F**king Mondays: The Knife Fight In Iowa, Israel's Deal, And The Co-opting Of Martin Luther King Jr.
by Ben Cohen
Welcome to the latest installment of “F**king Mondays”! In the round up today:
Can Republicans quit Trump?
The primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire have the GOP in a real state of panic. Trump is well ahead in the polls — particularly in Iowa — but there is a slim chance Nikki Haley can put on a good showing. If she comes in second in Iowa and wins in New Hampshire (unlikely, but not impossible), Haley gives the party hope they can finally move on from the deranged mad man who keeps losing elections and getting himself indicted. And make no mistake: Republicans really do want Trump to lose — they just can’t say it publicly.
Contrary to media hysteria, Trump is not likely to win in 2024, and Republican party figures know this. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, lost the House in 2018, then lost the White House, the House, and the Senate in 2020. Trump backed candidates across the country have consistently fared terribly, putting the party in an impossible situation.
As National Review editor Rich Lowry warned his fellow conservatives last year: “Republicans telling themselves otherwise are engaged in self-delusion.”
“Incumbency bestows important advantages,” wrote Lowry. “The sitting president is highly visible, is the only civilian in the country who gets saluted by Marines walking out his door every day, has established a certain threshold ability to do the job, and can wield awesome powers to help his cause and that of his party.”
This is why GOP donors are funneling as much money as they can into Nikki Haley’s campaign. With a hapless Ron DeSantis dead in the water, Haley is their only hope of salvaging the party and mounting a serious campaign against President Biden.
Stranger things have happened in presidential elections, but the odds are stacked against Haley for a reason: the GOP is the party of Trump, and no amount of money is going to change it.
Israel has to make a deal
The appalling death toll in Gaza and Israel’s inability to get the 136 remaining hostages home is pushing the conflict in the Middle East to breaking point. Israel is rapidly losing international support for its war on Gaza, and the families of the hostages are demanding the government makes a deal before it is too late.
The scale of destruction and suffering in Gaza is now beyond comprehension. The enclave has been demolished, and some calculations put the death toll at over 24,000 people — many of whom were children. While Israel had a moral right to hit back at Hamas for its barbaric act of genocide last October, it cannot have unlimited freedom to destroy all of Gaza in the name of erasing Hamas. The costs are simply too high — both for the Palestinians and the future of Israel itself.
Hamas is ultimately responsible for this horrific escalation in violence, but it does little to alter the perception of a one sided blood bath in Israel’s favor. The Israeli government is going to have come to terms with this political reality, and the sooner they make a deal, the better. As former Israeli hostage negotiator Gershon Baskin writes, the deal is going to be a hard one for Israel to swallow:
After the horrific carnage and destruction that we have seen in Israel and in Gaza, the “all for all” deal between Israel and Hamas that Hamas presented at the beginning of the war now has additional demands. Hamas now also demands an end to the war and an Israeli withdrawal to the international border. Without this package, there is no deal. From my 17 years experience of negotiating with Hamas, and from what I have heard from officials in Qatar, Egypt and Hamas – that is the deal. Only now, of the 136 hostages on Israel’s list, it is believed that at least 20 of them are not alive (including Oron Shaul and Hadar Goldin killed in 2014). We don’t know how many of them will survive until they are released. Every day that they are in captivity is a risk to their lives.
The “all for all” deal is one where Israel hands over all Palestinian prisoners in Israel for all of the hostages. For Baskin, this is the only way given the enormous premium Israelis put on rescuing captured citizens. Baskin argues that that “the most important priority for Israel in this war is to bring the hostages home. It is Israel’s moral responsibility to do so. The second priority of ensuring that Hamas can never rule Gaza or possess the military capacity to threaten Israel can wait. The hostages cannot wait.”
Israel cannot co-exist with Hamas in the long term, but how that gets resolved is for another day. Right now the hostages need to come home and the killing needs to stop.
Co-opting Dr. King
It has long been a tradition in America for Republicans to use Martin Luther King Jr. Day to pretend racism in America has vanished. They pay homage to Dr. King, give a speech on why he said we shouldn’t see color, then go about making life harder for minorities.
Conversely, the identity politics left has been playing a similar game, ignoring Dr. King’s actual words and claiming he believed in a philosophy he would have found abhorrent. This appears to be largely ignored in left wing circles as activist voices drown out everyone else. As Coleman Hughes points out: “It is hard to imagine the “anti-racist” thought leaders of today uttering even one of the following Dr. King quotes below, let alone all of them.”
The quote from Dr. King Hughes refers to is this:
Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout “White Power!”––when nobody will shout “Black Power!”––but everybody will talk about God’s power and human power.
In an effort to achieve freedom in America, Asia, and Africa we must not try to leap from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage, thus subverting justice. We must seek democracy and not the substitution of one tyranny for another. Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man. We must not become victimized with a philosophy of black supremacy.
Black supremacy is as dangerous as white supremacy, and God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men. God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race.
The problem is not a purely racial one, with Negroes set against whites. In the end, it is not a struggle between people at all, but between justice and injustice. Nonviolent resistance is not aimed against oppressors but against oppression. Under its banner consciences, not racial groups, are enlisted.
I understand the argument that “not seeing race” isn’t always helpful, or that trying to move beyond skin color isn’t realistic, but that is exactly what Martin Luther King was arguing for. Left wing activists are perfectly entitled to their own philosophy on racism/identity etc, but they can’t claim it has anything to do with Dr. King.
The kids are alright
My five year old son asked me last night about what he referred to as “King Day.” I did my best to explain why Martin Luther King was such an important figure, and why he is celebrated every year. He listened attentively as I told him about segregation and the appalling treatment of black Americans, but he genuinely struggled to understand it. The more I explained racism, the more confused he became. He simply could not fathom why people would divide themselves by skin color, or why black people weren’t allowed to go to certain places under segregation.
“What color am I?” he asked after a while. I told him he would probably be considered white. “But I’m not white, I’m peach colored,” he said, pointing to his skin. He had a point.
“Why did people hate black people?” he asked. I had to confess I didn’t know. “So they were crazy?” he continued.
Yes, I said. They were crazy.
See you next week!
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I had a similar conversation with my son, and it ended a very similar way.
To quote the modern classic Forrest Gump, "Mama said that the Forrest part was to remind me that sometimes we all do things that, well, just don't make no sense."
Absolutely.