Originally published via Armageddon Prose:

The trainwreck GOP debate the other night was mostly irrelevant — largely because the Big Guy, once again, who is dominating every other candidate on stage combined with a 40%+ lead, was not in attendance.

The mild standout was Vivek Ramaswamy, who correctly opened the proceedings with an impressive rhetorical assault on the GOP establishment, the corporate state media outfit hosting the theater production (NBC), and his hack rivals, the most distasteful of whom is Nikki Haley.

This is how you make hay out of an otherwise stultified, arcane performance that is a presidential debate. Repeating donor talking points handed to them by advisors is a losing strategy, a performance that the establishment candidates are seemingly obliged to dramatize under threat of losing their sponsorships.

Related: A Modest Proposal: Alternative Congressional Dress Codes

And here is Ramaswamy breaking down Nikki Haley’s brazen, easily documented corruption, in bed as she is up to her eyeballs with defense contractors (a euphemism for parasites who get rich on public lobbying for wars and then selling weapons for them), who rescued her from financial obscurity in 2017 and turned her virtually overnight into a multimillionaire.

But those defense dollars didn’t deposit themselves into Haley’s bank account for no reason, and it certainly wasn’t a philanthropic act on the contractors’ part. She repaid her benefactors in full on the debate stage, dutifully repeating the talking points they handed her.

Here was the crowning one:

“It’s not that Israel needs America. America needs Israel.”

This is, of course, patent nonsense that anyone with a grade school-level understanding of geopolitics could see through.

Israel would never have been successfully founded in the first instance without American financial, diplomatic, and military support. It certainly wouldn’t have survived the various wars over the decades with its neighbors without American sponsorship.

If Israel “doesn’t need America,” as Haley claims, why does it desperately sponsor legislation to ban boycotts against Israel within the United States? “In recent years, we have promoted laws in most US states, which determine that strong action is to be taken against whoever tries to boycott Israel,” brags the Prime Minister of Israel on Twitter/X. This is a leader of a foreign government bragging about rigging laws to silence what should be the free speech of American citizens — and he doesn’t even have the decency to hide it.

Israel doesn’t need America or its money, so why would its Prime Minister care which Americans boycott it?

Why do Israel’s (and the Democrat Party’s) proxy groups, like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), push censorious regimes to stifle anti-Israeli speech under the guise of fighting antisemitism — smuggled in under “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” brainwashing — if “Israel doesn’t need America”?

Related: The Neocon Jihad Against Free Speech Goes Full-Tilt

Why do pro-Israel lobbying groups like AIPAC funnel tens of millions of dollars into national-level campaigns on both sides of the aisle each election cycle? That sounds like a waste of money on a nation’s political process that “Israel doesn’t need.”

At any rate, the logical follow-up to Haley’s claim would be:

Great, so Israel doesn’t need the United States. So it can refund the $260 billion American taxpayers have gifted it since World War II as the world’s largest welfare queen state.

It can also forgo the multi-billion aid package currently in the pipeline.

It can do without the U.S. running political interference for it at the U.N. Security Council — with the U.S. delegation often being the only one in the way of various condemnations issued by the illegitimate authority (a story for another day).

It doesn’t need the U.S. to broker anymore normalization agreements with other regional powers like Saudi Arabia, expending precious American political capital in the process and requiring massive concessions to these nations as well.

No American would accept this kind of overblown and patently false rhetorical cuckoldry from a Republican candidate regarding literally any other nation, even our most stalwart allies.

Imagine Chris Christie declaring: “We need Canada. Canada doesn’t need us.” Or Ron DeSantis offering his geopolitical analysis that “America needs France. France doesn’t need America.”

It would go over like a lead balloon and would mark the immediate end to their campaigns with the GOP base. And everybody knows it.

Israel is also the only nation of which the military uniform we would permit to be worn in the halls of Congress, as Rep. Brian Mast of Florida did recently with his absurd IDF getup.

In what universe is Haley’s rhetoric remotely compatible with the America First ideology embraced by the party rank-and-file?

Where is the condemnation from high-profile America First Republican figures?

Is this real life?

What is going on here, and why does MAGA not revolt?

*Note: As you might have noticed if you follow the news closely, you’re not likely to get the kind of perspectives on the Israel-Gaza conflict offered at Armageddon Prose from the corporate state media or even, unfortunately, from much of the independent media, a large portion of which for whatever reason sees fit to aggressively promulgate the Israeli state narrative.

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Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.

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