"I checked in on BlueSky to see how people there are reacting to the release of the Israeli hostages, and it’s the eeriest thing."

"It’s not trending. There’s no mention of it on the 'Explore' tab. I started scrolling the feed and went through hundreds of posts without seeing a single one that mentioned it. Instead, it’s all posts about Mamdani, John Oliver’s new episode criticizing Bari Weiss and Jamie Reed, the “No Kings” protest apparently happening this weekend, Taylor Swift, the Epstein Files, complaints about anti-vaxxers, and snarky takes insisting that Antifa doesn’t exist. That's it. It’s honestly blowing my mind...."

Writes Colin Wright, at X — via Instapundit.

I signed up for BlueSky so I could do a search over there. My search word, "hostages." This was the main thing that came up:

 

I also saw things like "Now release the Epstein file hostages" and "How about the US releasing all the hostages that ICE has recently taken?"

"Joe Biden and Netanyahu were offered Gaza deal a year ago, says negotiator."

The London Times reports.

Gershon Baskin, the architect of the negotiations that freed the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in 2011, revealed on Thursday that Hamas had agreed the exact same terms of the deal in September 2024, in the last months of the Biden administration, but that Biden officials had disregarded it while Binyamin Netanyahu had refused point blank....

Baskin said members of the American negotiating team “were as frustrated as I was in their inability to convince Biden and Biden’s people to look seriously at the deal on the table”. In Doha, the Qataris said they could do nothing more “without the American adoption of the plan, nothing could be done, because the obstacle was Israel”.

The Biden administration had over a month to act before the election. After his party lost the election, Baskin supposedly learned that the Israelis wouldn't deal with Biden.

"I just don't understand how people think that if we allow a dictator, a thug, to decide he's going to take significant portions of land that aren't his, that that's going to satisfy him. I don't quite understand."

Said Joe Biden, quoted in "Five takeaways from Biden's BBC interview" (BBC).

"These men are all caught with their pants down, and Theissen marvels at how well-endowed they are."

That's the top-rated comment at Marc Thiessen's Washington Post column "The Signal chat’s big takeaway? Trump has built an effective team. Americans got a fly-on-the-wall view of a group working together to execute the president’s policy."

"Somewhere in a Kyiv bunker a former comedian is quietly whimpering. But if the show that is unfolding will remain just a show, we will say 'thanks for the popcorn' and move on."

Said "an op-ed published by state-run news agency RIA Novosti, referring to President Volodymyr Zelensky’s past as a TV personality."

Quoted in "The Russian guide to Trump’s Cabinet picks/Who’s good for Russia and who’s going to be a problem among Trump’s choices according to Russian commentators" (WaPo)(free-access link).

In other Ukraine news: "Biden admin urges Ukraine to lower draft age to conscript 18-year-olds/Ukraine already lowered draft age to 25 in April" (Fox News)(it "already" went all the way down... to 25).

And: "Overnight, Russia carried out a horrific aerial attack against Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities report that Russia launched nearly 200 missiles and drones against Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure, depriving Ukrainian civilians of access to electricity" (Statement from President Joe Biden on Russia’s Attack on Ukraine).

"They’ve asked for these, and so I think it’s a good idea."

Said Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, in a stunning feat of moral reasoning, quoted in "Biden Administration Approves Ukraine’s Use of Anti-Personnel Mines" (NYT). The U.S. did not merely approve the use of land mines. We are supplying them. 

The Biden administration’s decision came despite widespread condemnation of mines by rights groups that cite their toll on civilians, which can stretch for years or decades after conflicts end as the locations of minefields are left unmarked or forgotten.... Russia has seeded mines throughout vast swaths of Ukraine since 2014 as front lines have swayed over forests, farm fields and villages. It has also set many so-called victim-activated booby traps, such as explosives rigged to detonate when a car door is opened, a category of weapon also prohibited in the mine ban treaty.

"President Zelensky has been pushing for this moment for months. When it finally came, he was a little coy."

"Strikes are not made with words, he said in his nightly address: 'Such things are not announced, missiles speak for themselves.' President Biden has given Ukraine permission to use long range missiles supplied by Washington to strike deep inside Russia."

BBC reports.

"Iran fired a large barrage of missiles at Israel on Tuesday evening, an attack that could set off a sharp escalation in the long-simmering conflict...."

"Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps said in a statement that the missile attack had been in retaliation for the assassinations of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh, and an Iranian commander. The statement said Iran would launch more missiles if Iran were attacked.... Loud booming explosions were heard above Tel Aviv, and flashes of light from the arcing intercepting rockets of Israel’s air defense system were visible. The salvo of missiles from Iran came a day after Israeli forces began a rare ground invasion of southern Lebanon aimed at crippling the Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah there.... A senior White House official said the United States would help defend Israel and warned that a direct attack against Israel 'will carry severe consequences for Iran.'... President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris... reviewed plans to help Israel defend against the attacks and protect Americans in the region."

The NYT reports.

"Well, Kamala Harris, of course, hasn't had a lot of experience in foreign policy, but she's learned a lot at the side of President Biden as his vice president."

"So we're sort of guessing a little bit about her vision and her views. I think our general assumption is that she's pretty close to where Biden is, and I think it's safe to assume that she is basically a pretty conventional center left Democratic, foreign-policy thinker. I mean, to the extent that she brings her own individual perspective, it probably comes from her time as a prosecutor and a lawyer that she believes in the international rules-based order. So she looks at foreign policy in the sense of who is following the rules, in effect, in terms of whether it be trade security or economics."

Said Peter Baker on "Alliance vs. Isolation: Harris and Trump’s Competing Views on Foreign Policy," today's episode of the NYT "Daily" podcast (transcript and audio at that link)(I've tweaked some punctuation, etc.).

How are we to understand Harris as anything other than a continuation of Biden? That's what Peter Baker is doing.

And here's how he contrasts Trump:

"Vice President Kamala Harris largely embraces Mr. Biden’s view of the importance of strategic alliances, though her specific policy views are still coming into focus..."

"... as she campaigns on a compressed timeline.... [M]any leaders are scrambling to meet with all three of America’s current or would-be leaders — Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump — during, or after, their visit to New York for the General Assembly this week. The vice president had a closed-door meeting with Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, the president of the United Arab Emirates, at the White House on Monday afternoon, just hours after a similar meeting between the Emirati leader and Mr. Biden. Officials said Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris each was expected to raise the deepening violence in Israel and the Emirates’ involvement in the conflict in Sudan. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine is set to meet with Mr. Biden in the Oval Office on Thursday, one day after he addresses the United Nations. Later on Thursday, Mr. Zelensky will meet separately at the White House with Ms. Harris — an indication that he is eager to bolster his own one-on-one relationship with her in case she wins the presidency in November. After that meeting, aides say the White House has no plans for further engagement between Ms. Harris and foreign leaders or travel by the vice president outside the United States before Election Day, as she focuses all of her energies on the campaign trail."

From "At U.N. Conference, Global Crises Collide With Fraught American Politics/President Biden will speak at a time of deep uncertainty about the future of America’s role in the world" (NYT).

Is Harris displaying an intention to maintain continuity with Biden's foreign policy? We're told she's "coming into focus," but is she? It seems that after today, the plan is to "focus[] all of her energies on the campaign trail." But the campaign has what seems to be a deliberate strategy of remaining out of focus. It's a focus on being out of focus. The NYT asserts, without evidence, that Harris's "specific policy views are still coming into focus."

ADDED: To avoid my criticism of the phrase "her specific policy views are still coming into focus," the NYT could write "her specific policy views have yet to come into focus." That little change would replace coddling with gentle criticism. 

BUT: I still have a problem with "her specific policy views have yet to come into focus" —  a big problem! It assumes, without evidence, that Harris has specific policy views.

How can we simultaneously believe in the resurrection of Joe Biden and in the legitimacy of depriving him of the nomination he won in the primaries?

I open the NYT this morning — it's 3 a.m. — and see this:

 

Biden isn't sleeping in the middle of the day on a beach in Delaware, he's working — if not around the clock, against the clock.

The last couple weeks I'd been fretting about whether we even had a President at the moment and fantasizing about asking Kamala Harris how she could justify refraining from using the 25th Amendment to fill the vacuum. If it was proper to engage in the bold strategy to displace him as her party's candidate, why is it acceptable to stand by and do nothing when you are the one with the power to oust him from the presidency? 

Maybe it's because of questions like mine that the NYT concocted the headline "Biden Works Against the Clock as Violence Escalates in the Middle East" and installed it at the top of the front page alongside that somber photo of the elderly man's serious, determined face. I read the subheadline and wonder if any newsworthy story even occurred: "President Biden is beginning to acknowledge that he is simply running out of time to help forge a cease-fire and hostage deal with Hamas, his aides say. And the risk of a wider war has never looked greater." That's a well-known, persistent condition. 

"Hamas’s reasoning is simple — winning simply means surviving and, at least for now, the group has managed to do that..."

"... even if it is severely weakened... In the interview, Mr. Meshal made clear that Hamas officials are not in a rush to conclude a cease-fire with Israel at any price, and will not give up on their main demands for an end to the war and an Israeli withdrawal. Independent analysts have made similar assessments about Hamas’s priorities. 'They completely feel time is on their side,' said Ghaith al-Omari, an expert on Palestinian affairs. 'They think they’re the only game in town.'...At the war’s start, President Biden expressed a similar position to that of Mr. Netanyahu — that Hamas needed to be eliminated. But Mr. Biden no longer speaks of its eradication, and both the United States and Israel have taken part in indirect negotiations with Hamas. Mr. Meshal said he took that to mean that the United States was acknowledging Hamas was not going anywhere...."

"Hamas Is Surviving War With Israel. Now It Hopes to Thrive in Gaza Again. Khaled Meshal, one of Hamas’s most senior officials, said in an interview that the militant group expects to play a decisive role in the enclave when the war is over" (NYT).

The perverse incentive of prisoner deals.

"Prisoner Deals Stoke Fears of Perverse ‘Incentive’ to Grab Americans/Hostile governments like Russia and Iran are often involved, and practical alternatives are hard to come by, experts say" (yesterday, in the NYT). 

Officials and experts agree that these recent cases reflect what Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in February called a “rising trend” in which American enemies are “wrongfully detaining people, often as political pawns.”...

[I]n roughly the past 10 years, as foreign terrorist threats have receded, the imprisonment of Americans by hostile governments on false or inflated legal charges has risen sharply, according to Danielle Gilbert, an assistant professor at Northwestern University who studies so-called hostage diplomacy....

Families of prisoners.... enlist celebrities and the media to help pressure U.S. officials to “do whatever it takes,” as they often say.... Ms. Gilbert noted that such deals have proven to be politically popular. Both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden have benefited from heartwarming Oval Office meetings with freed prisoners and their families, and dramatic accounts of how their leadership sealed the deals....

The article links to Trump's response at Truth Social:

"Russia freed wrongly convicted Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich as part of the largest and most complex East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War..."

"... in which he and more than a dozen others jailed by the Kremlin were exchanged for Russians held in the U.S. and Europe, including a convicted murderer. Gershkovich and other Americans left Russian aircraft moments ago at an airport in Turkey’s capital, Ankara. Russia had kept the 32-year-old behind bars for more than a year on a false allegation of espionage. It sentenced him in a hurried and secret three-day trial to 16 years in a high-security penal colony. Moscow also released former Marine Paul Whelan, journalist Alsu Kurmasheva and Vladimir Kara-Murza, a British-Russian dissident and Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, sentenced to 25 years in prison on treason-related charges. Russia also released a number of political dissidents. The sweeping deal involved 24 prisoners and at least six countries, and came together after months of negotiations at the highest levels of governments in the U.S., Russia and Germany, whose prisoner, Russian hit man Vadim Krasikov, emerged as the linchpin to the arrangement."

The Wall Street Journal reports (with no pay wall).

"Nostalgia for the Trump-era geopolitical landscape seems entirely reasonable: Before his defeat there was no Russian invasion of Ukraine, no brutal struggle in the Holy Land..."

"... and a weaker alignment of anti-American powers rather than the increasing consolidation by our rivals in Moscow and Beijing and Tehran and even Pyongyang. The Biden administration would obviously deny responsibility for these deteriorations.... But I... think that liberal investment in the idea of Biden as the great defender of the liberal international order against isolationism and reaction has made it hard for Democrats to reckon with how much more stability the American-led order seemed to enjoy under the crudely transactional machtpolitik of Trump. That contrast means that if there is a positive case for Biden’s foreign policy, it can’t just be made with rote warnings about how Trump will unravel NATO and let our enemies run roughshod — not when those enemies seem so much more aggressive under Biden than before."

Writes Ross Douthat, in "The Biden and Trump Weaknesses That Don’t Get Enough Attention" (NYT).

"Pro-Hamas and pro-Hezbollah demonstrators staged an anti-Israel protest near the White House on Saturday, calling for 'jihad'..."

"... and voicing anger at US President Joe Biden’s management of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Thousands of protesters chanting 'From DC to Palestine, we are the red line' held a long banner scribbled with the names of Palestinians killed in the ongoing fighting.... Reports on social media appeared to show masked demonstrators chanting slogans urging Hamas’s military wing to 'kill another soldier now' and calling on Hezbollah to 'kill another Zionist now.' Protesters also held signs calling for 'Intifada'....

I'm reading "Pro-Hamas, pro-Hezbollah protesters cheer ‘jihad’ at anti-Israel rally in DC Demonstrators near White House protest Gaza war in terror group attire, burn US flags; in London, thousands march against Israel amid chants of ‘From the river to the sea’" (The Times of Israel).

The article embeds this X post ("Protester holds up a bloody mask depicting President Joe Biden. Another protester burns American flag behind him as statue is sprayed with "FJB" outside of the White House during Pro-palestine protest"):

DC: Protester holds up a bloody mask depicting President Joe Biden. Another protester burns American flag behind him as statue is sprayed with 'FJB' outside of the White House during Pro-palestine protest.

Video by @yyeeaahhhboiii2 Desk@freedomnews.tv to license pic.twitter.com/viHOfVToDq

— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) June 8, 2024

Here's the NYT article about the protests, "Protest Against Gaza War Draws Thousands to the White House/The demonstration included ringing the White House grounds with a red banner showing the names of the more than 36,000 Palestinians killed during the war."

In France, Biden rhapsodized about 'the story of America' told by the rows of graves at the Normandy America Cemetery: 'Nearly 10,000 heroes buried side-by-side...'"

"'... officers and enlisted, immigrants and native-born, different races, different faiths, but all Americans.' In Phoenix, Trump, invoked the racist 'great replacement' conspiracy theory, saying Biden had orchestrated an 'invasion' at the border as part of 'a deliberate demolition of our sovereignty' because “they probably think these people are going to be voting.... Trump... complained about 'endless wars' and 'delinquent' Europeans, and vowed to 'spend our money in our country' — including by 'moving thousands of troops, if necessary, currently stationed overseas to our own borders.'... Will Americans recognize their country in the dark and desperate portrait Trump painted? 'Our country is falling to pieces,' he said, and if he isn’t returned to power, 'the country is finished ... You won’t have a country anymore.' Trump described a nation full of 'crooked people' and serving as 'a dumping ground for the dungeons of the Third World.'"

WaPo opinion-writer Dana Milbank endeavors to frame the candidates, in "As Biden rallies the free world, Trump serves a higher cause: Himself/In Phoenix, at his first post-conviction campaign rally, Trump portrayed a dark and desperate America" (WaPo).

Milbank's writing is so heavy-handed, but it must please some readers, perhaps readers who want to believe Biden is a good-enough candidate. He rhapsodized about a story told by the rows of graves, while Trump complained of endless wars.

"In their generation, in their hour of trial, the Allied forces of D-Day did their duty. Now the question for us is, in our hour of trial, will we do ours?"

Said President Biden, quoted in "Biden, world leaders and veterans mark D-Day’s 80th anniversary in France/While the U.S. president’s speech was directed at a global audience, it comes against the backdrop of a fierce domestic political battle with his predecessor, Donald Trump" (WaP0).

Biden did not name Trump during his remarks, but he offered an unequivocal endorsement of the global order that the Republican front-runner has trashed, asserting that NATO and other alliances “make us strong.”... “Make no mistake, the autocrats of the world are watching closely to see what happens in Ukraine; to see if we let this illegal aggression go unchecked,” he said. “We cannot let that happen. To surrender to bullies, to bow down to dictators, is simply unthinkable.”... 

Biden has pointed to his administration’s record of building alliances amid the war in Ukraine as a top selling point for his reelection as he seeks to draw a sharp contrast with Trump. In an interview with Time magazine, Biden said Trump “wanted to just abandon” U.S. alliances, and suggested that the former president would ultimately pull the country out of NATO if he returns to the White House.... 

"Prior negotiations ran aground after Hamas insisted that it be able to include dead hostages, as opposed to just living ones, in the number required by the agreement’s first phase."

"In his speech, Biden indicated that Israel had now acceded to this previously rejected stipulation. 'Some remains of hostages who have been killed will be returned to their...families,' he said, 'bringing some degree of closure to their terrible grief.'..."

Writes Yair Rosenberg, in "Biden’s Bold Gaza Cease-Fire Gambit/The president has pushed events as far as he can, but even American presidents have their limits" (The Atlantic).

"The American people expect their presidents to have the guts to make hard national security decisions, and to put our safety, interests, principles, and alliances above politics."

"That’s exactly what Joe Biden is doing. He is standing with Israel as they fight the Hamas terrorists who committed the hideous Oct. 7 attacks, and is making clear that how Israel defends itself matters because we do not want to see any more civilians killed."

Said White House spokesman Andrew Bates, quoted in "Biden’s isolation grows as Gaza report both criticizes and clears Israel/Like much of the president’s, at times, halting approach toward the war, the report released to Congress on Friday drew criticism from across the political spectrum" (WaPo)(free access link).

Biden is making the "hard decision" to please no one while purporting to please everyone.