Politics & Stuff

[Clockwork 1,794]

The thing Trump and GOP understand is appealing to tribalism. Nationalism and appealing to an identity of your country is very effective. The thing is you can pretty much advocate most policy, leftist and liberals do a terrible job at this. GOP policies are quite frankly shit, and leftiest/liberals policy are quite popular according to the polls. But they come across as anti American or foreign. 

For example the Palestine/Israel issue. Israel position that being pro Israel is pro America, while leftiest/liberals when they advocate for peace they come off as anti america and talk about imparlism that is not effective. 

Here is how i would message an anti Isreal from an American standpoint. For example i would advocate that sending billions of dollars is anti American, and that those politicians are serving the interest of a foreign country and they are placing the interest of a foreign country over Americans. Imo this would be a much more effective way to advocate and achieve the same goal. 

 

[Clockwork 1,794]

 

When US politicians visit Israel, either they are signing bombs and advocating killing, or they are taking pictures of remembrance of the holocaust. 

[Vesper 28,767]

42 minutes ago, Clockwork said:

 

When US politicians visit Israel, either they are signing bombs and advocating killing, or they are taking pictures of remembrance of the holocaust. 

Nikki Haley writes 'finish them' on IDF artillery shells during Israel visit

Ex-governor also criticises Biden administration for temporarily withholding weapons to discourage attack on Rafah

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/28/nikki-haley-finish-them-missile-israel

Nikki Haley, the failed Republican presidential nominee, signed Israeli artillery shells with the inscription “Finish Them!” on a Memorial Day visit to Israel. The former South Carolina governor’s graphic display of support came on a trip to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where she was accompanied by Danny Danon, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and a noted hawkish member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party in the Knesset. Her shell-signing activities came at a time when Israel is engaged in a devastating military offensive in Gaza that has so far killed more than 36,000 Palestinians, an estimated 15,000 of them children.

Talking to reporters, Haley was unapologetic, criticising Joe Biden’s administration for temporarily withholding weapons as a means of discouraging an Israeli attack on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, and aiming barbs at the international criminal court (ICC) – which is seeking Netanyahu’s arrest – and the international court of justice (ICJ), which is considering charges of genocide against Israel. “What America needs to understand is if Israel’s fighting our enemies, how can we not help them,” said Haley, whose missile message also carried the words “America loves Israel”.

“The sure way to not help Israel is to withhold weapons. The sure way to not help Israel is to praise the ICC, the ICJ or any of those that are condemning Israel instead of condemning what happens. “America needs to do whatever Israel needs and stop telling them how to fight this war. You are either a friend or not a friend.” Haley, like Danon a former ambassador to the UN, last week said she would vote for Trump in November’s presidential election, despite having previously denounced him as “dangerous” and unfit to serve.

Danon proudly recorded Haley’s show of support, which also included a trip to southern Israel to meet survivors of Hamas’s 7 October attack in which about 1,200 people were killed and another 253 were taken hostage, on his X account. According to one Israeli peace activist, Alon-Lee Green, Haley also visited settlements in the West Bank, which are not recognised under international law. “Dear Americans, Nikki Haley visited us today: she went to the West Bank settlements and then signed on a bomb ‘finish them’. Just disgusting,” Green posted. “Can you take her back please? We already have one [Itamar] Ben-Gvir [Israel’s national security minister] and don’t need your filthy death-promoting politicians as well. Thanks!”

[cosmicway 1,323]

The 7 of October attacks were by and large a conspiracy to have Trump elected.
There was no military objective of any kind.
Hamas even if they lose Gaza and the tunnels don't mind.
Their leaders are safe in the emirates or Iran and they will find some other way to carry out more terror operations.
With Trump -they reckon- the whole edifice of the western alliance cracks and everybody go their separate ways.
Their master behind the scenes Vladimir Putin becomes happy, wins the war in Ukraine and is ready for more territorial gains.
Places where NATO already has cracked are Hungary, Turkey, Spain and Norway while pro-Putin political factions exist almost everywhere.
 

 

[Fulham Broadway 16,829]

8 hours ago, Vesper said:

Nikki Haley writes 'finish them' on IDF artillery shells during Israel visit

Ex-governor also criticises Biden administration for temporarily withholding weapons to discourage attack on Rafah

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/28/nikki-haley-finish-them-missile-israel

Nikki Haley, the failed Republican presidential nominee, signed Israeli artillery shells with the inscription “Finish Them!” on a Memorial Day visit to Israel. The former South Carolina governor’s graphic display of support came on a trip to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where she was accompanied by Danny Danon, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and a noted hawkish member of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party in the Knesset. Her shell-signing activities came at a time when Israel is engaged in a devastating military offensive in Gaza that has so far killed more than 36,000 Palestinians, an estimated 15,000 of them children.

Talking to reporters, Haley was unapologetic, criticising Joe Biden’s administration for temporarily withholding weapons as a means of discouraging an Israeli attack on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, and aiming barbs at the international criminal court (ICC) – which is seeking Netanyahu’s arrest – and the international court of justice (ICJ), which is considering charges of genocide against Israel. “What America needs to understand is if Israel’s fighting our enemies, how can we not help them,” said Haley, whose missile message also carried the words “America loves Israel”.

“The sure way to not help Israel is to withhold weapons. The sure way to not help Israel is to praise the ICC, the ICJ or any of those that are condemning Israel instead of condemning what happens. “America needs to do whatever Israel needs and stop telling them how to fight this war. You are either a friend or not a friend.” Haley, like Danon a former ambassador to the UN, last week said she would vote for Trump in November’s presidential election, despite having previously denounced him as “dangerous” and unfit to serve.

Danon proudly recorded Haley’s show of support, which also included a trip to southern Israel to meet survivors of Hamas’s 7 October attack in which about 1,200 people were killed and another 253 were taken hostage, on his X account. According to one Israeli peace activist, Alon-Lee Green, Haley also visited settlements in the West Bank, which are not recognised under international law. “Dear Americans, Nikki Haley visited us today: she went to the West Bank settlements and then signed on a bomb ‘finish them’. Just disgusting,” Green posted. “Can you take her back please? We already have one [Itamar] Ben-Gvir [Israel’s national security minister] and don’t need your filthy death-promoting politicians as well. Thanks!”

US taxpayers, many struggling to pay bills, rent, mortgages, food should be given a choice as to whether they want another $300 billion to go to the rogue state.

[Fulham Broadway 16,829]

Five Israelis were seen filming as jet liners ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 ...(Reuters)

THERE was ruin and terror in Manhattan, but, over the Hudson River in New Jersey, a handful of men were dancing. As the World Trade Centre burned and crumpled, the five men celebrated and filmed the worst atrocity ever committed on American soil as it played out before their eyes.

Who do you think they were? Palestinians? Saudis? Iraqis, even? Al-Qaeda, surely? Wrong on all counts. They were Israelis - and at least two of them were Israeli intelligence agents, working for Mossad, the equivalent of MI6 or the CIA.

Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of indisputable fact. To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they moved from the Middle East through Europe and into America where they trained as pilots and prepared to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States. And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause.

 

After the attacks on New York and Washington, the former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was asked what the terrorist strikes would mean for US-Israeli relations. He said: "It's very good." Then he corrected himself, adding: "Well, it's not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy for Israel from Americans."

[cosmicway 1,323]

Just now, Fulham Broadway said:

Five Israelis were seen filming as jet liners ploughed into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 ...(Reuters)

THERE was ruin and terror in Manhattan, but, over the Hudson River in New Jersey, a handful of men were dancing. As the World Trade Centre burned and crumpled, the five men celebrated and filmed the worst atrocity ever committed on American soil as it played out before their eyes.

Who do you think they were? Palestinians? Saudis? Iraqis, even? Al-Qaeda, surely? Wrong on all counts. They were Israelis - and at least two of them were Israeli intelligence agents, working for Mossad, the equivalent of MI6 or the CIA.

Their discovery and arrest that morning is a matter of indisputable fact. To those who have investigated just what the Israelis were up to that day, the case raises one dreadful possibility: that Israeli intelligence had been shadowing the al-Qaeda hijackers as they moved from the Middle East through Europe and into America where they trained as pilots and prepared to suicide-bomb the symbolic heart of the United States. And the motive? To bind America in blood and mutual suffering to the Israeli cause.

 

After the attacks on New York and Washington, the former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was asked what the terrorist strikes would mean for US-Israeli relations. He said: "It's very good." Then he corrected himself, adding: "Well, it's not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy for Israel from Americans."

Those days I was listening to the sports radio phone in program all night.
2001, Pasok government, the party not yet split two ways like they are now.
The switchboard was jammed with commies who were praising Bin Laden and the terror attack.
If that was happening in Athens, then Gaza ?

So to you the Israelis did a Winston Churchill after Pearl Harbour thing.
I have n't been witness but has its logic.

Dig this also:
 

 

It's AEK Athens v. Hibernian for the Europa cup of 2001-02 a few days after 9-11.
There is a one minute silence for 9-11 and the hooligans break it with Bin Laden chants.
And we are thousands of miles from Gaza.
To compensate for this the board took the entire team to the US embassy the following day
to sign the book of condolensces.

 

 

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,919]

9 hours ago, Clockwork said:

 

When US politicians visit Israel, either they are signing bombs and advocating killing, or they are taking pictures of remembrance of the holocaust. 

Nimarata the Nimrod Hailey has spent her entire life trying to hide her Indian heritage, and laying up under any white man who'd have her. She sold out her dignity decades ago, which is why South Carolina was what it was under her "Leadership"

 

Her legacy will always be the guy she put on to politics all together, Tim Scott, rebuking her in favor of Trump. Of course as he's gay he was able to see through her quite clearly being the only one on that side who isnt dreaming of having sex with her(or her daughter in the case of that weirdo Vivek).

She clearly wants some do nothing cabinet job under trump now.

[Vesper 28,767]

Joe Biden’s Dithering in Gaza Gets Absurd

Today on TAP: The Netanyahu regime is making a mockery of American policy.

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-05-28-joe-bidens-dithering-in-gaza-gets-absurd/

 

Back on May 8, President Biden told CNN’s Erin Burnett that if Israel invaded Rafah—a small, extremely dense city within the Gaza Strip that has become crammed with perhaps a million refugees because Israel had previously declared parts of the city a safe zone—he would cut off their supply of American weapons. “If they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities,” he said. “We’re not going to supply the weapons and artillery shells.”

Fast-forward to this week, and Israel has indeed attacked and invaded the city. On Sunday, an airstrike hit a mass of tents in the city, reportedly killing 45 people. On Tuesday, Reuters reported witness testimony that “tanks and armoured vehicles mounted with machine guns were spotted near Al-Awda mosque” in central Rafah.

Yet as of this week, Axios reported that the White House is “still assessing” whether the red line had been crossed, and at the time of writing the weapons had not been cut off. I ask: What else is there to assess? Do they think they could be someone else’s tanks? (Perhaps Bugs Bunny got lost taking his armored regiment to Palm Springs.)

More from Ryan Cooper

The Guardian also reported Tuesday that Yossi Cohen, former head of the Israeli spy agency Mossad, “allegedly threatened a chief prosecutor of the international criminal court in a series of secret meetings in which he tried to pressure her into abandoning a war crimes investigation.”

What more is it going to take for Biden to stop enabling this rogue state?

It should be emphasized that the Rafah attack was no outlier. From the very start of the campaign, “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy,” to quote Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, an Israeli military spokesman, from back in October. And it was only a few weeks ago that Israeli forces killed several World Central Kitchen aid workers, including an American citizen, with repeated precision airstrikes.

In international law, there is an important distinction between collateral damage—civilians killed by accident in a conflict—and deliberately killing civilians because you claim there might be a military target among them. That is a war crime. Stopping shipments of food and medical supplies—in an obvious, undisguised attempt to create famine in Gaza, which Israel has been doing for months—is also a war crime.

Yet this has been the story of the Biden administration and the war in Gaza. Biden makes some timid requests for Israeli forces to cool it a little bit; Netanyahu spits in his face, blows up another hospital, and then demands more free weapons.

I’d argue that a true friend of Israel—one who does not want it to end up as a North Korea–style pariah state—would have long since put maximum pressure on it to end this war and accept a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians, either with their own state or as one state with equal rights for all. That’s the only thing that will protect Israeli security in the long run.

But it seems Joe Biden is not such a friend.

[Vesper 28,767]

The Three Barriers to Biden’s Re-Election

Price increases, a broader economic frustration built over decades, and an inability to articulate what’s being done about any of it

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-three-barriers-biden-reelection/

 

Democratic anxiety has ratcheted up to the point of neurosis. The presidential election today is within the margin of error, with a difference of a point or two. By way of comparison, at this moment in 2000 George W. Bush was up by seven points, and by August of that year, by 16 points. At no point was Al Gore publicly admonished to step aside, nor was any conspiracy to somehow throw him out at the convention openly discussed. Gore came out, kissed his wife, gave a speech about the people vs. the powerful, and the race was tied in a blink.

Such patience is not in evidence today. The default mode for Democrats is panic, and for Republicans, bravado. It pervades the way politics feels, regardless of results, and tilts the turf on which the election is waged in a conservative direction. It hobbles clear thinking about the dynamics of elections, and in some ways perpetuates the outcome; after all, people love a bandwagon.

What Democrats need to know right now is why they’re losing in the presidential race, so they can be confident in adopting the right strategies to change course. Some pundits are attempting to reason out theories, sometimes seven theories at a time. I have a few of my own, which separately point to the fact that policy matters, though you can’t expect people to intuit that policy themselves.

More from David Dayen

The first thing to say here is just that inflation is bad, and this first sustained round in 40 years has been poison for heads of state, regardless of their political ideology. Biden’s situation is positively sunny compared to Justin Trudeau or Rishi Sunak; indeed, just about every incumbent in a highly industrialized nation who presided over inflation is in rather terrible shape, from Japan to France to South Korea to Germany.

That should put the cottage industry of “what Biden is doing wrong” takes in their proper context; he’s in better shape than his colleagues, in part because his economy is faring better than other nations. But price hikes have a strong downward pull, and contra Ezra Klein, they are borne by heads of state, not governors or senators.

It’s true that inflation in the U.S. has been generally stable for a year, at a level barely above the norm, and wages have increased more rapidly in the aggregate, bringing Americans more purchasing power. But I think economist J.W. Mason is right to say that the time period by which we chart inflation statistics, over one or 12 months, is not necessarily the most obviously correct one. “The change in prices over the past several years is just as much an economic fact as the change over the past year,” Mason posted on Twitter. (That change in prices appears to be worse in areas less favorable to Democrats.) People have not reconfigured their mental beliefs of what things should cost, and assuming their view of this is simply wrong is the equivalent of the satirical Bertolt Brecht decree that the government should “dissolve the people and elect another.”

During the 2020 election, candidate Biden made a promise to not be a totalizing force in people’s lives as president.

I think there’s another driver here. Cory Doctorow has blessed us with the term “enshittification,” though for purposes of historical accuracy I must note that the blogger Yves Smith came up with the concept more than a decade ago, under the sobriquet “crapification.” For at least this long, consumers have been abused, as their role as the primary group companies must please has been supplanted by Wall Street. As surplus value pools in the hands of investors and executives, product quality suffers and customer service drifts into the territory of nightmares. Yet market power locks people into enduring these burdens. This has been happening for a while, but inflation punctuated it and made it more visible. When you’re paying more for the same stuff, you might ruminate on how the stuff was better back when you were paying less.

Biden is therefore being punished for a buildup of degradations that corporate America has inflicted upon its customers for decades. The demoralizing nature of crapification combines with the demoralizing nature of price rises, and people cast about for someone to blame.

That they have put it on the president is natural, even though the policy side of this administration, more than any other in recent memory, is actually working to punish companies for these practices. Nobody in decades has attempted to take on private equity bust-outs, junk fees, and the lock-in effects of corporate concentration like the high-profile officials in the Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and Antitrust Division of the Justice Department.

Yet Biden gets almost no credit for these or other achievements, and this is what really frustrates partisans, who cannot believe the polling they’re seeing, where Americans think the economy is in recession and unemployment is at a 50-year high rather than a 50-year low. (In this case, we should probably choose not to believe the polling that found this result, given that it was conducted by the perfectly self-interested Mark Penn.)

What I think is not understood enough is that the Biden presidency was in many ways predicated on not taking credit for achievements.

DURING THE 2020 ELECTION, CANDIDATE BIDEN made a promise to not be a totalizing force in people’s lives as president. He would not generate drama or instigate day-to-day hysteria; he would end rage-tweeting and fight-picking and endless boasting. He would be a different kind of president, concerned with quiet progress over self-aggrandizement. He would bring things back to normal.

There was a comfort in this, and because we’re dealing with Democrats, anxiety about that comfort, fueling worries that a mass of resistance leaders “going back to brunch” would dissipate the energy around changes that needed to be made. By and large, the administration has gotten done what it wanted to do anyway, without a rank-and-file army pushing from below. But this determination to disconnect the presidency from Americans, after four years of a presidency delivered directly to the national bloodstream, has not worked out well in building a record.

Over the Trump years, Americans became accustomed to substituting noise for action. If Donald Trump was yelling about something or other, at least it meant there was a debate going in Washington. There was a sense of motion about the Trump presidency that was at odds with the generally torpid output.

In the Biden administration, this dynamic is flipped. His legislative record was decent for the first two years, and his administrative record decent throughout; but because politics has now become more of a rap battle than the gradual establishment of foundations for progress, nobody gets the sense that anything is happening.

Some of this is the failings of the storyteller and his age. Biden’s not a great messenger. But the bigger problem is he hasn’t wanted to carry any message. Matt Stoller’s readout of how Biden’s press secretaries, whose job is to explain the White House agenda, consistently demur at saying anything about what that agenda is, is indicative of a political decision to stay out of people’s feeds and recede into the background. There are theories about how speaking softly lowers the temperature for legislative dealmaking, but it’s the worst way to maintain standing among voters, especially coming off a presidential term where talk stood in for action.

The fact that Biden took on advisers from the Sanders and Warren wing of the party, far from being a concession to left-wing ascendancy, was a concession to the reality that Biden had practically no policy apparatus as a candidate. He had a choice to reimpose the Clinton/Obama retreads that put the country on the path to electing Donald Trump, or the only other idea factory in the party. This worked out for the business of policy, but the pillars of this strategy—industrial policy, trustbusting, strengthening labor, and generally providing the counterweights to crapification—were so novel that they required a politics that educates the public on their rationale. That stands in direct contrast to the hands-off approach signaled by Biden before his inauguration.

Former White House adviser Tim Wu’s frank discussion of both the history and current practice of presidents in antitrust policy lends some support to this view. On the policy side, Biden’s team is attempting to reconnect antitrust with politics; on the political side, there remains “a significant distance from involvement in or even mentioning individual cases.” (This is starting to change, as Karine Jean-Pierre did decide to comment on the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Ticketmaster.)

Part of this is overcautiousness from White House lawyers concerned with being seen as influencing legal actions. But part of it is a conscious choice. It’s a bad choice, because the public was taught through nonstop coverage of Trump and a Great Man depiction of history going back centuries that the president is the center of the political story. If you decide to move out of that spotlight, you must not be doing anything worth a damn.

Though I haven’t mentioned Gaza up to now, I should say that this disinterest in vocalizing policy is playing a huge role here. The feebleness of having Benjamin Netanyahu viciously ignore every back-channel entreaty to restraint is palpable, and it sums up people’s attitude about the president.

The election shines a spotlight even on the reluctant, and maybe this will bounce in Democrats’ direction. Consumer resistance to price levels is spurring some discounting, border crossings are falling precipitously, crime rates have come down, clean-energy investment is soaring, and entire industries are being reshored. Those realities will be aired in public, though whether the voters who matter most will see or feel them is still an open question.

But at least some of the discontent and belief in government futility is locked in, not just because inflation is poisonous to political fortunes but because Biden wanted to keep his achievements locked away. That obviously has to change.

Running a populist campaign has been the Democratic antidote to voter apathy or anger for the entirety of their run in winning the popular vote in seven of the last eight elections. Bill Clinton said that Americans who worked hard and played by the rules should get a fair shot. Gore pitted the people vs. the powerful. Barack Obama, who had populism surgically removed from his person at birth, reacted to an economy in a far worse state than today by running ruthlessly in his 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney, who was depicted as the private equity ghoul who literally just fired you.

Donald Trump, who is seeking bribes from oil companies and wants to give corporations more tax breaks as a reward for their elevated profits, is if anything easier to target in this manner. Biden flirted with it in 2020 and even this year, using a “Scranton vs. Park Avenue” formulation. It may be boring to see this old-time religion from Democrats every four years, and in the past maybe tiresome in its hypocrisy. But for Biden, or at least for the significant faction of his administration trying to change the rules of the economy, it would have the added benefit of being correct.

[Vesper 28,767]

My Political Depression Problem—and Ours

Granular study of the ever-more-authoritarian right didn’t demoralize the author as much as reaction from the left.

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-my-political-depression-problem/

 

I don’t want to make this about me, because it really isn’t about me. I don’t want make it about them, because it really isn’t about them.

I’m talking about an anguish I felt this past week, a weight heaving down somewhere around my sternum, grinding away at my ability to proceed through daily life. Such feelings are not unfamiliar to me; just ask my pharmacist. But I’ve never had them before over politics.

So, yes, OK: Maybe this is a little bit about me.

I’ve spent half my life now, starting in 1997 when I was 27, trying to make sense of the right. It was a fortunate career choice. With each passing year, the right became more and more the star of the American political show. More and more, people began telling me, with aching earnestness, that what I did was profoundly valuable to them. I helped them understand their childhoods; I helped them fear the future less, because they saw what we had overcome before. They still feared the future, but they were grateful, because I inspired them to launch their own careers as activists or politicians to fight for it.

This has been a fortunate thing for my soul. Writing that last sentence, in fact, I misted up a little bit—which is a good thing, because for the last several days, I’ve felt so dead inside that I’ve hardly had any emotions at all.

What does my work on American conservatism come down to? One of my readers once put it best: “There’s always more, and it’s always worse. But it’s never new.”

The most important part of that formulation is the “always worse” part. Right now, that means three things. First, there is no going back to some more innocent conservatism of the past. Second, if Donald Trump wins the majority of electoral votes and accedes again to the White House, this will obviously be very bad. But third, if he does not win the majority of electoral votes—well, it might be worse. I’ve heard that the secret to politics is repetition. Can you stand for me to repeat it one more time? The question is not just how many votes Donald Trump gets, but how many are willing to take up arms for him if he loses.

More from Rick Perlstein

Always worse. In the book I’m working on now, I’ve developed a theory to explain why that is, and how it works. I call it the “authoritarian ratchet.” Its axioms are that the basic thing conservatism promises to its adherents, a return of society to a prelapsarian state, is impossible; but that this impossible thing, in the logic of conservatism, is also imperative to achieve, lest civilization collapse, and good people suffer a kind of living death.

To understand the “imperative” part, note how conservatives talk in every generation about whatever it is they identify as the latest existential threat to civilization.

“The demand is for the abolition of all distinctions … It attacks the integrity of the family; it attacks the eternal decrees of God Almighty; it denies and repudiates the obligations of motherhood.” (That was a delegate to the California constitutional convention of 1879, speaking on a motion to give women the vote.)

“Never in the history of the world has any measure [been] so insidiously designed … to enslave workers … The lash of the dictator will be felt … [It will] pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants.” (That was Republican congressmen in the debate over Social Security in 1935.)

“You and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” (That was Ronald Reagan in 1961, talking about what would happen if Congress enacted Medicare.)

“We won’t have a country anymore.” (Donald Trump, 2015–present, usually about “open borders,” but more recently, about what will happen if he loses in November.)

When conservatives lose fights like these, and civilizations stand nonetheless, conservatives just move on to the next existential threat: people using the “wrong” bathrooms, lab-grown meat, or whatever else is invented by some clever ideological entrepreneur.

Which is strange. Imagine living, as your basic orientation toward the world, under the imperative/impossible dyad. No wonder conservatives, as a basic psychological proposition, tend to feel so angry and unhinged.

What is even stranger is when conservatives win. When this, that, or the other liberal horror they’ve been working decades to repeal is finally repealed (think, most recently, of the right to abortion). When after decades of struggle, they take command of a marquee institution like the Supreme Court. When they control the White House, House, and Senate, like they did between 2017 and 2019. And yet that never makes them less agitated. The promised return to a prelapsarian peace doesn’t feel any closer—because retuning to that fictional state is impossible.

Note how conservatives talk in every generation about whatever it is they identify as the latest existential threat to civilization.

Of course, a conservative could respond by moderating their expectations of what politics could achieve—but then other conservatives say they are no longer conservatives. They are “squishes,” “RINOs,” or “cucks.” No wonder there are fewer moderate Republicans to point to all the time.

A conservative could also respond by questioning the original premise. But if they do that, they are no longer “conservative” either.

Those who do affect this apostasy are often the most clear-eyed explicators of what happens next, as the imperative/impossible dyad continues to fail to deliver. Constituents demand, and conservative politicians offer, even more radical panaceas, the problem always being that the previous ones were not conservative enough. Ever-more-elaborate conspiracy theories as the only explanation for the disappointment. Ever-more-fierce hunts for quislings to purge. Ever-more-metastasizing scapegoating. Anger at the designated Others who must have made it happen—for conservatism itself can never be the problem. Conservatism, as I once wrote, never fails. It is only failed.

This is why I now describe the history of conservatism as a ratchet. It must always move in an invariably more authoritarian direction, with no possible end point but an apocalyptic one.

Just listen to any recent Donald Trump speech: The redemptive promises he makes are more insanely fantastical with each passing day. Imagine the disappointment their serial failures will bring in their wake, which can never redound on him. (Conservatism never fails …) They must instead be blamed on the Enemy.

Which is us.

That is why another Trump term—or the potential insurgency after a Trump defeat—may be traumatic beyond our poor powers to imagine it. People seem to think there’s some modern American exception to the ease with which human beings can turn to violence on a mass scale, and the pleasure they will take in it, once they receive sanction from on high to do so. It can happen here. It might.

But believe it or not, contemplating that is not what is making me so depressed.

LOOK AT THE FIRST PARAGRAPH OF THIS ESSAY: its reference to “them.” I’m not talking about right-wingers.

There have always been right-wingers. They’ve always harbored the potential to do the most terrible things imaginable. After all my years dwelling intellectually among them, I’ve devised ways to retain equanimity while staring down that particular abyss, and become adept at taking in their harshest assaults. I’m talking about the kind of person who tracks down your email to let you know they hope someday to flay all the skin off your body (I got that one for calling the Vietnam POW/MIA flag “racist”); or the kind of Fox News host who spits out “that Perlstein,” as a picture of me with my nose photoshopped to be 15 percent more Jew-y flashes on the screen; or a top-drawer right-wing publicist, one of the people at the vanguard in driving Bill Clinton’s impeachment, trying to smear my career out of existence for writing a book critical of Ronald Reagan.

No, the injury grinding me down is built of much smaller differences. It comes from encounters with colleagues and comrades on the left. What we disagree on, as you might have guessed, is endorsing a Democratic president who shares responsibility for the massacre of tens of thousands of innocents, in a criminal war that another country’s quite fascist leader seems to be pursuing, not merely out of fanatical bloodlust and racism but in order to stay in power and perhaps to avoid prison.

It’s happening, no surprise, on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, where I’ve been drafted as an apologist for “Genocide Joe” for arguing why the alternative is so much worse.

People who read me here won’t be particularly surprised to learn that I agree with these interlocutors that the best word the English language gives us to describe what the IDF is doing to the population trapped within Gaza is, indeed, “genocide.” And while I think the version of the argument that holds that Joe Biden himself is committing genocide is a grievous violation of reason, I still believe that, considering the tools at his disposal to stop it, Biden’s moral culpability for the slaughter is only a few notches below that.

So, saying you should vote for him anyway is a hard argument to make. Maybe I should be gentler on myself that I’ve not managed to persuade the literally thousands of people on the left raining abuse down upon me for making it. All the same, my failure is gutting me worse than anything that has happened to me before in my career.

What it comes down to, I guess, is this. If I of all people can’t convince people on the left to fight right-wing authoritarians who consider them veritable Untermenschen, then what the hell have I been wasting half my life on this work for?

FORMERLY-KNOWN-AS-TWITTER IS NOT REAL LIFE, they say, and you can dismiss a lot of the nastiness, especially when it’s attached to a pseudonym, as the product of minds not mature enough to know better.

But it has also come from grown-ups with considerable cultural capital, including people I deeply admire. When I reposted a picture of an IDF soldier proudly sitting and reading in the library of Gaza City’s Aqsa University, in front of a set of shelves he and his unit had set on fire, a response shredded my insides more than anything I had ever fielded about my writing (including the guy who wanted to flay me alive). It came from someone who is a major intellectual influence on me. It amounted to: Rick Perlstein thinks you should vote for Biden, because under Trump, the books will burn faster.

Not bad, by Algonquin Round Table standards: That’s genuine wit. You’ll have a hard time finding the post, though, if you care to search, because by the time this essay is posted I plan to have closed down my formerly-known-as-Twitter account, at least until people can be counted on to have moved on. It’s hardly an original insight to point out that the incentives on social media are set up to award the hit-and-run over respectful mutual engagement. So I’ll take a break—not least because I am very guilty of that sin, too.

My worst offense was an over-the-top claim that we can expect second-term Trump to urge Israel to use nuclear weapons, that they just might, and that this would lead to World War III and global Armageddon—and, well, isn’t that worse than what is happening now?

The thing is, I don’t really believe it. Still, I convinced myself I did, doubling down, patronizing people by claiming they just didn’t know the literature, etc. My temptation to histrionic speculation was born of the logic of fka Twitter: to score points. It helped nothing. It opened me up to a mocking that was probably deserved.

I’ve certainly made arguments there that I stand behind, ones that don’t demand speculation about what Trump would do, but point to what he has done. Trump doesn’t care about causing mass death when those dying are red-blooded Americans. In my column on sociologist Eric Klinenberg’s book on COVID, I cited a study demonstrating that if the United States had the same COVID death rate as Australia, 900,000 more people would be alive today. This is largely Trump’s fault, for refusing to do things Australia did like establish federal task forces, publicly subsidize necessary equipment, establish uniform lockdown policies and contact-tracing protocols, respect and empower the relevant public-health experts, etc. The reason he did not was his infantile magic thinking that if he pretended there was not a crisis, there would not be one, and he would not be blamed. Imagine how much less he’d care about corpses in a “shithole” like Gaza.

Another argument I stand by is a hoary cliché of the “lesser evil” sweepstakes: quoting Frederick Douglass’s famous advice to recently enfranchised Black voters that “the Republican Party is the ship, all else the sea.” I pointed out that, in 1872, white Republicans’ willingness to sell out multiracial democracy in the South was already in evidence, and the sharecropping system that forced Blacks into conditions almost as bad as slavery already in formation. So was Frederick Douglass pro-sharecropping? No, he was just saying that the leaky, rusting pile they were stuck with beat the hell out of drowning. It was a 19th-century version of imploring people once to hold their noses and support another oft-pathetic political party, our own benighted Democrats.

The authoritarian ratchet grinds ceaselessly on, with anti-authoritarians helpless to stop it.

Be that as it may. For making arguments like these, I learned I was “a genocidal racist and it defines your politics, your character, and your scholarship.” And maybe I’ll keep pushing arguments like these, somewhere. But not chez Elon Musk.

I don’t trust my own infantile temptation to answer back snark for snark, to dream up cleverer cheap shots, to fantasize about spurring my own troops to a pile-on. So no more. De-escalation, or nothing.

Blame Joe Biden for this present mess, sure—this guy without the character to grasp how vulnerable any campaign would be for a second term that ends at age 86. This guy without the wisdom or foresight to conspicuously groom a successor. This guy who, in some unreachable recess of his brain, seems to have convinced himself he’s somehow saving another six million Jews from death by letting Benjamin Netanyahu indiscriminately massacre Palestinians.

Or, hell, blame Adolf Hitler, for making what was once the ideology of only a tiny minority of Jews—state-based Zionism—seem suddenly the only viable solution to the worst refugee crisis the world had ever seen.

Blame whoever you want, because either way, no one’s getting anywhere on fka Twitter.

One thing I’ve been thinking about a lot instead: calling the guys (the debaters seem to be all male, for what it’s worth) who’ve been slamming me. On the telephone, like in the olden days. Ask where they are coming from. Establish a common ground of understanding. Then, maybe, have the arguments.

Because what happens on fka Twitter, and I hope my interlocutors there don’t find this too patronizing, aren’t even actually arguments. They can be, certainly. But according to a koan issued by a long-forgotten social critic named Marshall McLuhan: The medium is the message. How a conduit for information structures that information determines how that information comes across. In Elon’s house, collecting endorphin hits from piling up points—follows, retweets, pile-ons, etc.—is just too easy. And in the world we live in, in 2024, all of us need some kind of narcotic just to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

It’s a symptom. A symptom of a time when oceans are rising and fires are burning and trust is evaporating and guns are proliferating, when AI is embraced headlong even as proof piles up that it just makes everything worse. A symptom of what happens when one broken society, the United States, smashes up against another broken society, Israel. A symptom of institutionalized stupidity, like Jews getting regularly called antisemites for not holding the same opinions as the most powerful people in society. People gulp the available pixel-pills to keep from feeling too much pain—which only makes us all more insane, and thus adds to the diseases causing the pain.

We need the drug. He’s got the drug. That makes this particular opium den, whatever the stakes of the arguments, just one more manifestation of an entire society in unceasing fight-or-flight mode, looking for an enemy to blame or a bunker to hide in. Our highbrow version of the thoroughgoing trashiness of MAGA culture. If it wasn’t, people agreeing on 95 percent of everything else wouldn’t be acting like such assholes to one another.

For me, it’s a symptom most of all of my helplessness, as the authoritarian ratchet grinds ceaselessly on, with anti-authoritarians helpless to stop it whether we “win” in Washington or not, with the way one group of anti-authoritarians accuses another group of anti-authoritarians of being complicit “shitlibs,” and with that group accusing the first group of sole responsibility for every loss to the Republicans since the time when convention power brokers smoked backroom cigars. It was my New Year’s resolution two years ago to do whatever I could to keep an operational peace between “liberals” and the “left”; and how’s that working out for me?

As I like to point out in another of those arguments I kept futilely making on fka Twitter, the bad guys want to put us all in stretchers, not recognizing any distinction we’d care to make. It’s like an old joke from the 1960s. A cop bops a liberal on the head with a billy club at an anti-war protest, calling him a “Commie” as he slaps the bracelets on him.

“But officer, I’m an anti-Communist!”

“I don’t care what kind of Communist you are, you’re coming with me.”

No wonder I’ve been depressed.

LAST NOVEMBER, ON FRESH AIR, at the end of an interview with the outstanding and prolific writer Garrett Graff, who had written a new book on the possibility of life on other planets, Terry Gross asked him to reflect back on an interview they’d done two years earlier about a prescient article he’d published about the damage Trump might still do to democracy in his remaining weeks in the White House. “So I’m wondering what you’re thinking now about Trump … if he does manage, in spite of all the indictments, to get re-elected.”

I deeply appreciated Graff’s response. He said it better than I could.

“Let me give you an answer,” he began, “that, unexpectedly, is going to connect to UFOs.”

Gross laughed. I didn’t. I had some idea where he was going.

The scientists who work on SETI—the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—have this thing called the “Drake Equation.” It’s an equation that is supposed to predict the number of intelligent civilizations out there, and how many there are at any given time. The main variable scientists call “L,” which stands for the length of time an advanced civilization lasts. To me, the challenge is, L could turn out to be, based on where humanity is heading, a pretty short number. And when you look around our world right now … there’s no guarantee that human civilization is around for that much longer … So to me, when I look at Donald Trump’s possible return to power, what I’m thinking about right now is what it does to the L of American democracy and human civilization and how it could, and almost certainly would, accelerate the unwinding of modern American life.

Me, too. I can’t be the only one whose unconscious figures out ways to keep them in bed until noon, even on sunny spring days where everything else in life is full of safety, sweetness, rewarding work. Read Auden, he said it even better than anyone: We must love each other, or die.

But there I go again, being histrionic. I can’t help it. It’s simply how I understand the stakes.

 

[Vesper 28,767]

The Impartial Jurist

[Fulham Broadway 16,829]

Pop singer Dua Lipa has condemned the military operations in Gaza, describing them as “Israeli genocide” in an Instagram post to her 88 million followers.

Reposting a graphic from the group Artists4Ceasefire, along with the hashtag #AllEyesOnRafah that has trended in the days following Israel’s bombing of the Palestinian city, she wrote: “Burning children alive can never be justified. The whole world is mobilising to stop the Israeli genocide. Please show your solidarity with Gaza.”

[cosmicway 1,323]

52 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Pop singer Dua Lipa has condemned the military operations in Gaza, describing them as “Israeli genocide” in an Instagram post to her 88 million followers.

Reposting a graphic from the group Artists4Ceasefire, along with the hashtag #AllEyesOnRafah that has trended in the days following Israel’s bombing of the Palestinian city, she wrote: “Burning children alive can never be justified. The whole world is mobilising to stop the Israeli genocide. Please show your solidarity with Gaza.”

We ought to show our solidarity with Gaza after Hamas is gone, especially if post-Hamas Israeli administration proves to be unjust.
No solidarity with Hamas-Iran-Putin.

[Fulham Broadway 16,829]

The head of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, allegedly threatened a chief prosecutor of the international criminal court (ICC) in a series of secret meetings in which he tried to pressure her into abandoning a war crimes investigation, it has been revealed. Yossi Cohen’s covert contacts with the ICC’s then prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, took place in the years leading up to her decision to open a formal investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in occupied Palestinian territories.

Reuters

[Vesper 28,767]

The Weakness of a Violent Man

He pretends to be a strongman, but his desperation is always on display

https://www.americaamerica.news/p/the-weakness-of-a-violent-man

He attacks a judge’s daughter to stir up hate and conflict. He posts a video of the President of the United States, bound and gagged. He condemns millions of humans as poison, who, in their struggle to survive, have come to the United States to seek better lives. This is not a strong man, a man displaying his strength to lead; this is a malignant man who’s revealing his essential weakness and dangerously exacerbating a climate of violence.

Bereft of any vision of positive change, this is a man who is only capable of exploiting an aggrieved people’s worst instincts—who has figured out that he can get what he wants by stoking the fear, hatred and anger of others. He uses violence, not imagination. Conflict, not collaboration. Cruelty, never kindness. Retribution, not affirmation. These are the tools of a weak man inciting the mob to satisfy his hunger for carnage.

A man like this sells bibles wrapped in an American flag. Desperate for dollars and loyalty, he laughably claims the bible is his “favorite” book and that he has many of them. Empty and broken inside, he needs to compare himself to Jesus Christ on the holy weekend of Easter.

But this is a weak man, a narcissist in the extreme, who cannot tolerate his own failures or the painfully obvious reality that he will never get the total adoration that his bottomless pit of need seeks. This is a sad creature, utterly lacking self-consciousness. When he looks in a mirror, he never sees the truth.

We are living in complex, challenging times, in which our problems are increasingly global and often seem insurmountable. Climate change. Immigration driven by displacement. Murderous rulers set upon stealing their neighbors’ sovereignty, ending their commitment to democracy and exploiting their limited resources by undermining their allies’ commitment to support them.

In such times, we hope for leaders possessed of the necessary intellect and imagination, compassion and competence to engage the public in the arduous task of self-governance. At a time when the problems we face depend on genuinely strong leaders, capable of inspiring the public to pursue their better selves and work together, a weak man relies on scapegoating the most vulnerable among us and promising that he alone can fix our most intractable problems—and do it quick. The demagoguery is as old as the hills, only the details and the targets of hate change over time.

In less troubled times, a man like this would remain in the darkened fringes of society, limited in his ability to incite stochastic terrorism. In times like this, such a man can not only ascend to the nation’s highest office once, he has the potential to regain that office even after he’s been disgraced with two impeachments, engaged in a violent insurrection, lied more than a documented 30,000 times, and has been indicted four times and charged with 88 felony charges. Still today, his followers remain devoted to him, even after he was found guilty of raping and defaming E. Jean Carroll, as well as committing widespread tax and business fraud and facing fines of more than half a billion dollars. For Trump and his cult, rising political violence is assuredly a feature, not a bug.

Times like these make the weak man masquerading as the strong man look like a real answer for the aggrieved voters who are attracted to cruelty and brute force as a promised path to easy solutions. The increasingly poisonous hostility between parties only intensifies their dark desires.

I’ve quoted it before, but the prophetic insight and warning of George Washington bears repeating. In his farewell address from 1796, America’s first president worried about the dangers of factionalism and revenge-filled hostility between factions. “The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” he wisely said. “And sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.”

I have also noted before the necessary insight of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker on the topic of cruelty and kindness, but this too bears repeating. “When someone’s path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society,” he told newly minted college graduates in a commencement address. “They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct. They never forged new mental pathways to overcome their instinctual fears and so their thinking and problem-solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades.”

The responsibility to defeat Donald Trump and the Trump Republicans could not be clearer. In another time, that may sound like a partisan urging. But this is about our commitment to sustaining America’s centuries-old democratic experiment.

Many of our fellow citizens look at Joe Biden and insist he lacks something they want. But his capacity for compassion and kindness, his commitment to democracy, and his record of competence and achievement should be more than enough for doubters to find a reason to support him.

The failure to achieve massive voter turnout can lead to a dark, fascistic future, led by a weak and desperate man who thinks he’s strong. That is a dangerous combination, which each of us has the power to help overcome.

 

[Sir Mikel OBE 4,919]

22 minutes ago, Vesper said:

Many of our fellow citizens look at Joe Biden and insist he lacks something they want. But his capacity for compassion and kindness, his commitment to democracy, and his record of competence and achievement should be more than enough for doubters to find a reason to support him.

 

I wonder do Gazan's feel that capacity for compassion as he sells Israel the bombs which kills their children?

I think the best framing can be Joe simply being honest and saying:

"Look, Im the best the party can do right now, and I haven't been the worst president"

Which would be enough to get people out, and would be 100% true. He is, by far, the best the democrat party has to offer and has been a solid president. Until Gaza I honestly think his biggest(and only real) flub was letting his incompetent VP run the border issue, and that wasn't completely on her being chosen in the end.

 

[Vesper 28,767]

29 minutes ago, Sir Mikel OBE said:

I wonder do Gazan's feel that capacity for compassion as he sells Israel the bombs which kills their children?

I think the best framing can be Joe simply being honest and saying:

"Look, Im the best the party can do right now, and I haven't been the worst president"

Which would be enough to get people out, and would be 100% true. He is, by far, the best the democrat party has to offer and has been a solid president. Until Gaza I honestly think his biggest(and only real) flub was letting his incompetent VP run the border issue, and that wasn't completely on her being chosen in the end.

 

yes, I agree he has cocked up Israel/Hamas nightmare

he needs to bring Netanyahu and the zio-loons to heel NOW