Greetings on the second Victory in Europe Day. The final capitulation came into effect May 8, 1945 at 23:01 Central European Time — which was already May 9 in the USSR. Hence Russia and a number of other countries (notably Israel, where the large immigration wave from the former USSR brought in many WW II veterans) mark the day on May 9.
(a) In what is Abu Hunter Biden’s most overt stab in Israel’s back thus far, he has basically told Israel: you can have your Rafiach operation or you can have US weapons, but not both.
Alan Dershowitz minces no words.
But is it really even Biden anymore? It’s painfully clear at this point that Biden has become, as one of my online friends calls him, “President John Gill” reduced to mindlessly reading off his teleprompter — including instructions such as “Four more years. Pause” and “Father Insert Surname” — for which Vodkapundit has compiled comedic precedents such as the feather-brained himbo anchorman Ron Burgundy and the fraternity pledges from Animal House.
So who is pulling the strings? As we covered here previously at length, (sympathetic) 0bama biographer David Garrow has basically said flat-out that the Biden (p)residency is 0bama’s third term with Biden as a front. [For foreign readers: the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1951 during Harry S Truman’s second term, limits the US presidency to two terms.] Back in 2007, when we were living in Chicagoland, it took me about one week to figure out that the Crook County Machine Messiah, a.k.a. Fresh Prez of Bill Ayers, was bad news all around.
For all the highly publicized expensive mansions in toney spots that the 0bamas own, Garrow points out that he still spends most of his time in DC (breaking a long-standing tradition that past presidents leave town) and that the Biden [mis]administration is almost entirely made up of 0bama retreads.
As much as I have derided “Abu Hunter” on these pages (deservedly so, I believe), I am increasingly coming around to the view he has lost whatever vestigial control over events he still had and we are now in full-on 0bamunism.
(b) Follow the money paying for astroturfed far-left and anti-Israel protests: The Tablet’s Park MacDougald does an investigative deep dive: The People Setting America On Fire. It’s long but eye-opening. Just one taste:
But this is the first time that these donor-funded radical networks have gone to war with a Democratic president. Shideler speculates that whatever the ultimate goal of funding the anti-Israel protests, it is to be found closer to home than Gaza. “It has more to do with domestic politics, and we can see this by the language targeting Joe Biden explicitly, even though he and his administration have already handled the conflict in an exceedingly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian way.” One reason to target Biden is that it provides his administration cover to ignore a weakened but still influential block of pro-Israel Democrats—allowing the president to claim, in essence, that his hands are tied. But it may also reflect a power struggle within the party, between what was formerly an insurgent progressive fringe—now backed by a murderer’s row of billionaire donors and energized by young cadres rising through the professional-managerial cursus honorum—and what remains of the teetering old Clintonian establishment. Or, rather, it is a display of force by the faction that has already won, complete with a message for the losers: This is who we are now. Get in line or be destroyed.
Read the whole thing. Let me also highlight a useful reminder:
[…] When police cleared out encampments at the University of Texas-Austin and Columbia and the City University of New York last week, roughly half of those arrested—45 of the 79 in Texas, 134 of the 282 in New York—had no connection with the university at which they were arrested. Some, like the 40-year-old anarchist heir James Carlson, arrested at Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, had protest related rap sheets going back two decades. […]
ADDENDUM: saying the quiet part out loud: ‘And we as Arabs, Palestinian, Muslim and anti-Jewish students, are we not worth protecting?’
ADDENDUM 2: Masgramondou wonders if silly season is coming early this year…
Spin, strangeness, and charm 