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It's Wednesday, October 30.
Tonight: As we head into the 2024 election, finally, the media was consumed for three straight days with one of the most pressing questions facing our nation: What does it mean that a comedian told an offensive joke about Puerto Rico and various other groups that came to Trump’s Sunday rally? That compelling news cycle was broken only because Joe Biden – remember him, the one with the nuclear codes? – defied the nurse's orders to sit quietly in the corner and instead made an appearance by Zoom attempting to convince Latino voters to vote for Kamala Harris and proceeded to call half of the country, quote, “garbage.” It is impossible to know what Biden actually meant to say, it's rare that he even completes a sentence, but this time he did complete the sentence and unmistakably that is what he said.
I personally don't think that the ramblings of a senile old man are particularly relevant, though I do think it's relevant that the sitting president of the United States has little to no functional brain matter and we'll talk about that. But it has been remarkable watching Democrats and the corporate media spring into action to try to defend Biden, even inventing an imaginary apostrophe in the middle of his sentence to try to pretend that he did not actually say what everyone knows for whatever reasons he clearly did say. As is true for so many of these seemingly trivial episodes, they become windows that vividly reveal how our key institutions function and we'll examine this episode with that in mind.
Then: The only reason Israel can bomb and destroy Gaza for a full year and counting and the only reason they're able to fight a war in Lebanon while threatening one with Iran and various other neighbors is that the United States – meaning American citizens, American workers – finance Israel's military, arm their wars and use its diplomatic power to shield Israel from criticism or from the mandates of international law even though Israelis have a much higher standard of living than millions of Americans forced to subsidize their wars and their military. In short, Israel – by every historical measure – is a vassal state of the United States, yet somehow the dynamic is exactly the opposite. The U.S. is, or at least it strives to appear to be a vassal state of Israel under the command of that foreign government and subject to all its whims and dictates.
Two weeks ago, the U.S. sent a letter to Israel demanding that it allow more humanitarian aid to enter northern Gaza and threatened a possible arms embargo if Israel did not complete those tasks within 30 days, conveniently scheduled for after the election. Recently, the U.S. government – through its State Department spokesman Matthew Miller – emphatically condemned any attempt by Israel to implement legislation banning the UNRWA, the only organization capable of delivering food, water and medication to dying Gazans. “The U.S. would not appreciate and would strongly oppose any such law,” said Miller.
Within two hours of Miller's directive not to ban that organization, literally two hours, the Israeli Knesset proceeded to overwhelmingly ignore what he said and approved the exact law the U.S. warned them not to. As for that letter dressed up as an ultimatum, not only has Israel made no moves or even gestures to pretend to comply with the U.S. demands, but they have also gone in exactly the opposite direction: squeezing and suffocating Gazans in the north even more than before the U.S. wrote that letter by blocking virtually all humanitarian aid from entering that region and reaching them.
There are many other similar examples where the Israelis openly and seemingly with glee mock, ignore and violate every request or demand that the United States government makes. Whether these are really cases of Israel deliberately humiliating the United States or whether it is the United States pretending to impose demands on Israel that the Israelis openly flaunt only because the U.S. privately tells them they don't really mean it, the U.S. continues to be humiliated in front of the world, making all these statements and decrees – and even declaring “red lines” – seem worthless, because they are. It again raises the question of who the real vassal state here is.
And then finally: the worst time to do journalism, at least for me – and I've been saying this since I began – is the weeks heading into a national election. Many people will not pay attention to anything, no matter how consequential other-than-election-related news, while there is not all that much to say to satisfy people beyond either openly cheering for a given candidate or endlessly analyzing poll numbers – none of which we like to do here. Nonetheless, there is actually a national election, at least formally, that will be held in 5 days, so we decided to take a bit of time to give you our analysis of what is happening, though I don't have any more idea than anyone else as to who will win. But we'll give you some thoughts about what seems to be taking place.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
