Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Welcome to June, halfway through 2021. Here in Enon Holler, it’s been raining off-and-on all day and when it wasn’t, it was muggy as hell. Welcome to Summer in Mississippi.

I’ve said before that I try to keep my focus on American politics with an emphasis on how it affects Mississippi, and I really try to stay out of the whole Israel/Palestine argument. Thanks to the machinations of Israeli politics, it looks almost certain that current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is on the way out. At twelve years, he’s the country’s longest-serving prime minister and since his run has been colorful, to say the least, he’s managed to hang on to power by hook or by crook.

It should be noted that Israel’s approach to deciding who runs the country is more like the United Kingdom than ours. In short, the various parties in parliament called the Knesset – and there’s more than just two – tussle between each other with whoever having the most swing is the leading party. Whoever leads that party, then, is the prime minister. For the past twelve years – and a three-year abortive run in the late nineties – that’s been Netanyahu.

And that little quirk is how he’s getting ousted from power. A coalition of the various parties from across the board, from leftist to harder right than Netanyahu’s Likud party, got it together today with the sole purpose of booting him out of the driver’s seat. In fact, they got it done with less than forty minutes to go in the parliamentary session. Interestingly, the coalition was joined by a small Islamist party, the United Arab List, the first time that’s ever happened. It probably won’t translate into much for them, but it is a foot in the door.

While nothing is written in stone and Netanyahu still has some daylight to make something happen, it’s generally agreed the next Prime Minister of Israel will most likely be Naftali Bennett, the head of the aforementioned far-right Yamina party. He’ll be the head for the first two years of a four-year term wherein he’ll swap places with incoming foreign minister Yair Lapid of the centrist Yesh Atid party.

I know this all sounds wonky to American ears, but that’s how quite a number of countries do things. Israel does have a president but that’s largely a ceremonial role. They’re Head of State while the Prime Minister is the Head of Government, where the real power lies. I don’t know enough to know how this change will affect relations with the U.S. nor what it’ll mean for the current flare-up in Israeli-Palestinian tensions, but there you go. If nothing else, it should be a lesson in how politics all over the world is a dirty business.

Speaking of political bullshit, Washington’s It-Girl Kyrsten Sinema is in the bullseye these days. She missed the very important vote this past weekend that would have established a bipartisan commission to investigate the whys, hows, and whos of the Great American Temper Tantrum on January 6. Along with fellow apostate Jim Manchin of West Virginia, Sinema’s been a thorn in the side of Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats’ slight lead in the Senate particularly in their efforts to do something about the filibuster which Republicans are using to kill any attempts to actually change things.

Although she identifies as bisexual, Sinema stood with virulent homophobe and feckless bigot John Cornyn of Texas to tell the world just why she missed that vote. Turns out she had a “personal family matter” and, no, you’re not getting anymore. Naturally, progressive elements within the party and voting base went nuts, partly because it took her four days to come up with such a weak sauce excuse.

And while it’s not really fair to call her an out-and-out Republican, Sinema does have a fairly conservative record. Both as a Senator – where she voted with Trump 25% of the time, the third most in the Democratic Party – and her former life as a U.S. Representative and Arizona state congress critter, her overall politics isn’t that far right. She’s being a pain about the whole filibuster business, though, leading some to wonder if she’ll swap parties. I think that’s a bit premature, but not as silly as the idea that Mitch McConnell has some sort of kompromat on her.

That’s just politics, baby.