isn’t there. Any initiative will have to come from the outside, and he credits President Trump for pressuring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to accept a 20-point plan last fall that at least gestures ‘toward a new political horizon.’” Even Germany, seeking its “greatest atonement” could play a role, he suggests.

As might be expected, ideas such as Bartov’s have their critics.

The American Jewish Committee, for instance, contends genocide – a term first used by a Polish Jewish lawyer to refer to the Nazis’ effort to destroy world Jewry – is a misnomer for the Gaza campaign. “Israel is not seeking to destroy the Palestinian people or the Palestinian population of Gaza, which is what would need to happen in order to correctly apply the term ‘genocide,’” the AJC maintains. “Israel’s leaders have repeatedly asserted that their campaign in Gaza is solely against the terrorist organization Hamas.”

Well, not all Israeli leaders say as much. If they don’t want to kill Palestinians, they at least want to drive them out.

“We must promote a solution to encourage the emigration of the residents of Gaza,” far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said in 2024. And far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who also holds a position in the Defense Ministry, says that Israel “will rule there. And in order to rule there securely for a long time, we must have a civilian presence.” In other words, settlements much like those unsettling the West Bank.

And, as Bartov has noted, the big problem for Gazans is they have nowhere to go.

“The big difference between the Nakba of 1948 and what happened in ‘23, ‘24, ‘25 in Gaza is that at the time the borders were open, in ‘48, they could flee. They did flee, to Lebanon, to Jordan, to Syria,” the Holocaust and genocide scholar said. “In 2023, 2024, Israel, of course, did not open its borders. Egypt did not open its borders, and they had no place to flee. Ethnic cleansing, which was what the Israeli government wanted to carry out, became genocide.”

It’s all reminiscent of “Neighborhood Bully,” 1983 song about Israel by Bob Dylan (nee Zimmerman):

Well, he knocked out a lynch mob, he was criticized

Old women condemned him, said he should apologize

Then he destroyed a bomb factory, nobody was glad

The bombs were meant for him. He was supposed to feel bad

He’s the neighborhood bully.

Well, the chances are against it, and the odds are slim

That he’ll live by the rules that the world makes for him

‘Cause there’s a noose at his neck and a gun at his back

And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac

He’s the neighborhood bully.

Of course, Israel is surrounded by bullies who want nothing more than its destruction. Genocide for Israelis would be fine with them.

The synagogue that plans to remove its “We Stand with Israel” message will replace it with rotating banners. Some messages will be seasonal – “Shanah tovah!” around the holidays, for example. Others will be general, such as “BZBI: Where You Belong.” At times, it will display an “Am Yisrael Chai” banner, using a phrase that means “The People of Israel Live.”

“We look forward to having this new communication tool,” the rabbi wrote. “Rather than live under one banner, we will return again and again to davar acher, a new idea, a new approach.” That may accommodate several opinions.

Of course, it’s not clear what opinions will guide Israel’s future over time.

“Zionism is not reformable. The state of Israel is,” Bartov argues. “The state of Israel has to be reinvented, and it cannot be reinvented according to this ethnonationalist principle that has taken hold of it.… Israel, as a society, there has to be a society of all its citizens. As it was said at the time, in the 1990s, in the early 1990s, Eretz Kol Ezracheha, a country of all its citizens.”

The Big Picture

Category Archives: Politics

Trump and the press

We’re getting a master class in would-be autocracy

An age-old hatred revived

Or, perhaps, never-departed antisemitism is just convenient again

Paranoia abounds

The left has taken up the mantle from the wackos on the right

Watch the parkin’ meters

Why do so many politicians disappoint us?

Moi, moi, moi

Trump apes a 17th century king – without his grace or taste

“Losers” abound

But all of us are suffering for that

Zionism, unembarrassed

While Dems tear themselves apart about Israel, this seems a useful reminder

Preferring yesterday

To some, progress is so threatening that even bicycles are targets

The Revolution is feasting on its own

Trump’s penchant for firing his loyalists defines his movement

“Am Yisrael Chai”

But, as for the current Israeli government approach, some disagree