It’s fun watching CNN talking heads cover the events in the Middle East looking as if they are dying of some kind of painful abdominal parasite because they have to say positive things about President Trump. The only time I have seen them look more miserable was on election night last November. Every time these hacks play the moving footage of Israeli families reacting to seeing their loved ones again after being released from Hamas’s tunnels, their expressions look more appropriate for someone who has just watched a beheading than a joyous reunion.

None of them are mentioning the effect today will have on the Democratic Party’s desperate (and stupid) shutdown gambit, but they should. For President Trump is rising into positive territory on the Cognitive Dissonance scale. When that happens, it will necessarily push those things that he opposes down the scale, for that’s how cognitive dissonance works. Except for the hopelessly Trump Deranged, the members of the public who are inclined to be sympathetic to the Democrats in the shutdown will be less so the more the President rises, even though the Hamas-Israel deal he brokered is completely unrelated to it.

The politics of the shutdown are ultimately a PR battle, and the more popular Trump is, the worse the Democrats’ prospects of winning it becomes. The Trump-Hate/ Israel Hate town meeting CNN is about to host featuring AOC and Bernie Sanders could not be timed more horribly for Democrats, foes of Trump, and anti-Israel activists.

True, foreign policy triumphs usually create only temporary bumps in Presidential popularity. Remember that the first Iraq war pushed George H.W. Bush into the 90s for a while. President Trump’s approval will start to fall again, but Democrats were already losing the PR battle over the shutdown. Trump’s big day can only make the situation worse. They ignore the cognitive dissonance scale at their peril.

Addendum: WordPress tells me that this post should have a “Joe Biden” tag. That’s smoking gun evidence that WordPress is tainted with Axis bias: the Left’s current myth-making, along with “Antifa? What Antifa?” is that Biden deserves any credit for the Gaza breakthrough at all.