DL Open Thread Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2023
Everyone knows that Donald Trump has never had an original thought and that most of his insults are simply projection. You’d think the mainstream media would have noticed this by now, and investigated him for any of the complaints he has about someone else. For example, his constant drumbeat of “Joe Biden is old and feeble,” while true, is even more true of him, as as the Lincoln Project has demonstrated with a couple of videos showing his frequent foggy moments. It’s so bad that Trump himself claims it’s been doctored with AI. Sure it has. Hey, maybe this time you’ll finally defeat Barack Obama and win World War II.
Likewise, you’d think the mainstream media might have noticed by now that the gun lobby wants everyone to react to everyone else’s lethal potential by buying a gun. As this Philadelphia Inquirer article demonstrates, it’s working. I used to think it might change if some of these people got shot, but Rep. (short for “reprehensible”) Steve Scalise almost got his dick shot off and he’s still a gun-sucker.
Another Louisiana excrescence, MAGA Mike Johnson, this month’s Speaker of the House, released security camera footage of the Jan. 6 insurrection with the faces blurred because, he said, he didn’t want the Department of Justice using it to arrest anyone. This is performance-art bullshit, as the DOJ has had the footage for years, but it demonstrates that he leads a party of traitors.
More evidence that what we call “Congress” is actually a poorly managed circus: Virginia Rep. Nancy Mace gets a lot of air time because she’s better-looking and only intermittently as loony as MTG or Lauren Boebert, but she’s apparently just as far off the rails. A bunch of her staff, all of whom used to work for Trump, have quit, and one took the office popcorn machine with him. Now how are they going to run a circus without a popcorn machine? Apparently she demanded her staff schedule her a minimum quota of TV appearances to maintain her celebrity status. On the most recent, host Neil Cavuto of Fox News told her, “A lot of people feel that you’re a narcissist.”
I’ve mostly avoided reading about what’s going on in Gaza, partly because I don’t trust my ability to sort fact from propaganda and partly because I can’t figure out what Israel hopes to accomplish beyond killing children. But Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has offered the best guess I’ve seen yet on that second point: Netanyahu wants to destroy the tunnel system Hamas uses to hide the rockets with which it bombards Israel. That’s a big job. Analysts think the system consists of more than 500 km of tunnels, more than the London underground.
I have a fairly libertarian attitude about drugs, based on the historical fact that trying to ban them doesn’t work and most of the harm they cause is to their users. But I have noticed that it’s the legal ones that do the most residual problems. The societal miseries caused by alcohol are too long to list, and tobacco’s toll isn’t limited to second-hand smoke. The environmental damage caused by discarded cigarette filters is estimated to cost the world $26 billion annually.
On the local front, the four-year battle over Incyte’s construction plan in Alapocas is over. The company has shitcanned the expansion of its headquarters, which will please its neighbors but not the Chamber of Commerce.
The floor’s yours.
Ladeez And Gentlemen: Meet the two leading R’s seeking to run for Santos’ vacated seat:
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/new-york-playbook/2023/12/06/a-problem-with-a-possible-santos-successor-00130244
One’s a Democrat, the other has donated to the presumed Democratic nominee, and:
“As an NYPD detective, Sapraicone was also accused of coercing a false confession and ignoring exonerating evidence that kept a man wrongly imprisoned for two decades, Playbook first reported. The city settled a federal civil rights lawsuit over the incident for $3.3 million.”
mccarthy is resigning dec 31
Hmmm, Santos is gone, election not until Feb.
McCarthy leaving.
Can a Jeffries speakership be in sight? If only temporarily?
LBR voted in favor of H.Res.894 that specifically states “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
People should make noise about this, IMO.
I was wondering how she’d voted.
She opted for pack mentality over, you know, facts.
“LBR voted in favor of H.Res.894 that specifically states “clearly and firmly states that anti-Zionism is antisemitism.”
I am pleased she didn’t vote with the Hamas caucus on this. And that she had enough backbone not to vote “present.”
Anti-Zionism holds that Jews in Israel should die or disperse so that Palestinians can control that real estate. Sounds like anti-semitism to me. Of course it is couched in dog whistles, as anti-semitism usually is.
It is entirely possible to oppose the current far-right factions in Israel while still supporting a secure Jewish state in Israel (i.e., Zionism).
It is not correct to equate opposition to Zionism to antisemitism outright.
Opposing Zionism means opposing the existence of a colonial semi-theocratic ethnostate. Zionism is not coterminous with Jewishness.
Antisemitism is vile. Harassing or doing violence to people because of their religion or ethnic background is unequivocally terrible.
If by “colonial semi-theocratic ethnostate” you mean Israel, then opposing Israel’s existence is a call for the Jews living there to disperse or die. To be replaced by a different semi-theocratic ethnostate.
Wake me up when you can support reform in Israel that preserves it as a secure state, without denying its right to exist.
The existence of a state that only views a single ethnicity or religion as deserving of full citizenship and human rights is not something that I find workable.
The belief that Jewish people can only exist in the middle east by controlling and dominating other people is not correct. Jewish people can absolutely live side-by-side with Muslims, Christians, Druze and any other religious group.
A world exists where the people who live in what is now considered Israel and Palestine can co-exist without the need for a colonial semi-theocratic ethnostate.
The whole point of a pogrom is that Jews are supposed to cower in terror and flee, giving up their land and their possessions. Anti-semites get so discombobulated when instead the victims of a pogrom fight back against the perpetrators. That is why the Jewish people need a strong state.
Okay, you’re not engaging with the actual argument or arguing in good faith here. I’m done.
Q.E.D.
Zionists are very dumb and racist. Ceasefire now.
Listen very closely to Professor Avi Shlaim.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9xM7Jo1QPo
Most anti Zionist arguments are reasonable, evidenced based and legitimate.
Suspect MAGA Mike Johnson will suffer the same fate as McCarthy given time, the demands of the farthest right are impossible, though none of them will admit it. Hatred is already building as Johnson briefly worked with the Dems to avoid a shut down. Trump has dementia and there’s about eleven months to go until the election, from long, sad experience can assure you it will become increasingly obvious, not that it will matter to his base. Jeffries as speaker? All for it times ten.
Are the rabidly anti Zionist Satmar Hasidim anti-semitic?