Let’s see if I have this straight.
Donald Trump set a deadline of 8pm April 7 for Iran to stop attacking ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz. Over the Easter weekend, Trump posted an obscene threat to Iran promising Iranians will be “living in hell” if they do not comply by the deadline. On the morning of April 7, Trump posted another threat, promising, “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
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A group calling itself “Princeton Israel Apartheid Divest” (“PAID”) submitted a proposal to the university asking that it divest and dissociate from companies and holdings with ties to Israel. The Princeton’s Resources Committee asked members of the community for comments. An abridged version of my response follows.
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There is no sugar-coating it. President Joe Biden had a train wreck in his first 2024 debate with Former President Donald Trump. Fifty-one million watched. I wrote that I had concerns because Biden had seemed physically feeble during some appearances in the last year. Right as he walked out on the debate stage, I saw those signs, Biden walking slowly and speaking slowly and in a soft scratchy voice. I did not expect to see him ramble and become incoherent, but he did that more than once. At other times he was clear, combative, and effective, defending his administration and listing his accomplishments. But you could not fail to notice the other moments.
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(Speaker Mike Johnson leads GOP Members of Congress in prayer on the House floor – CSPAN)
Critical assistance for Ukraine, which was approved by the Senate, is languishing in the House. The same is true for assistance for Israel. The impending budget crisis which threatened to shut down the government was punted down the field again with an agreement that keeps operations going until the end of the fiscal year in September but threatens to come back in full force two months before the election.
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Republicans scraped the bottom of the barrel last October when they elected the little-known Mike Johnson of Louisiana Speaker of the House of Representatives and second in line to the Presidency of the United States. Johnson emerged as the fourth Republican nominee in what had become a clown show of political infighting after the Republican caucus threw out Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Johnson’s election required fifteen votes.
McCarthy was voted out of the job in an extraordinary showdown, a first in U.S. history, forced by a gang of hard-right conservative Republicans. The vote threw the House and its Republican leadership into chaos. McCarthy’s crime was to have reached a bipartisan agreement with Democrats to fund the government for a brief period to prevent a shutdown.
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What Ukraine could use is a Jimmy Doolittle. James (Jimmy) Doolittle was a pilot, a Lieutenant Colonel in 1942, when he led a bombing raid on Tokyo. It was just five months after Pearl Harbor, where the Japanese struck the American Naval base in a surprise attack.
Doolittle led sixteen stripped-down B-25 bombers carrying extra fuel and a reduced bombload taking off from the U.S.S. Hornet – a feat never attempted – and struck Tokyo. Fifteen of the planes then flew to the Chinese coast where they ditched and the crews were recovered by Chinese nationalist allies, while the other bomber landed in the Soviet Union.
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This is the 21st century. The Russians deny they are responsible for the slaughter of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine, claiming corpses were planted on the streets after Russian soldiers had left the scene. Satellite pictures clearly show bodies on the ground and Russian troops still on the scene.
There is a fiction making the rounds that says the average Russian does not know what their country is doing in Ukraine. Don’t buy it for a minute. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union worked hard to keep the truth out of their territory. Western news media were blocked, jammed, and banned. But the truth leaked in, and when the USSR fell in an economic collapse, the truth flowed in with a vengeance.
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