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Former U.S. President Donald Trump arrives during a Get Out the Vote rally in Greensboro, N.C., on March 2, 2024. Photo: Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images

To understand the state of American politics today when it comes to Gaza, Israel, and Palestine, just look at the very different ways in which the House of Representatives handled the cases of Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, and Rep. Brian Mast, a Florida Republican.

Tlaib was punished for her views on Israel and the war in Gaza. Mast was not.

Its not hard to figure out why.

Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, was censured by the Republican-controlled House in November after she posted a video of protesters in Michigan chanting from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. Israels supporters claim the chant is code for a desire to wipe the Jewish state off the map, but Tlaib responded that it was just an aspirational call for freedom, human rights and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction or hate.

I cant believe I have to say this, she added, but Palestinian people are not disposable.

Tlaibs censure was a symbolic act that has no substantive impact on her ability to function in Congress, but that wasnt the point. House Republicans just wanted to embarrass her and politically marginalize any congressional support for the Palestinian people. House Democrats briefly sought to censure Mast for comparing Palestinians to the hundreds of thousands of German civilians carpet bombed into oblivion by the Allies in Nazi Germany during World War II. His implication was that Palestinians deserve to be obliterated for the crimes of Hamas, just as German civilians were annihilated for the crimes of Hitler and the Third Reich. I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians, he said. I dont think we would so lightly throw around the term innocent Nazi civilians during World War II.

The motion to censure Mast was introduced in the House last November, at the same time the Republicans were going after Tlaib. But while the censure motion against Tlaib succeeded, the motion against Mast was quietly withdrawn.

Ever since, Mast has doubled down on his anti-Palestinian rhetoric without facing any consequences. He even wore an Israeli military uniform to a Republican conference meetingon Capitol Hill. When questioned about it by reporters, he said that since Tlaib displays a Palestinian flag outside her office, he thought he should wear his old Israel Defense Forces uniform. A U.S. Army veteran who lost both of his legs in Afghanistan in 2010, Mast briefly volunteered with the IDF in January 2015, performing support functions like packing medical kits. Virtually every other Republican in Congress shares Masts views and would gladly don an IDF uniform if they had one.

Earlier this year, Mast expanded on his comments about Palestinian civilians, saying that even Palestinian babies are not innocent and are thus legitimate targets. It would be better if you kill all the terrorists and kill everyone who are supporters, he told Code Pink protesters. When asked about images of Palestinian infants being killed in Israeli attacks, he said these are not innocent Palestinian civilians.

The contrasting outcomes of the Tlaib and Mast cases highlight an undeniable fact: The American political establishment still strongly favors Israel over the Palestinians. But if Donald Trump gets back into the Oval Office, he and his MAGA Republicans like Brian Mast will be even worse.

Trump is a big fan of war crimes, especially against Muslims. During his first term, he intervened on behalf of Special Operations Chief Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL platoon leader convicted of posing for a photo with the body of dead Iraqi; another SEAL team member told investigators that Gallagher was freaking evil, but Trump said at a political rally that he was one of our great fighters. Trump also pardoned Blackwater contractors convicted of killing Iraqi civilians in a wild shooting spree in Baghdads Nisour Square. There is no chance that he would try to stop Israel from indiscriminately killing Palestinians.

After the October 7 Hamas attack, Trump was briefly critical of Netanyahu and blurted out that Hezbollah was very smart. Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed group designated a terrorist organization by the United States, has battled Israel on its northern border with Lebanon. Trump was immediately and roundly attacked by other Republicans for his comments, and he quickly renewed his long-standing pledge to align the United States fully with Israel. If hes reelected, he will give Israel unalloyed support for all-out war, and he will do so with the wholehearted backing of the Republican Party.

Republicans support for Israel is matched or exceeded by their hatred for Palestinians. Rep. Ryan Zinke, a Montana Republican who was secretary of the interior in the Trump administration, has proposed legislation that would prevent Palestinians from entering the United States and trigger the mass deportation of those already here. It would ban those holding passports issued by the Palestinian Authority from obtaining U.S. visas, while mandating the removal of Palestinian passport holders already living here.

Many Republicans express their unwavering support for Israel in biblical and apocalyptic terms. Rep. Mike Johnson, a Christian evangelical, made his first public appearance after being elected House speaker last October at a conference of the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he said that God is not done with Israel.

It is dangerous to get between evangelicals and their theology. Trump recognizes their importance to his political success, and his support for Israel is a way to satisfy his evangelical Christian base. No president has done more for Israel than I have,Trump claimed in 2022. Our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the U.S.

At the 2016 Republican convention, Trump pushed through a provision in the party platform ending GOP support for a two-state solution and a Palestinian state. Now, Trump and Republicans agree with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he says that Israel can no longer agree to a two-state solution. In any future arrangement Israel needs security control over all territory west of the Jordan, Netanyahu said in January. This collides with the idea of sovereignty. What can you do? This truth I tell to our American friends, and I put the brakes on the attempt to coerce us to a reality that would endanger the state of Israel.

Thats fine with Trump and Republicans like Brian Mast.

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Although the Biden administration has bent over backward to support Israel, the president has said repeatedly in recent weeks that an independent Palestinian state is still possible. Whats more, political unrest within the Democratic Party is starting to have an impact on Biden, forcing changes in the White Houses approach to Israel. Over the weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris called for an immediate ceasefire; such new pressure from the Biden administration appears to be working, as Israel and Hamas now seem closer to an agreement.

Trump would never face such pro-Palestinian pressure from within the Republican Party. He and his MAGA cult of Christian nationalists would never force Israel to accept a ceasefire or a Palestinian state. Mast has harshly attacked Biden for continuing to support a two-state solution, dismissing the idea by saying that a Palestinian state would be run by terrorists.

There are limits to Bidens support for Netanyahu. Trump and the Republican Party have none.

Correction: March 4, 2024 8:26 p.m. ET An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the organization that Trump called very smart. It was Hezbollah, not Hamas.

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On Israel, Trump Is Even Worse Than Biden - The Intercept

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Alabama IVF ruling leaves Republicans stuck between their base and the broader public  The Guardian US

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Alabama IVF ruling leaves Republicans stuck between their base and the broader public - The Guardian US

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Hunter Bidens appearance in front of investigators and members of the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees unfolded a bit like a Bruce Lee movie.

Republican legislators and interviewers challenging the presidents son on the House majoritys behalf would throw out an allegation, often one thats been worn smooth after tumbling around in the right-wing media universe for the past year or two. And Biden would invariably swat it away, stripping off the layers of innuendo that had been applied by Donald Trump and Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) or Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) or any of myriad Fox News commentators.

This included epic battles against well-known foes, like an exchange between Hunter Biden and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), or repeated, extended back-and-forth with Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). But at no point was a question left unanswered including through an invocation of the Fifth Amendment or, to an objective observer, left answered with obvious incompletion.

The discussion was centered on the Republican effort in the ongoing impeachment inquiry to demonstrate that President Biden had benefited financially from Hunter Bidens business endeavors and, they hoped, that the elder Biden had used his position as vice president to that end. They were unsuccessful in making that case from the hearings first moments.

I did not involve my father in my business, Hunter Biden said in his opening comments, not while I was a practicing lawyer, not in my investments or transactions, domestic or international, not as a board member, and not as an artist, never. His position did not diverge from that at any point; instead, he frequently invoked this same claim over and over again as a means of cutting off one of the familiar lines of inquiry with which he was presented.

The effect, in reading a transcript of Wednesdays hours-long interaction, is of a man repeatedly trying to get his accusers to see a forest instead of a smattering of trees.

Hunter Bidens testimony centered heavily on two themes. First, the closeness of his family, having been drawn together by the tragic deaths of his mother and, later, his brother. This is why he always took his fathers calls, he said, and why he would always welcome his father to join him at dinners.

I can't count the number of times my dad stopped to have dinner with me and my family, he testified including at a cafe that was situated between the White House and the vice-presidential residence.

The other was that Joe Biden was a career politician.

My dad has been a United States Senator since I was 2 years old, Biden said at one point. My whole life has been this.

His point? That glad-handing strangers and dropping into events was part of his father's daily life and therefore his own.

At one point, a questioner pressed Biden to admit that there was a suspicious pattern in his father having met people with whom Hunter Biden or his partners ended up doing business. Biden rejected that framing.

The pattern I see is that you literally have no evidence whatsoever of any corruption on the part of my father, he said. And therefore what you're trying to do is you're trying to make every single thing in business that I was ever involved in somehow corrupt.

Gaetz, during his lengthy inquisition of Biden, attempted to portray several occasions in which Joe Biden called his son during a meeting or stopped by a dinner as implicating the president in his sons business. Hunter Biden turned the question around.

If my father was to sit down here today and he was to call me right now and I was in and I put him on the speakerphone, does that mean that he had a meeting with you, Mr. Gaetz? he asked.

Yeah, Gaetz replied.

Gaetz later tried to suggest that since Hunter Biden sometimes covered his fathers tab, that his and his fathers finances were pretty interwoven. (Will the record show that were all laughing? Biden attorney Abbe Lowell interjected.)

No, our finances arent interwoven, Hunter Biden said in response. What are interwoven is that were a family.

Over and over, interlocutors presented Hunter Biden with the sorts of suspicious-sounding tidbits that have been the crux of the Republican argument for months. And, over and over, he offered credible responses.

Biden was asked, for example, whether he was aware that money hed transferred to his uncle James Biden might have been reused by his uncle to repay a loan to his father.

This is the most ridiculous thing that I mean, so far, Biden replied. Are you saying to me, do I understand the fungibility of dollars? Do I understand that there is a I mean, what is it? Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Its all based upon a fallacy?

He noted that the deal at issue was centered on building a liquefied natural gas terminal in Louisiana that, according to him, would have created 17,000 jobs.

Mentioning this had a different purpose: to bolster his credentials and, by extension, the validity of his having been hired to participate in these agreements in the first place. He fleshed out the specifics of several of them in a similar way, including offering details of his relationships with prospective partners, both close and contentious.

Id put my rsum up against any one of you, in terms of my responsibility, he challenged the lawmakers at one point.

Those deeply immersed in the lore of Joe Bidens putative corruption will find any number of the allegations dismissed in Hunter Bidens testimony, not that they will believe his (sworn) testimony if they were to read the transcript at all. They would also note two particular targets of Hunter Bidens ire: Donald Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner and Hunter Bidens former associate Tony Bobulinski.

Kushner served as a repeated point of comparison for Biden: Republicans were quizzing him on his father stopping by a dinner one evening when Kushner pulled in $2 billion after leaving the White House?

A legislator asked him whether he'd worked for foreign governments.

I never worked for a country, he replied. I am not Jared Kushner.

Bobulinski, whose testimony has been repeatedly cited by Republicans as their probe has progressed, was dismissed by Hunter Biden as only briefly involved in his endeavors and as having been bounced for being unreliable. Among the transgressions, he said, was that Bobulinski had hoped to gain leverage over the Biden family name, something that Hunter Biden found particularly offensive.

He had no faith in this person that I had just met, Tony Bobulinski, he said, who was presented to me as some Wall Street whiz kid that was going around, throwing around my name, and throwing around my family's name.

It's not their name to screw up, he added at one point. It's mine.

This relates to where Hunter Bidens testimony was the shakiest. He indicated that, thanks to those decades of being immersed in his fathers world, he was sensitive to keeping his father at arms length.

One thing that we that I was fully aware of my entire life, is that my dad was an official of the United States Government, he said, and there were very bright lines that I abided to and that I was very, very cognizant of. And made certain that I never engaged with my father in asking him to do anything on my behalf or on behalf of any client of mine.

That may be, but it has also been demonstrated that he at times specifically sought to invoke his father, including in a text message in which he falsely implied that his father was sitting beside him. (He said he was probably intoxicated when it was sent and that he was more embarrassed of this text message, if it actually did come from me, than any text message Ive ever sent.)

Toward the end of his deposition, Biden deflected one of Gaetzs questions about the specifics of his picking up a bill for his father by noting how deep his questioners were having to dive to find things that looked suspicious.

Its not incumbent upon me to point to you to something that doesnt exist, Biden said. Its incumbent upon you to create something, to come up with something based upon the voluminous evidence that youve collected, which shows no involvement.

The forest remains uninteresting to those trying to build a case for impeaching President Biden. In his testimony, Hunter Biden did an effective job of also explaining why the trees Republicans had focused on werent that important either.

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Analysis | Hunter Biden gives House Republicans the rebuttal they didn't want - The Washington Post

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February 29, 2024

Two years after Russias invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Congress is divided over continuing aid to help Ukraine in its war against Russia. The public is also split along party lines.

Overall, 4 in 10 adults think the U.S. government is spending too much on aid to Ukraine. Three in ten say they are spending too little and a third think the amount is about right. Roughly half of Republicans (55%) think the government is spending too much money on military aid to Ukraine whereas 44% of Democrats think the government is spending too little.

Support for sanctions on Russia has remained steady. Last November, 63% supported economic sanctions on Russia. Today, 63% support such sanctions. Democrats are more likely to support sanctions (74%) than Republicans (52%). Four in ten adults support accepting Ukrainian refugees into the United States. Democrats are also more likely to support accepting Ukrainian refugees (61%) than Republicans (27%).

Foreign policy on the Russia-Ukraine war has become a partisan dividing line. Most Democrats see it as a priority for the U.S. government to prevent Russia from gaining more territory in Ukraine and to help Ukraine regain territory that is currently occupied by Russia. Less than half of Republicans agree.

At the two-year anniversary of Russias invasion, the publics outlook on the outcomes of the war are pessimistic. Only 13% are extremely or very confident that Ukraine can win the war against Rusia. Another 36% are somewhat confident and 49% are not too or not at all confident.

While many agree with the foreign policy goals of the United States regarding the conflict, few, regardless of party identification, are extremely or very confident about any positive results. Twenty-two percent say the United States should take a more involved role in the war between Russia and Ukraine, while 36% say it should have a less active role, and 40% think the United States involvement is at about the right level.

About a third of adults (35%) are concerned that the war between Russia and Ukraine will lead to a bigger conflict in Europe. Forty percent are worried that the United States will be drawn into a war with Russia. Democrats and Republicans have similar concerns about the possibility of broader conflicts.

Sixty-one percent of adults think being part of NATO, the military alliance between the United States, Canada, and many European countries, is good for the United States. This is similar to the 65% who said the same in April 2022, shortly after the war began. Democrats are more likely to support NATO membership (78%) than Republicans (50%).

Fifty-six percent of adults would support deploying U.S. troops to defend a NATO ally if it was attacked by Russia, which falls under Article V in the NATO military alliance. Despite former President Trumps remarks last week that he would not defend a NATO ally if it failed to meet defense spending targets, about half of Republicans support sending troops to defend a NATO ally if attacked by Russia.

Seventy-nine percent of adults have an unfavorable opinion of Vladimir Putin, who received international criticism last week after the death of political opponent Alexei Navalny in an Arctic penal colony. Although few in either party are favorable, Republicans are more likely to have a favorable opinion (14%) than Democrats (3%).

Volodymyr Zelenskyy is viewed more positively 43% of adults have a favorable opinion, 22% unfavorable, and 35% dont know enough about him to say. These opinions are divided by partisanship. Sixty-two percent of Democrats have a favorable opinion of the Ukrainian leader compared with 32% of Republicans.

The nationwide poll was conducted February 22-26, 2024 using the AmeriSpeak Panel, the probability-based panel of NORC at the University of Chicago. Online and telephone interviews using landlines and cell phones were conducted with 1,102 adults. The margin of sampling error is +/- 4.1 percentage points.

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Reflecting Congressional divisions over U.S. involvement with Ukraine, Republicans are more reluctant than ... - AP-NORC

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Murphy says Republicans want the border to be a mess  The Hill

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Murphy says Republicans want the border to be a mess - The Hill

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