We interrupt this Super Bowl for a massacre | Will Bunch Newsletter

It was 57 years ago this winter that an 8-year-old boy starting to get obsessed with football turned on a newfangled color TV in a linoleum family room to watch the first-ever AFL-NFL Championship Game. Since then, I’ve watched all 58 Super Bowls — a window into an America that changed a lot while not really changing at all. The Chiefs, who were blown out in that first Super Bowl, won an overtime thriller Sunday night. It was one of the best I’ve seen, BUT... (see right below).

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Since that first January afternoon in 1967, when the halftime show promoted peace with the release of 300 pigeons into the blue sky over the one-third empty L.A. Coliseum while U.S. soldiers were dying in the jungles of Vietnam, the Super Bowl has worked overtime to drive an American narrative through the diversions of bloodsport and pop fantasy.

With F-16s in the “missing man formation” or Whitney Houston foreshadowing the rockets’ red glare of Operation Desert Storm, the blur of patriotism, pigskin, and propaganda is usually none too subtle. This year, however, it was a U.S.-armed ally, in Israel, that crashed America’s biggest party of the year — and things got more than a little awkward.

During the game, the predictable flow of “is-that-them?” celebrities hawking Dunkin Donuts or TurboTax, interrupted by Taylor Swift beer chugs and an occasional outbreak of football, was jarred by a couple of unusual $7-million-apiece spots — one against antisemitism, and another to drive up U.S. support for Israel’s military campaign against Hamas. That ad, paid for by the Israeli government’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate, started as a warm and fuzzy celebration of fatherhood before its jarring tagline: “To all the dads held in captivity by Hamas for over 120 days, we vow to bring you home.”

By then, in a digital world where so most of us watch the Big Game with one eye, while the other stays glued to a glowing phone or a laptop, a deeply unsettling split-screen scenario was breaking out. While the bread and circus of gleeful consumerism and gridiron violence splayed across 48 diagonal inches, millions were watching horror on their iPhones in real time: a massacre in the Gaza city of Rafah.

“Why are they bombing us?!” a woman screamed in a medical tent, as she waited for a medic to treat her bloodied right arm and her two frightened children looked on. “They told us this was a safe zone!” Her plea has been viewed at least 12 million times. Indeed, Israel had pushed as many as 1 million civilians to Rafah — which normally has a population of 300,000 — on Gaza’s southern border, and then urged them to evacuate again, despite there being nowhere left to go. The bombs began bursting over the Palestinian enclave right around the last notes of the Star Spangled Banner in Las Vegas. Some on social media called it a #SuperBowlMassacre.

“We found ourselves running with our children, from the airstrikes, in every direction,” a Palestinian man named Mohamed Zoghroub told the Associated Press, speaking in front of a Rafah block that had been flattened to rubble. Another man was carrying the dead body of an infant who’d been born after the war began on Oct. 7, and now was already gone. The AP said its footage from Rafah revealed “a large area of flattened houses, tattered tents and lines of bloodied bodies brought into nearby hospitals.”

Yet the story of the night — like everything that comes out of the war-torn region — was complicated. Israel announced some good news that felt almost timed to coincide with the release of its Super Bowl ad — a military operation that liberated two of the hostages. The strikes that Israel insisted were necessary to execute the operation killed some 67 people, according to Gazan authorities, which jibed with the AP eyewitness account.

No one disputes that Hamas started this phase of the conflict on Oct. 7, or that its actions that day — killing hundreds of innocent civilians among at least 1,200 Israeli dead, and seizing several hundred hostages — are morally indefensible. Most Americans would also agree Israel has a right to respond. But like this? The started objectives in attacking Gaza were freeing the hostages and decapitating Hamas. But the hostages rescued during the Super Bowl were just the second and third to be freed militarily, while 80 hostages were released through negotiation and a ceasefire.

Few, if any, senior Hamas commanders have been killed. But the non-stop shelling and drone and missile attacks — often using weapons supplied by the United States — have killed more than 28,000 people. That includes an estimated 12,300 children, a stunning number. Shortly before the raid on Rafah, we learned that a 6-year-old named Hind Rajab who’d frantically dialed 911 for help, trapped in a car with dead relatives and under Israeli fire, had been found dead. A ambulance carrying two paramedics racing to save her had been incinerated by an Israeli missile.

On Thursday night, while the White House press corps was peppering him with questions about his alleged memory problems, President Joe Biden made some news with his harshest criticism yet of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying the ongoing destruction of Gaza is “over the top.” On Monday, we learned that an increasingly frustrated Biden also has a choice 7-letter epithet for the 1967 Cheltenham High School grad.

Seriously, Mr. President? You’re the leader of the free world, but have no power beyond calling the Israeli leader the equivalent of a tuchus? You could do such more more. The White House could center a call for an immediate ceasefire over its blanket public statements of support for Israel, and stop using its veto to block action at the United Nations. It could agree with the International Court of Justice that Israel’s action are tipping into genocide if its “over the top” assault isn’t scaled back. Our government could place strict human-rights limitations on future arms deals, as we do with many other nations whose history is as problematic as what Israel is currently doing in Gaza.

Frankly, it would be a lot easier to enjoy next year’s Super Bowl LIX knowing there’s nothing more violent going on in the world than a horse-collar tackle, and when any supersonic fighter jets over New Orleans aren’t reminding us of the latest atrocity on the other side of the world.

You’ll never totally separate politics from pro football. When the Chiefs claimed victory late Sunday night, Biden himself got in on the act by making fun of right-wing conspiracy theories about him, the NFL, Taylor Swift, and Travis Kelce with his first-ever post on TikTok. It depicted the president as laser-eyed “Dark Brandon,” joking it was all “Just like we drew it up.” But any jokes about Dark Brandon’s alleged power to fix a football game just won’t be funny to the kids until POTUS 46 decides to use his actual superpowers to stop an ungodly #SuperBowlMassacre.

Question: Why are there no longer quality presidential candidates? — Via JB19 (@JTBoz19) on X/Twitter

Answer: Like most Americans, I’ve been thinking about this one a lot recently. On the GOP side, Donald Trump has mastered the two things that an angry and grievance-bearing base of the party wasn’t getting from conventional candidates like Mitt Romney or John McCain, which is irritating the heck out of liberal elites and then defeating them, as he did in 2016. The reward for that is a cult of personality that accepts no substitutes. And yet on the Democratic side, President Joe Biden’s defeat of Trump in 2020 convinced partisans that no one else can do it — that a misogynist nation would reject Kamala Harris just as it did Hillary Clinton, and that any other candidate would blow up the uneasy truce between young leftists and older MSNBC-watching boomers. So ... we are stuck.

Last week’s question about GOP candidate Nikki Haley’s appearance on Saturday Night Live generated mostly a consensus that — despite her lamentable views around race and other topics — we should lighten up about politicians on our TV screen. “If Richard Nixon could appear on Laugh-In in 1968 (that’s how old I am), then why not Nikki Haley on SNL?” asked Anne Knop, adding: “After all, it is a comedy show, even though it hasn’t been very comedic recently.” Said Diane Marcakis: “We should be presented with all the candidate’s viewpoints in order for us all to make a clear decision when we vote! However not Trump because all he does is lie!”

📮This week’s question: Joe Biden’s age and mental acuity have, for better or worse, become the media’s main obsession. At this late date, do Democrats stick with their 81-year-old president, or desperately search for a replacement? And ... who?. For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “Biden’s age” in the subject line.

They say that generals are always fighting the last war, and apparently that’s true for attorneys general as well. It’s time to think harder about the career prosecutor and judge that President Joe Biden tapped to oversee the Department of Justice, Merrick Garland. At the time, Biden’s Democrats were promising to reverse what was widely seen as the corruption of that department during Donald Trump’s presidency — especially under AG William Barr, who ran political interference for the 45th president by whitewashing the report from special prosecutor Robert Mueller on Trump’s White House cover-up. Garland’s brand? The vague and abstract qualities of fairness and even-handedness, wrapped in the same milquetoast package that had inspired Barack Obama in 2016 to unsuccessfully push Garland for the Supreme Court, as the nominal Democrat least offensive to hardball Senate Republicans.

Three years after Biden and Garland took office, voters alarmed about the threat to democracy by a looming Trump 47 presidency are shocked to learn that Garland’s reputation for bland passivity has meant gross inaction during this five-alarm fire. The biggest problem is that Team Biden’s AG seemed to think — as many in The Establishment wrongly did in 2021 — that Trump would fade away and he could avoid the hard questions about prosecuting an ex-president for an attempted coup. Instead of naming an aggressive special counsel such as Jack Smith on Day One, Garland waited an excruciating and inexplicable 22 months to act. Now, there’s a very real possibility that Trump’s two federal trials can be delayed until after the 2024 election.

Also, many are rightly questioning why Garland named an ambitious GOP member of the Federalist Society, Robert Hur, to probe Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents after his vice presidency. Hur’s report cleared the president of criminal wrongdoing, but advanced a gratuitous and nakedly political attack on the 81-year-old’s mental acuity. Fairness, amirite? In a nuclear war for the future of American democracy, Garland brought a rusty kitchen knife. If POTUS 46 somehow gets reelected despite Garland’s unforced errors, he needs to demand the AG’s resignation on Nov. 6. That would be the kind of realpolitik so sorely missing these last three wasted years.

Sometimes you have to wonder why people ignore their own excellent advice. On this date 12 years ago, Marty Baron was editor of the Boston Globe, soon to be made semi-famous through a portrayal in the Oscar-winning movie Spotlight. I quoted extensively from a Baron speech: “The greatest danger to a vigorous press today, however, comes from ourselves ... In this environment, too many news organizations are holding back, out of fear — fear that we will be saddled with an uncomfortable political label, fear that we will be accused of bias, fear that we will be portrayed as negative, fear that we will lose customers, fear that advertisers will run from us, fear that we will be assailed as anti-this or anti-that, fear that we will offend someone, anyone.” Baron went on to become editor of the Washington Post during the Trump era, where his mantra — “We’re not at war ... we’re at work” — became the epitaph for journalism’s failures to defend democracy. Read my Feb. 13, 2012 post and weep: “The speech every journalist needs to read.”

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