Four more years!

Q: Do you condemn the antisemitic protests on college campuses?

THE PRESIDENT: I condemn the antisemitic protests. That’s why I’ve set up a program to deal with that. I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians and their — how they’re being —

Q: Should the Columbia University President resign?

THE PRESIDENT: I didn’t know that. I’ll — I’ll have to find out more about it.

Sounds like a plan!

A coalition of faculty and staff at Columbia ... called for faculty to boycott commencement activities unless the school meets a number of demands ... includ[ing] removing city police from campus, reinstating student groups that have lost official recognition because of prior protest activity, divesting itself from companies tied to weapons manufacturing[,] and offering amnesty for students and faculty disciplined for their recent protest actions.

Better late than never, I suppose

He may look like a 9th-grader, but Mike Johnson proved yesterday that he's one of the few adults in the US Congress. (Think of Jamaal Bowman, D-NY, who not only pulled a fire alarm to delay a vote but claims he thought it was a door-handle!) Mr Johnson's backbone is even more impressive since he was earlier opposed to aiding Ukraine.

Kudos also to the Democrats who made up for the Republican Clown Caucus voting against Ukraine and what we used to call the Free World. Let's hope that they'll also support Speaker Johnson if Chief Clown Marjorie Taylor Greene tries to unseat him.

It's not that I particularly care for the specifics. The total is impressive enough -- $60 billion! -- but less than $9 billion of that is for ammunition and missiles.

And another milestone was reached yesterday: Russian Mediazona and BBC Russia have compiled 50,471 names of Putin's soldiers killed in the war against Ukraine. The number is certainly higher, meaning that Russia has lost more men in Ukraine than the US lost in nearly ten years of fighting in Vietnam.

For a few hours, we did everything right!

While the good people of Dearborn, Michigan, scream "Death to Israel! Death to America!", Iran made a good stab at providing the former, sending hundreds of drones and missiles to overwhelm the "Zionist regime." What a hoot! Almost all were shot down by the most astonishing display of Allied skill and backbone on the part of the Little Satan, the Big Satan, Britain (semper fi!), France (really!), Jordan, and a member or three of Trump's Abraham Accords. Yes, one Israeli child was hospitalized with serious injuries, but Iran's savagery and Israel's humanity are highlighlighted by the fact that she is not only a Muslim but a Bedouin Arab.

Of course Joe Biden couldn't maintain his display of courage for more than a few hours before begging Israel to "take the win." Don't hit back! Would he have said the same to America on 9/11/2001? Probably. As firn defense secretary Robert Gates warned us ten years ago, Joe Biden has been "wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades." We can now make that five decades. And if, by accident, he gets something right, he'll reverse himself as soon as the first antisemite hits the street in Dearborn MI or Cambridge MA. Death to Israel! Death to America! Vote for Biden!

Biden administration cancels another $7.4 billion in student loans

Why doesn't he just cancel the national debt while he's at it?

A salute to the brave

Joe Biden is of course "outraged" at the death of seven World Central Kitchen workers in Gaza the other day, but my reaction is pride and admiration for the brave foreigners who put their lives on the line in a good cause. They include a Pole, an Australian, and a Canadian working for WCK, and three British military veterans who hired out as security guards. (The seventh victim was their Palestinian driver.)

A tip of the virtual hat to them! I especially liked this image of Jim Henderson, 33 years old, a veteran of the Royal Marines. (The photographer is the woman shown on the left in the mirror.) The thugs of the Wagner Group in Ukraine and Africa, and the American contractors who went off the rails in Iraq, have given the profession a bad name, but military veterans doing security work are mostly good-hearted people helping others at the risk of their own lives, as Jim Henderson, John Chapman, and James Kirby have demonstrated. They worked for a British firm, Solace Global, whose motto is "Leave nothing to chance." But chance, alas, always gets its vote.

On banning arms sales to Israel

"If you want an example of the death wish of Western civilisation, I give you the current proposal from members of the British establishment that this country should ban arms sales to Israel.... The proposed embargo is now supported by [Members of Parliament] on all sides, by the former head of MI6, by some former Supreme Court Justices, and by about 600 members of the legal profession, all of them clamouring for us to turn our backs on the only democracy in the Middle East.

"We are being asked to shun the Israelis ... [who have] only recently suffered the biggest and most horrifying massacre of Jewish people since World War II; and when 130 hostages, including, for heaven’s sake, a baby, are being kept in dungeons in Gaza by their jihadi captors...." (Boris Johnson in the Sunday Daily Mail)

A new plan for surrender

Donald Trump thinks he's following the Nixon plan to win an election: promise a "secret plan" to end the war. The difference is that Nixon actually had a plan: first to widen the war, then turn it over to the Vietnamese. And Nixon's plan actually worked. By 1973 the last American combat troops were withdrawn, and the ARVN (South Vietnamese army) soldiered on for two years until North Vietnamese tanks rolled across the border and a Democratic Congress refused to let President Ford provide money and air support for the Saigon regime.

Sounds like Trump's secret plan, doesn't it? Let Putin have what he wants, sign a peace treaty, and wait two years for him to try again. By that time, of course, Xi Jingping will have launched his invasion of Taiwan, and Trump will shrug his shoulders. None of our business, really! As Neville Chamberlain said in 1938, a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing."

So it's all up to Mike Johnson in the US House of Representatives. He can't pass a Ukraine aid bill of his own, because the Republican Clown Caucus takes its orders from Mr Trump. He'll need a whole lot of Democratic votes, which Mr Biden might not allow, figuring that it's better for the good guys to lose two wars (to Hamas as well as to Putin) than to lose the Republicans' disarray as a vote-getter in November. What a cheap country we have become! Biden fled from Afghanistan, following the script Trump had laid out, and now he seems prepared abandone Ukraine and Israel as well.

"The particulars of the bill will be forgotten within weeks," the Wall Street Journal says today. "What America’s allies—and adversaries—will remember is whether the U.S. cuts and runs on its friends in a fight."