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Thanks To Trump, Netanyahu Rides to Washington in Triumph

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Say what you will about Donald Trump, he has forever changed the rules governing Israel’s conflict with its Arab neighbors.

Trump has reportedly decided that the United States will recognize Israel’s sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights, an 1,800-square kilometer slice of territory that was conquered by Israel in the June 1967 war. The announcement may come when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits Washington next week, where he will appear live at the annual AIPAC confab.

Israel’s occupation of the Golan Heights in 1967 brought the Israel Defense Forces to within 69 kilometers of Damascus and sent more than 100,000 Syrians fleeing from the vast volcanic plateau that had been their home.

In the first hours of the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, surprise Syrian advances led Israel to briefly consider using nuclear weapons to stop what some Israeli leaders considered to be a threat to Israel’s very existence. By the war’s end, Israel had recovered the plateau and the UN had unanimously reaffirmed “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” in Security Council resolution 338.

On that basis, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated a separation of forces agreement, which has kept an uneasy peace for more than four decades. The 1974 agreement locked in a ceasefire, limited Israeli and Syrian forces, and created a UN-patrolled buffer zone that separated the antagonists. The United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) still mans observer posts along the frontier.

The international community, Washington included, refused to recognize a unilateral Israel declaration in December 1981 annexing the Golan. It thus had limited practical effect, on the ground or diplomatically.

But Israel remained in control of the plateau and continued to populate the region with more than 20,000 settlers residing in more than 30 settlements.

All diplomatic efforts by the United States and others since have pushed for an Israeli withdrawal back to the “June 4, 1967 border,” that is, Israel’s retreat from all territories it forcefully occupied in 1967. Notwithstanding its annexation, Israel too accepted this principle. But the inability to agree on the details of withdrawal was the prime obstacle to an agreement on the “land for peace” model of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.

Israel continued to engage diplomatically with Syria until the second term of the Obama administration. Obama’s failure to close the file on Israel’s occupation of the Golan and the West Bank then opened the door to Trump’s diplomatic gate crashing.

Trump’s blockbuster announcement itself will have little immediate practical effect. The renewal of diplomacy towards a Syrian-Israeli peace agreement has never been a more distant prospect. Israel will continue to settle. And Syria will see these moves as yet another indication of Washington’s inveterate opposition to Syrian and Arab independence.

Recognizing Israel’s land grab not only destroys the diplomatic system governing Israel-Syrian relations, it also undermines a basic principle of the current crisis in Syria, where U.S. support for Syria’s territorial integrity will be subject to ever greater doubt. Trump’s decision will not go unnoticed in Ankara, which is now occupying parts of Syria, and looks to expand its occupation east of the Euphrates. Vladimir Putin, casting a wary eye on Crimea, annexed five years ago, can be forgiven a wry smile.

Netanyahu, like all world leaders, had reason to wonder whether the mercurial Trump would be an asset or a threat. That question has, at least for the time being, been answered.

Amid the Purim holiday season that celebrates the downfall of the Persians who persecuted the Jews, Trump appears as a messiah ready to answer Netanyahu’s most fervent prayers. His secretary of state, who has moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, now breaks another taboo by visiting the Western (Wailing) Wall in East Jerusalem, creating a potentially lethal diplomatic and religious fait accompli.

Is there any aspect of Israel’s right-wing agenda that the Trump administration has not accommodated?  

Netanyahu, in talks with Pompeo, boasts that there are “no limitations to Israel’s freedom of action” in the campaign against Iran’s presence in Syria.

Indeed, Trump has adopted Bibi’s narrative on Iran without restraint. Recognition of Israeli sovereignty on the Golan is a reflection of the shared anti-Iran campaign more than any other consideration.

This alignment of views is not limited to the rarified diplomatic arena. Trump and Netanyahu are close political allies, determined to cement their bond. In the weeks before the April elections in Israel, Trump is giving Bibi a real lift. Netanyahu gets to bask in the praise bestowed by Pompeo. He accompanies the secretary of state to the Wailing Wall and celebrates the opening of the rebranded U.S. embassy in Jerusalem. No one in Israel will dare raise their voice to say that the U.S. action on the Golan is a bad idea. Ditto for Jerusalem.

Bibi is prepared to return the favor when he visits Washington next week, assisting Trump in his efforts to turn Jewish-American voters into Trump Republicans.

With his moves on the Golan, Trump sees himself as acting alone and above the world stage. But the myopic assumption that Washington can command both its policy and those of its antagonists is not only misplaced but dangerous.

It is reckless to assume there will be no price to pay for destroying the international consensus established in 1974, a consensus that admittedly has failed to achieve a peace agreement but which nonetheless has provided a critical foundation for the diplomatic system that has kept an uneasy peace for almost 50 years. As a consequence, the long-agreed upon view that such moves could only be addressed in the context of a final deal between the parties has been turned on its head. Rather than reflect the outcome of agreement, America’s moves risk undermining any prospect of agreement. Nobody knows what diplomatic system—other than the improvised patchwork produced by the American fait accompli—will emerge in its place.

Geoffrey Aronson is founder and chairman of The Mortons Group and a non-resident fellow of the Middle East Institute.

New Mexico town becomes 'sanctuary city for unborn'…

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U.S. town becomes ‘sanctuary city for the unborn’

ROSWELL, New Mexico, March 15, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – The City Council of Roswell, New Mexico passed a resolution Thursday declaring its jurisdiction to be in support of “fetal life,” something local pro-life activists say makes Roswell a “sanctuary city for the unborn.”

In a seven-to-one vote, with one council member abstaining, the City Council passed Resolution 19-28, which declares “that innocent human life, including fetal life, must always be protected and that Society must protect those who cannot protect themselves.”

The resolution also states that the City Council declares “its opposition to any diminution by the New Mexico Legislature of the limitations on abortion” and “honors the rights of healthcare providers to object on moral grounds to performing abortions and opposes any regulation or law seeking to violate that right.”

This week, the New Mexico Senate was considering a pro-abortion bill that would have forced doctors to commit abortions. It also would have repealed old, unenforced sections of the law criminalizing abortion – preparation for a possible overturning of Roe v. Wade. New Mexico is home to an infamous late-term abortion facility, Southwestern Women’s Options, and has some of the loosest abortion laws in the country. Southwestern Women’s Options commits abortions throughout the third trimester of pregnancy.

In a surprise pro-life victory, though, the New Mexico Senate rejected the bill 24 to 18. Eight Democrats joined 16 Republicans in voting against it.

The Roswell resolution cites the Declaration of Independence’s listing of life as the first unalienable right. It also cites a paper from the American College of Pediatricians stating:

The predominance of human biological research confirms that human life begins at conception-fertilization. At fertilization, the human being emerges as a whole, genetically distinct, individuated zygotic living human organism, a member of the species Homo sapiens, needing only the proper environment to grow and develop. The difference between the individual in its adult state and in its zygotic state is one of form, not nature.

“The protection of human life is important to the people of the City of Roswell,” the resolution says.

A Pox on the Houses of Trump and McCain, Huxleyan Media, and the Myth of “The Vietnam War”

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Photograph Source DVIDSHUB • CC BY 2.0

You’re going to have to shut up or I’ll call the police…Get out of here you low-life scum.”

— John McCain’s statement to peace activists calling for the arrest of epic war criminal Henry Kissinger, January 29. 2015

Yes, Trump is Disgusting

Is it disgusting and pathetic that the mentally deranged President of the United States wakes up early in the morning to engage in hours of adolescent Twitter warfare with his personal and political enemies?

Is it ridiculous and pitiful that the tangerine-tinted Twitter-addict continues to attack the late United States Senator John McCain and McCain’s family months after McCain has been buried?

Is it sickening that the primary McCain sin Bad Grandpa Trump can’t seem to forgive is the former Senator’s failure to join Trump and the Republicans in kicking millions of ordinary Americans off the health insurance rolls?

Is it true that, as, George Conway – one of Trump’s recent Twitter enemies – tweets, Trump is a textbook case of malignant narcissism?

Is it creepy that Trump calls Kellyanne Conway, George’s wife and a top Trump counselor, “honey” and that Mrs. Conway sides with her demented boss over her husband in the Trump-Conway Twitter feud?

Is it distressing that the man with his fingers on the nuclear codes feels compelled to call George Conway “Mr. Kellyanne” and a “husband from Hell” – and to Tweet this about Conway: “I barely know him but just take a look, a stone-cold LOSER.”

The answer to each of these questions is yes, of course.  It’s all totally contemptible and yet darkly risible.

A Note on Infantilization

Even Aldous Huxley and Neal Postman would blush over the childish Kardashian nothingness that has infected the reigning U.S. media-politics culture. Did you know that Governor Hickenlooper took his mother to see the movie Deep Throat? We found that out on CNN two night ago.

Soon we will learn that Robert Mueller wears adult diapers. Trump will Tweet about it.

I am waiting for CNN eyes to spin and MSDNC tongues to wag when this Tweet comes out from Trump’s White House bedroom: “We will soon release report on our EXHAUSTIVE investigation of Rancid Robert Mueller, the DIAPER–wearing job killer who colluded with China, Kenyan socialist Obama, FAKE hero McCain, and Crooked Hillary to create the climate hoax and send rapist Caravans led by the Central Park Five and MS-13 to invade our country!”

The nation is being infantilized at an increasing rate.

McCain: A War Criminal and a Warmonger

But I digress. Let’s shift from Huxley to Orwell for a moment. Here’s something arguably even more disgusting and pathetic than Trump’s insane and ridiculous online conduct and his recent Twitter feuds with the House of McCain and George Conway: the constant and ritual outraged repetition of cable news commentators’ and bipartisan politicos’ claim that John McCain was a great “national war hero” who rose to “defend his country” during “The Vietnam War.”

This is a persistent and recurrent line at CNN, MSNBC (MSDNC), “P”BS, N “P”R, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, and all down the corporate media feeding chain.

And it is complete historical bullshit.  John McCain was a war criminal who happened to get shot down while trying to kill Vietnamese human beings who had the audacity to fight for national independence and social justice in their Third World nation during the 1960s.  He was captured after he lost control of his plane while participating eagerly as a fast-living and reckless U.S. Navy flyboy – the privileged offspring of a top Navy Admiral – in the mass-murderous U.S. “crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (as Noam Chomsky accurately described “the Vietnam War” at the time).

McCain flew 23 missions in which he participated in the bombing of civilians.  He was likely responsible for the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of Vietnamese.

He would later publicly describe (as late as 2000) the Vietnamese military personnel who saved his life and then (doing their national duty every bit as much as the North American rebels who fought the British Redcoats in the 1770s and 1780s) captured and interrogated him as “Gooks.”

McCain continued to be a war criminal after he entered public office. The “Maverick” would kill many more people around the world indirectly, as a Congressman in the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate, than he did as a bomber.  A rabid imperialist, Representative and Senator McCain:

+ championed the vicious and arch-reactionary Islamist mujahedin in Afghanistan, as part of the U.S. effort to disastrously collapse the Soviet Union.

+ enthusiastically supported the murderous right-wing Contras and right-wing death squads across Central America, many of whose leaders were trained in torture in the “School of the Americas” (now called WHINSEC).

+ strongly backed U.S. economic sanctions that killed at least a million Iraqis including over 500 000 children under the age of 5, according to a 1995 United Nations report.

+ championed the criminal U.S. bombing of Serbia.

+ eagerly pushed for and backed George W. Bush’s monumentally criminal and imperial invasion of Iraq on thoroughly false pretexts.

+ voted for legislation that helped make torture seem legal to Bush.

+ cultivated Al Qaeda allies and affiliates in Libya and Syria.

+ fervently backed massive U.S. arms sales to the butchers atop the Saudi Kingdom, perpetrators of horrific war crimes in Yemen (the poorest country in the Middle East)– crimes he perversely denied.

+ was a booster of Al Qaeda allies and affiliates in Libya and Syria.

+  met with jihadi rebel groups, posing for photos with militants, called them his “heroes” and advocated for more material support and resources for their terrorist organizations.

+ wooed and abetted neo-Nazis in Ukraine, consistent with his service on the board of the World Anti-Communist League – an organization that included fascists, neo-Nazis, and anti-Semites.

Senator McCain never saw or smelled an imperialist war or adventure he didn’t love. He contradicted his repeated declared opposition to Pentagon waste by advocating giant wars that poured billions of taxpayer dollars into wasteful death and destruction.

“There were few figures in recent American life,” Max Blumenthal wrote last year, “who dedicated themselves so personally to the perpetuation of war and empire as McCain… He was uniquely ruthless when it came to advancing imperial goals, barnstorming from one conflict zones to another to personally recruit far-right fanatics as American proxies” and turning his “Senate office [into]…a clubhouse for arms industry lobbyists and neocon operatives.”

There was No “Vietnam War”

McCain bombed Vietnamese men, women, and children to “defend our country” during “the Vietnam War? Not true. There was no Vietnam War.  There was a U.S.-imperial war on Vietnam and Southeast Asia – a remarkably one-sided and prolonged slaughter in which world history’s most powerful industrialized state and military empire pummeled a small peasant nation and some of its neighbors with awesome force for more than a decade. The United States was NOT under Vietnamese assault during the 1960s and 1970s.  The notion that it was is Orwellian nonsense. As Frank Joyce wrote two and a half years ago on AlterNet:

“Did Vietnamese troops invade the United States? Did the Vietnamese air force spend years spraying millions of tons of Agent Orange onto forests and crops in California and Ohio? Are there pictures of naked girls fried with napalm in Alabama that we haven’t seen? Were hundreds of thousands of civilians in Canada and Mexico killed to pursue Vietnamese military objectives in the U.S? Did Vietnamese troops massacre women, old people and babies and dump their bodies into mass graves in Missouri, Montana and Michigan? The United States government invaded Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos; not the other way around. Before that, the U.S. provided financial and military support to the French war to keep Vietnam a colony. Any suggestion that the U.S. was somehow the victim of the war is not just wrong, it is yet another example of the moral confusion for which our nation pays a far greater price than we are willing to admit.”

Indeed. The United States lost 58,000 soldiers in an imperial invasion that killed as many as 5 million Southeast Asians between 1962 and 1975. The massive U.S. assault laid waste to vast stretches of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. It spread disease and birth defects across the region. Just one joint CIA and U.S. military program alone, Operation Phoenix, killed 40,000 South Vietnamese, equivalent to more than two-thirds of the total U.S. body count in Vietnam.

Vietnamese freedom-fighters did not kill a single American solider – much less a U.S. civilian – on U.S. soil.  They killed imperial U.S. invaders in noble and frankly heroic defense of their homeland and revolution.

All the Americans who died in the so-called Vietnam War died in Southeast Asia. They’d been sent to the region to crush a national independence movement and a social revolution. Washington was determined to prevent the “threat of a good example” (as Noam Chomsky has rightly described it) – to stop a small and poor, peripheral nation from successfully developing outside and against the control and rules of the U.S.-managed world capitalist system.

The U.S. armed forces weren’t sent to defend the American people.  Their mission was to stop the anti-imperial threat by any means the Superpower deemed necessary, including “bombing [the Vietnamese] back to the Stone Age” (Curtis Lemay).

A Class Warrior for the Rich at Home

McCain’s malevolence wasn’t limited to the infliction of misery abroad. He also managed to assault U.S. citizens at home by pushing for  regressive and plutocratic neoliberal policies that matched his status as a silver-spooned multi-millionaire. His ruling class corruption earned Senate censure for his role in the “Keating Five” savings and loan scandal in 1989.

McCain’s upper-class pedigree and loyalties were evident in how the supposed people’s “maverick” supportedTrump and the GOP’s giant 2017 tax cut for the rich in a nation where the top tenth of the upper 1 Percent already had as much wealth as the nation’s bottom 90 percent.

John McCain enlisted eagerly in the class war at home. He fought in that war for the wealthy Few – for his own class.

John Fogarty and Credence Clearwater Revival had wealthy nationalist warmongers like John McCain in mind when they wrote their classic, class-conscious antiwar anthem “Fortunate Son”:

Some folks are born made to wave the flag, ooh, they’re red, white and blue. And when the band plays ‘Hail to the Chief. they point the cannon at you.

Some folks are born silver spoon in hand, don’t they help themselves. But when the taxman comes to the door Lord, the house looks like a rummage sale.

Some folks inherit star-spangled eyes. ooh, they send you down to war. And when you ask ’    em how much should we give. they only answer ‘more, more, more

It ain’t me… I ain’t no millionaire’s son.
It ain’t me… I ain’t no military son, son,
It ain’t me… I ain’t no fortunate one, one
It ain’t me … I ain’t no fortunate son

“Get Out of Here You Low-Life Scum”

Many thousands fewer Americans and countless fewer Southeast Asians would have died in the “Vietnam War” but for Henry Kissinger’s work to undermine the Lyndon Johnson administration’s peace negotiations with Hanoi (see Greg Gandin’s 2015 book, Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Controversial Statesman).  Kissinger’s interference helped Richard Nixon win the U.S. presidency in 1968 and helped prolong the American onslaught.

Kissinger was only getting started on a blood-drenched career that would include monumental war crimes and other soul-chilling transgressions against humanity in Cambodia, Laos, Chile, Argentina, East Timor and elsewhere.

Recall how then Senator McCain referred to Code Pink activists who had the historical memory and decency to call for Kissinger’s overdue arrest during a U.S. Senate hearing on “global security” in January of 2015. The great “national hero” McCain called the peace protesters “low-life scum.”

“You’re going to have to shut up or I’ll call the police,” McCain said. “Get out of here you low-life scum.”

Low-life scum: I’m guessing that’s pretty much how McCain felt about the “Gooks” he murdered and maimed from the air before he thankfully crashed.

Beyond False Dichotomy and Twitter Distraction

To Hell with Donald Trump, of course.  He isn’t just (yes, George Conway) a malignant narcissist [1]. He’s also “an aspiring fascist leader” (in the words of Counterpuncher Eric Draitser) and a leading national and global symbol of white supremacist racial identity.

But to Hell also with the imperialist, racist, and classist legacy of John McCain and with the unelected and interrelated dictatorships of wealth and empire for which both major U.S. parties and all the major U.S. corporate media stand along with the surviving House of McCain. To Hell with the Fake Resistance, the Inauthentic Opposition that opposes Trump in the name of the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, and the American Empire.

A pox on all their ruling-class houses!

Oh, By the Way

A pox also on the Huxleyan distraction of Trump’s Twitter tiffs and the endless reporting on his mendacity and corruption by a corporate media that can’t report and comment adequately on the single greatest issue of our or any time: the capitalogenic climate catastrophe, which raises the specter of human extinction[2] in the not-so distant future.

Oh, that.  Yeah, by the way.  Maybe it’s time for the “mainstream” war and entertainment media to pull its head out of the asses of Donny DumpsterFire&Fury, the Outraged McCains, and the Fighting Conways et al and develop the basic natural  intelligence to take a serious and honest look at the real world, which edges closer to irreversible tipping points of environmental collapse with each passing day. The Earth is our witness.

Help Street keep writing here and/or here.

Endnotes

[1] In her eerie defense of Trump’s escalating assault on her own husband, Kellyanne Conway said this to Politico: “He [Trump] left it alone for months out of respect for me. But you think he shouldn’t respond when somebody, a non-medical professional accuses him of having a mental disorder? You think he should just take that sitting down?” Did she mention “medical professionals”? Mrs. Conway may or may not be aware that more than two dozen psychiatrists and mental health professionals dedicated an entire book to making the water-tight case that Donald Trump is and has long been a textbook example of Narcissistic Personality Disorder: Bandy Lee and Robert Jay Lifton et al., The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President

[2] Please join The Extinction Rebellion before it’s too late.

Radio Atlantic: President Trump’s Post-Mueller Corruption Problem

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When elected, most presidents either sell their assets or put them in a blind trust. Isolating presidents’ financial interests from their time in office has been a norm for decades: from Jimmy Carter giving up his peanut farm to Barack Obama liquidating his assets.

But Donald Trump is not like most presidents. He’s said he won’t divest from his businesses, even though his real-estate deals around the world open up countless opportunities for conflicts of interest. His unprecedented decision might violate the emoluments clause of the Constitution—a rule that’s existed longer than the American republic, but that has never before faced scrutiny in the courts. On Tuesday, a panel of Fourth Circuit judges heard an emoluments case, and its decision appears likely to send the fight to the Supreme Court.

Alex Wagner talks to Joshua Matz, a lawyer for the plaintiffs in that case, a Georgetown University law professor, and a co-author of the January 2017 Atlantic story “Emoluments: Trump’s Coming Ethics Troubles.”

Listen for:

  • The strange gifts throughout history that have defined the emoluments clause

  • Why Matz considers the solution that President Trump’s lawyers came up with “malarkey”

  • What could happen in these cases, now that the Mueller report has been submitted

Voices:

A Veteran’s Message to Congress: ‘I Am Not Honored. I Am Disgusted.’

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It’s Time for U.S. Troops to Leave Afghanistan

In an essay on TheAtlantic.com last week, Senators Rand Paul and Tom Udall urged members of Congress to support their bipartisan joint resolution, the American Forces Going Home After Noble (AFGHAN) Service Act. The bill, they wrote, would “return our combat forces home from Afghanistan in an orderly and responsible way, while also setting a framework for political reconciliation in Afghanistan without a permanent U.S. presence.” It would also provide a $2,500 bonus to members of the military who have served in the Global War on Terror.

“Congress must step up and step in to ensure that another generation of Americans is not sent to fight a war with no end in sight,” Paul and Udall wrote, “especially when there is no military solution to the challenges facing Afghanistan.”

Members of our Congress once again demonstrated that they do not understand our country’s veterans. Last week, Senators Rand Paul and Tom Udall published an article promoting their new bill, the AFGHAN Service Act. In it, the senators commend the patriotism and bravery of the many men and women who served in Afghanistan for the past 18 years, including 2,300 fallen and more than 20,000 wounded service members.

They write:

For their heroism and valor, our legislation says “Thank you” by ensuring we recognize and honor that service. Drawing from the billions saved by ending the war in Afghanistan, our bill provides a $2,500 bonus within one year to all the members of our volunteer military who have served in the Global War on Terrorism.

As one of the more than 20,000 veterans wounded in Afghanistan, I want to be clear: I am not honored. I am disgusted.

The senators’ bill embodies a sentiment that makes the military-civilian transition so difficult for veterans. Society assumes that those of us who went over there, saw horrible things, endured terrible pain, and who now struggle to function as normal human beings will be “honored” by lip service and a check in the mail. It is insulting.

As a veteran, I want to see my brothers and sisters in arms get the help they need. I want people to understand the sacrifices they made and the many battles they face. I want to see people show respect for veterans more than twice a year, on Veterans Day and Memorial Day. I want our country to honor its commitment to veteran services.

Instead, we have veterans struggling to access quality health care and benefits. Veterans coping with depression, substance abuse, and PTSD without adequate support. Veterans without meaningful employment, or housing. Veterans who fear being stigmatized for talking about their military service with others.

If Senators Paul and Udall really want to honor our service members, here are a few things they could do with that money instead:

Even if ending the war in Afghanistan is inevitable at this point, Congress can do far better for our veterans than what is being touted as “honor” in the AFGHAN Service Act.

Nathan Jerauld
U.S. Army Veteran, Bronze Star and Purple Heart Recipient
Cicero, N.Y.

Yale students aren't surprised their school was at the center of the college admissions scandal

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When the FBI went public with Operation Varsity Blues and exposed a network of wealthy families cheating the college admissions system, many Yale students weren’t surprised to discover that their school was among those at the center of the scandal.

A wealthy Yale dad allegedly tipped off investigators. A Yale soccer coach accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from families eager to secure a spot at the Ivy League school, according to prosecutors. The charges confirmed what almost everyone already suspected: Our higher education system is no meritocracy.

VICE News met with Yale undergraduate students from higher and lower income backgrounds as they processed the news during their spring break.

“I think people with a lot of money leveraging that to get into Yale was not surprising at all,” said Lily, a Yale senior from California who identifies as lower income. “But the extent of it is shocking. I think at first I was very like ‘Oh, I’m so unsurprised.’ And then the next day I was like ‘No, I’m actually really angry.’ I think the anger took a while because it was so funny.”

For students from more affluent backgrounds, the scandal made them reflect on the difference, if any, between the alleged fraud in the case and the socially accepted practices wealthy families use — like donating money and buying campus buildings — to boost their children’s’ chances.

Ethan, a freshman and legacy of Yale, argued that donations have some benefit, at least. “I think there is a moral difference between perhaps donations versus bribery,” he said. “The school benefits and for other kids tuition. It might pay for new programs or something that can benefit people. Bribery doesn’t go to the school.”

This segment originally aired March 22, 2019, on VICE News Tonight on HBO.

Joe Biden’s Half-Baked Political Gimmicks

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Joe Biden knows what you’re thinking. He has seen the stories, too.

He knows he’s too old: 76 years old today, and 78 on Inauguration Day, 2021. He knows that, as a senator representing Delaware for nearly half a century, his extensive ties to the banking, credit, and financial industries are liabilities in an increasingly populist Democratic Party. He knows that his treatment of Anita Hill during Clarence Thomas’s confirmation hearings, and the dozens of photographs of him being handsy with women over the years, are being scrutinized in a new light. And he knows he was on the wrong side of the crime debate.

Biden, who has yet to announce his candidacy for president, reportedly is weighing two solutions to the problem of his unsavory record. One is to pledge to leave office in 2021, at age 82. The other is to name Stacey Abrams, a black woman 31 years his junior, as his running mate early in the race. Such a “big play,” in the New York Times’ words, “would send a signal about the seriousness of the election, and could potentially appeal to both liberal activists and general-election voters who are eager to chart the safest route toward defeating President Trump.”

But the fact that Biden is even considering these moves only underscores his innumerable flaws, rather than addressing them.

It’s easy to see the appeal of a one-and-done presidency. Biden’s age, like that of the 77-year-old Bernie Sanders, undoubtedly would be a concern for some Americans, given the erratic and seemingly cognitively impaired septuagenarian currently in the White House. Promising to serve only one term could reassure voters concerned about the fact that Biden (and, for that matter Sanders) would become America’s first octogenarian president before the end of his second year in office.

And teaming up with Abrams, who energized the party during an unsuccessful bid for governor of Georgia, could show he has evolved on race and women and potentially inoculate himself from further criticism. It would be a salve, as New York’s Jonathan Chait argued, for “Biden’s cringe-inducing and sometimes ghastly history of retrograde positions on segregation and criminal justice,” would energize Democratic voters, and “would make Biden’s race feel more serious.”

But it’s worth taking a moment to revisit that cringe-inducing and sometimes ghastly history. Biden, as Ryan Cooper wrote in The Week, was one of the Democrats who “pushed the party away from Civil Rights.” Biden embraced anti-integration measures early in his career in the Senate, becoming what Politico termed “a leading anti-busing crusader” in the 1970s. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Biden was one of the most vehement anti-crime crusaders in the Senate, pushing increasingly draconian punishments. Biden “wasn’t trying to compromise with the Republicans” on crime, Ta-Nehisi Coates told New York magazine recently, but “to get to the right of Republicans.”

Biden did so proudly. “Quite frankly, the president’s plan is not tough enough, bold enough, or imaginative enough to meet the crisis at hand,” he said in 1989 about a crime bill being pushed by President George H. W. Bush. “In a nutshell, the president’s plan does not include enough police officers to catch the violent thugs, enough prosecutors to convict them, enough judges to sentence them, or enough prison cells to put them away for a long time.” In the Senate, Biden backed mandatory minimum sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, civil forfeiture, and the death penalty. He bragged that one Democrat-backed crime bill in 1992 did “everything but hang people for jaywalking”; two years later he would be a principal author of the 1994 crime bill that exacerbated mass incarceration.  

“There’s a tendency now to talk about Joe Biden as the sort of affable if inappropriate uncle, as loudmouth and silly,” sociologist Naomi Murakawa told the Marshall Project in 2015. “But he’s actually done really deeply disturbing, dangerous reforms that have made the criminal justice system more lethal and just bigger.” Biden recently apologized for this stain on his record, saying “I haven’t always been right. I know we haven’t always gotten things right, but I’ve always tried.”  

Biden also recently suggested that he owes an apology to Anita Hill for his handling, as chair of the Judiciary Committee, of her accusations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas. “Anita Hill was vilified when she came forward by a lot of my colleagues, character assassination. I wish I could’ve done more to prevent those questions and the way they asked them,” he said on the Today show last year. But Biden, as the Boston Globe’s Joan Vennochi noted, “also posed questions designed to humiliate her” during her testimony. By failing to call favorable witnesses or solicit affidavits from experts on sexual harassment, Biden was as responsible for Hill’s “character assassination” and Thomas’s place on the Supreme Court as anyone. “He did everything to make it be good for Thomas and to slant it against her,” Georgetown University law professor Susan Deller Ross observed to the Times in 2008.

Biden may feel he owes Hill an apology, but he hasn’t actually given it. “It’s become sort of a running joke in the household when someone rings the doorbell and we’re not expecting company,” Hill told Elle last fall. “‘Oh,’ we say. ‘Is that Joe Biden coming to apologize?’”

These are just a few of the myriad sins that Biden and his advisers hope to neutralize with a novel campaign strategy. But these moves would likely backfire. Announcing that he will only serve one term will make Biden seem weak and not up for the job, reminding voters yet again that he would be by far the oldest president ever. Announcing a running mate nearly two years before an election, as an attempt to cover up past failings, will only draw more attention to them. And if you’re a career-long politician who can’t run on your record, then why are you running at all?

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