In 1955, sociologist Will Herberg published Protestant, Catholic, Jew , about the ways in which the U.S. is not actually a melting pot, but has distinct religiously-based communities. Some of the effect of his study was blunted by the Baby Boomers, who in the 1960s began intermarrying across those religious boundaries in great numbers and some of whom began abandoning the churches and synagogues. Today’s Gen Z have gone even further, with a third of them reporting themselves to have no religion. Nevertheless, the communities Herberg wrote about still under-gird U.S. political alignments. The Democratic Party is a coalition of such urban religious ethnicities. Protestant Blacks, liberal white and Asian Protestants, liberal Catholics, whether white or Hispanic or Asian, and liberal Jews (the vast majority) form the core of the party.

Back in the day, the Democrats made a bargain with one another among these religious ethnicities. The Christians would support Israel. The Protestants would avoid bashing the “Papists.” The Catholics would refrain from imposing their beliefs on the others. That is how you get an Irish Catholic president such as Joe Biden who says he is a Zionist and who supports abortion rights in the teeth of his own church. He is the old urban Democratic coalition of religious ethnic groups in the flesh. Also back in the day, Israel was a socialist democracy, which made it easy for U.S. Democrats to support.

For a long time, the Republican Party was a coalition of rural and suburban Protestants with the Protestant urban economic elite. Over time, about half of Catholics joined the GOP, mainly on a culture war basis or because they were in business and liked the program of tax cuts and deregulation. The paucity of Jews in the party allowed Republican presidents like Eisenhower and George H. W. Bush to take a hard line with Israel. Eisenhower was furious at David Ben Gurion over the 1956 war of aggression on Egypt and made him give back the Sinai on the threat that the US would call in its loans and bankrupt Tel Aviv.

The Evangelical take-over of the Republican Party in the 1980s and after changed the dynamics. A reactionary Evangelical-Catholic alliance was determined to repeal abortion rights, roll back the sexual revolution, put women back in their place as homemakers and child-rearers, and keep alternative sexualities illegal. About 20 percent of Jews also aligned themselves with the party, more on the program of deep tax cuts and deregulation of businesses than on the culture warrior front. In this century Israel swung increasingly to the right, ending up about where Victor Urban of Hungary is, which suited the Evangelicals, hard line Catholics, and wealthy conservative Jews.

The character of the cities was changed enormously by the 1965 Immigration Act, as a result of which about a million people a year legally immigrated to the United States. The foreign-born population has risen to nearly 14 percent, a figure not seen since the late nineteenth century. Many of the newcomers were urban people and ended up in the Democratic Party. There were a few who became Republicans, either through business interests or conversion to Evangelicalism, or through dislike of the Communism of their homelands (Cubans, some Vietnamese, some Eastern Europeans).

The new Democrats included Arabs and Muslims, Buddhists, some Hindus (Ro Khanna, Pramila Jayapal) and Hispanics. Many came from formerly colonized countries that had thrown off their European overlord after WW II.

Joe Biden never really came to terms with these New Democrats, though he attempted outreach to the Muslims and others, reversing Trump’s Muslim Ban. Biden’s mindset was stuck in the 1970s when he went into politics, and the old Catholic-Jewish-Black-and-liberal white Protestant coalition was central. He could not imagine offering Israel anything but full impunity for anything it did and billions in aid, because that was the old Democratic bargain with the Zionist Jews in the party.

Not only are the 14 percent of Americans, nearly 1 in six, who are foreign born mostly more critical of Israel than was common in Biden’s youth, but Israel itself changed. The immigration of a million Jews from the old Soviet bloc to Israel, and the gradual enfranchisement of the Mizrahim, the Jews from places like Morocco and Iraq, resulted in a decline of influence for the socialist-oriented central European Jews. Right wing parties began regularly winning elections, instituting neo-liberal policies and destroying the socialist legacy, favoring tech start-ups and billionaires. The right wing allied with the squatter-settlers determined to steal vast swathes of Palestinian land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

To the New Democrats from an immigrant background, this Israel looked like a classic settler colonial state and the Palestinians looked like a colonized people seeking self-determination. That narrative also increasingly appealed to young Democrats from liberal households and to African-Americans of the BLM movement, who took a dim view of the militarism and racist rhetoric of figures such as Netanyahu. The Gaza War has been a watershed for attitudes toward Israel among American youths across the board. Biden’s name was mud among the under-30 crowd, in part because of his callousness on the Gaza carnage.

Joe Biden could never grasp this sea change, and so lost the youths and was heading for defeat in November as a result. The youths had made the difference for Obama in 2008 and for Biden in 2020. If they sat this one out, Trump could have won.

Kamala Harris is herself a New Democrat, with a Jamaican father and an Indian mother, both leftists and anti-colonialist activists. She understands the youths. She now has the tricky task of mollifying these Democratic youths who view Israel as committing a genocide while not losing the 70 to 80 percent of Jews who typically vote Democratic (though to be sure many of them are upset with Netanyahu and his Gaza carnage, as well).

Harris’s tightrope walk was apparent in the remarks she made Thursday after meeting with Netanyahu. Note that she carefully kept the actual meeting off-camera, so that her report of it could shape its reception. She began by reaffirming what we might call the Herberg bargain — support for Israel, affirmation of its right to defend itself, “including from Iran and Iran-backed militias such as Hamas and Hezbollah,” “unwavering commitment to the existence of the State of Israel, to its security, and to the people of Israel.” She rightly emphasized the need to secure the release of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza.

This sentence, though, is very carefully crafted: “I’ve said it many times, but it bears repeating: Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters.”

How it does so matters. That is a caveat that Biden was never willing to add, nor are most Republicans.

So then, Harris went off script compared to anything we ever heard from Biden or from his Blob factotums such as Brett McGurk, Jake Sullivan or Antony Blinken.

She said, “I also expressed with the Prime Minister my serious concern about the scale of human suffering in Gaza, including the death of far too many innocent civilians. I made clear my serious concern about the dire humanitarian situation there. With over 2 million people facing high levels of food insecurity and half a million people facing catastrophic levels of acute food insecurity, what has happened in Gaza over the past nine months is devastating. The images of dead children and desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, sometimes doing so for the second, third, or fourth time, cannot be ignored. We cannot look away in the face of these tragedies. We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to the suffering, and I will not be silent.”

I was impressed that she or her speechwriter knew that 500,000 Palestinians in Gaza were assessed this spring to be enduring Integrated Phase Classification 5 for food security, defined as “Households have an extreme lack of food and/or other basic needs even after full employment of coping strategies. Starvation, death, destitution and extremely critical acute malnutrition levels are evident.” I think, though, that more recent assessments suggest that the entire Gaza Strip may be in phase 5.

Biden used to doubt that all those Palestinians were actually being killed and said things like “people die in war.” His hardheartedness toward the Palestinian people is as disturbing as it is baffling, since of all people an Irish-American should be able to sympathize with indigenous people being starved by a settler colonial state. But I guess seeing things this way would have been a violation of the Herberg Bargain.

Harris continued, “Thanks to the leadership of our president, Joe Biden, there is a deal on the table for a ceasefire and a hostage deal, and it is important that we recall what the deal involves. The first phase of the deal would bring about a full ceasefire, including a withdrawal of the Israeli military from population centers in Gaza. In the second phase, the Israeli forces will withdraw from Gaza entirely, leading to a permanent end to the hostilities. It is time for this war to end and to end in a way where Israel is secure, all the hostages are released, the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza ends, and the Palestinian people can exercise their right to freedom, dignity, and self-determination.”

So she is supporting a definitive end to the war as part of Phase II, something Netanyahu has repeatedly rejected.

I have a sense that when she says, “Let’s get the deal done so we can get a ceasefire to end the war. Let’s bring the hostages home and let’s provide much-needed relief to the Palestinian people,” she is sending a firm message to Netanyahu that she wants this war to end so it can stop being a fly in the ointment of the Democratic presidential campaign.

Unfortunately, she went on to reiterate the standard bullshit U.S. boilerplate about a two-state solution, which is practically speaking now impossible and which the Israeli parliament definitively rejected just this week. To be fair, she did endorse freedom and self-determination for the Palestinians, though in this fairy tale scenario.

Finally, she said, “I will close with this: It is important for the American people to remember that the war in Gaza is not a binary. However, too often the conversation is binary when the reality is anything but. I ask my fellow Americans to help encourage efforts to acknowledge the complexity, nuance, and the history of the region. Let us all condemn terrorism and violence. Let us all do what we can to prevent the suffering of innocent civilians and let us condemn antisemitism, Islamophobia, and hate of any kind. Let us work to unite our country.”

That’s her Mideast platform. It is designed to hold together in the Democratic Party both Jews and Muslims, to fulfill the aspirations of both and to protect the interests of both. It also hopes to galvanize the youth vote, as Obama did in 2008. It is a harbinger of a new American political paradigm, Protestant-Catholic-Jew-Muslim-Hindu-Buddhist-None, with which the Democratic Party must contend. To pull it off, she will need to put forward more than well crafted phrases. And implementing rights for Palestinians while making Zionist Jews happy is no mean feat.

But I have to say, her rhetoric, at least, is a breath of fresh air after ten months of weasel words and genocide denial. As always, the proof will be in the pudding.

CNN: “Hear what VP Harris says she told Israel’s Netanyahu”

Netanyahu, the Butcher of Gaza, boasted of destroying the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords that would have resulted in a Palestinian state and an Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Palestinian Territories by 1997. He has consistently attempted to annex Palestinian private property and covertly has paid for a movement of Israeli squatters onto Palestinian land. He has engaged in collective punishment of innocent noncombatants in order to quash any resistance to his vast acts of grand larceny. He bankrolled Hamas for a decade with Egyptian and Qatari funds deposited in Israeli accounts, which he transferred to Gaza, in hopes of taming the organization by giving it Gaza as a fief. He thereby hoped to continue to split the Palestinians, most of whom support instead the secular, nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization. Most Israelis recognize that Netanyahu’s brain-dead policies led to the October 7 terrorist attack.

One of the twenty-first century’s worst war criminals, responsible for more deaths of innocents and children than Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Netanyahu needs a bright shiny object to distract the world from the threat his racist, fascist Likud-led government, armed with 200 nuclear devices, poses to the planet.

Ben Norton at The Real News Network has reviewed Netanyahu’s long history of blatant warmongering lies:

In 1990, when Netanyahu was deputy foreign minister of Israel, he alleged that Iraq’s nuclear program was “fast accelerating.” In December, 1990, he said on the NBC News Today Show of Iraq’s ruler Saddam Hussein: “The question is, really, how do we ensure that these weapons of destruction, these missiles, these chemical weapons, the nuclear program that is fast accelerating in Iraq, that these do not pose a threat in the aftermath of the crisis, assuming, assuming it gets out of Kuwait? This is an issue for the entire international community.”

Iraq’s chemical weapons were used on Kurds and on Iranian troops but were not in a form where they could be deployed outside the country. Iraq engaged only in anemic and sporadic nuclear experimentation that never amounted to anything (they did not have centrifuges, then or later). Iraq was a ramshackle third world country, not a threat to Europe or the United States. Netanyahu just had a wish list of wars he wanted other people to fight for him, and his exaggerations and fantasies were tools toward that end.

Netanyahu addressed a US Congressional hearing September 2002, saying:

“If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others, will say the time of such regimes, of such despots, is gone. There is a new age, something new is happening.”

Actually, all the Arab countries are dictatorships, monarchies or failed states after the disastrous US invasion and occupation of Iraq, which left tens of thousands of veterans wounded and killed 4,492 US military personnel. The US operation in Iraq gave rise to ISIL, which roiled the region for several years and conducted terrorism against France, Belgium and other countries to which Saddam Hussein had posed no challenge.

As for Iran’s ayatollahs, the US destruction of the Baath regime in Iraq and the installation of a Shiite-majority government strengthened them enormously.

Netanyahu told Congress:

“Two decades ago it was possible to thwart Saddam’s nuclear ambitions by bombing a single installation. But today nothing less than dismantling his regime will do, because Saddam’s nuclear program has fundamentally changed in those two decades. He no longer needs one large reactor to produce the deadly material necessary for atomic bombs. He could produce it in centrifuges the size of washing machines that can be hidden throughout the country. And I want to remind you that Iraq is a very big country.”

He told Congress before the Iraq War, “There is no question whatsoever that Saddam is seeking and is working and is advancing towards the development of nuclear weapons. No question whatsoever. And there was no question that once he acquires it, history shifts immediately. There is no question that he had not given up on his nuclear program. None whatsoever. There is also no question that he was not satisfied with the arsenal of chemical and biological weapons that he had and was trying to perfect them constantly. Saddam is hellbent on achieving atomic bombs, atomic capabilities as soon as he can.”

Netanyahu also said, “The two nations that are vying, competing with each other, who will be the first to achieve nuclear weapons, is Iraq and Iran. And Iran, by the way, is also outpacing Iraq in the development of ballistic missile systems that they hope will reach the Eastern seaboard of the United States within 15 years. Now, the question is what’s your next step, knowing that three of these nations are developing nuclear weapons? This is not a hypothesis. It is fact. Iraq, Iran, and Libya are racing to develop nuclear weapons.”

None of them were racing to develop nuclear weapons. None. And none have the capacity to hit the US with missiles. It is all intense and delusional fearmongering.

Once the US military was on the ground in Iraq, it became clear that it had never had a serious nuclear weapons program, and the little it had was mothballed by UN inspectors in 1995. At the time that Netanyahu was speaking, Iraq had no centrifuges or any enrichment program of any sort. It was all smoke and mirrors, as tissue-thin and insubstantial as a paranoid nightmare. All those “no questions” were expressions of a false certainty or outright lies.

Here’s an interview Norton pulled up that Netanyahu gave on Iraq after 9/11:

INTERVIEWER: “You’re making a connection between the Taliban and Iraq.

NETANYAHU: Yes, I am. I’m saying that the, if you look at those who harbor terrorists, and those who support terrorists, and-.

INTERVIEWER: I guess I was looking for a connection between September 11, and my understanding why we went to the Taliban is it was a connection there, they were harboring somebody that we believed did the act of September 11.

NETANYAHU: Yes, that’s the first reason why you did it, and-.

INTERVIEWER: Now you’re going to take me from September 11 to Iraq, somehow?

NETANYAHU: Yes, but I’m saying something else. I’m saying the connection is not whether Iraq was directly connected to September 11, but how do you prevent the next September 11? . . . And to the various critics, especially overseas, believe that a clear connection between Saddam and September 11 must be established before we have a right to prevent the next September 11, well, I think not.”

I once saw on the web a captured Iraqi document from Saddam’s secret police warning of how dangerous Bin Laden and al-Qaeda were and putting out an all points bulletin for any al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq. Saddam was afraid of those people, not in cahoots with them. We know that the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq had absolutely no plans or possibly even the capacity to stage a terrorist attack on the United States homeland. Iraq was secular and Arab nationalist. There was no connection with or resemblance to the fundamentalist Pushtun-speaking Taliban or the equally fundamentalist al-Qaeda. Netanyahu was just pulling things out of his ass, to drag the U.S. into a Middle East war that would break the legs of Iraq, then a significant military power. As Norton pointed out, he even asserted that the US needed no casus belli to go to war with Iraq. Apparently paranoid suspicions are sufficient. Which explains a lot.

Iraq was not the only butt of his calumnies. In 2012, Norton shows, Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly, “By next spring, at most by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks, before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb. A red line should be drawn right here, before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb.”

Iran has had a civilian nuclear enrichment program since 2000. If it wanted a nuclear weapon, it could have one by now. In fact, the CIA has repeatedly assessed that Iran has no military nuclear program and cannot be shown to be trying for a bomb.

Netanyahu has long tried to get the US into a war with Iran: “Obviously we’d like to see a regime change, at least I would, in Iran, just as I would like to see in Iraq. The question now is a practical question. What is the best place to proceed? It’s not a question of whether Iraq’s regime should be taken out, but when should it be taken out? It’s not a question of whether you’d like to see a regime change in Iran, but how to achieve it. The application of power is the most important thing in winning the war on terrorism. The more victories you amass, the easier the next victory becomes. The first victory in Afghanistan makes a second victory in Iraq that much easier. The second victory in Iraq will make the third victory that much easier, too.”

Those “victories” in Afghanistan and Iraq turned quickly to dust in America’s mouth, and if the US government ever allowed the wily Netanyahu to trap it into a war with Iran, it might well bankrupt the Republic for no gain.

Netanyahu tried to derail the 2015 UNSC nuclear deal with Iran, in which it mothballed 80% of its nuclear enrichment program in return for sanctions relief. Netanyahu successfully pushed US Republicans to refuse the sanctions relief, helping derail the treaty. He then went before the UN again, saying, “Well, tonight I’m here to tell you one thing: Iran lied. Big time. After signing the nuclear deal in 2015, Iran intensified its efforts to hide its secret nuclear files.”

UN inspections repeatedly showed that Iran was carefully abiding by the terms of the nuclear deal. Netanyahu was just making shit up again. Norton quotes Robert Kelley, the former inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, on the falsity of Netanyahu’s claims: “I thought many of the things that he presented were very childish. I would think that a country like Israel that has its own nuclear weapons, and has scientists who must be pretty competent, would be able to look at the information we were shown and say right away, well, this is garbage. He presented very early in the presentation a drawing which was supposed to be an illustration of a nuclear device. And you look at that drawing, it’s a cartoon, it’s a joke. You look at this and you see it’s completely amateurish, completely childish, and trying to make something very important out of something that’s not important at all.”

When Trump got in, Netanyahu whispered into his ear that he should rip up the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which Trump did with alacrity. As a result, Iran felt stabbed in the back. It never got sanctions relief. Its leaders felt free to enrich uranium to higher levels than the treaty had allowed.

Having destroyed the best chance for denuclearizing Iran, Netanyahu will now tell Congress to go to war against that country because “there is no question” that Tehran is attempting to get a nuclear bomb with which to attack the United States.

Netanyahu has all the variation in his speeches of a myna bird, and squawks just as annoyingly. After his decades of lies, misrepresentations, undermining of the US government’s foreign policy, and now his maniacal genocide, no one in Washington should be willing to listen to a word he says.

Note that Netanyahu was afraid of having any layovers on his way to Washington in any civilized countries for fear he’d be dragged off to the Hague for trial. Congress has brought eternal and indelible shame on itself by inviting this war criminal to address it.

Whenever reporters press spokesmen like John Kirby (NSC) or Matthew Miller (State Department) about continued Israeli lawlessness, their mantra is that the US seeks a two state solution. It was never a logical response, since the Israeli government’s planting of hundreds of thousands of Israeli squatters throughout the West Bank and illegal annexation of East Jerusalem was always intended to forestall a Palestinian state.

The Israeli parliament has let the scales fall from the world’s eyes by formally rejecting, now and forever, any establishment of a Palestinian state.

The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reported that the Knesset or Israeli national legislature voted last Thursday to reject any establishment of a Palestinian state on the grounds that it would actually prolong the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilize the Middle East.

The resolution came in the wake of a Knesset decision last February rejecting the “unilateral” recognition of a Palestinian state by other countries.

As recently as May, Spain, Ireland and Norway recognized Palestine, followed by Slovakia.

The Israeli parliament announced that “The Knesset strongly opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state west of the Jordan,” saying that it considers “the establishment of a Palestinian state in the heart of the Land of Israel will constitute an existential threat to the State of Israel and its citizens, and will lead to the perpetuation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and destabilize the region.”

The Palestinian West Bank is not in the heart of the Land of Israel. It wasn’t even awarded to Israel by the grossly unfair and insufferably pro-Zionist 1947 UN General Assembly partition proposal.

The Israeli parliamentarians expressed a conviction that a Palestinian state would quickly be taken over by Hamas and would become a terrorist base coordinating with Iran. This assertion ignores that the secular-minded Palestine Liberation Organization runs the West Bank, and that it has poor relations with Iran. It is also a vote of lack of confidence in the Israeli government, which says that it is destroying Hamas.

TRT World: “Israel’s Knesset passes resolution rejecting Palestinian statehood”

The resolution was supported by all the member parties of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition. Gideon Moshe Serchensky Sa’ar, a longtime Likud figure now of the “New Hope” party, said of the vote: “It aims to express the comprehensive opposition that exists among the Israeli people to the establishment of a Palestinian state that would endanger Israel’s security and future.” He said it was aimed at the international community, to convey that “pressures aimed at imposing a Palestinian state on Israel will not work.”

The US has also long held that a Palestinian state can only be established with Israel’s acquiescence. But that principle rings hollow if Israel has ruled such a state out of the question a priori.

Arab 48 also reports that the Knesset vote shooting down a Palestinian state provoked consternation in Washington. The Biden administration had hoped that the “day after” the Israeli campaign against Gaza, such a state could be established, resulting in Saudi Arabia’s recognition of it and of Israel.

John Kirby, spokesman for the National Security Council, dismissed the vote as a “difficulty” that Washington hopes to “overcome.” In other words, the American daydream will continue, unaffected by political reality on the ground.

The State Department admitted to being “displeased” by the vote, which is as close as it gets to condemning anything Israel does.

The same State Department continues to deny that there is any genocide happening in Gaza despite the killing of over 39,000 persons, the majority of them women and children.

I don’t know who Washington thinks it is fooling with this “two-state solution” mantra, which is simply a non-starter and a form of gaslighting.

The problem is that if there isn’t a two-state solution, there aren’t many alternatives. You could have ongoing Apartheid. Or you could see the Palestinian expelled en masse from Gaza and the West Bank in a massive ethnic cleansing campaign. Or you could see a one-state solution, whereby Israel grants Israeli citizenship to the Palestinians.

I’d rank the likelihood right now as 1) ethnic cleansing, 2) long-term Apartheid, and 3) a one-state solution.

I was reminded of LBJ’s resignation speech by Biden’s announcement on Sunday that he would not seek another term.

Much to the annoyance of my leftist friends, I once suggested that Biden would be the most consequential president since Lyndon Johnson. I’m reprinting my reasoning below. Those achievements, however, were domestic.

Like Johnson, Biden has provoked massive campus protests by going all in on a ruinous foreign misadventure. In Biden’s case, the great white whale has been the destruction of Hamas, and his albatross has been his “bear hug” of the extremist government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Biden has resupplied Israel with ammunition and weaponry in real time to allow Netanyahu and his far, far right cronies (the Israeli equivalents of Neo-Nazis) to destroy much of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and to kill over 38,000 Palestinians, the majority of them women and children. Biden’s State Department has avoided concluding that Israel has misused US weaponry to commit war crimes, making a mockery of the Leahy Act. Biden has attempted to create a US shield of impunity for Netanyahu, even calling a UNSC ceasefire resolution “nonbinding” (it was binding). The International Criminal Court found on January 26 that it is plausible that Israel is committing genocide and ordered a halt to such activities, but to no effect. Biden himself disputed the numbers of dead Palestinians at first, but later admitted that 30,000 had been killed, going on to say “it must not be 60,000.” He drew a red line around Rafah, but Netanyahu made a laughingstock out of him by simply ignoring US strictures and destroying Rafah the way he had previously destroyed Gaza City.

Biden’s extreme backing for Netanyahu’s genocide has left an indelible stain on his presidency and has harmed US diplomacy around the world.

The president has only a few months to make at least some amends for his catastrophic Gaza policy. He should restore funding to the UN Reliefs and Works Agency, which Israel falsely accused of being a Hamas front. Even Britain has restored funding, but Biden remains the odd man out.

Biden should cut off shipments to Israel of further munitions unless Netanyahu gets out of Gaza and lets the Palestine Authority move in to govern it.

Biden should massively sanction the Israeli enterprise of squatting on ever more Palestinian land in the West Bank.

As for his domestic legacy, I wrote in 2022:

Biden came into office under the cloud of the pandemic and Trump’s lackadaisical response to it, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. It is true that Biden had the advantage that the vaccines had been developed, in part with Trump’s investment in Moderna. (Pfizer marketed the German Biontech vaccine). But under Trump, few federal resources had been mobilized and one leak suggested that Jared Kushner deliberately hurt New York’s response to punish it for voting Democratic.

Biden mobilized the US military to provide vaccinators, because there were too few civilian ones, and coordinated with states and localities. In 6 months he got those adults vaccinated who were willing, and began the process whereby getting Covid for most of people was no longer life threatening. As for the die hard Trumpist old people who refuse to get vaccinated, they are harming themselves and those around them.

Biden’s pandemic intervention is estimated to have saved a million lives.

Biden put America back to work, getting the unemployment rate down to levels not seen since the Woodstock Music Festival and the craze for paisley.

So much production had temporarily cut back during the pandemic that when consumers wanted to buy again, there were bottlenecks that caused inflation. These supply problems are easing, though prices of staples remain too high. In some instances, Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine caused spikes that won’t be easy to overcome, both in energy prices and in wheat prices. Still, gasoline prices have fallen steadily for two months now.

Biden charged the Department of the Interior to jumpstart the US offshore wind industry, with a goal of 30 gigawatts by 2030, by leasing federal waters offshore to private companies. We will see some new, enormous wind farms come on line in as little as four years, some of the biggest in the world.

Biden glad-handed and wheedled to get the bipartisan $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed, which will among other things build out electric vehicle charging stations throughout the country and help schools buy electric buses, along with investments in bridges (10% of which seem to be on the verge of falling down) and other key infrastructure. It even has $65 billion in it to ease access for all Americans to the internet, which should increase productivity.

Biden got a new industrial policy with the $52 billion in the CHIPS Act for revving up a US-based semi-conductor industry, which is key to progress in fighting climate change, as well. He arranged funding for veterans suffering the after-effects of toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.

. . . He succeeded in encouraging Democrats in the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act . . . with $369 billion for the green energy transition. It will also make seniors’ medicines cheaper and help the 40% of the country stricken by long-term drought owing to the climate emergency adopt resiliency measures.

In the first two quarters of the previous year, 2023, that figure was only 44%. Moreover, the percentage of electricity coming from wind, water, solar and batteries increased even though total electricity output grew by 7%.

Turkey has now overtaken Morocco as having the cleanest grid in the Middle East. In Morocco, about 40% of electricity comes from renewables. Turkiye, moreover, has a much bigger economy and has much more in the way of industry. Turkiye is in the G20, the twenty states with the largest gross domestic product.

Turkiye’s grid is still very dirty, and it burns more coal than do Poland or Germany, other big coal users in Europe. What is remarkable is that so far this year Turkish companies have cut coal’s share of the grid by 5%. Likewise, Turkiye purchased much less fossil gas this year, which is expensive in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the move to renewables reflects popular discontent with high Turkish electricity costs.

TRT World Video: “Türkiye ranks 11th in renewable energy in the world”

Renewables are cheaper. Turkiye saw a substantial increase in hydro-electric power this year, and both wind and solar surged as well.

In mid-June, the share of solar in Turkiye’s electricity reached about 16%

Turkiye plans to add 3.5 gigawatts of solar annually for the foreseeable future.

Likewise, Turkiye now has 12 gigawatts of wind power, accounting last year for 11% of its electricity generation capacity. Ankara plans, however, to add 28 gigawatts of wind power by 2035.

Turkey’s elite appears to have decided that the country’s energy dependence on Russia, from which it received the bulk of its petroleum, fossil gas and coal, is too dangerous and expensive.

The world used 102.04 million barrels per day of petroleum as of May. That figure has to be brought down to zero by 2050 if the world is to avoid the climate going batshit crazy and posing a challenge to civilized life. It is therefore disappointing that demand grew 710,000 barrels a day in the second quarter of this year. We want to see it decline. But the increase was still much less than historical trends would have predicted.

Why the reduced rate of growth? The IEA largely fingered China, saying that its post-COVID recovery has run its course and its gdp growth is slowing. China is the world’s second largest economy, and it trucks around an enormous number of goods from factories to marketplaces and to ports for export. When it trucks fewer goods because of reduced demand, China requires less petroleum. Although its imports of oil rose in Q2, they rose at an anemic rate compared to the previous year. April and May likewise saw a slowing in Chinese petroleum imports.

But the erosion in Chinese petroleum demand is not only owing to its slowing economy. The IEA projects that fully 45% of the automobiles sold in China this year will be electric. Chinese economists are predicting that by next year, so many vehicles on the road will be electric that petroleum demand will start falling. Not just the rate of increase, as with this year. The number of barrels of oil brought in will be less than in 2024, and will be less yet every year thereafter. We are on the cusp of the end of the oil bubble that dominated the past century.

CNBC Int’l Video: “We’re seeing a clear slowdown in oil demand growth, says IEA”

Most petroleum is used to power vehicles. The decline of Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles equals the decline of oil demand.

Bloomberg NEF predicts that EV sales will triple in 2025 globally, with over 20 million units sold.

The EVs already on the road have reduced global petroleum demand by 1.5 million barrels a day. By 2025 these vehicles will displace 2.5 million barrels a day. It is not only in China that petroleum demand will begin declining. That trend will start next year in China, but by 2026, demand will fall globally.

China has gotten ahead of the United States in EV technology and is able to produce electric cars for half the price of the average US EV (the average such vehicle in the US costs $55,000).

China, according to AP, manufactured “62% of the 10.4 million battery-powered EVs that were produced worldwide last year.” The US only produced about a million, some 10%. Since the auto industry is a leading sector of advanced economies, China’s vast superiority here is a national security threat to the United States. Many US observers are petrified of what would happen to the US Big Three if China follows through with plans to open an EV manufacturing plant in Mexico, to take advantage of NAFTA. Although the US can block that move with tariffs, it would be better if US industrial policy put the Big Three on a better foundation to compete with the Chinese EVs.

The US backwardness in this sector is also a drag on our fight against carbon dioxide-driven global heating, which is baking much of the country and intensifying hurricanes that threaten the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. If Trump gets in and guts the US EV market, as he pledges, he will be dooming us to Third World status in the foreseeable future.

Gavin McGuire at Reuters reported that for the first time this winter, wind generated more power for Britain than all fossil fuels combined. It produced 39.4% of all electricity in the emerald isles, as opposed to 36.2% from fossil fuels.

In fact, the government says, “Renewable electricity generation reached a near record share of 50.9 percent of total generation in the first quarter of the year.” That’s right. A majority of British electricity is now produced by sustainable sources. In fact, if you count nuclear, the low-carbon energy sources provided about 61% of British electricity.

Some 19.5% of British electricity in Q1 was supplied by offshore wind, and 14.3% by onshore wind. Some 2.5% came from solar PV and 2.6% from hydro. Unfortunately, Britain counts “bioenergy” as a renewable, providing 12% of electricity; but sorry, friends, burning wood and biomass is not green. On the other hand, 11% of electricity is imported from France, and that is mainly from nuclear plants, which are relatively low carbon. So the 61% low-carbon statistic likely stands.

And it is a magnificent statistic at that, for a major industrial country to have its power be 61% low-carbon — something undreamt of even a decade ago. The below chart shows the welcome downturn in fossil fuels as a percentage of electricity generation:

H/t UK.gov .

The future clearly lies with the genuinely sustainable energy sources. The government says, “Solar PV accounted for 60 per cent of the new capacity and offshore wind a third.” Amazingly enough in cloudy Britain, new solar is growing faster than new wind. That statistic is now likely to change.

Coal use in Britain has fallen to almost nothing, and the government says that after October 1, the country will not use coal to generate electricity.. I noted how historic this achievement was, given Britain’s prominence in coal production and use: “ The world’s first coal-fired electric plant opened in London in 1882. It was the Edison Electric Light Station, at 57 Holborn Viaduct. It powered electric lights and wasn’t a commercial success. In the twentieth century until about 1965, almost all British electricity was fueled by coal, after which nuclear, hydro, and from the mid-1990s, natural gas, took large shares. Coal pollution in London grew so bad that in 1952 some 4,000 to 12,000 people are thought to have died in the Great Smog, when particulate matter in the air proved so heavy that it slashed visibility and fingers of it swirled into homes.”

One is grateful that Trump appears to have suffered only minor injuries and that his doctors say he is well. Political violence is always fatal to democracy, which is a big political argument. As soon as people get out their guns, it isn’t a democracy anymore, it is a war.

The political violence could not have come at a worse time. Although the Right is blaming the political left for the violence, saying that its meme that Trump has dictatorial tendencies is responsible, the fact is that he did try to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, and some of his acolytes, at least, brought guns and ammunition to Washington, D.C, for the purpose, including the Proud Boys. It seems clear that the lives of Mike Pence, Nancy Pelosi and others in the Capitol had been in danger that day, had security not whisked them to safety.

The mob called into being by Donald J. Trump chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” which was a call for an assassination. Insiders have reported that Trump expressed support for the sentiment.

As it was, a deranged follower of Trump came looking for Pelosi at her house in San Francisco and tried to kill her husband Paul with a hammer when he found she wasn’t there.

Trump appears to have thought that the attempt on Paul Pelosi’s life, which left him with a fractured cranium, was hilarious. In 2023 he told a rally, ““We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco. How’s her husband doing, by the way, anybody know?” He added that the wall around her house “didn’t do a very good job,” apparently a bizarre reference to her opposition to building a wall at the Mexico border.

The Trump crowd broke into uproarious laughter.

The Hill reported, “Donald Trump Jr. posted several photos and comments on Twitter and Instagram making light of the violent home invasion attack last week against Paul Pelosi, the husband of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).”

When President Biden awarded Nancy Pelosi the Presidential medal of freedom, anchor Rachel Campos-Duffy on the notoriously pro-Trump Fox Cable News, quipped that Pelosi “needs the hammer instead of the medal.”

This cavalier attitude toward political violence must not be emulated by Democrats. It should be remembered that the bloody May Day demonstrations by the Left in Weimar Germany in 1929 radically hurt their image with the German middle classes and paved the way for the rise of Hitler.

This is a time for extreme political maturity by members of both major parties. The Republic depends on it. Trump and his partisans will inevitably attempt to use the incident to drive further polarization and grievance-based politics. They should be denied ammunition for any such efforts.

Informed Comment wishes Mr. Trump a speedy recovery.

Biden probably would survive a lot of fact checks, but on the Israeli total war on Gaza, he can’t seem to be straight with us. No, the Israelis have not accepted the peace proposal Biden put forward in late May, even though Biden characterized it as an Israeli proposal. As I explained in mid-June, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was reported in the Israeli press as completely rejecting what Biden laid out. Netanyahu said, “There was no deal because we will not give up on completing the war objectives. The main disagreement with Hamas revolves around the commitment to end the fighting without completing the objectives.” Even as Netanyahu openly threw a spanner in the works, Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken kept saying that it was Hamas that had rejected the Biden proposal — even though Hamas kept saying it accepted it.

Hamas was, however, demanding an actual cease fire, not a pause in the fighting during which it would give up most of its leverage, after which the Israelis would continue their total war.

Last weekend, Hamas dropped the demand that the war would not start back up again after the negotiations. The US said last weekend that Netanyahu and Hamas have accepted a “framework agreement,” an outline for negotiations within which finer points still need to be worked out.

But there isn’t actually any evidence that Netanyahu has accepted the framework or that he is willing to make the compromises necessary to reach an agreement.

The peace deal involves allowing Palestinians to return to North Gaza, from which a million of them were exiled by the Israeli military. Yesterday, Jeremy Diamond at CNN reported a leak that last Sunday, Netanyahu had abruptly said that no armed men would be allowed to return to the north. I’m not sure how you would even verify whether the returnees had firearms, and given that the Israelis have destroyed the Gaza police, assassinating many of them on the inaccurate grounds that they are all Hamas, there is no law and order in the Strip and a family that had a gun would certainly want to bring it with them. Netanyahu is demanding an “enforcement mechanism” for disarming returnees.

The Israeli hostage families are in no doubt that Netanyahu is attempting to wreck the negotiations, as he has consistently done all along.

Not only that, but Netanyahu has started demanding a permanent Israeli occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor and the Rafah checkpoint crossing on the Egyptian side of the border. The Egyptians have gone ballistic, and Cairo is key to getting the pause in fighting.

For Biden to tell Detroit that the Israelis have “accepted” his “detailed plan” is just dishonest, an attempt to put lipstick on a pig, and it is more redolent of Trumpian rhetoric than of the straight shooting Biden says he aims for.

This problem was also visible in Biden’s remarks about the war at his news conference Thursday after the NATO summit.

Mr. Biden took a question from Nation Public Radio correspondent Asma Khalid:

Thank you, Mr. President. Asma Khalid with NPR. I have two questions. Earlier, you spoke about the ceasefire plan between Israel and Hamas. We’re now looking at ten months of war, and I’m curious if there’s anything that you feel personally you wish you would have done differently over the course of the war. Secondly, if I may, I wanted to ask you about your presidential campaign. I remember covering your campaign in 2020, and there was a moment when you referred to yourself as a “quote” Bridge candidacy, a transition to a younger generation of leaders. I want to understand what changed.

Biden: Two things. Let’s go back to when you talked about whether I would have changed anything that’s happening with Israel and the Palestinians and the Palestinian movement. The answer is, as you recall, from the very beginning, I immediately went to Israel, but I also got in immediate contact with Lisi in Egypt. I met with the king of Jordan. I met with most of the Arab leaders to try to get a consensus on what had to be done to get more aid and food and medicine into the Gaza Strip. We pushed it really hard, and Israel occasionally was less than cooperative. The Israeli War Cabinet is one of the most conservative war cabinets in the history of Israel.

Israel has not allowed sufficient aid into Gaza, creating vast food insecurity and a critical failure of health and medical facilities, leading to large numbers of unreported deaths from those causes, which a communication in the Lancet recently suggested could mount to 189,000 deaths or more. Biden has continued to supply Israel on a daily basis with all the munitions necessary to this war on Gaza civilians and he is deeply implicated in it. He speaks as though he has no leverage on the uncooperative Israeli cabinet. At one point Minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich personally sequestered trucks full of flour destined for Gaza.

Biden: There’s no ultimate answer other than a two-state solution here. The plan I put together was for a process for a two-state solution. We got the Arab nations, particularly from Egypt to Saudi Arabia, to be in a position where they would cooperate in the transition so that they could keep the peace in Gaza without Israeli forces staying there. The question has been from the beginning: what’s the day after in Gaza? The day after in Gaza has to be no occupation by Israel in the Gaza Strip and the ability for us to get in and out as needed.

Yes and there is no ultimate answer to the problem of the helplessness of horses but the unicorn, but it is a fantasy, too. Netanyahu and his cabinet completely and openly reject a two-state solution and Smotrich has now de facto annexed the Palestinian West Bank to Israel. I’m sorry, but it is just dishonest to keep holding out this prospect as realistic, especially since Biden has shown himself to be completely unwilling to pressure Israel in any meaningful way. Biden’s factotum for the Middle East, Brett McGurk (a George W. Bush leftover) used the two state solution as a carrot for Saudi Arabia to recognize Israel. But since Netanyahu plainly would do no such thing. that entire set of negotiations, initiated by corrupt Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, crashed and burned. So Biden may as well have left this part out of his answer, since it went nowhere.

Biden: I’ve been disappointed that some of the things I put forward have not succeeded as well, like the port we attached from Cyprus. I was hopeful that it would be more successful, but that’s why I went to Israel immediately after the massacres at the hands of Hamas. One thing I said to the Israelis, and I met with the war cabinet and with BB, was don’t make the same mistakes America made after Bin Laden. There’s no need to occupy anywhere. Go after the people who did the job. You may recall, I get criticized for it, but I was totally opposed to the occupation and trying to unite Afghanistan. Once we got Bin Laden, we should have moved on . . .

Again, he is pretending that he hasn’t supplied the Israeli military with the tank shells and 500-pound bombs, and until very recently 2000-pound bombs they have used to destroy Gaza.

Biden: Remember what happened when you had the [Iranian] attack on Israel with rockets and ballistic missiles. I was able to unite the Arab nations as well as Europe, and nothing happened, nothing got hurt. It sent an incredible lesson to what was going on in the Middle East.

This is true, but irrelevant to the ongoing total war on Gaza’s civilians.

Biden: There’s a lot of things in retrospect I wish I had been able to convince the Israelis to do, but the bottom line is we have a chance now. It’s time to end this war. It doesn’t mean walking away from going after Sinwar and Hamas. If you notice, there is a growing dissatisfaction on the West Bank from Palestinians about Hamas. Hamas is not popular now.

Hamas is not in the West Bank. He meant Gaza. He could have convinced the Israelis of anything he wanted to. He could have cut their military supplies off. He didn’t. Why does he think he is powerless in this regard? Why does he want us to think so?

Having presided over a genocide and not lifted a finger to stop it, Biden has now taken to lying to us and saying that “Israel” has “accepted” his “detailed” proposal.

Meanwhile, dozens of civilians in Gaza are killed daily, and on Thursday I reported on the Great Soccer Massacre. Biden’s peace process subsists in the same fantasy-land as Trump’s cancerous windmills.

When questions arose about Biden’s fitness for office, it seemed to me that his Gaza policy was the most worrisome sign that something is not right. Biden had slapped down Netanyahu back in the old days, but won’t do it anymore, and doesn’t seem to realize that he even can do so any more. In his answer to Asma Khalid he depicted himself as a helpless giant, giving out wise advice that his client states for some reason willfully ignored, and portraying himself as unable to stop the most destructive military campaign in the 21st century. The Lilliputians tying down Lemuel Gulliver flashed through my mind. It just doesn’t sound to me as though he is any longer in control, and it seems clear that whoever actually is in control is malign and disserving the interests of the United States of America.

Forbes Breaking News: “Biden Asked If He Wishes He Had Done Things Differently Handling Israel’s War With Hamas”