With the assassination of the Hamas commander in Iran and the death of Hezbollah’s top military commander in an airstrike in Beirut it seems that the war in the Middle East is expanding. It is hard to imagine that neither the Iranians nor Lebanese Hezbollah will retaliate.

I also find it hard to believe that anyone will think the Jewish Israelis are the problem The attack by Hezbollah in the Golan Heights which killed 12 Druze children would seem to have put that to bed. For more on the Druze see here or here.

The Druze are an ethnic or ethno-religious minority that are genetically mostly Arabs, speak Arabic, and practice a religion that is an offshoot of Islam, distinct to the Druze. Other Moslems generally consider them heretical. They live in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. Sir Richard Francis Burton, one of the founding figures in serious Western study of the Middle East called them “the only men in Palestine worthy of the name”. The Druze themselves have rejected retaliation in their name.

But this is the point: they are not colonizers by anyone’s standards. They have as much right to be where they are as anyone in the region. The attack on the Druze confirms that Hezbollah is composed of murderous radical thugs. Hostis humani generis.

In my view the United States should maintain a low profile with respect to this escalating conflict. Given a choice among Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, or the Israelis our preference should be the Israelis but that does not mean that our interests are perfectly aligned with theirs. We should be willing to sell arms to the Israelis but that should be the limit of our military support. I would further suggest that anyone demonstrating in the streets here in the U. S. in favor of Hamas are either our enemies or have been cruelly misled.

We cannot assume the role of interlocutor among these groups: we are too closely associated with the Israelis to be considered impartial.

I honestly have no idea what Donald Trump was trying to accomplish by agreeing to be interviewed by the National Association of Black Journalists here in Chicago yesterday. Consequently, I have no idea whether it was worthwhile or whether he accomplished his objective or not. Here’s how the editors’ of the Wall Street Journal’s read the tealeaves:

Half of politics is showing up, even for a roomful of critics. That’s the best way to think about Donald Trump’s appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) convention in Chicago on Wednesday.

In her opening question to Mr. Trump, Rachel Scott from ABC News told Mr. Trump that “a lot of people” didn’t think he should be invited. “You have pushed false claims about some of your rivals . . . saying they were not born in the United States”; told “four Congresswomen of color . . . to go back to where they came from”; and “attacked black journalists” saying the questions they asked were “stupid and racist,” Ms. Scott said.

Mr. Trump called the question “rude” and “disgraceful,” but he had to know this wouldn’t be a love-fest. Mr. Trump also said, oddly, that Kamala Harris was “always of Indian heritage” and he “didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black and now she wants to be known as black.”

The main thing I can think of that he might have accomplished is that he showed he’s willing to talk to a hostile audience.

I think I’ve mentioned that I do all of the cooking and all of the shopping here at Chez Schuler. It was already becoming harder pre-Covid but it has become much harder post-Covid.

I have quite a few grocery stores fairly close to me:

2 blocks away

Whole Foods

Less than 2 miles away

Happy Foods
Mariano’s

Less than 5 miles away

Jewel
Fresh Farms
Costco
Aldi

Unfortunately, none of them carries everything we buy and they each have their strengths and weaknesses. I would do all of my shopping at my beloved Happy Foods but it doesn’t carry everything we use and there are better places for produce. Pre-Covid its meat was matchless. I believe they changed suppliers during Covid and it just hasn’t been the same. Still, Happy Foods has an amazingly broad selection considering its small footprint.

Mariano’s (acquired in 2015 by Kroger’s) has been declining in quality since its acquisition and the traffic getting there is daunting. I go there because my dogs’ prescriptions come from their pharmacy and they have a few things that Happy Foods doesn’t carry. With the Kroger’s-Albertson’s merger it’s going to get tougher. Our Mariano’s location will close. I don’t know what will replace it.

I rarely go to Jewel. It’s more than twice as far away as Mariano’s and has about the same selection. Like Mariano’s I don’t much care for its produce or meat and poultry.

Fresh Farms is sort of an odd duck. It has an amazing selection of ethnic specialties and its produce is probably the best of any grocery near me. Oddly, it carries Costco-branded items. I find competing with a retailer for stuff I buy at Costco troubling. If you’re looking for goat, Fresh Farms is your place.

Costco is Costco.

Whole Foods is Whole Foods. Its produce is pretty good but limited in variety. Its meat and fish are fine but price-y.

I went to an Aldi’s once about forty years ago. I doubt I’ll go back.

The bottom line is that I need to go to two or three places to get the things we need. I can get the milk my wife drinks at Happy Foods or Whole Foods. I can only get the string cheese she likes at Mariano’s. I get the skyr my wife likes at Whole Foods or Mariano’s. I get the laundry detergent we use at Happy Foods, Mariano’s, or Jewel. I get our dishwashing detergent, paper towels, and toilet paper at Costco. I get the breakfast cereal my wife likes at Happy Foods, Mariano’s or Jewel.

My impression is that Whole Foods, Jewel, and Mariano’s have been focusing increasingly on store-branded items. Items I used to be able to get from several different places I can now only get from one or need to obtain via shopping online.

The present name-calling that passes for presidential campaigns is a good example of why I have been so quiet lately. First, Republican VP candidate Vance calls Kamala Harris a “childless cat lady”. Then Hillary Clinton calls Donald Trump and J. D. Vance “creepy” and “weird”. Both names (“childless cat lady” and “weird”) are unkind but, let’s admit it, Donald Trump is weird from his hair plugs and comb over to the spray tan (“Orange Man”) to his vestigial Eastern seaboard prep school honk. About Mr. Vance I couldn’t comment. I haven’t read his book or listened to him and am not particularly interested in doing so. And Kamala Harris is childless. Whether she likes cats I couldn’t say.

But is this the rhetorical level at which our political campaigning should be taking place? I recognize it’s not new and rather tame compared to some epithets that have been hurled going back 200 years. It was crude then and it’s crude now. Can’t we be better than this?

Are there no issues at stake?

For what? Maybe forty years? My impression has been that Seymour Hersh gets his scoops from barflies in the watering holes of Washington, DC. This one may be no different but at the Post Millenial Libby Emmons is reporting that Sy Hersh’s most recent claim is that what we’ve been hearing from the White House and major media outlets has been baloney:

A new Substack out from Seymour Hersch indicates that former President Barack Obama and VP Kamala Harris, now presumptive Democrat nominee for president, threatened sitting President Joe Biden with the potential invocation of the 25th Amendment if he didn’t drop out the presidential race and cede that spot to the veep. This would mean that not only did they force Biden out of the race, but that the Democrats know full well that Biden isn’t fit to serve out the rest of his term, but are comfortable letting him continued as a figure head if it serves their efforts to retain power for the party.

Biden engaged in a debate with former President and GOP nominee for president Donald Trump on June 27. It was so bad that almost instantly Democrat leaders and pundits were looking for a way to get Biden off the ticket. They could see that there was very little chance that Biden, in his diminished state, coudl beat Trump at the ballot box. The party elite were aghast and worked hard both in public and private to oust Biden. While much of that played out in leaked rumor, speculation, it turns out, per Hersch, that what was going on behind the scenes was a kind of coup, complete with threats from the Obama Kamala team.

It’s a sad commentary when a presidential address to the nation carried on multiple networks has about the same level of credibility as the scuttlebutt in DC bars. Mister, we could use a man like Walter Cronkite again. Maybe he was no more credible than the present crop. He just didn’t have anybody fact-checking him.

Speaking of the White House I found the “Fact Sheet” produced there an interesting exercise in giving the impression of doing something while actually doing nothing interesting:

In the face of this crisis of confidence in America’s democratic institutions, President Biden is calling for three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability…

Here are the three bullet points:

1. No Immunity for Crimes a Former President Committed in Office
2. Term Limits for Supreme Court Justices
3. Binding Code of Conduct for the Supreme Court

Each of those would require a constitutional amendment. How likely is any of those amendments to be achieved in the foreseeable future?

I did have a couple of questions. Why term limits for Supreme Court justices but not for members of the House or Senate. There are presently members of each house who have held their seats longer than any Supreme Court justice presently sitting. And why not a “binding code of conduct” for members of Congress? Or for the president?

Update

At Axios Stephen Neukam and Andrew Solender report that President Biden did not confer with congressional Democrats before making his Supreme Court reform proposals:

The White House didn’t consult Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin and other key congressional Democrats on President Biden’s proposals to dramatically overhaul the Supreme Court, Axios has learned.

Why it matters: The lack of coordination with Capitol Hill signals that Biden’s SCOTUS proposals amount to more of a pre-election messaging push than a legislative imperative.

So it looks like my hipshot reaction was right.

Between meeting deadlines at work and the rapid and unusual developments in politics over the last week or so, I have been reluctant to post. I simply didn’t know what to say. The Democrats, who have been whinging about saving democracy for the last couple of years, have resorted to anything but democratic strategies for removing President Biden from the campaign and anointing Vice President Harris as his successor.

As it turns out I’m not the only one. At the Wall Street Journal Jon Kamp, Richard Rubin, and Justin Lahart struggle to figure out what VP Harris’s economic views might be:

Kamala Harris is well known for her forceful defense of abortion rights, her role within the Biden administration on immigration and border security, and her legacy as a prosecutor and attorney general of California.

But the economy is a central election issue, and there, her positions and policy goals haven’t yet been as clearly defined.

Her record does reveal, however, some clues about her priorities, including a focus on low-income workers, women, small businesses and middle-class families.

As vice president, Harris has largely moved in lockstep with President Biden on economic issues, and some analysts see this record as a road map. “In general, we think she’ll pick up the Biden-Harris mantle,” policy analysts at Evercore ISI said in a note Tuesday.

Before her time in the administration, she sometimes differed with Biden—specifically in trade and climate-related policy—often by favoring bigger governmental interventions in the economy.

For nearly 50 years Joe Biden has striven to characterize himself as a moderate by positioning himself in the center of the Democratic Party, wherever that might have been at the time. VP Harris has made no such effort. Her four years in the Senate were notable for her striking a position as the farthest left member of the Senate. Under the circumstances it seems unlikely to me that she will veer to the center of the Democratic Party let alone the center of the country should she be elected president.

The Economist struggles similarly to decode her foreign policy views:

Ms Harris did not mention foreign policy in her first campaign rally as her party’s presumptive nominee, in Wisconsin on July 23rd. Her cv on foreign affairs was thin at first, and the subject of controversy about her role in trying to deal with the “root causes” of migration from Central America. Indeed Republicans have renewed attacks on her for failing to secure the southern border.

That said, Ms Harris has become somewhat more assured lately, having visited Europe, Asia and Africa, among other regions. Her national security adviser, Philip Gordon, is a veteran of European and Middle Eastern affairs at the State Department and the White House under Democratic administrations. More than 350 former national-security officials, including Democratic Party heavyweights, described Ms Harris as “the best qualified person to lead our nation as Commander in Chief”, with more experience of foreign affairs than most recent incoming presidents.

Ms Harris shares Mr Biden’s internationalism. In February at the Munich Security Conference, an annual talkfest, she warned against American retrenchment under Mr Trump. “Isolation is not insulation. In fact, when America has isolated herself, threats have only grown.”

But just as she may lack Mr Biden’s love of Israel, she may also not fully share his generation’s instinctive transatlanticism. Unlike Mr Trump, she would not threaten to abandon European allies. But American politicians of all persuasions are increasingly preoccupied with the growing rivalry with China.

I find the attempts to characterize her efforts over the last several years as becoming some sort of foreign policy guru not just far-fetched but rather pathetic. What is far more likely is that the Department of State will continue its preferred role of dictating its preferred foreign policy direction rather than paying any attention whatever to the “temporary help”, as insiders refer to the White House.

I want to commend Isaac Saul’s take on President Biden’s ending his re-election campaign at the Tangle newsletter to your attention. To read the whole thing you need to register to receive the newsletter. Here’s a paraphrase of his bullet points:

• Biden did the right thing.
• We’re getting to watch political talking points being formulated in realtime.
• For the first time in years we’re seeing Democrats trying to attract voters rather than drive them away.
• Their present direction appears to split the difference between the least democratic response they might have made and the most democratic response they might have made.
• We’re in uncharted water.
• The president should have withdrawn earlier.
• He supports an open convention.
• Nancy Pelosi continues to be the most influential Democrat.
• Asking how President Biden is fit to serve but not fit to run is a fair question.
• The Silicon Valley tech-bro elites are becoming more obnoxious by the day.
• When he polled his friends and family about it the main reaction of Democrats was relief.
• The main reaction of Republicans was, basically, it doesn’t matter.
• When he posed the same question on X the main reaction was that VP Harris couldn’t win.
• She’s not a great politician.
• The significant amount of money raised from small contributions over the last 48 hours suggests substantial grassroots support.
• President Biden has been a drag on the Democratic Party for the last several months.
• Trump is now the oldest major party presidential candidate in U. S. history. The track record of old Republicans running against younger Democrats favors the Democrats.
• He thought that a Biden vs. Trump contest probably favored Trump. Harris vs. Trump may be about even.
• What will Biden do for the next several months?
• This will be the first Presidential election since 1976 to not have a Biden, Bush, or Clinton on the ticket.
• Trump would probably have preferred for Biden to remain in the race.
• Does this demonstrate that presidential debate do matter?
• Note that President Biden took this action without our hearing directly from him.
• This has been a pretty eventful couple of months

Those aren’t my observations—they’re Isaac’s. My only observation is that replacing President Biden with VP Harris on the ticket is the Democrats’ only play. Black women are the Democrats’ most reliable voting bloc. How would the Democrats explain passing over a black woman in favor of, say, a white man?

To that I would like to add former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s comment:

I’ve known Obama since 1995. We both come out of Chicago politics. I know how it works. He’s behind the campaign to dump 15 million Dem primary voters & replace Biden with his choice. Classic Chicago Democrat machine politics. Selection over election. The bosses over the people.

In other words there are people other than Republicans who will see it that way.

I was greatly surprised when President Biden announced he was ending his re-election campaign. As of this writing he had not endorsed anyone.

Now what? IMO the best case is an open convention and I honestly do not know what will emerge from that.

Update

David Ignatius remarks at the Washington Post:

Biden’s decision will allow a relieved country to applaud his success as president. Much of the Republican critique of Biden is pure nonsense. In fact, he helped steward sustained economic growth. He made critical investments in technology and infrastructure. He rebuilt America’s foreign alliances. And he was steadfast in the great moral challenge of our time, which was resistance to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s dark designs on Ukraine and the world.

?It’s often said that if we could see ourselves through others’ eyes, we would make better decisions about our weaknesses. But Biden for many months resisted recognizing what television viewers could plainly see: that he was aging and increasingly unsteady in ways that made another term as commander in chief problematic.

Update

President Biden has just endorsed Kamala Harris.