Sorry, if you think we're close to War...you're greatly mistaken. I've served and spent time in both Israel & Palestine because I have ex-college friends who live there... Trump lied when he stated "no American soldier lost their life" while he was President. He either does not know what the fuck is going on out there in the world or he's high on drugs along with his lie that there were "no wars, no problems" when he was President. #FACTS @ https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/biden-fucking-up-already.352729/page-77#post-5938079 I've seen the faces of our dead American soldiers on the walls at the Veterans Administration (VA) hospital and I've visited a few buried in Arlington National Cemetery and Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery... They're dead...not coming back...pictures on the VA walls...died when Trump was President. Now this idiot wants America and the families of our fallen heroes to pretend no soldier died when he was commander in chief. Arlington National Cemetery@ Arlington, VA Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery @ 20953 W Hoff Rd, Elwood, IL 60421 If Biden had said the same, or any other talking head here at ET has made such a dismissing statement as Trump...all would be a liar. Thus, Biden has not disrespected our U.S. military the way the Trump consistently does. You can continue that debate with someone else. wrbtrader
redhats are quick to forget Trump backed/geared a Saudi-led Yemeni genocide which had a toll of 300k+, not like they ever did any reading. We know he's worse just by the numbers, Joe still doesn't get a pass. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/11/21/yemen-children-hunger/2076683002/ https://www.american.edu/sis/news/20190128-the-us-s-role-in-the-hidden-genocide-in-yemen.cfm
I am not surprised by how many morons (MAGA numbers continue to grow) believe Trump's lies as facts that there were no conflicts in the world when he was President and no Americans die in any of those conflicts when he was President. Just as bad, these morons underestimate the United States role in some of those conflicts that resulted in more deaths. Simply, Joe does not get a pass (the media hits him hard about Israel/Hamas), but facts (+conflicts) show Trump's lies of zero are Trump's way of gaining more popularity from morons (MAGA and closet MAGA). Just as bad, some of his morons served in the U.S. military during his Presidency in the countries where Americans were killed or in the countries where the genocide of civilians occurred...those idiots are the worst of the morons. Trump has fawned over evil and praises authoritarian world leaders who are dictators and Trump ignores the fact that those he praises have murdered their political rivals. wrbtrader
Biden angry after poll numbers drop over his handling of Israel’s war on Gaza: Report https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/biden-anger-rcna143729 WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden was seething. In a private meeting at the White House in January, allies of the president had just told him that his poll numbers in Michigan and Georgia had dropped over his handling of the war between Israel and Hamas. Both are battleground states he narrowly won four years ago, and he can’t afford any backsliding if he is to once again defeat Donald Trump. He began to shout and swear, a lawmaker familiar with the meeting said. He believed he had been doing what was right, despite the political fallout, he told the group, according to the lawmaker. Asked about the episode, Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said: “President Biden makes national security decisions based on the country’s national security needs alone — no other factor.” For months, Democrats have watched the 2024 campaign unfold with rising alarm as the sitting president struggles to gain ground against his defeated predecessor. Frustrations rippling through the party have reached the top, with Biden at times second-guessing travel decisions and communications strategies that have left much of the electorate clueless about his record, interviews with nearly 20 lawmakers, present and past administration officials and Biden allies show. The starting gun for the general election campaign fired last week as Biden wrapped up the Democratic nomination. Yet he is still searching for ways to impress upon voters that he deserves a second term by dint of policy achievements that eluded past presidents. History suggests it will be tough for him to recover. Biden’s 38% approval rating at this stage in the calendar is lower than that of the last three presidents who went on to lose re-election: Trump (48%), George H.W. Bush (39%) and Jimmy Carter (43%), according to Gallup survey data. Biden has long believed that he isn’t getting sufficient credit for an economy that has created 15 million new jobs. Looking to reach distracted voters who may be tuning in, he told his speechwriters before the State of the Union address to tone down some of the lofty rhetoric and plainly lay out what he’s done, a person familiar with speech preparations said. During internal discussions, he’ll press aides about which parts of his record to highlight in different states, said a second person who is familiar with the matter. Surrounded by protective aides who want to minimize the chances of a flub, the 81-year-old president has chafed at restraints that he sees as counter to his natural instincts as a retail politician, a third person familiar with internal discussions said. He has felt cocooned at times and has been eager to get out more, meet voters face-to-face and take the fight directly to Trump, said the third person and a fourth also familiar with the matter who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss campaign strategy and the president’s private views. There are signs that some within his party are also losing patience with him. “Biden stood up in front of the whole world and said, ‘I’m ready. I’m the guy who can take down Donald Trump,’” said Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash. “So, he goddamn well better do it. We don’t have time for him to be worried about whether or not people are saying things right or the poll numbers are where they should be. I want focused energy and not defensive anger.” Eminently beatable Biden has on occasion directed his ire at his tightknit senior staff. Given the successes he has had in passing consequential bills and improving the economy, Biden was irritated that his message wasn’t sinking in with the broader electorate, the sources said. Eight months before the election, Biden’s campaign team remains confident about his chances. A memo that campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez sent out in December suggests that it was always the plan for Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to start “ramping up” campaign travel early this year — something that is now happening. Since the State of the Union speech, Biden has traveled to Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. He’ll be heading to Nevada and Arizona early this week. “The president and his advisers have all been eager for him to be out there more and planned for that to take place at the start of the election year, as has been the norm for past incumbents seeking re-election,” thesecondperson familiar with the matter said. Biden aides see Trump as an eminently beatable and deeply flawed opponent. In a recent campaign call with reporters, Jen O’Malley Dillon, the campaign chairwoman, said Trump appears to have little interest in attracting voters beyond his most faithful base. “We know that he lost in 2020,” she said. “In order to win, he’s got to expand his base of voters to find new people to be with him. And that is not something he’s shown that he’s really focused on.” ‘A little mad at himself’ At times, Biden gets suggestions that conflict with one another. Some advisers have told him he should walk faster out of concern that his gait feeds impressions that he’s too old. And yet the White House is sufficiently worried about him tripping that he has taken to boarding Air Force One via a shorter staircase through the belly of the plane, forgoing the iconic image of the president waving from the main doorway high above the tarmac. “He’s probably a little mad at himself for not being more forceful with the staff,” a person familiar with internal discussions said. Privately, Biden questions whether he should trust his gut instincts over the guidance coming from the array of advisers tending to his political interests, this person added. “The man’s been successful for decades in Congress and became vice president and president,” said a fifth person, who formerly served in the Biden administration. “If you try to change the person, you’re making a mistake. Let the president go out there and do his thing.” ‘A failure of communication’ A consensus of Democratic officials is that Biden needs an army of surrogates to spread the word that his record has improved American lives in concrete ways. He can’t carry the message alone. Andre Dickens, the Democratic mayor of Atlanta, said that Trump’s bluster tends to soak up the attention, but Biden’s record is actually making city streets safer. He cited spending bills that enabled his city to pay retention bonuses to police officers and underwrite youth programs that help to curb crime. “Coming after a blowhard like Trump who tells you every day what he hates and what he likes, Biden is … soft and calm and getting the work done,” Dickens said. Letting voters know is “the job of the mayor and county leaders who have benefited from the Biden administration’s policies,” he added. Simplicity might be Biden’s most promising approach, some of his allies said. Package his record as part of an American renaissance — a success story that is putting money into peoples’ pockets, they suggested. Mary Landrieu is a former Democratic senator from Louisiana and a Biden supporter. Asked about Biden’s inability to get credit for legislation meant to revive American high-tech manufacturing and upgrade the country’s roads and bridges, she said: “I think it’s actually a bit of a failure of communication on the part of the White House.” Nearly $4 billion in clean energy projects are underway in Louisiana under a bill that Biden ushered into law called the Inflation Reduction Act, a title that doesn’t capture the measure’s real purpose. “There’s a real story to tell,” Landrieu said. “It’s a winning message and it’s about jobs, prosperity and evolution. If that message can be communicated, I think the American people will respond.”
https://archive.ph/CHvi4 On Oct. 27, three weeks into Israel’s punishing counterattack in Gaza, top Biden officials privately told a small group assembled at the White House what they would not say in public: Israel was regularly bombing buildings without solid intelligence that they were legitimate military targets. The previously unreported meeting shows that discrepancies were emerging far earlier than publicly known between the Biden team’s internal doubts about Israel’s conduct and its ironclad external support. At nearly every turn, President Biden and his aides defended the Jewish state, even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defied the U.S. on everything from protecting civilians to allowing aid delivery to accepting a Palestinian state. The Israeli Embassy in Washington denied claims that Israel Defense Forces hit targets with insufficient intelligence, saying the IDF is committed to “international law” and “applies a thorough legal process in the selection of targets and invests significant resources to minimize harm to civilians.” This article, based on interviews with 20 administration officials and outside advisers, examines how Biden, more than five months after the Oct. 7 attacks, has found himself deeply entangled in a war he does not want and that threatens to become a defining element of his tenure. His allies privately acknowledge that it has done him significant damage domestically and globally and could easily become his biggest foreign policy cataclysm. Biden’s strategy from the outset rested on a central trade-off: that if he showed Israel unequivocal, even defiant, support early on, he could ultimately influence its conduct of the war. Some administration officials now concede the strategy is heading toward failure, and in private talks, they voice a striking frustration and uncertainty about how the war will end. “I supported the president’s decision to go to Israel, in that moment of trauma, to let the Israeli people know the United States stood with them. But the strategy beyond that, which was this constant private jawboning of Netanyahu, has produced very few meaningful results,” Van Hollen said in an interview. “There have been some incremental changes, but the gap between what the president has called on the Netanyahu government to do and what they’ve actually delivered is huge. It’s a chasm.” If Netanyahu moves on Rafah without consequences, Van Hollen said, the United States will look “feckless.” He added, “It’s good to see the president’s tougher comments. But the question will be whether the president uses the leverage he has to demand accountability and enforce his requests.” White House officials say that privately, they were repeatedly urging Israel to rein in its onslaught. But when those conversations yielded little result, U.S. officials offered few public rebukes and no evident consequences. As the weeks went on, the calculus of Israel and the U.S. appeared to diverge. In early November, Israel bombed the densely packed Jabalya refugee camp several times, saying it had eliminated a senior Hamas commander, Ibrahim Biari, but dozens of civilians were also killed. “That was the first time that everybody was focusing on the size of the bombs Israel was dropping and how little they seemed to care,” one White House ally said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations. But Israel’s conduct of its military campaign was increasingly prompting skepticism in the U.S. In early November, Israel began warning that al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest, where thousands of civilians were sheltering, was being used by Hamas as a major command center. That prompted a vigorous debate among Biden officials over whether to publicly support Israel’s claim, according to three senior administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to disclose internal discussions. Some worried that Israel would see such a statement as a green light to raid the hospital, while others wanted to use the information to show the public how Hamas embedded itself among civilians to underline the complexities Israel faced. On Nov. 14, the White House decided to publicly back Israel on the matter. “We have information that confirms that Hamas is using that particular hospital for a command-and-control mode,” Kirby told reporters aboard Air Force One, citing declassified intelligence. “That is a war crime.” Van Hollen, who had received a classified briefing about the U.S. intelligence on al-Shifa, said there were “important and subtle differences” between what Biden officials were saying publicly and what the intelligence actually showed. “I did find there to be some disconnect between the administration’s public statements and the classified findings,” the senator said. At the end of November, White House officials thought they saw an opportunity to significantly change the course of the war. The U.S. helped broker a week-long pause in the fighting between Israel and Hamas that included the release of more than 100 hostages, and during that break, Americans tried to persuade Israel to make targeted raids that would minimize civilian casualties. But when the pause ended on Dec. 1, which U.S. and Israeli officials blamed on Hamas for not releasing promised hostages, Israel began attacking the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, where many Palestinians had fled, with little evidence of a more targeted approach. The White House praised some Israeli moves, such as its distribution of a map of the areas it planned to target. As the new year began, the administration’s patience with Netanyahu was wearing thin, as officials increasingly concluded he was prioritizing his own political survival. That included loudly standing up to Biden to appease far-right members of his government, they believed — for example by flatly rejecting a Palestinian state shortly after Biden called for one. “Bibi’s approach to disagreements in the past has been something along the lines of, ‘Let’s not and say we might.’ In this case, he stopped even pretending or obfuscating,” said Frank Lowenstein, a former State Department official who helped lead Israeli-Palestinian negotiations in 2014. “He just went out and announced the exact opposite of what we asked them to do.” The Israeli Embassy denied blocking aid to Gaza, saying the government “is making significant efforts to ramp up humanitarian assistance into Gaza from land, air and sea,” a point contested by the United Nations and numerous aid groups who have decried the lack of food, water and medicine in the enclave. White House officials say they realized after the meetings that they needed to speak more forcefully about Palestinian suffering, two senior officials said. Biden soon began using casualty figures from the Gaza Health Ministry, which he had earlier dismissed as untrustworthy, and spoke about starvation and civilian deaths in the enclave. “They seem to have calculated that the war would end quickly and any opposition from progressives, youth and Arab Americans would blow over without any lasting impact,” said Martin Indyk, who represented the U.S. in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks under President Barack Obama and is now a Lowy Distinguished Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. But as the Michigan primary approached, he said, “they realized they had a problem in Michigan, and if they didn’t deal with it, they could lose the state and therefore the presidential election.” The pace of events surrounding the Israel-Gaza war has only quickened in recent days. More than 100 people died when desperate Gazans rushed an aid convoy in late February, creating a stampede and prompting deadly gunfire from Israeli soldiers. Some in the White House saw it as the most dramatic evidence so far of Israel’s failure to safeguard civilians. The U.S. intelligence community recently released a skeptical assessment of Netanyahu’s plummeting public support in Israel. “Distrust of Netanyahu’s ability to rule has deepened and broadened across the public from its already high levels before the war, and we expect large protests demanding his resignation and new elections,” read the report, adding that his “viability as a leader” is in “jeopardy.”