Trump’s Economic Approval Rating Drops Below Joe Biden’s All-Time Low

Seems about right. Guess ICE is the ginyu force.

Do you know the ultimate disrespect to the holocaust? Someone growing up on stories of the horrible things their grandparents went through and going: "wow, I can't wait to do that to someone else's grandma!" I grew up on the same horrible stories. And my takeaway was "nobody should ever go through this ever", like a normal human being with a sense of empathy.

Half agree, half disagree. Clinton and Obama did a much better job at pushing against Netanyahu and clearly understood this wasn't a complete friend situation. I think they would've allowed more Palestinian deaths than should've happened, but they wouldn't have gone all out in the way Biden did. The raw amount of ordinance dropped and ridiculous contractor shenanigans allowed afterwards are...so exceptionally bad. I also partially agree that a lot of presidents would've done something near as bad. But this ain't Minority Report or some sci-fi relality where you judge people on the behavior of hypothetical other people. We don't judge people on speculatives of what they might or might not have done. When judging someone's crimes, you don't consult the oracles on what % of people would've followed the same life decisions that caused the crime. It happened under him. He was the one holding the gun at the time who pulled the trigger. So yeah, I judge him for it.

Yeah... Just to disclose my biases here, I have a degree in Middle Eastern Studies and (briefly) lived in the Middle East. When I visited Jerusalem, people heard I was American and bought me shots while blasting "This is America" over the speakers. But I also happened to be traveling next to a dark-skinned American woman in a hijab who I didn't even know that well and *holy shit I saw some things.* I was behind her in line while our friends got through in .05 seconds flat. They kept her waiting without asking any questions for something like \~8h--our classmates had assumed we'd get through the line like they did and went on ahead to the city. We didn't get in until maybe midnight, and there was literally nothing open except for bars. We met our classmates at one and were celebrated as visiting American heroes or some weird-shit. And my hijabi classmate was pulled aside in the bathroom hallway and grilled by a crowd of young men about who she was, why she was there, etc. I grew up mixed race & queer in old Klan country in the Midwest and holy shit...Jerusalem felt like a straight-up sundown Klan town. First gay bar I ever went to was in Jordan run by Palestinian refugees, so you can imagine how I saw red when people were saying "you can't be pro gay rights and pro Palestinian rights". Wonder if anyone told my friends they weren't allowed to care about their families. I also spent a decent chunk of time volunteering with Palestinian refugee schoolkids. Once you physically see Arab Muslims as regular old people, our country's post-9/11 blatant racism becomes painfully unavoidable. The things we do and say about brown Muslims would not be allowed towards any other demographic. I moved to NYC later and was here for the Mamdani election. Holy shit, watching our Dem party establishment stand aside and quietly clap as Cuomo ran the most racist political campaign I've ever seen (and my first degree was in electoral studies, so we watched a lot of racist historical ads) in a way that would've seen someone castigated and ran out of the party on rail if targeted against anybody who wasn't a brown Muslim...holy shit. Long wind-up, but Biden openly embraced the worst of the Kissinger mentality. Where we pursue something with few-to-no political gains to prop up an awful dictator ruining their country (Netanyahu is the worst traitor in Israeli history imo and functionally Hamas's main patron for most of the last few decades)...and we just handwave the downside of killing hundreds of thousands of nonwhite people. I've got old classmates 100x better at Arabic and Hebrew than I am who were chomping at the bit to solve crises like this. But credible reports are Biden put absolutely 0 pressure on Netanyahu his entire presidency when the Netanyahu admin would've run out of bombs in the first few weeks by themselves. And Witkoff, that pathetic, guillible, naive, incompetent real estate slug...was literally the first pressure of any kind Netanyahu got. What a middle finger to everyone who cares about diplomacy. Biden didn't give a shit. When we judge historically bad presidents, we have to weigh two things: the absolute bad and the relative bad of their time. Andrew Jackson was an open genocider at a time open genocide was normalized for many. Biden was a semi-open genocider at a time we thought we'd long evolved as a country/society beyond that, and he brought us back to the bad times we thought we'd outgrown. While also cracking down on freedom of speech to punish anyone who protested his backslide. I was in a health insurance nightmare at the time and my family likely would've died if I'd gotten fired. The Columbia protests were near me and I desperately wanted to join in protesting anywhere it would've been appropriate (I wasn't a student). The way Biden and his DoE/DoJ fueled campus crackdowns normalized a culture of punishing people for protesting what's now becoming the Holocaust of our time. My aunt was at Kent State and had to run for her life, while my whole family marched in the CRM. I see this as a similar fight in our time, but I couldn't go do my part. Because my family would've died if I'd gotten fired. So it felt like the Biden admin and its policy put a gun to my family's head and said "don't you dare object to the Holocaust of our time or else your loved ones get it." F*** him.