Well. This past week was certainly something. Whatever one thought, or thinks, about the evolving conflict in the Middle East, it was terrifying to watch ballistic missiles illuminating the night skies over Jordan, struck down, one after another, by Israel’s Iron Dome defense system. It was a grim reminder—as if anyone actually needed one—that the cauldron of historic regional hatred is now boiling over. Jews have a right to protect their homeland from invasion. At the same time, the Palestinian people are perpetual pawns in the proxy war between Iran and Israel. Tens of thousands of people have died since October 9 of last year, and there appears to be no end in sight.
I keep asking myself why these conflicts are so durable, and I arrive, always, at the same conclusion: Strongmen aren’t really happy unless they are actively flexing their muscles, and it appears to be irrelevant to them if thousands of innocents are harmed in the process. It seems unlikely that this will end any time soon, and it is far too late for it to end well. I have said to my partner often enough that this war will likely end only when there is nothing left of the region but a large, smoldering crater.
This is why I firmly believe that women should be running the show, globally. I recall that after the Six Day War, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, “I can forgive you for killing our sons, but I can never forgive you for forcing us to kill yours.”
I am glad that Kamala Harris is likely to become the first female president of the United States. Women think differently. Women don’t think that other people’s children are expendable.
Meanwhile, on Tuesday night, when J.D. Vance blamed Kamala Harris for the migrant crisis at our southern border, he missed the point. The reason that the refugee surge is finally ebbing, besides the fact that Joe Biden has simply slammed the door closed, is that Kamala Harris has been doing the much longer and more difficult work of addressing the crisis through diplomacy and compassion. Compassionate approaches take infinitely longer to yield a result.
Real and lasting solutions to our conflicts, both at home and abroad, happen over the course of years, not of days or weeks or months. That is because wounded humans require patience and tenderness, not brutality. Beating up human beings who are already suffering is the least effective way to achieve positive, lasting change.
Harris does not think it a good idea to round up millions of immigrants and send them to prison camps. That is because she is a woman and not a brute. She does not think that children should be separated from their parents as a deterrent. She knows that the crisis will end only when we engage in the much more difficult work of addressing poverty, corruption, and violence in their homelands. That is long work, and hard work, but as Ms. Harris has said often enough, hard work is good work. President Harris, like every president since 1948, will continue the long, hard work of creating an equitable two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians. The task would be infinitely easier if the prime ministers of Israel and Palestine were women, too.
Women don’t believe in casual cruelty. Women don’t believe in separating mothers from their children. Women don’t believe in killing other people’s children, either.
The vice presidential debate on Tuesday night was almost as bad as the Trump-Biden debate last summer. J.D. Vance used up plenty of oxygen talking glibly about nothing. Those listening carefully realized that he succeeded in artfully dodging every question he was asked. “I’m not looking backward, Margaret, I’m looking forward.” Lather, rinse, repeat.
One might have almost forgotten that this is the candidate who wants every woman to be barefoot, pregnant, and entirely dependent on men, no matter how abusive those men might be. He continues to falsely accuse Haitian immigrants—who are here legally—of eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. Vance now subscribes to Donald Trump’s guiding principle: If you tell a lie three times in a row, it somehow becomes the truth.
There is absolutely nothing admirable about J.D. Vance, and he is not someone who should be a heartbeat away from the presidency, particularly because he is running beside a fatuous, morbidly obese lunatic who could very well keel over at any moment. I know there are many who disagree with me, but I believe that J.D. Vance should never be given the keys to the kingdom.
At the same time, Tim Walz must have forgotten that he is not running to be the governor of Minnesota. As we all know, that position has already been filled. It has been filled by him. I remarked to a friend that if I had had a shot of tequila every time Walz said “Minnesota” on Tuesday night, I would have been unconscious by 9:15.
He stumbled. He fumbled. He said “Minnesota” lots of times. The repetition would have been more effective if he had simply said, over and over again, “J.D. Vance is a liar, just like his running mate.”
However, in the final analysis, I would rather see a guy who clearly is a poor debater as vice president than a man who thinks of women as incubators, Haitians as cannibals, and white Christian nationalism as the holy grail.
So, on aisle five we have the intractable mess in the Middle East, and on aisle six the splatter of another pointless debate. Easy to mop up the latter, but the former, not so much.
As fate would have it, the debate is unlikely to move the electoral needle in one direction or the other. Besides, by day’s end on Wednesday, the bad debate was made irrelevant by the unsealing of Jack Smith’s 165-page filing to D.C. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, in the moldering election interference case against Donald Trump.
As you might recall, independent counsel Smith was forced into making an excruciatingly detailed filing by the Supreme Court, when they gave absolute immunity for any act that could be construed as part of Trump’s official duties as president.
That filing was unsealed by Judge Chutkan on Wednesday morning as she denied Trump’s lawyers’ motion to have the case dismissed. I encourage anyone who still thinks that Donald Trump should ever be president again to read the filing in its entirety.
November 5 can’t come fast enough for me.
