What's On My Mind
To the ignorant eye, vaguely similar things blur together. Only when you know something about a subject do individual examples stand out in all their particularity. The magazine Garden & Gun has an article this week about the Smithsonian album Sounds of North American Frogs, which is apparently a “cult classic” among amateur naturalists. I’ll take their word for it. To my ear, all frog noises just sound like ribbit.
Our foreign policy debate is between those who want to collapse every ongoing conflict into one big war and those who think each case is distinct. President Biden on Thursday gave a speech expressing the former view, painting Hamas and Putin as allies against freedom. Jonah Goldberg and Matthew Continetti both had columns saying the same thing: it’s all one war.
In general, my rule of thumb is that the people trying to obfuscate details are the ones trying to pull one over on you and the people who think details are important are the ones who care about the truth.
That’s certainly true in this case. The conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza could not be more different—in their causes, their bearing on American interests, and the feasibility of the antagonists’ goals.
Senator J.D. Vance tweeted that Biden’s speech was an effort at deliberate moral confusion, “using dead children in Israel to sell his disastrous Ukraine policy to skeptical Americans.” That sounds about right.
From the Pod
As I noted on this week’s podcast, one place where the line that “it’s all one war” is getting zero traction is Jerusalem. The Israeli government denied a request from Volodymyr Zelensky for a “solidarity visit.” No thanks, they said, we’ll catch you next time. Like I said, the more you know about something, the more you want to treat it as unique.
Also on the podcast this week was a segment on Judge Tanya Chutkan’s new gag order in the federal case against Donald Trump, which in my opinion is an even bigger story than the war in the Middle East. This takes the lawfare against Trump to a whole new level. Preventing him from speaking freely about public figures including one of his rival candidates, Mike Pence, is such blatant election interference that it would shock the greatest cynic.
Under the terms of the gag order, President Trump can’t say that the prosecution against him is a political show trial that would embarrass a banana republic. So I will.
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