XPost: or.politics, alt.computer.workshop, alt.society.liberalism   
   XPost: alt.politics.democrats.d   
   From: void@invalid.noy   
      
   President Biden has the stench of LBJ about him. For those of us old   
   enough to remember, that stink is recalled with sadness and   
   foreboding.   
      
   After President Kennedy was assassinated, President Johnson proved   
   himself adept at passing civil rights and other Great Society domestic   
   legislation that JFK couldn’t. It would have been enough to make him   
   one of our great presidents. But he had a fatal flaw when it came to   
   Vietnam.   
      
   Johnson saw that war in geopolitical and personal terms. A struggle by   
   Vietnamese nationalists against French and then American oppressors   
   and their South Vietnamese puppets was, to Johnson, an American fight   
   against Communism, the Soviet Union, and China. Once he made that   
   fight his own, he couldn’t “back down” despite the war’s course and   
   the press and TV coverage which, over time, revealed to the American   
   people his mistaken framing and the horrific punishment he, and they,   
   were inflicting on their Vietnamese victims, who declined to submit   
   despite millions dead, more millions maimed, and much of the country   
   destroyed by bombs and napalm.   
      
   Personal defeat was anathema to LBJ, so he persevered in a war that   
   much of the country came to believe was immoral and wrong as the   
   anti-war movement, led by students and faculty on campus, rapidly   
   expanded and tore apart the country, creating divisions that remain   
   today. When the movement took its protest to the Chicago streets   
   outside the Democratic convention, the police ran amok in full view of   
   the TV cameras, which played a role in Richard Nixon’s narrow defeat   
   of Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 watershed election, which started the   
   country down the more Republican, more conservative path that has   
   largely characterized our politics to this day.   
      
   President Biden suffers the same flaws. He has been fine all his   
   political life with the Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Israel was   
   running an apartheid state all that time, but there was never so much   
   as a peep of criticism of it from him. AIPAC’s money was political   
   mother’s milk for him. He has been the USA’s foremost Christian   
   Zionist for a long time. As President, he preferred the Palestinians   
   docile and quiescent, so that his geopolitical vision of an   
   Israeli-Saudi Arabian pact, leading a Western-dominated Middle East   
   against Iran, could be born. When Hamas struck on October 7, Biden   
   couldn’t see it as part of a resistance struggle against 75 years of   
   oppression. He saw it as a challenge to him and his hopes for   
   stabilizing the region to permit him to focus on his hot war against   
   Russia and his cold war against China. Palestinians be damned.   
      
   So he unleashed Israel, knowing it was going to lay waste to Gaza to   
   “restore deterrence.”  Despite his issues with Benjamin Netanyahu, he   
   gave him his full support, never expecting that there might be an   
   uproar in America over an Israeli genocide of Palestinians. His   
   recent, tone-deaf visit to Michael Douglas and Katherine Zeta Jones to   
   raise a few million from well-heeled Democratic contributors   
   exemplifies the bubble in which Biden lives. He continues to support   
   the genocide with tens of billions because he does not really believe   
   that he can lose the country over it, and because he has no empathy   
   for the Palestinian victims of Zionism.   
      
   It is redolent of the same stench of arrogance that brought down LBJ.   
   Today’s suppression of the rapidly expanding anti-genocide movement on   
   campuses mirrors what we endured back then, and strongly suggests that   
   we are looking at a repetition of 1968 at the upcoming Democratic   
   Convention in Chicago. His prospect of a narrow victory over Trump in   
   Michigan and the other few critical battleground states is already   
   endangered, and the anticipated reaction to the violence the   
   authorities will visit on American young people there will further   
   alienate more voters from Biden. Yet his support of the genocide   
   continues.   
      
   He’s content to gamble that he will prevail in the end because his   
   opponent is Trump. The protesters be damned. He may be right. But   
   Biden is gambling with American democracy, all to permit Israeli Jews,   
   at least two-thirds of whom support the genocide and oppose letting   
   any humanitarian aid enter Gaza, to continue to kill Palestinian women   
   and children by the thousands, and to use their own government’s   
   failure to anticipate the Hamas attack to ratchet up their ethnic   
   cleansing of the Palestinian people from the land between the River   
   and the Sea.   
      
   As a civil rights lawyer who has investigated and prosecuted cases in   
   the International Criminal Tribunals, I can well understand the   
   dilemma faced by those Democratic voters in Michigan, Georgia,   
   Pennsylvania, and Arizona who hesitate to vote for a genocider, even   
   one running against an insurrectionist.   
      
   Jill Biden reportedly told her husband some time ago to “Stop it, Joe,   
   stop it now.” Good advice that he continues to ignore — at his peril,   
   and ours.   
      
   https://mondoweiss.net/2024/05/genocide-joe-is-beginning-to-stin   
   -like-lyndon-b-johnson/   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)