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With three days until Election Day, is there still enough time for the Democrats to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in Michigan?
Cenk Uygur's Rebellion PAC dropped a controversial new ad supporting the Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El Sayed featuring a grocery store conversation about Israel. Some are calling it the most antisemitic ad of all time:
Now, I don't think this is a very good ad. It's poorly acted and a bit too on-the-nose, but accusing the political opposition of wasting money on unpopular special interests while regular citizens deal with rising prices is probably the most common political maneuver in modern American politics. Apparently, this ad is at the center of a possible last-minute fracture of the Michigan Democratic coalition.
Haley Stevens, El Sayed's defeated challenger in the dem primary, released an incredibly passive aggressive statement preemptively thanking El Sayed for his "Expected Condemnation of Antisemitic Campaign Advertisement". Amusingly, long-time TYT host Ceng Uygur has been demoted to "Hasan Piker's Uncle". In case you didn't catch the subtext, this is a threat to pull her support (as explained by Haley Stevens's fiance on TMZ for some reason?). Abdul appears to have no intention of disavowing the ad.
This doesn't seem to have affected El Sayed's chances in the prediction markets. He is now up to an 80% chance to win, but I guess we'll see what happens at the black church on Sunday.
Per my LLM of choice, the Cost Per American (Full Footprint) of the Israel war is about $90 to $96 per person to empty Arab territories in the Levant of weapons of medium destruction, logistics chains, and terror cells, while having a surprisingly low death rate of civilians and Israeli soldiers.
Meanwhile the Ukraine war is costing $560.64 per American to empty Ukraine of non-disabled men, freeze the lines of battle as long as the money lasts, and bring the world closer to nuclear exchange. And that’s before counting the higher price of diesel fuel since the refinery bombings.
The faction of conservatives who want Ukraine to concede the lost provinces are counting utilons, and those who want Israel to stop fighting are counting hedons.
Hamas and Hezbollah replenish their numbers. For whatever reason, Israeli ground troops don't seem capable of forcing the issue, their military doctrine is a little like the English chevauchee in the Hundred Years War. They go into Gaza and blow things up, they go into Lebanon and blow up bridges, buildings. But they don't establish a proper, stable occupation government. It's unsustainable to approach these problems just by helping Israel with bombing, or assisting with bombing.
Israel's been bombing and invading Lebanon periodically for decades and it hasn't improved anything.
Furthermore, even if conquest was on the table, it's cucked to support the imperial ambitions of other countries, especially the most untrustworthy. US resources should be spent on US goals, not Israeli imperialism. Sponsoring Israeli ambitions doesn't necessarily help the US, Israel has never sent troops to fight with the US before and they have a very mercenary, unscrupulous outlook (selling technology to China, spying on everyone including the US). They cause all kinds of problems, most recently encouraging the US into a war with Iran.
Ukraine is another example of the US providing costly support with little hope of return. It would've been wiser to not have a Ukraine policy, to do what China does and try to trade peacefully with these far away countries. Do that in the Middle East too!
They have a delicate balancing act they're constrained by: they can't entirely become an international pariah on the level of Iran or NK, and an occupation (and the stories that would come out of a Hamas-influenced Gaza in the middle of an actual occupation and pacification campaign) would be far, far more harmful to public opinion of them in the democracies that matter than a ground offensive and bombing campaign that has, ultimately, killed fewer than one person per bomb dropped.
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Talleyrand once remarked to Napoleon, “You can do everything with the bayonets except sit on them.” Some things you just can’t bomb your way into a solution over, short of nuclear annihilation, and force both parties to lose.
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