AG Report 8.28.2024
Press Glazing of Harris Campaign Reaches Absurd Levels
It’s been 5 weeks since Joe Biden exited the race after concerns about his cognitive decline reached a fever pitch. You’d think the press would have learned from that experience and sought to reinforce their duties of properly informing the public, but the opposite has happened. Most mainstream outlets have doubled down on pure partisan hackery while cheering on the idea of misleading and hiding things from the public as a respectable political strategy.
After being anointed by party leaders despite no primary, Kamala Harris has refused interviews for over a month. Her campaign has made it clear that running on vibes is an intentional strategy, pretending her administration’s record over the last 3.5 years doesn’t apply to her, avoiding any controversial policy statements, and issuing constant policy flip-flops via campaign sources without explaining them.
Instead of confronting Harris about her disregard for the process and refusal to honestly answer tough questions, the media has resorted to cheerleading for and parroting Harris campaign lines. It’s gotten so bad that they’ve even defended the strategy of avoiding questions and refusing to provide details. They’ve also praised the strategy of misleading the public about a possible Beyonce appearance to get more viewers for the DNC convention.
The open partisanship has reached unprecedented levels and will do permanent damage to the reporters and outlets that are engaging in it.
Anti-Israel Commentators Expose Themselves Yet Again
There’s a large group of anti-Israel activists who pretend their objection is over how Israel is conducting the war in Gaza. Much like Hamas uses civilians as human shields, these commentators often use civilian deaths as a shield for their support for Israel’s enemies.
Former MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hassan is a rather prominent example of this. In theory, Hassan argues that he would not be as upset if Israel just targeted terrorists and prevented attacks against civilians. By that logic, if Israel had learned about the 10/7 attack in advance and struck Hamas sites to prevent it, they would have celebrated such an action. After all, this would have prevented not only the deaths on 10/7, but also many Palestinian deaths in Gaza. Yet their reaction to events last weekend makes it clear that they’re not being honest in their criticism.
Since October 8, 2023, Hezbollah has launched over 8,000 rockets at northern Israel, forcing tens of thousands of Israelis to leave their homes in the north. Hezbollah, much like Hamas, is a terror proxy for the Islamic Republic of Iran and acting on their orders.
Despite the constant rockets and damage being inflicted, Israel is doing everything possible to avoid a full-out war with Lebanon, which would lead to countless Lebanese civilians being killed. Instead, they have focused on targeted counterterrorism strikes against Hezbollah weapons sites and senior leadership. In other words, Israel is taking the exact type of defensive measures that those who object to Israel’s strategy in Gaza want.
As part of those efforts, Israel assassinated senior Hezbollah terrorist Fuad Shukr on July 30. Shukr was not only responsible for many of the attacks on Israel but also played a major role in the 1983 Beirut Barracks Bombing that killed 241 American military personnel. The United States also had a $5 million bounty on his head. For nearly four weeks, Hezbollah made daily threats to launch a major retaliatory strike, which created a major risk of escalation.
Israeli and U.S. intelligence identified that the retaliation was set to occur last Sunday morning. According to reports, Hezbollah made plans to launch thousands of missiles at Israeli city centers at 5 am that morning. In a major intelligence coup, Israel instead launched a massive pre-emptive strike, with 100+ planes targeting dozens of sites from which the missiles were set to launch less than an hour later. Such an operation requires incredible intelligence and capability.
Hezbollah still proceeded with their attack, claiming to have launched 300+ rockets. But they mostly hit open areas or were intercepted. If Hezbollah had been successful, they could have overwhelmed the missile defense systems and killed hundreds or thousands of people. This would have required Israel to invade Lebanon to clear out areas near the border and caused massive Lebanese civilian casualties. All of this was prevented by Israel’s pre-emptive strike focused exclusively on terrorist sites.
To save face, Hezbollah still issued statements claiming their operation was a success and limited, but the reality is that they took a major loss. This is something everyone should have celebrated, especially those allegedly concerned with protecting civilian lives. Yet anti-Israel commentators like Hassan were instead upset. They framed Israel’s pre-emptive action as an escalation, even as Hezbollah itself downplayed Israel’s success and rejected further escalation.
It shows once again that the major gripe of anti-Israel critics is not how Israel is conducting the war in Gaza, it’s that Israel is defending itself at all. That’s something everyone should keep in mind when they see commentary from bad-faith actors.
Biden Vacations