August 18, 2024
Special Edition
The Week That Was.
By: Victor Davis Hanson

Part One: The Middle East Cauldron
Israel is certainly in dire straits. The U.S., for the first time since the Carter administration, is now unapologetically anti-Israel. It leverages military aid to Israel to coerce concessions to Hamas and destabilize the Netanyahu government. Washington itself is rudderless, with a debilitated and evaporating president, a puerile and now mute vice president, and a Democratic ticket that is mostly guided by 200,000 pro-Hamas voters in Michigan.

Israel’s own Left is increasingly pro-Biden and supports its interference in Israeli politics and against its own elected government.

Over 100,000 northern Israelis are displaced. Iran is on the verge of attacking the Israeli homelands with supposedly greater force than its prior barrage. Europe, the U.S., and the new China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and Turkey axis all seem oddly aligned in their condemnation of Israel—this after Hamas pulled a medieval slaughter of some 1,200 Israelis in a time of peace.

Yet, all that said, Israel is still in an ascending position.

It has all but destroyed Hamas—its command-and-control leadership, subterranean headquarters, munitions storage and production, and its underground transit system. Almost all the planners of October 7 are dead. Those in hiding likely will be in a few months.

Hezbollah, Iran, and the Houthis are ready to strike in unison but oddly remain in an unforeseen, if temporary, pause phase—and perhaps for a variety of reasons.

One is that the Iran gang is now conducting a full cost-to-benefit analysis. Tehran, especially, is trying to figure out how much damage its consortia will incur if their actions soon match their loud, existential threats.

The rubble of Hamas in Gaza seems a warning of what Shiite Beirut and its rocket depositaries could soon look like—far worse than the flotsam and jetsam of 2006. Or if the logic of absolute war were to follow, Gaza City is an apocalyptic vision of what the critical infrastructure of Iran itself might soon resemble.

The loud and blowhard Houthis, in a nanosecond, lost their port facilities. That represented a hundred-million-dollar infrastructure loss. And their international Western and Chinese patrons may not wish to replace the bombed-out cranes and docks—given the Houthis’ terrorism in the Red Sea’s international maritime lanes.

Iran knows that during its last exchange, a handful of Israeli rockets did more damage than over 320 Iranian counterpart missiles launched at Israel. But more importantly, Israel has now taken out Hamas and radical Islamic terrorist leaders in three major Islamic cities—Beirut, Damascus, and Tehran. Iran and its surrogates know that even the Mossad and the IDF could not have pulled those hits off without inside helpers, who apparently hate their own terrorist leaders more than the Zionist entity. How many more are there, and where and who are they? The theocracy wonders.

The danger now, however, is that Israel’s enemies know that the waning Biden presidency and the 50/50 chance of an even more sympathetic Harris presidency both suggest that there is a window of opportunity for attack between August 2024 and late January 2025—and possibly beyond—when Israel’s traditional patron will not be a reliable counter to Iran.

Moreover, Iran also fears the possibility of a Trump presidency in January 2025. That scenario would likely allow Israel the wherewithal to do whatever it deemed necessary to reestablish theater-wide deterrence—while Washington would warn Tehran to stay out of any Hezbollah-Israeli border war.

Add it all up, and we are entering a dangerous six-month window of war where Israel’s enemies may do something stupid on the rationale that such an opportunity of U.S. disengagement from Israel may not recur.

Part Two: Recalling Coups, Conspiracies, and Cabals
Harris now says she will give one press conference before the conclusion of August. In other words, she admits that since the implosion of Biden and her immediate coronation, she has not spoken impromptu for more than a minute or two—the green zone, on-her-own maximum time her handlers have accorded her on rare occasions.

After that time is up, she is yanked, lest she confirm to the world that she cannot articulate a complete thought, will exhaust her tiny vocabulary in seconds, and thus initiate her loopy, wash/rinse/spin cycle of gobbledygook and accompanying cackling.

Her similar neo-socialist counterpart, Tim Walz, has the opposite problem but the same left-wing solution—muzzling. He is bombastic, a blowhard who cannot stop talking and thus cannot stop fabricating, exaggerating, and sometimes lying about his past and bio. His herky-jerky stage presence suggests more the work of a clown or court jester than the experience of a seasoned governor and politician.

The solution for both is what saved a similarly challenged Biden in 2020—seclusion, or at least teleprompted events without any questioning or impromptu interviews.

This media-Democratic-Orwellian conspiracy of silence is the latest coup in what has been a series of orchestrated cabals and conspiracies (in the words of liberal journalist Molly Ball, who bragged of leftwing successful machinations in 2020 with just those two cabal/conspiracy nouns).

When you add up all these clandestine efforts between 2020–2024, what you conclude is a systematic effort to undermine democracy and constitutional government by the very self-appointed guardians who warned us that “Democracy dies in darkness.” A more appropriate Washington Post motto might now read, “Our version of democracy thrives in darkness; yours will die in light.”

So, ponder these cabals; I count at least seven. Here they are:

1) The initial backroom effort was to erase the 2020 primary frontrunners Sanders, Warren, and Buttigieg and, in their place, anoint Biden, who had not won a single primary.
2) Using a clearly enfeebled Biden as a “moderate” veneer to mask his hard-left handlers’ implementation of a virtual third Obama term.
3) In June 2024, Biden was coerced to hold a historic “stress-test” debate with Trump before both conventions, when neither was yet nominated and in time to remove Biden from state ballots, should he publicly implode on stage: The event was pulled off by Biden baiting Trump to take up his challenge.
4) The coup to remove Biden immediately after his expected disastrous meltdown, given the supposedly hale and dynamic president would likely sink the Democratic Congress and lose the White House: His party nomination abdication was pulled off by threatening Biden with 25th Amendment removal from his very presidency should he not drop his reelection bid.
5) The backroom crowning of Harris as the Democratic nominee—before the convention, without a single won delegate, without ever entering a primary, by nullifying the wishes of 15 million primary voters, and squashing any talk of an open convention or rival candidates.
6) The radical change in a matter of hours of the state DNC/media Orwellian narrative: The fit-as-a-fiddle Biden, his tenure protected by his Spiro-Agnew-like choice of an empty pantsuit Vice President Harris—who was viewed as so incompetent than even an enfeebled Biden was preferable—was suddenly denounced as unfit. He was blasted as selfish for not abdicating hours after his debate meltdown.
7) And then, once Biden did as directed, he was abruptly deified as a Washingtonian in his self-sacrifice and allowed to continue his presidency.

The narrative concerning Harris’s incompetence and embarrassment in a matter of hours was rescripted to a female version of Barack Obama. Note how the consortium brazenly believed the public would not object to these Pravda-like corrections, given that everything they swore was gospel for years went down the memory hole in just hours.

The media/DNC effort to seclude Harris/Walz from public scrutiny, run out the 85-day clock, and install the most radical socialist government in U.S. history: The public will hear as much unscripted from either candidate as Cubans once heard from Castro or Russians from Brezhnev.

Part Three: – Can this Cabal Be Cracked?
Trump/Vance have less than 12 weeks to crack the Harris/Walz/DNC/media/donor/ backroom conspiracy and expose the Democratic ticket as the first Biden administration on steroids. Can it be done?

Debates? Trump is again negotiating for debates. He must avoid the 2020 first debate performance when his disruptions gained sympathy for a bewildered Biden (who was not confused but saved by Trump’s interruptions).

Trump’s second 2020 debate was far more successful, but it took place after 50 million voters had already cast early/mail-in ballots and thus was not entirely advantageous. His 2024 debate destroyed Biden, but Trump winged it and let the ossified Biden self-destruct rather than confront him with detailed counterarguments.

Trump should always avoid generic insults, especially against a black woman: labeling Harris as “stupid,” a “disaster,” “horrible,” or “dumb” tells the audience little. The key is to demonstrate in detail why that is so, e.g.:

Why, Vice President, do you talk of what you will do and what your agenda will be when right now you have half a year left as Vice President with a vanished president—in other words, why not implement your visions now?

Why, Vice President, do you avoid speaking ad hoc to journalists or crowds?

What was the real purpose of letting in 10 million unaudited illegal aliens? Did you care about the people whose small towns were swamped with thousands of illegal aliens without background checks? What did you think defunding the police would accomplish other than to render the poor defenseless?

And so on—in detail.

The audience can assess whether Harris is supposedly “stupid” or not by the caliber of her repartee and answers. And she may prove that if given a chance to debate without name-calling.

Cannot someone ask Harris:

Why are you not proud of letting in 10 million aliens—you seemed to be until this election year?

Why did you drain the strategic petroleum reserve at midterm time and suddenly start encouraging oil and gas pumping—but only at election time?

What was so great about bailing out felonious rioters and defunding the police? Please explain.”

Is there still a despised late Lee Atwater sort in the Republican Party, who is now postmortem roundly trashed (and by just those Obama ethicists who ran the McCain senile ads (and the Romney dog and high-school hazing ads) as too mean?

But in 1988, after Atwater closed a 17-point deficit in less than two months, he was considered a crazy genius for redefining Dukakis, who went from a supposedly apolitical “technocrat,” “professional,” and virtual nonpartisan shoo-in who built the “Massachusetts miracle” into a hard-core leftist whose policies endangered his state, spiked crime, nearly bankrupted it, and did nothing to clean up its pollution.

Note that Obama vastly outspent Romney in 2012 on negative ads that were also much more toxic and effective.

When Obama got through with the aristocratic Romney (who perhaps preferred to lose nobly than win ugly?), the Republican nominee was reduced to a selfish tax cheat (remember also Sen. Harry Reid’s infamous brag of that bogus 2012 tax-cheat campaign lie that “It worked, didn’t it?”).

We saw night after night Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, pushing the wheelchair-bound over cliffs (thereby executing granny). And again, Romney was the scourge who supposedly never talked to his garbage man—as well as having an elevator in his house and whose MS-stricken wife, God forbid, was an elite equestrian.

Add in the debate “moderator” Candy Crawley attacking Romney, hijacking the debate, and becoming an ally of Obama on stage.

Ditto the asymmetry in the earlier 2008 campaign against McCain. Do we remember the planted rumors of his “affair” or the ads suggesting he was demented or that he was a virtual war criminal or a veritable crook?

The point is not to revel in dirty ads but instead not to fall victim to the leftwing pseudo-morality that it abhors negative advertising when, in recent years, it has been the past master of destroying candidates through one-minute hit pieces as a way of redefining their opponents.

As for Trump’s press conferences and rallies:

· Hold them weekly to highlight the differences between Trump and the secluded Harris.
· Ensure they are 25 minutes—not over an hour.
· Avoid all ad hominem insults not just because they are “mean” (Harris routinely calls Trump a “perpetrator”) but because they don’t give any detail to convince the listener why the insult may be true.
· Rallies also should not go over 90 minutes. They should accentuate the positives of what Trump did in the past as a guide to how he will even do better in the future. Don’t waste time settling scores with perceived old tormentors, especially when they are of your own party and have endorsed you.
· Ignore the 2020 election. It is ancient history. Learn privately from it, but don’t publicly beat it to death.
· Don’t brag about crowd sizes. Observers can see the vast assembly without the need to claim that Trump’s rallies are bigger than those once held by Martin Luther King. Demonstrate popularity and superiority without a need to assert it.

History now begins from mid-August to November 5. Anything before then is increasingly irrelevant. Trump must play smart. Given that his dawdling opponents are trying to run out the clock, it is a beat-the-clock 2-minute football drill.

If you do not take an interest
in the affairs of your government,
then you are doomed to live under
the rule of fools.
Plato