Genocide Joe is beginning to stink like Lyndon B. Johnson 

President Biden has the stench of LBJ about him. For those of us old enough to remember, that stink is recalled with sadness and foreboding.

After President Kennedy was assassinated, President Johnson proved himself adept at passing civil rights and other Great Society domestic legislation that JFK couldn’t. It would have been enough to make him one of our great presidents. But he had a fatal flaw when it came to Vietnam. 

Johnson saw that war in geopolitical and personal terms. A struggle by Vietnamese nationalists against French and then American oppressors and their South Vietnamese puppets was, to Johnson, an American fight against Communism, the Soviet Union, and China. Once he made that fight his own, he couldn’t “back down” despite the war’s course and the press and TV coverage which, over time, revealed to the American people his mistaken framing and the horrific punishment he, and they, were inflicting on their Vietnamese victims, who declined to submit despite millions dead, more millions maimed, and much of the country destroyed by bombs and napalm. 

Personal defeat was anathema to LBJ, so he persevered in a war that much of the country came to believe was immoral and wrong as the anti-war movement, led by students and faculty on campus, rapidly expanded and tore apart the country, creating divisions that remain today. When the movement took its protest to the Chicago streets outside the Democratic convention, the police ran amok in full view of the TV cameras, which played a role in Richard Nixon’s narrow defeat of Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 watershed election, which started the country down the more Republican, more conservative path that has largely characterized our politics to this day.

President Biden suffers the same flaws. He has been fine all his political life with the Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Israel was running an apartheid state all that time, but there was never so much as a peep of criticism of it from him. AIPAC’s money was political mother’s milk for him. He has been the USA’s foremost Christian Zionist for a long time. As President, he preferred the Palestinians docile and quiescent, so that his geopolitical vision of an Israeli-Saudi Arabian pact, leading a Western-dominated Middle East against Iran, could be born. When Hamas struck on October 7, Biden couldn’t see it as part of a resistance struggle against 75 years of oppression. He saw it as a challenge to him and his hopes for stabilizing the region to permit him to focus on his hot war against Russia and his cold war against China. Palestinians be damned. 

So he unleashed Israel, knowing it was going to lay waste to Gaza to “restore deterrence.”  Despite his issues with Benjamin Netanyahu, he gave him his full support, never expecting that there might be an uproar in America over an Israeli genocide of Palestinians. His recent, tone-deaf visit to Michael Douglas and Katherine Zeta Jones to raise a few million from well-heeled Democratic contributors exemplifies the bubble in which Biden lives. He continues to support the genocide with tens of billions because he does not really believe that he can lose the country over it, and because he has no empathy for the Palestinian victims of Zionism. 

It is redolent of the same stench of arrogance that brought down LBJ. Today’s suppression of the rapidly expanding anti-genocide movement on campuses mirrors what we endured back then, and strongly suggests that we are looking at a repetition of 1968 at the upcoming Democratic Convention in Chicago. His prospect of a narrow victory over Trump in Michigan and the other few critical battleground states is already endangered, and the anticipated reaction to the violence the authorities will visit on American young people there will further alienate more voters from Biden. Yet his support of the genocide continues.          

He’s content to gamble that he will prevail in the end because his opponent is Trump. The protesters be damned. He may be right. But Biden is gambling with American democracy, all to permit Israeli Jews, at least two-thirds of whom support the genocide and oppose letting any humanitarian aid enter Gaza, to continue to kill Palestinian women and children by the thousands, and to use their own government’s failure to anticipate the Hamas attack to ratchet up their ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from the land between the River and the Sea.

As a civil rights lawyer who has investigated and prosecuted cases in the International Criminal Tribunals, I can well understand the dilemma faced by those Democratic voters in Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona who hesitate to vote for a genocider, even one running against an insurrectionist.

Jill Biden reportedly told her husband some time ago to “Stop it, Joe, stop it now.” Good advice that he continues to ignore — at his peril, and ours.