For a very long time in American politics, there was a truism about running for president of the United States: You were supposed to run to the extremes during the primaries, and then you were supposed to run toward the center in the general.
That made perfect sense. The idea was to consolidate a base in the primaries to overcome your primary rivals, and then run toward the center because that’s where the independents were.
And the truth is that in every American election, the winner was the person who won the independents. The sole exception came in 2012, when Mitt Romney beat Barack Obama with independents, but it didn’t matter because enough of Obama’s base voted that he was able to win.
In every other race, independents have decided the election.
Joe Biden is deciding to buck conventional wisdom. He is not running to the center. Instead, he’s believing all of the political idiots around him that he has to run it to the far-Left. He’s believing the Bernie Sanders crowd. He’s believing the Pod Save America crowd. He’s believing the most extreme members of his own base.
There is very little data to support the notion he is going to win if he runs to the extreme parts of his base — and that is why he is currently running far below expectations.
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The latest NPR Marist poll shows Biden two points ahead of former President Trump nationally. The same poll in October of 2020 found Biden was winning among independent voters by 21 points, 57 to 36.
The current Marist poll shows Trump beating Biden with independent voters by seven points, 52 to 45. That is a net-28 point swing toward Trump among independent voters.
There is a reason for that: Biden has decided he is not going to swivel to the center. Instead, he is going to run directly to his Left. He has cheerleaders on the Left who are promoting this narrative, even though the narrative isn’t particularly true.
The real reason Biden is losing is because most Americans perceive the economy to be poor. Most Americans perceive the president to be too old. They perceive Biden to be disconnected. And ultimately, they believe Biden doesn’t have their concerns at heart.
Meanwhile, all of Obama’s old buddies are suggesting Biden should cut off aid to Israel, that doing so will win him votes. This is why Karine Jean-Pierre is suggesting Israel should not go into Rafah, the last bastion of Hamas.
And because he is afraid, Biden is listening to all of this.
Now, the Left is using the horrifying and tragic incident in which seven aid workers from the World Central Kitchen were killed in what is best described as a friendly-fire incident. Apparently, the Israeli Air Force thought there was a terrorist riding on top of the convoy. They’ve already apologized. They’ve already acknowledged they were wrong.
Friendly-fire incidents in war are extremely common. This is something Americans really don’t have a lot of experience with because if you don’t watch war closely and have members of the military in your family, it’s almost impossible to think about the horror of being killed by your own side.
But the reality is that this happens a lot. It’s always tragic; it’s always terrible, and it happens a lot, particularly in areas that are highly populated and in which it is very difficult to tell one side from another.
During World War II, perhaps as many as 56,000 American troops were killed by friendly fire, as reported by the RAND Institute. During the Iraq war, somewhere around 1% of American troops killed in Iraq were killed by friendly fire.
Right now, because of the very close quarter combat situations in Gaza, at least 17% of all Israelis who are being killed in the Gaza Strip have been killed by friendly fire.
This is not rare in the annals of American war.
In 2003, according to PBS, a BBC reporter traveling in a convoy of 8 to 10 cars said it came under attack as it approached an area that was recently captured from Iraqi forces. The reporter said, “I counted 10 or 12 dead bodies around us. There are Americans dead. It was an American plane. It dropped a bomb right beside us. I saw it land about 10 to 12 feet away.”
Apparently, the attack killed at least 18 Kurdish fighters and injured another 45. Pat Tillman, who left the NFL to join the Army after September 11, was killed in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan in 2004.
The U.S. military mistakenly attacked an actual medical hospital, killing 22 people in Afghanistan. During the attempt to go after ISIS in Syria, the United States bombed hospitals in Raqqa, according to the Physicians for Human Rights. Reuters reported friendly fire from the U.S.-led coalition fighting Daesh (ISIS) killed 10 members of an Iraqi security force and a local official in an airstrike west of Baghdad.
The worst lie you can tell about allied forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Israeli forces in Gaza is the lie that they are actively attempting to target people they are working with.
The World Central Kitchen has been working with the Israeli government to get aid into the Gaza Strip. That is why they are there. They’ve been doing it for six months.
What happened was horrifying, but there is zero evidence or logic to support the idea that Israel would purposefully strike a convoy of aid vehicles for literally no reason.
The attempt to make a moral equivalence between Israel hitting an aid convoy in a case of mistaken identity and Hamas holding hostages and killing civilians on purpose, is disgusting.
You want the humanitarian crisis in Gaza to end? Hamas could surrender right now. But not only is Hamas not surrendering, they are also not even negotiating anymore because they believe they have the world on their side, as the world is so eager to declare a moral equivalence between an actual terrorist group and an actual army.
What Hamas wants more than anything right now is world pressure on Israel to stop before Israel can finish off Hamas in Rafah. They believe they have world opinion on their side now. Israel has offered a six-week ceasefire, and Hamas walked away from the table.
Why? Because they don’t care how many civilians have died. They want more civilians to die. They’re interested in more starvation. Hamas wants more people dead, as more people dead means more pressure on Israel. Hamas is in the advantageous PR position of being able to hold all of Gaza hostage by refusing to surrender and then suggesting that if Israel doesn’t allow them to survive and continue to threaten Israel, then it’s Israel’s fault.
Hamas knows they’ve got Israel in a PR bind because of a foolish media and a foolish West who have decided that after a terrorist group starts a war with a much larger power, that it is the job of the larger power to be absolutely anodyne in its response.
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No matter how much aid Israel lets in, Israel will still be blamed for starvation, despite the fact they’re allowing hundreds of trucks into an active war zone. I’ve never even seen anything like this militarily. This would be the equivalent of the United States attempting to facilitate aid into Iraq, into Baghdad, in the middle of a war with the actual Saddam Hussein Iraqi army. It would be comparable to the United States in the middle of a battle with the Taliban in 2000 trying to get aid into Kabul while the Taliban was still in control of Kabul.
The prevailing foreign policy idea on nearly all sides at this point is that if war is imperfect, war must end.
If that is the way Americans or Westerners are going to think about war, we will never win another war. It’s just that simple because all the incentive structures are then on the side of the people who are willing to fight a dirty war. The dirtier and uglier the war, the more we don’t want to be involved in the war.
But we’re not even involved in the war as Americans. Nobody wants American troops on the ground. I don’t even want America building a humanitarian aid bridge in the Mediterranean. We shouldn’t have American troops anywhere near this area. It’s absurd that Biden is putting troops in that particular area while simultaneously doing the dirty work of the Iranians.
He is funding both sides of this war. It’s absolutely insane. You wonder why people disapprove of Biden’s position? He doesn’t have one. He’s all over the damn place. And the end result is that America’s enemies grow stronger.
All the time, Biden is listening to those people who tell him he’ll win if he goes harder toward the Left.