Biden's Rock and a Hard Place

Well, that didn't take long. Caving (at least in my opinion) to the yapping ankle-biters harrying his left flank, Joe Biden called on Israel to stop its retaliatory action against Hamas in Gaza. Aka, a "cease fire," rephrased as a "humanitarian pause."

This has been the screeching demand from the likes of four Hamas-loving Congresswomen, the self-styled Squad, along with a handful of other socialists in Congress a whole lot of antisemitic Ivy League students and professors, and too many who admire and emulate them, from the moment Israel fired its first response to the 10/7 massacre.

Including my rep, Jamaal Bowman, who dropped this equivocating and outright deceitful pile of excrement into my mailbox the other day.

Congressman, where are your demands that Hamas release the hostages in exchange for a cease-fire? Where is your acknowledgment that Hamas has violated the Geneva Convention with its “human shield” practices, that any “human shield” qualifies as a hostage of Hamas, or that striking military positions embedded in civilian structures is permissible under the Geneva Convention? Where do you acknowledge that Hamas has no interest in a cease-fire, other than as a means of rearming and repositioning in order to repeat its atrocities? How about the utter lack of interest in a two-state solution on the part of the Palestinians and their leadership?

I know, I’m wasting my breath.

Back to Joe Biden, who less than four weeks ago said,

So, in this moment, we must be crystal clear: We stand with Israel. We stand with Israel. And we will make sure Israel has what it needs to take care of its citizens, defend itself, and respond to this attack.

and,

I just got off the phone with — the third call with Prime Minister Netanyahu. And I told him if the United States experienced what Israel is experiencing, our response would be swift, decisive, and overwhelming.

Joe quickly fulfilled my October 13 prediction:

soon there will be growing noise calling for Israel to cease its responses and to return to the previous status quo.

For that is exactly what a "pause" would be - a return to the conditions of 10/6 and before. With Hamas still standing as the government of Gaza, with it continuing to hoard food, fuel, and other supplies (depriving Gazans of the necessities of life), and it planning its next wave of brutality.

Hamas has told us, in the plainest words possible, that it would attempt to repeat the 10/7 atrocities - mass murder, rape, and infanticide in the most barbaric ways they can conceive.

That savagery has not only gone uncriticized or been justified by far, far too many of our Best-and-Brightest, it has actually outed a horrifying number of our fellow citizens as overt Jew-haters who actually embrace the inhumanity as a just response to... a nation and a people wanting to actually exist??

Anyone with a shred of morality or decency should recoil from these people, and indeed many have.

So, what gives? Why has Biden backed off his earlier "swift, decisive, and overwhelming" declaration?

As always, politics is first and foremost about elections, and we are only a year from Election Day, 2024.

One might think that the average American's revulsion at Hamas's horrors would cement Biden's position, especially with the parallels to 9/11. Imagine that 50,000 Americans were killed by Islamic terrorists on 9/11 instead of 2977. That's the proportional magnitude of Israel's loss.

Unfortunately for Joe, his party's core constituency has shifted in the past couple decades. The Democratic Party used to rely on the loyalty of working class voters to put its members in office. That group has been relegated to “crumbs” status by the Left's growing influence on the Party. The Left prioritized cultural progressivism, and its relative loudness (see: Twitter and other social media) and dominance in academia and the legacy media prompted the Party to fixate on identity politics and other "woke" matters.

And, vote-buying. It explains the Green obsession and giveaways, it explains the extraordinary obsession with transgender politics, it explains the tuition forgiveness obsession, and much, much more.

The Lunchbucket Joes were, in turn, catered to by the populist swing of the Republican Party, as embodied by Donald Trump. The Biden administration still wants their votes, and has been putting its thumb on the pro-union scale, but when they intersect with the woke-Left, it's clear which group gets priority.

The Dems' core constituency, the one that it courts and answers to, is now a combination of elite academia, blue-city millennials/Gen-Z, Beltway buccaneers, young techies, and the LGBTQIA2SEIEIO-fixated. This amalgam is where we find the anti-Israel, anti-Jew, pro-Hamas virulence, and it's the most likely explanation for why Biden is going squish on Israel.

One problem is - that group isn't very large, numerically. That it tends to be concentrated in places that don't matter i.e. the deep-blue states that don't decide elections makes it worse.

Another is that there are a lot of very wealthy Jewish or Israel-favoring people out there who traditionally donate to and vote for the Democrats. Alienating them by wavering in support for Israel is perilous.

So, what's JoeB to do?

Past performance may not be a guarantee of future results, but in politics, it falls into "leopards don't change their spots" territory. Somewhere, strategists are guessing at who is less likely to withhold or change a vote if betrayed, and my guess is that the Dems will continue to cater to their "woke" constituency and presume their legacy voter blocs will continue reflexively pulling those "D" levers, no matter that 'their' party has betrayed them.

Joe and his party have a dilemma, and one of their own making. Their loudest constituency, the core they’ve built upon, has been at odds with the rest of the country in many policy areas, but now we have a manner too overt to ignore. Joe must choose between appeasing them by pulling back on support for Israel and angering them by standing on the side of civilization and against barbarism and genocide.

If the Party's tack leftward (where being pro-Palestinian and anti-Jew is now a requirement for inclusion) costs them the election, I won't be shedding any tears.