A career State Department official resigned from her post on Tuesday, saying she could no longer work for the Biden administration after it released a report concluding that Israel was not preventing the flow of aid to Gaza.

Stacy Gilbert, who served as a senior civilian-military advisor to the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM), sent an email to staff saying she was resigning because she felt the State Department had made the wrong assessment, The Washington Post reported, citing officials who read the note.

The report was filed in response to President Joe Biden issuing a national security memorandum (NSM-20) in early February on whether the administration finds credible Israel’s assurances that its use of US weapons do not violate either American or international law.

The report said there were reasonable grounds to believe Israel on several occasions had used American-supplied weapons “inconsistent” with international humanitarian law, but said it could not make a definitive assessment - enough to prevent the suspension of arms transfers.

  • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Biden wasn’t supporting a genocide of the Palestinian people in 2020.

    Trump is also a supporter of Israel. Trump (and GOP lawmakers) actively criticized Biden for stopping delivery of weapons to Israel. So Trump comes out looking no better than Biden on Gaza.

    Things are different for incumbents than they are for challengers, especially those without a recent track record.

    Biden was in the Executive Branch for VP for 8 years and was in the US Senate for 36 years. Trump has 4 years as an twice impeached President.

    Its over. Biden loses. He can’t make up that kind of polling deficit.

    Thats funny, that’s what people said in Hilary’s favor, and then Trump won. So which is it?

    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Thats funny, that’s what people said in Hilary’s favor, and then Trump won. So which is it?

      You might consider that those were the same people who have been telling you to not worry about/ apologizing for Biden.

      The world isn’t a monolith. There were plenty of people, myself included, saying in 2016 that Trump had a far better shot than they were being led to believe.

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        You might consider that those were the same people who have been telling you to not worry about/ apologizing for Biden.

        No, they’re the same people saying the polls conclude Trump is a shoe in that you are citing yourself.

        • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          Bro you don’t know who I’m citing. I’ve been doing ground up analysis on polling data for years. Biden showed a 12 point polling deficit to Trump in 2020, and hasn’t led (unweighted) in 15 months.

          • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            So…you’re citing…yourself?

            Biden showed a 12 point polling deficit to Trump in 2020, and hasn’t led (unweighted) in 15 months.

            Didn’t you yourself point out that polling data analysis lead to the incorrect conclusion in 2016?

            • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              you’re citing…yourself?

              Yeah bruh that’s how shit works. Here is a link:

              https://lemmy.world/post/15291274?scrollToComments=true

              You put analysis out publicly and people can engage with it. Polling isn’t “wrong” it just has biases. It over samples some populations and under-samples others. Polling is only one approach to modeling political outcomes, but its generally pretty consistent. Trump was and is clearly an exception. But because we have the 2020 data, we can correct for some of these issues, especially because its consistent.

              The best data we have is that in a Biden / Trump head to head, Biden needs to be +12 on Trump to be secure and overcome the spread he has been shown to demonstrate between polling values and performance. And its pretty good data, its a years worth of scientifically conducted polls and an actual election. In-terms of data sources, it doesn’t get much better than this.

              Here it is in map form:

              https://lemmy.world/post/15294268?scrollToComments=true

              Another way to think of this map would be “how much so does a given candidate outperform local polling”.

              And this is the big takeaway. Biden was CRUSHING it in the polls prior to November 2020, and like, squeaked out a W.

              Even if you cut the polling differential in half (and we don’t have evidence for that), Biden is still failing dramatically.