We’re Michael Bender and Maya King, reporters for The New York Times covering the 2024 presidential election. Ask us Anything.
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Hello, ElPlywood. Thanks for participating, and I appreciate your passion! I'll try to answer the first few here as best as I can. 1 Why do you...

“I think what you’re reacting to is that, at the moment, Biden is an unpopular president seeking a second term while Trump is a popular figure inside his party who is winning primary races. I wouldn’t necessarily compare the two.”

Credit to @JoshuaHolland

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
    4·
    10 months ago

    You think they’re gonna build the port and then extend aid packages on long poles so their feet don’t have to touch the soil?

    No, I don’t think that, because I actually read about what the plan is: they’re having third-party organizations do the delivery of the aid.

    Compared to the IDF being there unsupervised? Yes it would.

    You think the US military would do shit if the IDF stepped in?

    Correct. It’s crap. But, it’s more than anyone else has done.

    Except it’s… not? Sanctioning 4 nobodies is somehow more than cutting off weapons sales? What?

    Iraq, not Iran

    Correct, my mistake.

    And you have to go back 42 years to find a US president who did more than what Biden’s doing, and the reason he did it was nothing to do with the Palestinians but just because the IDF was attacking our ally. And if your argument is that Biden would have much more quickly condemned Israel over bombing a military site in say, Germany, than over conducting a literal genocide, I’m not sure that supports Biden.

    Yes, you claimed that no US president has been harsher on Israel than Biden. That’s complete bunk, and I laid out the evidence. Now you’re moving the goalposts.

    Trump is way worse; Trump wants to “finish the problem” in Gaza

    No one else here is talking about Trump. Your apparent need to make everything a comparison of the 2 in no way lessens the actual actions Biden has taken.

    If he suddenly starts doing everything right in Gaza, and becomes the president who reverses 75 years of genocide enablement (4 fucking blood-soaked months too late) – are you gonna start saying hey this guy seems like he’s produced a genuine permanent improvement in the US’s policy which pretty badly needs the help, and as a person who wants to see it get better I’m behind that?

    Sure, I can commit to a fantasy scenario: If Biden makes the US no longer support Israel materially, politically, or ideologically, YES, I will absolutely say he deserves credit for it.

    But he’s not going to.

    • mozz@mbin.grits.devOP
      5·
      10 months ago

      Yes, you claimed that no US president has been harsher on Israel than Biden. That’s complete bunk, and I laid out the evidence. Now you’re moving the goalposts.

      That’s not what I said. The two main things I said initially were:

      After having spent several months engaged in absolutely war-criminal support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, he’s now put sanctions on Israeli settlers for the first time in history, is putting the US military on the ground in Gaza after having publicly clashed with Netanyahu about the war, and is directly feeding starving Gazans.

      and

      showing some little stumbling signs of humanity as regards our Israel policy, which is un heard of for a US politician

      I don’t feel that having a tactical disagreement with Israel over something unrelated, while fully supporting their ongoing program to kill Palestinians whenever they feel like and arming them the entire time, represents any humanity in Reagan’s Israel policy. I feel like giving food aid to the Gazans and telling Netanyahu there are particular cities he’s not allowed to bomb does. Not enough, by any means. But some. You might disagree, and point to the recent past as an argument for why. And fair enough if you do. Most especially fair enough if we do actually follow through on giving them $14 billion worth of weapons and money to keep killing with, which we seem poised to do at any moment.

      I feel like you’re trying to make a disagreement here, like I’m for Biden and you’re against Biden and we’re each trying to make the best argument because one of us has to win. I am not operating that way. There’s actually not a whole lot of difference between how we see what he’s been doing and saying on Israel. Maybe I have a little more hope that he’ll start to do better things soon. But go back and read what I actually said. I’m just a person trying to make sense of the world and explain how I see it; for as much as I say good things about Biden, I’m not really on anybody’s “side.”