A lot happened this week. US forces attacked rebels in Yemen, a country I doubt many Americans could find on a map or distinguish from a list of made-up countries. It all has something to do with the Gaza War, our regional rivalry with Iran, and shipping in the Red Sea, so it’s not a situation Biden can easily explain to the American people.
A partial government shutdown is scheduled for Friday, unless Congress passes another continuing resolution. It doesn’t look like anyone learned anything from the last two brushes with a shutdown in September and November. Speaker Johnson is in more-or-less the same position Speaker McCarthy was in September, and is doing more-or-less the same things that caused MAGA extremists to kick him out.
The Gaza War continues, but there’s a new wrinkle in the politics: South Africa has gone to the International Court of Justice and accused Israel of anti-Palestinian genocide. If that Court would happen to rule against Israel, it has few mechanisms for enforcing its judgment. But it would be a huge propaganda blow against both Israel and its supporters in the Biden administration.
The Trump trials continue. The civil fraud trial in New York wrapped up, and we await a decision from the judge. (It’s a bench trial, so there’s no jury.) The second E. Jean Carroll defamation trial starts tomorrow. The first trial (at which Carroll was awarded $5 million in a judgment Trump is appealing) was about statements he made about her after leaving office. This is about statements he made while he was president; the case was slowed down by his claims of presidential immunity. Meanwhile, we await a federal appeals court’s decision on whether Trump’s presidential immunity will derail the federal case against him for his January 6 conspiracy.
But the featured post this week is my review of Tim Alberta’s new book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, which critiques the Trump take-over of the Evangelical movement from the inside. That should be out before 9 EST. The weekly summary will cover everything else, and I’ll try to get it out by noon.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
Yemen and Sanaa is one of the oldest countries on earth tracing its founding to the son of Noah some 12,000 years ago.
Islamic terrorism supported by Iran like Iran supports Hezbollah and Hamas is the readon why peace accords like Abraham Accords have not been implemented as Biden gave cash to Iran and took the others off the terror list and now we face an expanded war to be sorted out that started like Xi threatening Taiwan Putin Ukraine and NK Kim us – all who challenge Biden policies but laid quiet 2016-20
This is the kind of alternative-reality foreign policy perspective that could only come from marinating oneself in Faux Noise propaganda in the service of trying to paint Trump as some sort of strong man foreign dictators fear and Biden as some sort of weakling, when, in fact, foreign leaders openly laugh at Trump (when they’re not simply telling him what to do) and have known Joe Biden from his lifetime of focus on foreign policy as a serious, highly experienced, and savvy expert who isn’t anything like the gullible stooge his predecessor was.
Donald Trump was a whipped puppy in Helsinki and saluted the dictator of the most brutal regime in the world in Kim Jong Un after NK nuclear missile tests in 2017 and ’18 pushed tensions to the brink. Xi continued his policy of insisting on a unified Taiwan and expanding claims (and building artificial islands) in the South China Sea while Trump saddled American consumers with a range of tariffs on Chinese goods and then lied about who was paying for them.
And Biden didn’t “give Iran cash”. As part of a prisoner exchange, $6 billion in Iranian state assets long frozen in a Qatar bank were released. Those funds were never accessed, and were refrozen after October 7th.
As for Russia, Putin used his control over Trump (he almost certainly has serious kompromat on him) to markedly weaken NATO while he prepared for his invasion of Ukraine and shored up his political control of countries like Belarus.
The world is vastly better place with adults in charge of American foreign policy, led by Joe Biden. Not only is Trump an existential threat to American democracy, he’s an existential threat to democratic alliances around the world and the countries that participate in them.
> Yemen and Sanaa is one of the oldest countries on earth tracing its founding to the son of Noah some 12,000 years ago.
This is mythology, not history.