Michigan Senator Arthur Vandenberg in 1947 offered the phrase, “Politics stops at the water’s edge.” That certainly used to be practiced by both sides of the aisle, but not so much anymore. It’s hard for this country to stop anything or anyone these days at its edge, especially after 7.5 million people have crossed the border into the country illegally, destined for parts unknown. In times past, there may have been a lot of merit to that sentiment, but those norms, like a lot of other political norms in today’s political climate, have gone out the window.

We have a line of succession in this country. Currently, Joe Biden gets to speak for the United States on foreign policy, and gets to wade into the Hamas massacre into Israel, and when and how Israel should respond, and to what degree the United States will help our most important ally.

Joe Biden is already on the way home after a whirlwind couple of hours spent in Israel ostensibly to show support. Biden was also supposed to go to Gaza and meet with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. But after a Hamas rocket that misfired and hit a hospital, that part of the trip was cancelled. The backup plan to show Biden as the world peace president and a player in the region was to go visit King Hussein in Jordan. That got cancelled, too. So it was just Joe Biden and Bibi Netanyahu, a disastrous visit, and a trip home, complete with a press gaggle aboard Air Force 1 to make things worse.

Ah, the Joe Biden clarity we’ve all come to recognize. It’s one thing when Floyd the Barber in Mayberry sits on the bench outside his empty barbershop on the Andy Griffith Show, talking out loud to nobody. It was funny and cute, because Jews weren’t currently being murdered in a pogrom while Floyd was babbling. We currently are on the precipice of a regional hot war, and Joe Biden is in Israel literally mumbling incoherently out loud.

The other team. In playoff NHL hockey, all sorts of underhanded hits are laid out on the other team’s players. Things are said, gloves are dropped, fights break out, often time, ugly ones. And as soon as the series is over, the teams line up at center ice and shake hands. That’s what teams do.

The president of the United States, in an attempt to fly halfway around the world to show solidarity with an ally that just suffered the worst human atrocity visited on them since the Holocaust, could not even mention the evil by name, and referred to them as the other team, as if they were sports competitors in a game. Do you think anyone who either had relatives killed, kidnapped, raped, beheaded, stabbed and/or shot by Hamas terrorists think this is just a game? Were Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito teammates? It was a fundamentally unserious thing to say. It didn’t get better.

Again, who is he telling his message of “Don’t” to, exactly? The bad team will just know? Does Biden think he is tamping down anti-bad guy sentiment around the world by not naming Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Iran? Is he worried about some global Jewish jihad against Muslims breaking out if he were to name the evil specifically?

It’s one thing for the president to say, “Don’t, don’t, don’t”, in a vague, unspecified way, when his actions demonstrate something entirely different. It appears that the only one Joe Biden is referring to by saying, “Don’t, don’t, don’t, is Benjamin Netanyahu, who is considering when to go into Gaza and root out Hamas once and for all, or whether or not he should preemptively take Hezbollah off the map before the rockets start coming in from the north. Biden’s words of no daylight just aren’t backed up with his actions and intentions. His message of don’t is for Israeli restraint in their necessary response.

There’s simply no way Joe Biden can know that to be true. The majority of Gazans are under 30. Virtually all of them were educated in Gaza schools run by Hamas for the last 20 years that teach Jew hatred as soon as they Gazan kids can walk and talk. There’s no way of knowing how anti-Semitic the average Gazan is. It’s wishcasting at best.

Aboard Air Force 1 for the abbreviated trip home, Biden spoke to the media and exacerbated the conflict by being flippant.

So exactly when is it justified to launch a rocket at a neighboring state? Hamas wasn’t celebrating a holiday with fireworks. Every rocket that was launched was intended to kill Jews. Their incompetence in rocket science ended up killing Gazans instead. But their intent to kill, in this case working in concert with Islamic Jihad, is not in question. Joe Biden is giving Hamas the benefit of the doubt for their intentions. He says they need to learn how to shoot straight. That’s not just nuts, it’s also vile. You’d think someone there to stand with their ally, Israel, would say something like, oh, I’m just spitballing here, don’t shoot rockets in the first place. But that might just be me. It begs a couple of follow-up questions. 1) How many rockets fired at Israel, if they’re constructed and aimed better, are acceptable to Joe Biden? And 2) Shouldn’t Biden be conditioning money going to Iran so that the training and execution of launching rockets at Israel are safer to all those living under the flight path to Hamas’ targets?

If you are charitable, you can kind of try to imagine a scenario where one might understand where Joe Biden was going with this remark. Maybe. Perhaps he was trying to signal that it’s Hamas’ own fault people got killed at the hospital. That’s fine to say, and it also has the added benefit of being absolutely true.

Again, go back to all those who have family either killed in the pogrom of 10/7, or who still have relatives captured and being held as hostages by the Nazis of Gaza. What comfort is Joe Biden providing them by being sarcastic about Hamas being literally the gang that can’t shoot straight?

It’s also factually untrue to say Hamas may not have intended this. The IDF literally has the tapes.

Almost certainly, by the time Biden is on the way home from a briefing with Israel’s prime minister and their intelligence services, he knows Hamas planned this attack and didn’t care about blowing rockets over civilian neighborhoods. Yet he’s still going out of his way to give Hamas the sliver of daylight between the U.S. and Israel they can exploit internationally.

People don’t believe Israel, Joe. People don’t believe you on the account of the Gaza hospital blast. That’s the proposition given to Joe Biden on Air Force 1. Joe Biden could have used that moment for moral clarity. He could have said the people you cite, Peter Baker of the New York Times, are Jew-hating sympathizers. Biden could have mentioned the fact that the New York Times rushed to print the PR wing of Hamas’ version of events without a shred of evidence or skepticism, and the damage that caused around the world. Biden could have said that those who accuse Israel of this attack on the hospital are overlooking the fact that the rockets originated from Gaza, and that they are committing a blood libel against Israel by trying to blame them.

We didn’t get that. Instead, the president of the United States’ message to anti-Semitics and Jew-haters is, “I can understand that.” If I were Israel, that’s not exactly the ringing endorsement of support I’m looking for.

The one thing Biden did say from Air Force 1 was that people are longing for hope, for direction, for some moral clarity. Okay, at least that’s what I think Biden meant when he said this.

So let’s look to American leadership for where that hope might arise, because it’s certainly not with President Joe Biden. After the president in succession, were something bad to happen, Vice President Kamala Harris would be next in line. At Northern Arizona University, the latest stop in Harris’ college Fight For Our Freedoms tour, she fielded a question from an anti-Semitic, Jew-hating, America-hating student, who went on a two-minute screed about how the United States and Israel are committing genocide.

Harris did not cut him off. She let him go, silently nodding along and letting his hatred flow forth uninterrupted. Once he was finished, she thanked him and praised him, offered a word salad that did not mention, let alone rebuke, the blood libel against Israel at all, and thanked him at the end for his leadership. Again, the second in line for the presidency just accepted the premise of a blood libel against our biggest ally, and refused to push back on anti-Semitism on open display, anti-Semitism that was applauded by others in the audience.

By the way, it’s not just me who doesn’t believe Kamala Harris is a serious person when it comes to national security. You know who else believes that? Joe Biden.

This morning, @POTUS and @VP were briefed by their national security team on the latest updates in the wake of Hamas’s abhorrent attack in Israel and the worsening humanitarian crisis in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/pthWb1R7kB

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) October 16, 2023

This is an emergency meeting of Biden’s national security team in the Oval Office specifically discussing what to do about the growing crisis in the Middle East. This was taken by a White House photographer and issued on the White House’s Twitter/X feed. Look real hard to see where Kamala Harris is, because she certainly must be present at such a moment, right? Nah, she’s not there.

Third in line for the presidency, according to the Constitution, is the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Today, Speaker (checks notes, notes we do not have a Speaker, nor are there prospects of having a Speaker anytime soon)…never mind. The Republican Party currently cannot field an elected politician in line of succession to offer moral clarity on Israel and the anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head everywhere. We’re too busy squabbling while the deficit hit $2 trillion dollars this year alone. The Republican Party defers on national security and Jew hatred at this point, apparently.

The fourth person on the depth chart, were something bad to happen, is Washington Senator Patty Murray, currently serving as the Senate pro tempore. She, at least, on the first working day after the massacre on October 7th, offered a statement of unwavering support for Israel. That’s good. Rock solid. Unwavering. Until yesterday.

Protecting innocent civilians has to be a top priority in any conflict—especially the war between Israel and Hamas. I joined my colleagues in calling on the Biden admin to ensure the U.S. is doing its part to provide humanitarian aid and assist Palestinian civilians in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/fHO7q6gY4q

— Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) October 18, 2023

I spent some time going over her Twitter/X feed looking for similar sentiments calling for international solidarity in demanding Hama release all of the hostages they’ve taken. I couldn’t find it, because no such statement was made. Her reflexive instinct was to show support for Israel, but as time marched on, she’s more worried about the plight of the people remaining in Gaza than she is the hundreds kidnapped by terrorists from their beds in Southern Israel.

If we had leadership of either party that used their position in true, unwavering fashion, calling out the evil actors for who they are, pointing out the ugliness of anti-Semitism in media, on the Democratic side of the aisle in Congress, and in academia, perhaps that would help coalesce the West on what it must confront and root out.

Sadly, we are devoid of that leadership now. Therefore, you are seeing anti-Israel sentiment grow into riots globally, insurrections into the United States Capitol, incitement on the steps of the Capitol by members of Congress, and recognition by U.S. Homeland Security officials that threats of jihadist attacks here are going through the roof.

Where is our Churchill? Where is our Reagan? Heck, where is this generation’s Bob Hope? Is there anyone currently in office with a moral compass that will use it to lead when we badly need it?