Americans last week were presented with a real-time demonstration of the stark contrast between responsible national leadership and crashing political dysfunction.

The latter, of course, came courtesy of the House Republican majority, whose continuing paralysis in its quest to choose a leader now endangers not only America's economy but its crucial support for two war-ravaged allies — and thus threatens U.S. national security itself.

On the other side of that ledger is President Joe Biden, whose Thursday night speech cogently outlining the urgent stakes in Israel and Ukraine doubled as an eloquent defense of America's core values in a political era that has battered and strained them.

Eloquence isn't a word often associated with Biden (even in his younger years), but his Oval Office speech was a welcomed exception.

"American leadership is what holds the world together," said Biden, couching U.S. support for Israel against Hamas' terrorism and for Ukraine against Russia's invasion as two parts of the same test of America's commitment to democratic allies. "Our alliances are what keep us safe, and our values are what make us a partner that other nations want to work with."

Biden's speech deftly navigated the divide in America over the situation in Israel, which was attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7 and has since embarked on a full-scale assault to root the terrorist organization out of Gaza.

Some fringe-left Democrats (including U.S. Rep. Cori Bush of St. Louis) have used the conflict to argue for U.S. abandonment of Israel for its treatment of stateless Palestinians. That historic conflict has long needed addressing, but not as Israel fights for its existence against an enemy that intentionally kills civilians and takes hostages, including Americans.

Biden's speech made clear that Bush and the rest are nowhere near the mainstream of his party, which is solidly behind Israel. But he also took pains to reject the wave of Islamophobia that the current conflict has spurred in the U.S.

Citing the recent stabbing death of a 6-year-old Palestinian-American boy in Chicago, allegedly because he was Muslim, Biden said: "We must without equivocation denounce antisemitism. We must also without equivocation denounce Islamophobia. And to all you hurting, I want you to know I see you. You belong. And I want to say this to you: You're all American."

It wasn't so long ago that the themes Biden hit in his speech — national unity, religious and ethnic tolerance, support for democracy throughout the globe — would have had such unquestioned bipartisan support as to sound routine.

But to a GOP still in thrall to a reckless former president and his autocracy-minded movement, it apparently looked like a thrown gauntlet.

"I think what the president did is completely disgraceful," Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, told Fox News after the speech. He said if Biden "wants to sell the American people" on more military aid to Ukraine, "he shouldn't use dead Israeli children to do it. It was disgusting."

Vance's disgusting assessment spotlights his party's disgraceful trend toward trying to abandon Ukraine to its Russian attackers — a trend with apparent roots in Donald Trump's chilling affinity for autocrats generally and Russia's Vladimir Putin specifically.

Biden's move to tie together billions of dollars in military aid to both Israel and Ukraine is both strategically smart in the face of an obstinate opposition party, and philosophically consistent in defending two democracies against brutal, anti-democratic attacks.

But that proposed aid package — including aid for Israel that most Republicans support — is mired in the House GOP meltdown.

Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio on Friday lost his third consecutive vote for House speaker and apparently won't get a fourth shot. No one else appeared positioned to win the office as of late Friday afternoon. The House cannot conduct any business until it fills the position.

That intraparty political food fight is bad for America, especially if it causes a government shutdown when the current stopgap spending agreement expires in mid-November. But a Jordan speakership would have been leagues worse. The MAGA-affiliated Jordan, who to this day refuses to definitively reject Trump's toxic claim that he won the 2020 election, represents the most extreme, nihilistic wing of his party, one dedicated to populist performance politics and stubbornly opposed to any bipartisanship at all.

Whatever happens going forward, the current GOP will still be a party whose only remaining principle was recently summed up by words of Republican Rep. Ann Wagner of suburban St. Louis, explaining why she ditched her own stated principles to support Jordan just days after deeming him too "disgraceful" to be speaker: "I am not, and will not, work with Democrats."

That's not leadership. This is:

"(It's) in moments like these, when fear and suspicion, anger and rage run hard, that we have to work harder than ever to hold on to the values that make us who we are," Biden said in Thursday's speech.

"We're a nation of religious freedom, freedom of expression. We all have a right to debate and disagree, without fear of being targeted in schools or workplaces or in our communities.

"We must renounce violence and vitriol, see each other not as enemies, but as fellow Americans."

Those are words the nation needed to hear right now, over the din of a radicalized Republican Party that no longer reflects even the long-held convictions of America's conservative movement — let alone America itself.

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