Just listened to my audio here and have to note an error: US/Biden administration officials are in fact involved in ceasefire talks between Israel and Hamas leadership. I said otherwise, incorrectly. I stand by the rest of what I said here.
And just to be clear, I am not here or anywhere else advocating for (or against) any candidate changes (though I do think the Dems are nuts to stay with Biden) or for voting for anyone in particular (or for not voting at all) this fall. I am aligned with the Revcom slogan: “No Facist Trump, No Genocide Joe, the Whole Damn System’s Got to Go!” This core alignment with a call for what Dr. King (no communist) called near the end of his life (in his last essay) “the real issue to be faced…the radical reconstruction of society itself” will not be altered by the (I think real) possiblity that the capitalist-imperialist Dems could replace Biden with a younger and more alert and telegenic imperialist atop their presidential ticket.
BTW just saw this old (2021) Jeremy Scahill piece at The Intercept:
‘JOE BIDEN FIRST ran for U.S. Senate in 1972 as the Vietnam War was entering its waning years. He was not a tenacious anti-war voice, nor did he embrace the anti-war movement, saying he was “not big on flak jackets and tie-dye shirts.” Biden described himself at the time as being married, in law school, and wearing sports coats. He professed a “lack of moral outrage” at the war. He described walking through campus with law school friends one day and seeing other students occupying office buildings in protest. “They were taking over the building,” Biden said. “And we looked up and said, ‘Look at these assholes.’ That’s how far apart from the anti-war movement I was.” In Biden’s words, “The war had just been a tragic mistake based on a faulty premise.”…Biden, who was of draft age during the war, received five student deferrals. A spokesperson said in 2008 that Biden was “disqualified from service because of asthma as a teenager.” In his own words, Biden did not oppose the immorality of the war, which took the lives of as many as 2 million Vietnamese civilians and 58,000 U.S. soldiers, as much as he believed that it was “lousy policy.” Other political figures from his generation “felt more strongly than I did about the immorality,” Biden said. “My view of it was it didn’t make sense.” ’
So, Biden didn’t think the mass-murderous US “Crucifixion of Southeast Asia” (Chomsky’s excellent phrase at the time), which killed 3 to 5 million people by some accounts, was a “moral” problem, just a strategic one. He considered those students who militantly opposed the criminal US imperialist war on moral grounds here in the USA to be “assholes.”
Which reminds me: I should have said in this audio that Biden has helped purvey the big Ziofascist lie claiming that the remarkable student protests against his sick backing of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza this and last year have been driven by “antisemitism.”
The Lancet analysis of more than 186,000 killed in Gaza since last October is here.
URL: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext
Joe Biden: A Genocidal, Jelly-Brained Liar, Corporatist, and Imperialist