How Will Conflict in the Middle East Affect the Presidential Election in 13 Months?
Nobody told me there would be days like these.
I mean, John Lennon sang about it, but I feel that was not given a proper heads-up about the events of not only the past three days but the past three years.
Before I get to the heart of this article, I want to give an acknowledgment to my cohorts who are at RedState for the number of outstanding pieces by them on the news of the attack of Hamas on Israel from multiple angles. If you've been here over the past couple of days, I have absolutely zero doubt that you learned a number of things with the superb writing that's been going on here.
Also, THANK YOU for stopping by to read the articles here because if it weren't for you, we wouldn't be here.
While I have been following the tragic events that happened on Saturday, I felt the need to pull myself out of the constant stream of news about what's going on over there and try to focus a little bit more at home. I did exactly that yesterday with this piece about the danger posed to our country by a wide-open border.
From my post:
We have had pretty much a wide-open border since January 20, 2021, when Joe Biden took the oath of office to be President of the United States. The administration stopped building the Trump border wall and did everything but send flyers down to Central America and the rest of the world so that they could skip across the Rio Grande and gain entry without authorities checking they are. Of course, this policy was just reversed within the past week, but it's really a case of too little too late.
So if I have my math correct from Ward's count... he quotes about 3.8 million people who have illegally crossed since Scranton Joe took the helm. So let's do an odd thing and LOWER that number to 3 million people. Now we take those 3 million folks and estimate that approximately one-quarter of one percent have some evil intent; that gives us 7,500 such people in this country illegally. Now they could be just bank robbers or common thieves, possibly some murders or other dastardly things.
If you increase the percentage, you increase the total number, and does that make you feel safe?
What are the chances it is more?
The border being left wide open is not the traditional foreign policy issue that Americans have had to deal with in the past, but I'm certain it will be a big issue in 2024 because of the two different positions of both parties on this. Democrats give lip service to the problem, while most Republicans take some varying degree of harder stance than their donkey counterparts.
The border and who has streamed across will not be the only issue that will be on the table for political hotspots around the world. Likely Ukraine and Israel will now take more of a traditional center stage during an election and potentially could shape the race in ways we have not seen since 9-11.
There’s a Grand Canyon of difference in how the Trump Administration handled Iran compared to the Biden team, and, after the events of Saturday, that could be a big factor in how the president and the Democrats will be viewed. Most analysts seem to agree that an attack of this magnitude against Israel was inconceivable, and the question is, did Biden's leniency toward Iran make it more possible?
As my colleague Neil McCabe wrote here earlier: Trump's Iran Advisor: Biden's 'Flying Dutchman' Foreign Policy Brought Us Chaos
Facing an ascendant Iran, Greenway said the Trump administration attacked its oil revenues.
“We had cut off their oil sales to the point where they were averaging 400,000 barrels a day at $55 a barrel, and so they were no longer able to sustain their military growth or sustain the level of funding for the surrogates and proxies.
“That was our going-in proposition. We were going to create a trading imbalance. We were going to prevent them from funding all the programs that threaten the United States and our partners and allies in the region.”
The president and executive director of the Abraham Accords Peace Institute said the Trump administration ran out of time.
“I think if we had more time to do it, we could have brought about something approaching an economic collapse or at least economic paralysis,” he said. “We probably started too late, so this may be a different discussion.”
With the United States economy seemingly stalled and the economies around the world following slowly in our wake, trouble of this magnitude in the Middle East should be worrisome to most Americans. Economies thrive in times of calmness, and currently, the world is not cooperating.
Domestic issues are almost always front and center in the elections that we hold every four years to see who will live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The only clear exceptions I can think of would have been the elections held in 1940 and 1944 during World War II and possibly the 1968 and 1972 elections during the Vietnam era.
Maybe the election of 2024 and a possible rematch of Joe Biden vs Donald Trump will be added to the list above of elections where our involvement overseas will be a major factor.
We are soon going to find out.
While we wait, I'm going to listen to John remind me below that Nobody Told Me There Would Be Days Like These, Strange Days Indeed.
Let me know what you think by clicking on my BIO right here or scrolling down a bit and letting me know what you think in the Comments. You can reach me on Facebook, X (The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter), or my email address. I have no fear of listening and or reading people with whom I do not see eye to eye.
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