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Good lord, these people are nuts.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

In my day, never was longer.

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

T R E 4 5 O N

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Oh FFS you might as well trust a 6-year-old with a flamethrower.

Republicans: The threats are dire, but my tickets are non-refundable!

Nothing worth doing is easy.

Hot air and ill-informed banter

Dead end MAGA boomers crying about Talyor Swift being a Dem is my kind of music. Turn it up.

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They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Lick the third rail, it tastes like chocolate!

This really is a full service blog.

Fuck these fucking interesting times.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Quote tweet friends, screenshot enemies.

The choice is between normal and crazy.

The frogs are rarely mistaken.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Foreign Policy Open Thread: Jared Kushner Will Bring Peace to the Middle East…

Foreign Policy Open Thread: Jared Kushner Will Bring Peace to the Middle East…

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… shortly after I win the Miss America contest. For which, let it be specified, I do not meet the basic requirements. And also, I wouldn’t enter if I *did*. So, context!

The Oval Office squatter and his Repub enablers don’t care about what happens in the Middle East, and even if they did, they haven’t the ability to do anything about it. But if they can skim some cash from the petrostate oligarchs for putting on a heavily PowerPointed dog & pony show — about the money, that, they care.

Long information thread here:

Reader Interactions

68Comments

  2. 2.

    TTT

    Israel offered to create land links between WB and Gaza as part of 2-state offers in 2000, 2001, and 2008. That element, at least, is not so unthinkable.

  3. 3.

    Another Scott

    Reuters:

    More than half of the $50 billion would be spent in the economically troubled Palestinian territories over 10 years while the rest would be split between Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan. Some of the projects would be in Egypt’s Sinai peninsula, where investments could benefit Palestinians living in adjacent Gaza, a crowded and impoverished coastal enclave.

    The plan also proposes nearly a billion dollars to build up the Palestinians’ tourism sector, a seemingly impractical notion for now given the frequent flareups between Israeli forces and militants from Hamas-ruled Gaza, and the tenuous security in the occupied West Bank.

    It’s a scam. $2.5B/yr for Palestine is nothing. Paying off her neighbors is stupid and won’t help the Palestinians.

    Donnie and Javanka apparently want the oil-rich Arab states (or at least the ones that they’re friendly with) to set up a slush fund for real-estate developments which no doubt would include some sort of Trump-branded thing. Which, no doubt, would be in area outside Gaza and the West Bank.

    Why they think anyone in the region who has an actual stake in the future of Palestine (and Israel) would be fooled by this is (yet another) example of how dangerous hubris and narcissism is.

    Grrr….

    tl;dr – What, me cynical?

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  5. 5.

    Martin

    Thankfully morally bankrupt people like Kushner are almost universally incompetent. That’s why people like Mitch McConnell stand out so clearly.

  7. 7.

    Ruckus

    But this plan doesn’t suggest a new approach. It is ahistorical. It suggests a repetition of failed past attempts…

    Nothing like digging up the oldies but when you dig up a song that was never higher than 95 on the charts and was only there for 1 week, you really haven’t accomplished anything. And it’s worse when all you do is reissue the tune with Capt Kangaroo singing. Cause he’s been dead about as long as this plan has been.

    @gene108:
    Attempting to find ways to profit. Like everything else he does, always looking in the wrong place, with the wrong people, with the wrong project, with the wrong, well, everything. He’s a doofus dipshit, always has been always will be. And all his friends are no better, possibly far worse than he is.

  8. 8.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Another Scott:

    1. This “plan” is moronic.
    2. Is there not a copy editor at Reuters who knows the difference between “between” and “among”?

  15. 15.

    Ken

    Suddenly my proposal to grant US citizenship to all the Palestinians and relocate them to one of our sparser Midwest states doesn’t look so idiotic. Only by contrast, of course.

    (Hey, Baud – looking for a Secretary of State?)

  20. 20.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Steve in the ATL:

    . Is there not a copy editor at Reuters who knows the difference between “between” and “among”?

    That literally makes me as crazy as “an historian” makes you.

  22. 22.

    Jeffro

    @Ken: I’d like to second that proposal. I had thought about offering the Israelis the same deal, but F that…let’s just let the Palestinians out of there and leave the Israelis wondering who they can abuse next.

  26. 26.

    Jay

    Acts of Hope: Challenging Empire on the World Stage
    By Rebecca Solnit

    What We Hope For

    On January 18, 1915, eighteen months into the first world war, the first terrible war in the modern sense — slaughter by the hundreds of thousands, poison gas, men living and dying in the open graves of trench warfare, tanks, barbed wire, machine guns, airplanes — Virginia Woolf wrote in her journal, “The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.” Dark, she seems to say, as in inscrutable, not as in terrible. We often mistake the one for the other. People imagine the end of the world is nigh because the future is unimaginable. Who twenty years ago would have pictured a world without the USSR and with the Internet? We talk about “what we hope for” in terms of what we hope will come to pass but we could think of it another way, as why we hope. We hope on principle, we hope tactically and strategically, we hope because the future is dark, we hope because it’s a more powerful and more joyful way to live. Despair presumes it knows what will happen next. But who, two decades ago, would have imagined that the Canadian government would give a huge swathe of the north back to its indigenous people, or that the imprisoned Nelson Mandela would become president of a free South Africa

    http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/677/rebecca_solnit_on_hope_in_dark_times

  30. 30.

    Steve in the ATL

    @SiubhanDuinne:

    In Flanders fields the poppies blow
    Between the crosses, row on row,
    That mark our place; and in the sky
    The larks, still bravely singing, fly
    Scarce heard amid the guns below.

    Really, John—are there only TWO crosses in Flanders Fields? I don’t think so!

  34. 34.

    Steeplejack

    @Jay:

    On January 18, 1915, eighteen months into the first world war [. . .].

    Only off by a year, but who’s counting?

  36. 36.

    Another Scott

    @Steve in the ATL: rofl.

    Lennon, (or McCartney, (or Harrison, (but not Ringo))) was asked in an interview about some particular words in a lyric and what it meant, and he said “oh, it just made it rhyme better”.

    And poets get to break the rules. It’s a law!!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  37. 37.

    Steve in the ATL

    @Another Scott: so we should just let our children listen to “lay [sic] lady lay [sic]” or “lay [sic] down sally”? Or Jim Morrison’s willful and malicious failure to use the subjunctive case in “light my fire”—“if I was [sic] to say to you…”? Won’t anyone think of the children?

  40. 40.

    Jay

    28 July, 1914.

    18 January 1915.

    Grammar Nazi or Nazi?

    Phone lines are open.

    Text 54321 for yes, 54322 for no.

    Text charges are $2.53, per response.

  42. 42.

    Steve in the ATL

    @NotMax: I’ve had the Green Tea Kit Kat. I strongly suggest we keep the gap as wide open as possible. Domo arigato!

  48. 48.

    Another Scott

    A decent history Twitter thread by Kevin M. Kruse:

    […]

    Kevin M. Kruse Verified account @KevinMKruse
    Jun 19

    These are not figures any politician should be reminiscing about.

    But Biden’s point was that he could make friends with people who didn’t share his values.

    They were in his caucus, as he noted, so it wasn’t “bipartisanship.” But working with them *was* an ideological stretch.

    […]

    Listen to the American Conservative Union (@ACUConservative), the conservative lobby which rated House and Senate members each year based on their votes.

    Like the ADA ratings for liberals, these are a great gauge for how conservative a legislator was regarded at the time.

    […]

    Here are the ACU’s Senate ratings for Biden’s first year in office, 1973.

    Eastland and Talmadge scored 77 and 76 (24th and 25th most conservative).

    Meanwhile, Biden scored a 9 (74th most conservative, between Ted Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey).

    […]

    But, to be fair here, Biden’s point — that he worked with people with whom he ideologically disagreed — is born out by the record.

    Eastland and Talmadge were fellow Democrats, yes–but at the conservative end of the party’s diverse caucus, while Biden was at the liberal one.

    […]

    Being able to work with people one disagrees with is important (AOC is working with Ted Cruz on various things). But even if Biden has a decent point to make, he has a habit of doing so in the most tone-deaf way possible (“he didn’t call me ‘boy'”). :-/

    FWIW.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  50. 50.

    Steeplejack

    @Another Scott:

    In all the talk about “Biden’s point—that he worked with people with whom he ideologically disagreed”—I have yet to see anyone, including Biden, detail specifically what work got done. Just showing up at the office together every day? Naming a few post offices?

    Mitch McConnell is probably happy to go that far today.

    But, of course, the real issue is how do you work with people on big, existential issues on which they are utterly intractable? That is the situation we face now, not some gauzy Chris Matthews past where Tip and Ronnie got together over a drink and sorted things out.

    ETA: Also, Biden seems to have slept through most of Obama’s two terms in office, if he thinks it’s just a matter of “working with people with whom you disagree.”

  52. 52.

    Another Scott

    @Steeplejack: We have a recent example of just such an issue.

    The JCPOA with Iran.

    Wasserman-Schultz.house.gov:

    […]

    Mr. Biden then told the gathering that he had spent his entire political life standing up for the state of Israel. But he also said he had decades of experience negotiating arms control agreements, and that he had little patience for those who argued that the United States should never negotiate with its adversaries.

    Mr. Biden spoke about several details of the agreement and addressed head­on many of the arguments posed by the deal’s critics, including those aired in TV ads.

    There is “one thing I want to set straight because I’ve seen the ads,” Mr. Biden said. “That is the idea that we can’t inspect military facilities — it’s simply not true. Let me get this straight. Look at me. As one person once said, ‘Read my lips.’ Not true,” he said to laughter. “We can, with cause, inspect any place in Iran if we believe there is illegal activity taking place.”

    Mr. Biden’s final, final, final point in his speech was that he had traveled 992,894 miles as vice president and met “virtually every major leader in the world.”

    “As I make my case on what U.S. policy should be, you know the one question I get: ‘Can you do it? Your government is dysfunctional. Can you deliver?’ ” Mr. Biden said. “Just imagine what would happen to our influence, guys, when the president cannot deliver on an agreement that the world — this is not a bilateral agreement — that the world thinks is important.”

    Citing efforts to punish Russia for its annexation of Crimea and support of separatists in eastern Ukraine, to get the Europeans to continue their support for NATO, and to reassure the Japanese and South Koreans about China’s ambitions in the South China Sea, Mr. Biden said it was vital for the world to be able to take the American president at his word.

    “Doesn’t mean we should be for a bad agreement,” Mr. Biden said, “but it is, it is, it is implicated in whether or not the United States of America’s Congress puts us in a position to make sure this deal goes into effect. Amen.”

    […]

    Good points all around. We know that Donnie and his minions will never be able to reach an agreement with Iran (or North Korea) because they (and we) know that Donnie lies and does not feel constrained by any sort of agreement that the US has in place now.

    Working with people you disagree with is the only way problems get solved in politics. Biden’s right there. And the US has had decades of disagreements with Iran (and the DPRK). But there has to be a willingness on the other side to work on the issue in good faith, and Biden knows that the GOP has not done that on important issues in many, many years. So, harking back 45+ years ago to some time when he could have civil discussions with unreconstructed racists isn’t really relevant to where we are now.

    And he knows that – or should.

    (sigh)

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  53. 53.

    Steeplejack

    @Another Scott:

    The JCPOA with Iran.

    Kind of a weak example. Biden was vice president, not a senator, basically talking up the agreement to a private audience and (allegedly) trying to influence Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who was reportedly “undecided.” Yee-haw.

    But there has to be a willingness on the other side to work on the issue in good faith, and Biden knows that the GOP has not done that on important issues in many, many years. So, harking back 45+ years ago to some time when he could have civil discussions with unreconstructed racists isn’t really relevant to where we are now.

    Here you are exactly on point.

  54. 54.

    Steeplejack

    Damn it. One of those third-tier cable channels got me hooked for a few months on ancient reruns of Patrick McGoohan in Danger Man (pre-Secret Agent) and pre-Mrs. Peel Avengers. I gained a great appreciation for Honor Blackman as Catherine Gale.

    Now they’ve disappeared, with no good replacement. I am bereft. Guess it’ll be Lupin the Third on Cartoon Network.

    ETA: Where is everybody?

  60. 60.

    Viva BrisVegas

    Jared’s peace deal won’t fly.

    It still leaves some Palestinians living on Palestinian land.

    That won’t be good enough for the only stakeholders in this that matter.

  61. 61.

    Zinsky

    Since Kushner is Jewish, he is not familiar with the verse, but one of my favorite New Testament passages is I Timothy 6:10 which begins, “the love of money is the root of all evil”. No other Bible verse explains as much of Donald J. Trump’s black soul as these words. Money will never solve an intractable problem like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – it will only create more evil.

  62. 62.

    Gvg

    Actually, this agreement reminds me of a sort of variant of the saying, “if you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” I would rephrase it as, “if you are a real estate developer, everything looks like it needs a development deal”. Jared, and possibly Trump, just don’t understand any other kind of deal. This is useless, of course.
    Fundamental principle, hire subject experts and listen. I’d like to end our American normal policy to end appointing Ambassadors from big donors to flatter their egos. I want all of the jobs to go to professionals. Boy are we going to have a foreign policy mess to sort out after Trump. And frankly, most of our citizens still don’t understand what the damage is costing us, so they won’t see the need for groveling and are going to hinder repair, even if they understood enough to hate Trump for domestic reasons.

  66. 66.

    大芒果

    @Ken:
    back in the 70s I suggested moving al of Israel to Southern Az…just peal off the top 2 inches of soil , move it to the desert and viola Holy Land…..

  67. 67.

    Mike in DC

    What I suspect the “plan” is:
    1. Israel annexes 40+% of the West Bank
    2. No land swaps
    3. Palestine gets token economic assistance
    4. No formal Palestinian state or nationhood, just a continuation of the status quo, with Israel controlling checkpoints and all borders
    5. No promises that Israel won’t annex additional territory in the future

    Basically, what any other people would react to by preparing for war.

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