Joe Biden's Betrayal and Mike Johnson's Fury

If you, like me, are from Louisiana and know a bit about Mike Johnson, one of the words that best describes him is "unflappable." He rarely shows that he's upset, and in fact, seems downright positive in almost every interaction you see him in - even when he's chastising antisemites on college campuses.

For those of us who have observed him for a while, you know that when he does get angry, he probably isn't showing the same level of rage you and I would feel in his position. So, when there is a headline at POLITICO that reads "Johnson slams Biden’s ‘senior moment’ on Israel aid," I'm going to stop and take notice.

RedState has covered, from multiple angles, Joe Biden's interview with Erin Burnett, and his comments on cutting off aid to Israel - specifically in the form of specific bombs and other precision weapons - have made official what we have long suspected: Joe Biden is letting his policy be dictated by election results from Dearborn, Michigan.

Biden Interview With Erin Burnett Is Hilarious Exercise in Childish Denial and Straight-Up Falsehood

Keep in mind what these weapons are actually for: Minimizing civilian casualties. If such weapons allow for precision strikes, that eliminates more troop movements, more engagements, and more loss of civilian lives. It also means fewer Israeli deaths in combat. By eliminating those weapons in our aid to Israel, the Biden Administration is creating a situation where more lives will be lost, not less.

Joe Biden is once again wrong on the issue - which, as Robert Gates would tell us, is par for the course when it comes to Biden and foreign policy. The fact that he is doing so because of political considerations, rather than any practical ones, is even more absurd. The man believes he is going to rescue the young vote for his reelection campaign by deferring on aiding Israel, as though there aren't a host of other reasons to dislike him. The fact is, he is never going to win young voters on this issue, because no matter what he does, he is seen as complicit in Israel's "genocide."

But that is among young voters who care about this. Recent polling suggests college campuses are filled with students who aren't aligned with what the protestors are doing, just as American cities are filled with people who aren't in the Muslim communities in Michigan that voted against him in the state's primary.

The editors at National Review are brutal in their morning op-ed:

While this would seem contradictory on the surface, one line from the speech makes it clear where Biden is coming from. “Never again,” Biden told the audience, “simply translated for me, means ‘never forget.’”
[...]
By pausing the transfer of bombs to Israel — with a clear threat of halting further aid — Biden is not only letting Hamas off the hook, but also emboldening Iran and its other terror proxies.
During his Holocaust remembrance speech, Biden talked passionately about not allowing hate to fester. Yet hate, by itself, would not have caused the Holocaust. Plenty of groups have hated each other at many points in history without it leading to horrors on the scale of the Holocaust. What was different was not just that Nazis hated but that they had amassed incredible military power, and that by the time the world rose up to stop them, it was too late for millions of Jews. Jews, meanwhile, were helpless, with no means to defend themselves.
Under Biden’s formulation — in which “never again” means “never forget” — simply talking about the horrors of October 7 in the past tense is sufficient. But if “never again” actually means “never again,” then it requires supporting the world’s only Jewish state in its efforts to destroy the terrorist group that is responsible for that horrific attack so that it can never massacre Jews again.

This betrayal of Israel also brings me back to the current House Speaker.

“And my reaction honestly was: Wow, that is a complete turn from what I have been told even in, you know, recent hours,” Johnson told POLITICO. “I mean, 24 hours ago it was confirmed to me by top administration officials that the policy’s very different than what he stated there. So I hope that’s a senior moment.”

To go back to the beginning of this column, Mike Johnson is relatively unflappable. So, when one of his first quotes in a story is saying Biden had a "senior moment," it's worth noting.

“I hope — I believe he’s off script,” Johnson said. “I don’t think that’s something that staff told him to say. I hope it’s a senior moment, because that would be a great deviation in what is said to be the policy there.”
Earlier in the day, before Biden’s CNN remarks, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin confirmed that withholding arms is a developing part of the administration’s Israel policy. He testified to a Senate panel that a bomb shipment was being withheld out of concern of Israel’s plans to invade Rafah, the southern Gaza town where more than 1 million Palestinians have settled following attacks elsewhere in the territory.
Asked if he felt betrayed by Biden’s statement, Johnson said, “I got to say that I do, yeah.”

We're talking about a guy who referred to a vote to oust him as "Just another Wednesday" in Congress. A guy whose own party is openly talking about ousting him. He's a Speaker with a one-seat majority and both sides breathing down his neck.

And yes, through some modern miracle, he got enough votes from both sides to pass an aid package that, among other things, included the very aid to Israel the Biden administration is now threatening to withhold. Of course, Johnson is a bit miffed... publicly, at least. Privately, I assume he's filled with as much rage as the rest of us, if not more given that he literally put his job on the line to get that aid passed in the first place. If that's how Biden, who he had to work with to get the aid passed, is going to treat him after that, what motivation does Johnson have to do that ever again?

Yes, yes, I know some of you are screaming "Well what did he expect?!" And that's absolutely fair. Perhaps he shouldn't have expected any different, but when you have someone passionately begging for you to work with them on something, only for them to then renege on their end of it because of (very dumb and mathematically inaccurate) political reasons, that will piss anyone off. Every time, the frog is upset that the scorpion stung it. Not because the frog is an idiot, but because the frog was a creature that took the scorpion at its word. The scorpion's nature remains the villain of the story.