Israel tells Washington it plans imminent ground operation in Lebanon, U.S. official says

I think Bibi knows that Biden isn't going to change course before the election, so he is using this month to escalate things enough to keep them going as long as possible afterwards. In Israel, once things calm down, there will be elections, and Bibi knows he probably won't win.

On the other hand, domestically, invading Lebanon is very popular - even most of the left wing Jewish opposition supports it. It's crazy making, and frustrating, believe me. But if you only read the Hebrew media and aren't a good enough English speaker to read the international news, it's almost like you live in a different reality where all of the awfulness of Israel goes unmentioned while the awfulness of Hamas and Hezbollah gets talked about 24/7

and to dare the Dems to come out against him

He knows that he'd die before anyone got around to censuring him. He doesn't have to give a shit, because we live in a world which allows hatred to be an acceptable political position that too many will happily vote for.

Call me paranoid

Paranoid isn't the word I was going to use, I was thinking 'self-obsessed'.

Seriously though, I think it's a little conceited to conceive of the escalating middle-eastern conflict as revolving around some personal vendetta against our specific domestic political party.

Netanyahu is an opportunist. A bunch of things came together to set the stage for this expansion, but he's been a imperialist with eyes for Lebanon and "Greater Israel" since at least when he served in the IDF, and he is not alone inside Israel, either. If he were ousted tomorrow, there's a greater than 50% chance a new zion-expansionist gets voted in after him. He's personally unpopular domestically - not because of his activities in the West Bank, Gaza, or Lebanon, but because he's cashing out Israel's diplomatic capital all at once and Israel is likely to see a period of isolation and an economic collapse once the dust settles. Israel was enjoying prosperity and a lack of consequences to their expansion through occupation and settlement before they turned Gaza to rubble, and Netanyahu has put that all at risk again by going in balls-deep and daring the US to pull him out.

Democrats would prefer Israel not make a bloodbath out of their carefully curated diplomatic embargo around the middle east, but they certainly still want Israel there acting as their proxy. Democrats won't risk being the ones to lose that foreign policy keystone by making any kind of opposition public, but if they can manage to get Netanyahu ousted their PR nightmare might finally come to an end.

This may be hard to remember, but there was a pretty long period of history where the U.S. wasn't represented by bumbling idiots, and the U.S. definitely projected strength on the world stage. There was even a brief window of competency during the Obama era where it seemed like the U.S. could be a leader again.

US now in the byzantine period..