Aprimetime address in the Oval Office is the pinnace of presidential speechifying. Ronald Reagan used the room in 1986 to console the nation after the Challenger blew up on live television. George W. Bush declared the global war on terrorism there. Donald Trump leveraged the weight of the Resolute Desk as he talked to Americans about a deadly but mysterious virus called Covid-19 for the first time.
Tonight, it was Joe Biden’s turn. The topics, the wars in Ukraine and Israel, couldn’t be more different with respect to the players, the stakes or the circumstances leading up to them. Even so, Biden tried to convince the American people on the idea that the two wars were one and the same. “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: they both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy, completely annihilate it,” he said. It was up to the United States, he insisted, to ensure the tyrannical Vladimir Putin and the bloodthirsty terrorists of Hamas didn’t succeed, lest faith in America’s global leadership depreciates.
Biden’s speech was a sales pitch. Nothing more, nothing less. Having flown back to Washington from Israel the previous day, he is obviously deeply impacted by the carnage that occurred on October 7, the worst day in the nation’s history in half a century. Given the gruesome videos and photos of Hamas’s hours-long assault, not to mention the ongoing saga over the fate of the roughly 200 people who were taken back to the Gaza Strip as captives, it’s almost unfathomable anybody could feel anything other than dread and sadness. Palestinian civilians are suffering enormous hardships as well; Gaza, known colloquially as the world’s largest open-air prison due to the border restrictions imposed by Israel and Egypt, is now awash in rubble, rebar, tears, desperation and hopelessness. Combine this awful situation with Israel’s upcoming ground invasion, as well as Hamas’s propensity to use civilians as human shields, and the overall picture will get even uglier as the days and weeks go on.
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