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Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman discuss the President Joe Biden's announcement to not draw a red line and stop sending arms to Israel if they make an incursion into Rafah. They then have to talk about the fact that Robert Kennedy Jr has a dead worm in his brain before finishing up with an article about young kids having past lives.
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Status quo, keep your eyes forward and don't look around and everything will be fine.
That is not convincing at all for anybody.
Well, you know, there's some mental health that's important to have.
And if you really focus on some of the things that have been happening, it can make your life... It wears on you.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm looking for some silver linings.
I'm looking for some, you know, ways that we can see a light at the end of the tunnel here.
Don't go to the light, but where's the tight?
I don't know.
Something about most mixing, I don't know.
Anyway, here we are.
We gotta keep this trade on the track today, is what we gotta do.
Listen, everybody, we got a packed show.
We gotta talk about election denying Republicans.
Yes, we're gonna talk about worms and brains, Nick.
Yeah.
We have to talk about worms and brains.
We also have a little bit of spooky action at a distance that we've got to talk about in a little bit.
Reminder, go to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast, support the show, keep it growing, keep us editorially independent and ad-free.
Nick, we've got to start with President Joe Biden.
Biden went on CNN with Aaron Burnett, and in a remark or a stance or a red line that wasn't necessarily expected, he told Burnett that if Israel does a hard invasion of Rafah, that he is planning on withholding munitions and weapons.
Here is the president speaking with Aaron Burnett.
I want to ask you about something happening as we sit here and speak, and that of course is Israel is striking Rafa.
I know that you have paused, Mr. President, shipments of 2,000 pound U.S.
bombs to Israel due to concern that they could be used in any offensive on Rafa.
Have those bombs, those powerful 2,000 pound bombs, been used to kill civilians in Gaza?
Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they go after population centers.
I made it clear that if they go into Rafa, they haven't gone into Rafa yet.
If they go into Rafa, I'm not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafa, to deal with the cities, to deal with that problem.
We're going to continue to make sure Israel is secure in terms of Iron Dome and their ability to respond to attacks like Came out of the Middle East recently, but it's it's just wrong.
We're not going to.
We're not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells used that have been used.
Artillery shells as well, yeah.
So there we go.
We need to talk about the reaction to this, get into the implications of it, but what are your initial thoughts on this?
I know that this is what you've been looking for Biden to do for a while now.
I've been saying this for months as he started to dip their toe into like slowly criticizing Netanyahu and then, you know, getting to figure out how that tests out in the real world and stuff.
I think this is a good thing.
If we're talking about a purely cynical, political bent of this thing, then yes, this should be something that would help him as he's now trying to move more to the right side of what is stopping the murdering of innocent people.
So, you know, it's an interesting thing because obviously, you know, if Israel wants to defend itself and they want to get rid of Hamas and target Hamas, you know, the alternatives are out there and certainly let us sending them bombs would greatly reduce the amount of the collateral wartime killings.
So I think it's a parallel thing, but I have more on this, but let me hear what your take is first.
Yeah, I think there, you know, in all of these things, and this is one of the reasons why I love being able to do this podcast, because so many people want to talk about it, like, from like one particular lens and live with it.
There's a political lens, right?
There's a moral lens.
There is a strategic lens.
You name it.
There's all different types of ways to look at this.
Um strategically I've been critical of how Biden has handled this entire situation at first saying obviously we stand with Israel and everything that they do not questioning anything then for a while it was like a slow rolling of like Biden saying this off the record then he's starting to give some speeches in which he calls into Question now he is drawing what is supposed to be a red line correct like this is this is somewhere where we're not going to go with this.
This is the conditional support that we're going to give.
I think that politically, it was smart to go ahead and make sure that you mentioned that you're going to continue with the Iron Dome so Israel can defend itself from outside attacks.
That goes ahead and tries to cut both ways, which says we're not going to help them offensively, but we're going to help them defensively.
And again, I've taken flak for saying this since October 7th.
I do believe that Israel has a right to defend itself.
I don't think that nations should come under attack and have their people kidnapped and murdered and assaulted, right?
But at the same time, I think we all understand, or I think the majority of people at this point understand, that what has been going on in Gaza is too much and it is immoral and unethical.
I think Biden had to do something.
I think that he has felt pressured on this thing.
The problem, Nick, is that none of this is particularly tenable.
You know what I mean?
Like, first of all, the people who are pissed off at Biden for enabling this ethnic cleansing in Gaza, they're not going to forgive him now that he's rhetorically said that he wasn't going to do this.
The people who want him to unabashedly support the movement, I mean, we're already starting to see things going online.
Biden loves Hamas.
Right?
He's being reminded by certain people that there are more Jewish voters than Muslim voters.
And, like, he's basically being told, like, if you don't do this, like, there are going to be consequences to it.
This situation, all the way around in every different direction, is so complicated and hard and weird and politically disadvantageous that being the president during it is awful.
And that's what being a modern president is.
It's a constant, awful job.
Of course, if Trump was in there, he wouldn't second-guess what he was doing.
He would never go backwards.
He would, you know, aggressively be for this, and we've already heard what he said about Gaza.
But I do think that this speaks to the larger issue that Biden has had as president, Nick, and that is that he's not particularly comfortable in always taking a bunch of hard stances.
He wants to be malleable.
He wants to move around.
He wants to have a sort of movement.
And this is one of those situations where there's no comfort here.
There's nothing about this that's good.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, there is.
It is good.
There is good in that we would cease to participate in what I agree.
That's good.
That said, it's also a what's the word I'm looking for?
I mean, listen, Could Israel go into Rafah and use all the bombs that they already have and not run out and finish this incursion into Rafah?
Could they do that?
And by the way, I think that's one of the things that's underneath all these statements, which is that they probably have all the munitions that they need to carry this out.
Right.
Now, is America the only, you know, people who sell these kind of bombs in the world?
No, and I'll tell you some people who would be very interested in selling these.
Yeah, I mean the list of the usual suspects.
So this isn't the thing where like so so Biden can kind of go like not like wash his hands, but he can kind of get on the right and moral side of this knowing that they can also still, you know, can do what they were going to do and doesn't really materially change anything they were doing.
So that's what a political win would be, I guess, right?
When you can kind of do both things at once.
And my prediction had always been that this would be a good thing, at the very least in his own party, it would be a good thing because people would finally say, yes, we were heard.
Now, the other interesting level to this is, do you think that the protests on the campuses for the last several weeks affected this decision?
Yes.
Yes, I do.
I don't know.
It's an interesting question.
So, here's what I'll say.
A few different things here.
First things first.
Netanyahu's already gone on the record.
The quote that's come out from his speeches is, quote, if we need to stand alone, we will stand alone.
Right?
I mean, we've talked about it.
One of the problems here is that Netanyahu is an actor who is not interested in the war ending.
His political and legal survival depends on this thing continuing and him going all the way with this thing.
That sucks.
On top of that, we have a particularly complicated political situation.
Nick, I don't want to scare you.
Our parties are not in agreement on things, and we have one party in particular that is more than happy in submarining the political fate of the United States of America.
I'm sorry, I know that's wild, right?
Most of the time, American political parties are in agreement about foreign policy.
That used to be the case before the Republican Party sort of went this route.
I'm not saying that's a good thing, but I am saying that used to sort of be the tendency, and the Republicans are going to absolutely jump all over this.
And like, let's say, theoretically, Let's say, theoretically, that Israel goes ahead and does a hard invasion.
I would make the argument that there's already a hard invasion going on in Rafah, but, you know, we can go ahead and hide behind semantics and rhetoric and all that.
So, all of a sudden, then, you're facing, like Obama did in 2013 with his red line in Syria, no chemical weapons.
Well, the red line got crossed.
What do you do now?
Right, so I happen to believe that Netanyahu will probably go ahead and cross that red line.
Biden will have to do something about that, or not do something about it, and probably the Republicans will turn up the heat if he refuses to do it.
So then all of a sudden you're in a situation where like it's it's it's Nick it's it's like on a chessboard when all that's left there's like one side has all of the pieces and the other side only has the king and the king's just moving from spot to spot trying not to get in checkmate like Biden doesn't have a lot of good moves here and the situation isn't very good being the incumbent president.
And I do feel like the pressure that's been put out there with the protest and with not just the protest, but also just the general populist pushback against this.
I think at some point or another, he had to say, there is a line.
And we've reached that point.
And what happens now?
I mean, it's anybody's guess.
You know, your description of how the two parties interact, this always makes me ask you why you hate America, Jared.
It's not me that did this.
I didn't create this.
Don't put it on me.
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