November 12, 2024

HOW IT STARTED: Why Isn’t the President Angry?

Obama’s aloofness was practiced, which is why he needed to be instructed out of it. But Joe Biden’s detachment is something else. If his administration’s bottomless tolerance for disruptive and unsympathetic anti-Israel demonstrators and its lopsided fixation with policing the conduct of Israel’s war against a mutual adversary didn’t come off as blinkered before, it most certainly will now. Maintaining that myopia still would reflect a degree of indifference to our shared reality that Americans should not tolerate in our president.

Perhaps the president isn’t indifferent. Maybe he’s simply scared — not just for his own reelection prospects, tenuous though they may be, but of what acknowledging Hamas’s actions obliges him to do. That diagnosis would make sense. His administration has been plagued by fear; fear of Russian escalation if they gave Ukraine the tools to win its war rather than simply not lose, fear of what the Taliban would do if the U.S. blew through a self-set deadline to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan, fear of having to restore stability to a region rocked by Iranian-backed terrorist attacks on Americans and their allies. The White House projects weakness and intimidation, a posture that encourages our adversaries. America’s enemies do not understand where Biden’s lines are, and they will keep testing him until they find one. This must be it.

Biden has shown incalculable patience with Hamas’s dilatory tactics, but that patience should reach its end with the news that it was all a game. The president and the nation he leads have been soundly embarrassed. It’s incumbent on Biden to summon at least some of the rage his countrymen feel and act accordingly. Americans and the world are watching, Mr. President. It’s your move.

—Noah Rothman, NRO, April 11, 2024.

How it’s going: Biden snaps at Israeli reporter in latest terse moment with media: ‘Think you can keep from getting hit in the head by a camera behind you?’

Lame-duck President Biden rounded on an Israeli TV reporter Tuesday after the correspondent asked whether Biden believed an agreement to free dozens of hostages held by Hamas in the Gaza Strip is possible before he leaves office in January

“President Biden, do you think we can get a hostage deal by the end of your term?” Israel Channel 13’s Neria Kraus asked Biden, 81, ahead of his meeting with Isaac Herzog, president of the Jewish state.

“Do you think you can keep from getting hit in the head by a — a camera behind you?” snapped an irritated-looking Biden in response.

Kraus caught the moment on video and appeared to hold back laughter as Biden pivoted to his Oval Office meeting with Herzog, whom he hailed as “a personal friend.”

The New York Post today.

Finally, with less than 70 days left in his administration, Biden found an issue involving Israel to be passionate about: being as crude and insulting to an Israeli reporter as he’s been throughout his career with American journalists — the vast majority of whom have been his party’s operatives with bylines.

Posted at 5:45 pm by Ed Driscoll