It’s been quite some time since I took my first-year algebra class at Paul Revere Junior High (Euclid, as I recall, had only recently died), but I still remember one problem we were asked to solve. It concerned a bathtub that a faucet was filling with water at one end while an open drain was removing that water at the other end. We were supposed to figure out at what point the water would reach a certain level, or at what point the person filling and draining the tub would be committed to an institution, or something like that.

I’ve remembered this problem lo these many years because it sometimes serves as the perfect metaphor for a policy so self-contradictory that its formulators need to be, at minimum, seriously questioned. And so it was that the mystery of the tub popped into mind when I read earlier today that in his State of the Union address tonight, President Biden will announce that the United States will build a floating pier off the shore of Gaza from which humanitarian aid will flow to the Palestinians, a great many of whom are in dire need of food, water, and medicine. Whether the pier will supplant or merely complement the airdrops of aid that the U.S. has already commenced is not yet clear.

In another part of the forest, The Times of Israel reported today that the U.S. has made more than 100 arms sales to Israel since October 7th—all of them just under the threshold which would require the administration to seek congressional approval for the sales. These sales have doubtless helped the Netanyahu government pursue its not-quite-openly-stated policy of immiserating the Palestinians and making life so impossible in Gaza that many are compelled to move elsewhere. That’s clearly not the preferred policy of the Biden administration, but the more it provides arms to Bibi, the more it looks like Bibi’s useful idiots.

Now that it’s floating the floating pier idea, administration policy resembles even more closely that filling, draining tub. We giveth and we taketh away, but we sure ain’t the Lord.