On the menu today: Seven weeks after the president announced that the administration would build a pier on the Gaza coast to receive aid shipments, a Pentagon spokesman admits that “there has been no physical construction of the temporary pier or the causeway.” Elsewhere, Taylor Swift tortures some poets, and Politico assures us that President Biden’s team “just isn’t stressing out about” antisemitic rallies on college campuses. Well, that’s a relief.
Seven Weeks Later, ‘No Physical Construction of the Temporary Pier or the Causeway’
Hey, remember in President Biden’s State of the Union Address — delivered March 7 — when he pledged, “I’m directing the U.S. military to lead an emergency mission to establish a temporary pier in the Mediterranean on the Gaza coast that can receive large ships carrying food, water, medicine, and temporary shelters. No U.S. boots will be on the ground”?
Remember how a whole bunch of us asked a lot of questions about how all of this was going to work, logistically, and how Biden could keep that promise?
How, exactly, will U.S. military forces build a temporary pier on the Gaza coast without putting any “boots on the ground”? Is the plan to build the pier offshore and then float it over toward the Palestinians? Is this some spin that if the boots are on the beach, they still count as “offshore”?
How close are our forces going to be to the Gaza coast? No one in the administration is worried about members of Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or any other extremist or terrorist group taking shots at American forces? Am I the only one getting vibes of Beirut in 1983 or Mogadishu in 1993? . . .
And if we’re going to do the Palestinians some favors, doesn’t that seem like the sort of thing that should involve the freeing of some hostages?
The aim was to begin “delivery operations in approximately 60 days.”
Well, 49 days, or seven weeks, have passed, and yesterday, the Pentagon press secretary, Air Force Major General Pat Ryder, conceded that nothing has been built yet:
As of right now, there has been no physical construction of the temporary pier or the causeway. As we’ve discussed, you know, there is a — for lack of a better term, sort of a checklist that one is going to follow in order to implement this capability.
And as Central Command and U.S. Army Central goes through that checklist, we are positioned to begin construction very soon, in the very near future, but you want to do those steps in order so that by the time you are erecting this causeway and temporary pier, that all of the pieces are in place and that you can begin operating.
So we’re still, based on all indications, on track to see an operating capability by the end of this month or early May, and we’ll keep you updated on that.
This contradicts media reports that “the dock has been built off U.S. naval vessels.” Part of the delay is that “one of the ships deployed to support the mission of building a pier to deliver aid to starving residents in Gaza was forced to turn back last week after it suffered a fire in its engine room.” Apparently, they found a substitute or can function with one less ship, as Ryder said yesterday that “all the necessary vessels are within the Mediterranean region and standing by, as I mentioned, to begin construction when given the order to do that.”
As for the security concerns:
While the Pentagon maintains that no U.S. troops will deploy into Gaza, it has disclosed little about how long the operation could last and how it intends to ensure the safety of those involved, alarming some in Congress and other critics of the president’s plan. Military officials declined to answer questions from The Washington Post about where the pier will be located and what security measures will be taken, citing a desire not to telegraph its plans.
And as for whether this benevolent gift from the U.S. government has spurred Hamas to release some hostages, not only have we not seen any hostages released since then, Hamas won’t even give updated numbers on how many hostages are alive or dead.
Let’s Torture Some More Poets
Thanks to the big crowd — 150 people, maybe? — who came out on a Tuesday night to listen to me talk and answer questions about reporting from Ukraine, and thanks to NRI and the Show-Me Institute for putting together last night’s event.
It’s a special week here in Kansas City, and not just because I’m here and am eating my body weight in barbeque. No, I’m in the heart of Chiefs Kingdom the week that a new Taylor Swift album comes out, which only happens . . . (checks notes) apparently twice a year lately.
(Hey, whatever happened to that Taylor Swift “psychological operation” that was supposed to swing the presidential election? Wasn’t she supposed to have endorsed Biden by now? You know, I’m starting to get the feeling that you can’t trust everything that you hear from the likes of Vivek Ramaswamy and Jack Posobiec and Benny Johnson.)
Any new offering from Swift is about as review-proof as an album can get; it’s going to sell about a bazillion copies, and her fanbase will defend it and her with the fierceness of vengeful Valkyries. The few reviews I have read have a, “Meh, it’s okay, more of the same,” vibe to them.
If you like Taylor Swift, great; if you don’t like Swift, fine. A morning newsletter that mostly focuses on politics is not likely to change your mind on her or her music.
But I can’t help but notice that a decent portion of her songs, at least the ones that get played a lot on the radio or in restaurants and bars, are about how hard it is to be Taylor Swift — the messy breakups and heartache, the criticism and scrutiny that comes with living in the public eye, and the sense that she’s always being betrayed by frenemies.
And yeah, fame and fortune come with their own problems. But they’re the kind of problems that people put a lot of effort into chasing.
Chris Richards, over in the Washington Post, asks the more than fair questions of how and why the biggest pop megastar in America has built her career on songs about how hard life is for her:
As a 21st-century pop omnipresence, Swift remains mercilessly prolific and unwilling to edit for length, which makes this extended version of her new album, “The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology,” feel miserable and bottomless. The big surprise is how much of that misery is intentional. In concussive contrast to the good times she’s been having in the public eye — highest-grossing concert tour in the history of the species; highest-grossing concert film to match; on-field kisses with her boyfriend after he won the Super Bowl — Swift’s new ballads are sour theater, fixated on memories of being wronged and stranded, sodden with lyrics that feel clunky, convoluted, samey, purple and hacky. There are song titles that burn hot like distress flares (“I Hate It Here”), and lines that feel waxy with Freudian slippage (“I know I’m just repeating myself”), and a profusion of soft-edged, slow-moving melodies — produced by Swift, Jack Antonoff, Aaron Dessner and Patrik Berger — that do her lyrics few favors. As she unloads every last item from her grievance vault, it’s hard for sentient listeners to not want to reciprocate. . . .
These are highly embarrassing combinations of words made to serve an even more embarrassing narrative: the childish idea that the most famous singer alive should be pitied for living alone atop her mountaintop of money, feeling sad and aggrieved. We should all try our hardest to forget the manipulative underdog posture that Swift refuses to forfeit with each passing album, especially when the genuine tragedy-like feeling to be gleaned from all of these songs — and from nearly every Swift song that came before, too — is that Swift has traded her adulthood for superstardom.
The Swifties — many young women, but not just young women — utterly adore the pop star and see her as someone whose songs and lyrics speak directly to their inner lives. “She gets me!” they exclaim. And maybe Swift singing about a breakup or the references to Travis Kelce remind these listeners of their own romantic ups and downs, or sense of being beleaguered by criticism and gossip.
If Swift sang about how great life is, would she be as popular? Or are her most popular works resonant because they commiserate with listeners about how seemingly endlessly unfair life is?
ADDENDUM: Politico characterizes President Biden as “blasé about campus turmoil,” which is mainstream-media affirmation of yesterday’s newsletter:
More broadly, the Biden political brain trust just isn’t stressing out about what’s roiling the groves of academe — viewing it as an obsession of a subset of the electorate and a phenomenon that’s drawn a disproportionate amount of media coverage to its actual political relevance. As one campaign official who works on youth engagement put it, “It’s not going to be for the vast majority of young voters the thing that’s going to determine whether they vote or how they vote.”
Don’t you feel better, knowing that the Biden political brain trust “just isn’t stressing out” about college students chanting “We’re all Hamas” and “Long live Hamas”?
Biden and his team are apparently completely convinced that after watching the events at Columbia University, you’re going to be even more enthusiastic to forgive these snot-nosed punks’ student loans.