This is utterly shameful. Tonight, the two candidates who are running for governor of Virginia debated each other on live television. Abigail Spanberger, the Democrat candidate, was finally confronted…

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Foreign Affairs Thank God There’s a Deal Peace, even a cold peace, in Israel–Palestine is the stuff of presidential legacies. Credit: Anas-Mohammed I hadn’t been very optimistic. I’m still not, in the long run; I think misery and stupidity are the rule in human affairs. Even in the short term, I am nervous that it could blow up—the hostages won’t be returned, or Netanyahu will cave to the right of his coalition and continue the bombing. But relief, even hope: That’s the feeling of the day.  A bad peace is often better than even a “good” war, and fewer and fewer people have seen this as a good war—even those (like myself and this magazine’s founder) who thought Israel’s response after October 7 was natural and inevitable. There will be resentments on both sides, grumbling that the agreement gave up too much for too little. That’s the nature of deals.  Yet this deal doesn’t actually seem so very bad; it may in fact be something close to the best politically viable. One point that bears repeating is that most of the people of Gaza were children or unborn when Hamas took power in 2006, and most opinion-polling in Palestine is conducted by people with an axe to grind one way or another. The stipulated period of technocratic rule followed by fresh elections is a real and plausible chance to purge the past. Hamas has not just been corrupt and murderous; it has been a bad government for Palestine, and has provoked an immense amount of human suffering among the people it notionally represents. It doesn’t seem too rash to bet that the Palestinian people would like a change of pace.  Speaking of elections, the prospect of the collapse of the Israeli governing coalition is not unwelcome. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has governed by political expedience more than prudence even in the opinion of many Israel boosters. It is likely that even a more hardline leader like Naftali Bennett who does not have Netanyahu’s peculiar political vulnerabilities (particularly the threat of going to jail) would pursue more rational, less risky policies. For the second time, I have to say viva la democracia. Peace will also allow the recovery of Israel’s relations with its immediate neighbors, which had been flying higher than ever at the outbreak of the war. The brutal fact of the Middle East is that Israel is small and its neighbors are large; Israeli technical prowess can go only so far in the face of raw human mass. Some sort of tolerable modus vivendi, which has been growing unstable under the weight of the rage of the Arab street, holds the most hopeful future for Israel.  Conversely, having peacekeeping forces in Gaza will incentivize those neighbors to maintain order in Palestine, rather than using the Palestinian cause as a sharp stick for poking Israel without taking any appreciable steps to relieve Palestinian suffering. (If you were the president of Egypt and responsible for keeping peace in the Strip, after the daring and even desperate measures Israel has taken in the past two years against its perceived enemies, would you really risk some bloodthirsty Islamic Jihad acolyte launching a rocket eastward on your watch?) Nobody expects an outbreak of warm, brotherly feeling in the Middle East; memories there are long. But a chilly alignment of incentives among better strangers will keep more people alive than the alternative.  Peace also makes it significantly more likely that the U.S. will finally begin to retrench from the Middle East; no matter how desirable in a vacuum it is just to leave the neighborhood, it is politically difficult to be seen cutting and running from chaos. (Ask Joe Biden how his withdrawal from Afghanistan went.) We may well be constrained in other respects—for example, by the festering Iranian situation, which seems unlikely to be resolved easily or soon—but Israel perceiving itself as being relatively more secure will make it easier to broker an exit without the Israelis blowing up whomever we’re negotiating with, which is becoming a challenging trend in our diplomacy. I have been rough on the administration lately, and I do not intend to credit this peace against whatever fresh idiocy might be lined up for us. But it is nevertheless an impressive achievement. If they give Trump the Nobel for this one, I won’t even laugh. I will doubtless be punished for this outburst of optimism, but for now, well, it’s a good day. The post Thank God There’s a Deal appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Democrats Take a Trick From the Tea Party And combine it with the classic “Republicans are after your healthcare” line. There are at least two layers to the government shutdown now about to enter its second week. One is the standard fight between the two major parties, which has defined most government shutdowns since Bill Clinton was forced to share power with a Republican-controlled Congress in 1995. The second is a battle within the Democratic Party, with disenchanted progressives simultaneously pressuring and revolting against an ossified leadership class they perceive as constantly losing to President Donald Trump. If the latter sounds familiar, simply swap out progressives for disenchanted conservatives, Democratic leaders for the Republican establishment, and Trump for the former President Barack Obama under the Tea Party more than a decade ago—really until that rebellion was more or less brought to heel by Trump. Rank-and-file progressives believe, like their conservative counterparts before them, that they belong to a party led by people who are too old and too nice, who play by the rules while the other side breaks them. This leadership legitimacy crisis isn’t the only reason Democrats are polling abysmally as the first year of Trump’s second term winds down, but it’s an important one. It is also a good reason for Republicans to take only limited comfort from the Democrats’ bad poll numbers, which will probably be less bad in a binary choice election. The second, more familiar shutdown dynamic is Democrats hoping to beat Republicans in a partisan political fight using what little leverage the party has against the GOP “trifecta”—a term like “gaggle” and “pool spray” that political reporters force us to use because they hate us and want us to sound ridiculous—of the House, Senate, and White House. Even this part of the shutdown slog is a little different than usual, because the Democrats are up to the Tea Party’s old tricks. They are trying to extract policy concessions from the dominant Republicans while voting against “clean” continuing resolutions—both the adjective and noun here are further proof the political class hates us—and shutting down the government.  No, they don’t want spending cuts. But they are in effect trying to govern by virtue of having more senators than is necessary to sustain a filibuster, a golden Ted Cruz oldie in terms of legislative strategy. But the terms of the partisan disagreement are much more conventional: Democrats say they are for healthcare and Republicans are against it. Specifically, some COVID-era Obamacare premium subsidies that were supposed to be temporary are set to expire and Democrats want to extend or even make them permanent. The pandemic as we knew it is over, and both bills that willed these particular subsidies into existence were passed through reconciliation, which requires them to lapse. Obamacare is a mess that did not improve most of the underlying problems with the healthcare system as it existed before the Affordable Care Act became law. But it did increase coverage, even if much less affordable than advertised, and it is easier to pile subsidy upon subsidy than for Republicans to feasibly get to better-functioning healthcare markets. Fifteen years into Obamacare, Republicans are still trying to beat something with nothing, which worked in the Clinton years but has failed since. Both of these political conditions suggest the shutdown will last at least a little while longer. The ascendant progressives want a fight and Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer are afraid not to give them one. Democrats also believe, and some Republicans appear to agree—Majorie Taylor Greene, anyone?—that they have the upper hand on the healthcare argument. Even with a diminished legacy media, there are a lot of voters who find it easier to believe Republicans will take their healthcare away than that the Democrats want to shut the government down, even though procedurally speaking, that’s exactly what most Democratic senators did. (Democrats were also responsible for the longest shutdown on record in 2018–19.) But Democrats don’t love government shutdowns and some who have gone along with this one were queasy about it. It’s one thing to block Trump’s border wall. It’s another thing for the party of government to keep the government shut down indefinitely, egged on by its members who most passionately believe in activist government.  That’s why the group of Republicans who seem least spooked about shutdown politics reside in the White House. Unlike jittery House GOP lawmakers in swing districts, they aren’t up for reelection in 2026 (or, depending on which baseball caps you believe, ever). They doubt Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will forever leave their precious government programs to the tender mercies of Russ Vought. Remember Project 2025? Both sides are waiting for the other to cave. If history is any guide, eventually someone will.   The post The Democrats Take a Trick From the Tea Party appeared first on The American Conservative.

Wrote liner notes for their album and turned up to gigs The post The forgotten ‘90s rock band Thomas Pynchon was a ‘groupie’ for first appeared on Far Out Magazine.