Blame Biden; no thinking required
John Brummett
“Absolutely. I think this is a great opportunity for our candidates.”
—Ronna McDaniel, national Republican chairwoman, when asked Saturday on Fox News to elaborate on blaming Joe Biden for the Hamas atrocities in Israel.
By now Ronna McDaniel may have blamed a slip of the tongue in the shock of the moment for the statement above. But she probably has not.
Most likely she committed no slip of the tongue, but revealed absence of brain, heart, decency and any sense of unified American attitude.
It once was said of the United States that its political differences ended at water’s edge when foreign policy crises occurred.
Now they accelerate. There is no coalesced American world interest anymore. Instead, there are Republicans who shrug at Vladimir Putin’s imperious criminality because he seems friendly to Donald Trump.
Then they shrug at Ukraine’s heroic stand against Putin because they think Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy seems Democrat-ish.
They rise in supposed moral outrage to defend Israel because Benjamin Netanyahu seems Trump-y.
They base their worldviews not on national interest or morality but on a Trump-o-meter that relishes tough-man brutishness and a political bellicosity over democratic interest and human rightness.
Their leadership rushes to blame Joe Biden for human atrocities committed by Hamas militants. Their substantial right wing opposes American aid to Ukraine.
So, amid that emerging Republican worldview in Trump’s image, let us put in a needed kind word for the balance of the United States, still great and righteous in the broad sense.
Even now, we do not invade or terrorize. We point fingers at ourselves. Then we spend resources to help the victims against the bad guys.
The United States, other Mideast policy differences aside, will help defend Israel with money, arms and an unwavering resolve in its longstanding commitment to the security and free democracy that Israel deserves, pursues and now must again fight for.
No one in the U.S. invaded Ukraine in the most blatantly imperious and criminal national act in Europe since Hitler. Putin did that.
The U.S. has defended and underwritten Ukraine’s heroic resistance to the Russian madman’s criminality. Though Republican opposition rises in Congress, the United States has led the free and progressive world’s solidarity for Ukraine—so far.
So America confronted a new domestic and foreign landscape over the weekend: Its House of Representatives was inoperative, rendered that way by Republican dysfunction that created a vacancy in its speakership. The House’s slim Republican majority was settled on a spending bill-provision to stop additional aid to Ukraine, thus, to concede to Putin, otherwise a loser. Hamas had come across from Gaza to kill and abuse and take as hostages unsuspecting Israeli citizens at a music concert and elsewhere. And Republican presidential candidates were saying that Joe Biden, the American president—their president until they can convince people that they can do better—was the guilty party. They went there first—to blaming Biden.
And the national Republican chairwoman was in Fox’s cocoon saying whoopee.
Foreign-policy differences of opinion are welcomed and valuable in America. Whether the Biden administration should have freed frozen funds for Iran in a hostage-release transaction is an issue for vigorous debate—but only on its specific individual terms.
To become the world’s fastest-flying vultures to zoom over dead citizens of Israel to say it’s Joe
Biden’s fault they are dead because Iran used that money to pay for what Hamas was doing, and to say it wholly without the remotest substantiation other than that money is fungible … that reveals an essential prioritizing of cheap political points over condemnation of the real criminals.
One more important point: Many Republicans will respond by saying Democrats and left-of-center sympathizers would be doing the same thing—blaming Trump—if the situation were reversed.
To that I say three things: I do not think I would, at least for a few days of contemplation. I do not think a Democrat would be tin-eared enough to put it as McDaniel put it. And I am not crazy about the current state of partisanship in America either way.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett feed on X, formerly Twitter.