THE ONLY MORAL THING IS TO EXTERMINATE HAMAS:

And their well-insulated funders.

OPEN THREAD: Can’t stop the signal.

THIS IS AN EXCELLENT POINT. It took a combination of persistence, intellectual foundation-laying, and grassroots politics, but the progress has been unimaginable by the standards of the 1990s.

JOHN HINDERAKER: The Least Successful Conspiracy. “I don’t doubt that various people, including the press, conspired, but the fact that Joe Biden was senile was open and obvious. . . . What is striking to me is not the conspiracy to cover up his condition, which was hardly more successful than the alleged conspiracy to cover up the fact that smoking is bad for you. What is striking is how few people on the Left–approximately zero–cared about the fact that we didn’t have a functioning president. Why were Democrats so unconcerned about having a president who was basically a cardboard cutout? Because they don’t really think the president is very important. They were content to have the Executive Branch run by nameless White House aides and by party grandees like Barack Obama.”

Plus: “I think this narrative helps to explain why Democrats are so horrified at the prospect of a Trump presidency. Trump, a real, non-senile president? A president with a mandate from the voters to bring about important changes? A president who will re-assert control over the ‘fourth branch?’ A president who won’t be a pawn in the hands of Washington insiders? A president who actually understands and carries out his duties under Article II? A president capable of standing up to the Washington establishment? This is what passes for revolutionary change in our late-stage republic.”

BYRON YORK: Kash Patel, onetime FBI target, now on track to run the FBI.

Not long ago, a left-wing journalist argued that when Republicans describe Kash Patel’s nomination to be FBI director as a way to “clean out” the FBI and “restore its integrity,” they are in fact creating “cover to go along with Trump’s scheme to unleash the FBI on enemies.”

It’s a common criticism in anti-Trump circles. But it raises a question. Where were these people in 2017, 2018, and after? If one wants to discuss the prospect of a new director unleashing the FBI on enemies, shouldn’t he grapple with the reality of years of bureau leadership unleashing the FBI on enemies?

During the Trump years, FBI directors and other top law enforcement and intelligence officials did the following:

1) Opened investigations on presidential candidates.

2) Deployed undercover agents and confidential sources to spy on a candidate’s advisers.

3) Hired a campaign opposition researcher under the guise of intelligence gathering.

4) Presented false opposition research to a court as a basis for wiretapping a candidate’s adviser.

5) Used false opposition research to brief the president of the United States.

6) Ambushed the president-elect with false opposition research.

7) Sought to include false opposition research in intelligence community products.

8) Ambushed the national security adviser with wiretap information on the pretense of a Logan Act violation.

9) Misled/stonewalled Congress on the investigation of the president.

10) Misled the president about the investigation targeting him.

It’s different when Democrats do it somehow, I’m sure.

RIP: Rickey Henderson Dead at 65. “There is a peculiar and painful symmetry here: the Oakland Athletics and the Oakland Athletics’ all-time greatest player, Rickey Henderson, have both departed from the scene within two months of each other.”

SCHRODINGER’S TERRORIST: On the one hand: Proposed Note: German Christmas Market Terrorist Was Islamophobic Right-Winger.

The AP report cited reads:

Taleb’s X account describes him as a former Muslim. It is filled with tweets and retweets focusing on anti-Islam themes and criticism of the religion, while sharing congratulatory notes to Muslims who left the faith.

He was critical of German authorities, saying they had failed to do enough to combat the “Islamism of Europe.”

He has also voiced support for the far-right and anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.

Prominent German terrorism expert Peter Neumann posted on X that he had never before come across a suspect in an act of mass violence with that profile.

“After 25 years in this ‘business’ you think nothing could surprise you anymore. But a 50-year-old Saudi ex-Muslim who lives in East Germany, loves the AfD and wants to punish Germany for its tolerance toward Islamists — that really wasn’t on my radar,” he wrote.

On the other hand:

[T]he practice of Taqqiye, an Islamic doctrine that permits lying and deception to advance Islamic objectives.

In reality, he is a radical Shia Muslim, as evidenced by his name and numerous tweets and chat leaks circulating on Arabic-speaking platforms like X. Disturbingly, his plans to carry out mass killings of Germans were brought to the attention of German authorities by a Saudi woman. Tragically, the police ignored her warnings.

The links are added in the thread.

Stay tuned.

NEO: About that David Samuels Piece — Obama’s “permission structures” seem to have gone awry.

But I don’t recall the public being in favor of Obamacare prior to its passage (see the early years in this chart). As for the Iran deal, also discussed at length in Samuels’ article, I don’t think the public ever bought into it. Only the party most faithful accepted any rationale for the Iran deal – and of course the ever-compliant MSM. So Obama didn’t enter into those things by convincing the public, whatever the media said and however the media helped. He accomplished them through Congressional machinations with the help of confederates such as Pelosi, and in the case of the Iran deal by ignoring any requirement that Congress approve it.

Biden was simply not as adept at any of this, even if he’d been in full possession of his faculties (which he was not). And although Obama was pulling strings behind the scenes, it was no longer working.

As with Bill Clinton having much greater political chops and charisma than his would-be successors, Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, the tactics that advanced Obama don’t translate nearly as well when the person behind the podium is Joe Biden or Kamala Harris.