Progressive Politics

Everything seems to be coming up Democrats. The party is still riding its wave of excitement over its “brat” new nominee, Donald Trump and his campaign are floundering, and their candidate has just widened her lead over him after a debate most everyone agreed Trump lost badly. What could possibly stop this kind of momentum?

Another dumb, disastrous quagmire in the Middle East could.

In their euphoric haze, Democrats and the Kamala Harris campaign have been doing their best the past two months to more or less ignore the ongoing, bloody tumult in the Middle East, which was already on the brink of tipping over into a region-wide war back when Joe Biden was still on the ticket.

The most dramatic sign was yesterday’s rash of Hezbollah pager explosions, which wounded 2,800 people across Lebanon and killed twelve, including two young children, and which an aide to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to take credit for in a tweet

If Democrats are hoping Harris might get a rally-round-the-flag bump in the event of US troops getting killed by Hezbollah or Iranian proxies, and so possibly shift public opinion in favor of war, they should be careful.

If the wanton slaughter in Gaza isn’t enough to make them cut Israel off, then Harris and the Democrats might want to at least think about their own political futures and take some similar advice: You might prefer to ignore the chance of regional war, but a regional war won’t ignore you.