Category: politicians behaving badly

Ilhan Omar blames the U.S. for the turmoil in Venezuela

May 3, 2019 • 8:45 am

Ilhan Omar is considered admirable, or even a Congressional hero, simply because, as a hijabi Muslim, she’s seen as an oppressed person of color. My view is that she’s a provocateur and anti-Semite without any substantive accomplishments in Congress (granted, she’s new). Her main job in Congress seems to be making hotheaded statements, often followed by an apology. But because she’s seen as a “progressive” Democrat, much of the Left seems to idolize her.

Omar’s latest provocation is to blame the U.S. for the turmoil in Venezuela, documented in Real Clear Politics(see also CNN) which has a transcript of her remarks. (Note: I don’t support U.S. military intervention in Venezuela but I do support sanctions so long as Maduro is in power, and the recognition of opposition leader Juan Guaido as President, as most European countries have done.)  What there is no question of, unless you’re someone whose hatred of America blinds their reason, is that Maduro’s authoritarian policies, and not the U.S., is what has driven Venezuela to the brink of collapse. He needs to go.

In contrast, Omar says it’s the U.S.’s fault, blaming “neocons and war mongers”, as well as U.S. sanctions. It looks as if she favors continuation of the Maduro regime. Her grilling of Eliott Abrams, a form of virtue signaling, is irrelevant to what’s going on in Venezuela and who’s responsible for the mess there. Listen:

Jeffrey Tayler, writer and contributing editor for the The Atlantic, and someone who’s appeared on this site several times before, watched the above video at my request because of his extensive experience covering Venezuela. (He was there a total of about 4 months in 2009, 2010, 2012 researching a book in on Simon Bolivar and covering the 2012 presidential elections.) He has written on Venezuela for The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and Quillette.”

After watching the video, Jeff said this, and allowed me to quote him:

“I do not know a single Venezuelan who would agree with Ilhan Omar.  Venezuelans roundly despise Maduro and blame him for their misery.  Maduro and his criminal gang have plundered the country.  Maduro has instituted killing gangs that patrol the poor barrios and do away with Chavistas who have come out against Maduro.”

But he’s a socialist, albeit a nasty dictator, and so Omar and other progressive Democrats support him.

The turmoil in Venezuela appears to be splitting the Democratic party, with centrists like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi calling for Maduro’s ouster while the “progressive” Twitter Democrats either remain silent or, like Omar, blame everything on the U.S.  The crickets include Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who refuses to give an opinion because she knows that saying she supports a socialist dictator will cause problems. You can see her reaction below, deflecting the question toward Elliott Abrams and Trump.

The National Review asked her about her stand on Venezuela, and reports this:

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells NR when asked to comment on the situation. When pressed on whether the Maduro government is legitimate or Guaidó deserves U.S. support, she adds that she’ll “defer to caucus leadership on how we navigate this.”

Since when has she ever deferred to caucus leadership about something like this?
Her weaselly views:

Live feed: Uprising in Venezuela

April 30, 2019 • 3:32 pm

Right now there are huge clashes in Venezuela between the government and the people after the opposition leader Juan Guaidó, as the NYT reports, “showed up with soldiers at a military base and called for the population to rise up against the president, Nicolás Maduro.”

That’s exactly what they’re doing. Maduro is an autocrat and Chavez successor who’s ruining his country.

The NYT article is below, but I’ve put a livefeed before that so you can watch people go up against a horrible dictator:

And note that although Trump supports the opposition, which we should all be doing, the “progressive” Democrats are either silent or tell us to leave the socialist dictatorship alone. In this case Trump is on the right side, but don’t take that as my endorsement of Trump.

Weekend reading

January 26, 2019 • 10:45 am

It’s supposedly my day off, though with the weather being Arctic, there’s not much to do outside—or even a reason to go outside. But I’ve read a few things that I’ll recommend if you too are housebound today.

First, a good column—especially the first part—from Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine (h/t Simon). It’s worth keeping up with him, as he’s becoming a voice of reason in this increasingly demented era of hatred and tribalism. Click on the screenshot:

This is about the Covington Mess and how both social and mainstream media, by going with their confirmation bias, is ruining America. And I agree. I’ll give a couple of good quotes:

Yes, the boys did chant some school riffs; I’m sure some of those joining in the Native American drumming and chanting were doing it partly in mockery, but others may have just been rolling with it. Yes, they should not have been wearing MAGA hats to a pro-life march. They aren’t angels; they’re teenage boys. But they were also subjected for quite a while to a racist, anti-Catholic, homophobic tirade on a loudspeaker, which would be more than most of us urbanites could bear — and they’re adolescents literally off the bus from Kentucky. I heard no slurs back. They stayed there because they were waiting for a bus, not to intimidate anyone.

. . . To put it bluntly: They were 16-year-olds subjected to verbal racist assault by grown men; and then the kids were accused of being bigots. It just beggars belief that the same liberals who fret about “micro-aggressions” for 20-somethings were able to see 16-year-olds absorbing the worst racist garbage from religious bigots … and then express the desire to punch the kids in the face.

. . . Across most of the national media, led by the New York Times and the Washington Post, the narrative had been set. “I’m willing to bet that fifty years from now, a defining image of this political era will be that smug white MAGA teen disrespecting a Native elder and veteran. It just captures so much,” Jessica Valenti tweeted. “And let’s please not forget that this group of teens … were there for the March for Life: There is an inextricable link between control over women’s bodies, white supremacy & young white male entitlement.” This is the orthodoxy of elite media, and it is increasingly the job of journalists to fit the facts to the narrative and to avoid any facts that undermine it.

There’s a reason why, in the crucial battle for the legitimacy of a free press, Trump is still on the offensive. Our mainstream press has been poisoned by tribalism. My own trust in it is eroding. I’m far from the only one.

The other night I was having a drink with a friend who said he believed that the Trump threat was essentially over, as the shutdown took its toll. He noted what might become an inflection point in the polling. He was heartened by the midterms. He might be right. But I think that misses the core point about this presidency. From my perspective, the Trump threat to liberal democracy is deepening, largely because its racial animus and rank tribalism are evoking a response that is increasingly imbued with racial animus and rank tribalism, in an ever-tightening spiral of mutual hostility.

I especially like this bit:

What was so depressing to me about the Covington incident was how so many liberals felt comfortable taking a random teenager and, purely because of his race and gender, projected onto him all their resentments and hatred of “white men” in general. Here is Kara Swisher, a sane and kind person, reacting to the first video: “To all you aggrieved folks who thought this Gillette ad was too much bad-men-shaming, after we just saw it come to life with those awful kids and their fetid smirking harassing that elderly man on the Mall: Go fuck yourselves.” Judging — indeed demonizing — an individual on the basis of the racial or gender group he belongs to is the core element of racism, and yet it is now routine on the left as well as the right. To her great credit, Kara apologized profusely for the outburst. The point here is that tribal hatred can consume even the best of us.

And this is what will inevitably happen once you’ve redefined racism or sexism to mean prejudice plus power. It’s reasonable to note the social context of bigotry and see shades of gray, in which the powerful should indeed be more aware of how their racial or gender prejudice can hurt others, and the powerless given some slack. But if that leads you to ignore or downplay the nastiest adult bigotry imaginable and to focus on a teen boy’s silent face as the real manifestation of evil, you are well on your way to creating a new racism that mirrors aspects of the old.

This is the abyss of hate versus hate, tribe versus tribe. This is a moment when we can look at ourselves in the mirror of social media and see what we have become. Liberal democracy is being dismantled before our eyes — by all of us. This process is greater than one president. It is bottom-up as well as top-down. Tyranny, as Damon Linker reminded us this week, is not just political but psychological, and the tyrannical impulse, ratcheted up by social media, is in all of us. It infects the soul of the entire body politic. It destroys good people. It slowly strangles liberal democracy. This is the ongoing extinction level event.

Andrew writes further about the legalization of marijuana, which has led to “dabbing”, or vaporizing concentrated weed resin. He decries this practice mainly because it leads to somnolence rather than facilitating good conversation, which is what he wants out of the drug. I am on his side, as I tend to become more gregarious when I partake. A few years ago tried dabbing in a state where it was legal to buy and smoke recreationally, and it blitzed me out for about 8 hours, in a way that just made me withdraw and want to sack out rather than chat. Our new governor has vowed to make marijuana legal in Illinois, and we’ll see if that happens. His third segment is about Brexit.

Speaking of Covington, one of the venues that’s tried its hardest to maintain its narrative in the face of changing facts is the Guardian, a site I rarely visit any more. Have a gander at this headline, from a story posted last Wednesday:

The article, and the Guardian as a whole, makes me ill; they’re presenting a caricature of the Left. When Wilson writes something like this, did he ever care about the truth? I don’t think so; he just wanted to maintain that the Covington students were still pariahs while dissing the conservative media that painted them as heroes. Nobody was a hero in that narrative, but neither were the boys nor the Native Americans pariahs. Wilson:

On Tuesday night, Fox News hosts continued to feast on the controversy, which was sparked by a standoff between Covington Catholic high school students and a Native American veteran called Nathan Phillips. Footage show students wearing pro-Trump Maga hats taunting the Omaha tribe elder. The relentlessly repeated talking point – that there was a collective “rush to judgment” on the boys because they were Trump supporters – was used by conservative anchors Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham to attack mainstream media and left leaning social media users.

. . . As of Wednesday, as a result of these well-worn tactics, liberal media has almost completely backed away from their initial, justified take on the story.

When will we ever learn?

Yep, use the kids to go after your favorite targets.  And “initial justified take on the story”? I don’t think so!

Speaking of social-media outrage, here’s a good article in The Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf:

A quote:

For example: I’m sitting in a coffee shop as I write this. Imagine that a man sitting at a nearby table spilled his coffee, got a phone call just afterward, and simply left, so that staff had to clean up his mess, a scene that culminated in a haggard-looking barista drooping her shoulders in frustration. Was the call a true emergency? We don’t know. But if not, almost everyone would agree that the man behaved badly.

Yet almost all of you would react with discomfort or opprobrium if I followed the man back to his office, learned his name, spent half an hour waiting to see his boss, adopted an outraged tone, explained his transgression, felt righteous, then commenced a week-long mission to alert his extended network of friends, family, and professional contacts to his behavior, all the while telling masses of strangers about it, too.

On the other hand, if that man spilled his coffee, leaving that same haggard barista to clean it up, and if I captured the whole thing on my phone camera and posted it to Twitter with a snarky comment about the need to better respect service workers, some nontrivial percentage of the public would help make the clip go viral, join in the shaming, and expend effort to “snitch-tag” various people in the man’s personal life. Some would quietly raise an eyebrow at my role in that public shaming, but I mostly wouldn’t be treated as a transgressor.

One cannot help but wonder whether there are better norms. . .

From Inside Higher Ed, Alan Sokal, author of the Great Hoax, criticizes the persecution of philosopher Peter Boghossian by his employer Portland State University (PSU) after Peter, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose submitted fake articles to humanities journals, exposing the egregiously low standards of those journals—and the disciplines as a whole. PSU found Peter guilty of violating rules about experimentation on human subjects—in this case, the subjects were journal editors and reviewers—without following “human subject research” policy.  Found guilty, Peter may be fired. Yet the federal regulations apply only to federally-funded research, which wasn’t behind Boghossian et al.’s work. Portland State just decided as its policy to follow the federal rules. Read on:

Sokal thinks this punishment is dumb, and I agree, but those who think the excesses of the humanities are just fine, thank you, are going for Peter’s throat. Vindictiveness reigns.

And Portland State University, like many other universities, has decided, as a matter of its own internal policy, to apply federal IRB rules to all research carried out by PSU employees or students — though such treatment is legally mandatory only for projects sponsored by the federal government, which Boghossian’s was not.

But common sense suggests that something has gone seriously awry here, when rules initially written to protect subjects in biomedical research from physical harm — and later extended to social-science research, where the harm could be psychological — are applied blindly and literally to an “audit study” aimed at testing the intellectual standards of scholarly journals. As Singal observed, “the potential for harm came in the form of reputational damage and humiliation to journal editors and reviewers.” But so what? The journal editors are professionals undertaking a public responsibility, not people in the street. If they screw up, why shouldn’t this be publicly known? Moreover, the journal editors are not voiceless: if their actions were defensible (as they may well have been), they and their supporters can set forth their reasons, and the rest of us can evaluate the competing arguments with our own brains.

Please note that the issue here is different from the one addressed in two recent articles, where it was proposed that research projects deemed to pose “low risk” might be exempted from IRB review (an issue that is quite delicate, as the comments on these articles show). Here I am not contending that the reputational risk to journal editors caught publishing grossly deficient articles is low. Quite the contrary: this risk can, depending on the circumstances, be severe. What I am contending, rather, is that journal editors do not deserve to be protected from this type of risk.

What we see here is a guy being punished not for violating sensible rules, but for violating senseless ideology.

Finally, The Washington Post calls out Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for telling whoppers, which she does habitually. And it’s a shame, as I like many of her policy recommendations. But she keeps shooting herself in the foot with misstatements and a fulminating love of the limelight (h/t Heather Hastie for the link):

The Post:

Ocasio-Cortez deserves credit for using her high profile to bring attention to income inequality. However, she undermines her message when she plays fast and loose with statistics. A lot of Americans do not earn enough for a living wage, but we cannot find evidence that it is the majority. Amazon and Walmart pay well above the minimum wage, contrary to her statement, and it is tendentious to claim those companies specifically get some sort of a wealth transfer from the public when such benefits flow to all low-wage workers in many companies. Overall, she earns Three Pinocchios.

The new Representative is awarded three Pinocchios for her misstatements, which, on the Post’s ratings, represent “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions. This gets into the realm of “mostly false.”

 

Burned out—before doing any work

December 18, 2018 • 12:45 pm

Trying to get attention all the time is hard and not cute! And the lady apparently doesn’t know how to chill, so she gets even more publicity by crowdsourcing her leisure:

And this is a real gem:

Well, as HuffPo might say (but wouldn’t), “AoC needs a face mask and Twitter isn’t having it.”

My suggestion for the incumbent Congresswoman:

Christopher Browning’s pessimistic take on America’s future

October 6, 2018 • 2:00 pm

Christopher Browning is an American historian whose expertise is mainly on the Holocaust. His new article in the New York Review of Books is on a related topic: comparing the debilitated state of American politics with what happened during the rise of Nazi Germany. Browning was apparently inspired by the frequent claim that the U.S. is becoming like Hitler’s Germany. Click on the screenshot below to read the free article.


It’s a very good piece that, while drawing some parallels between what happened in the two countries, also doesn’t buy the “Nazi” analogy. A few quotes to tease you:

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.

One can predict that henceforth no significant judicial appointments will be made when the presidency and the Senate are not controlled by the same party. McConnell and our dysfunctional and disrespected Congress have now ensured an increasingly dysfunctional and disrespected judiciary, and the constitutional balance of powers among the three branches of government is in peril.

A parallel:

But the potential impact of the Mueller report does suggest yet another eerie similarity to the interwar period—how the toxic divisions in domestic politics led to the complete inversion of previous political orientations. Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy. In Germany this reached the absurd extreme of the Communists underestimating the Nazis as a transitory challenge while focusing on the Social Democrats—dubbed “red fascists”—as the true long-term threat to Communist triumph.

And Browning’s depressing conclusion:

No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.

Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.

Browning’s essay is long, but we’re not abjuring print like the young folk, are we?

h/t: Ken

An antagonistic interview with Steve Bannon

September 19, 2018 • 9:30 am

In my futile effort to show that people need not fear public presentations of Steve Bannon, I present one interview from the Showtime program “The Circus”. It was sent by reader Paul, who said this:

This show is one of my favs as it combines behind the scenes looks at US politics and good food and drink.
Well, I wasn’t that impressed by the food and drink, but the 8-minute Bannon interview, from 12:30 to 20:25 in the clip below, is quite enlightening. In contrast to the last video I showed (the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s interview with Bannon and Sarah Ferguson), the interviewer, John Heilemann, just takes out from the beginning after Bannon. And Bannon doesn’t look very good. Not only does he paint a completely ridiculous picture of Trump as a very smart man, but Bannon also spouts rather unintelligible politicospeak. Here’s the YouTube summary.
The Gathering Storm. With the looming midterm elections, the Trump presidency under siege, and Hurricane Florence bearing down on the Carolina coast, Washington has a lot on its collective plate. Executive Producer and Host John Heilemann interviews Steve Bannon. Season 3 Episode 7 premiere. Watch The Circus Sundays at 8pm ET/PT.
The entire video covers a variety of topics, but all are centered on the frightening Trump presidency. Although I wasn’t as impressed as Paul with the show’s format, I was engrossed by the hard-hitting interview. My point is that it shows how unfounded is people’s fear that a public talk by Bannon—or interview, as proposed by both my University and David “Invertebrate” Remnick at the New Yorker Festival—will hurt feelings and, indeed, constitute a form of violence. Bannon is a fairly eloquent right-wing ideologue, but when pressed by somebody that knows something, his facade collapses. There’s nothing to be scared about having Bannon speak in public, or in a debate format.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Another lionized Democrat cozying up to anti-Semites

August 11, 2018 • 2:15 pm

Well, my headline may be a tad exaggerated, but I’m pretty sure that the subject of this post is not friendly to Jews (she’s made some remarkably ill informed comments about Palestine). Read on.

Many Democrats have been excited about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for the young Hispanic activist (she’s 28) won the Democratic primary for a House seat in New York, gaining a big upset victory over the incumbent. She’s a Democratic Socialist, but my take on her is that she’s not particularly bright and is espousing views that, while they may win her a seat in the House, won’t advance the Democratic platform. In fact, her election may give Democrats an even worse image.

I say that because Ocasio-Cortez has cozied up to some odious characters. Here she is headlining the Universal Muslim Association of America meeting with our favorite sharia-lover and FOF (Friend of Farrakhan), Linda Sarsour (click on screenshot):

From an interview on a Leftist website (click on screenshot):

An excerpt:

 

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’re going to talk about the travel ban, but Linda Sarsour is with us, director of the first Muslim online organizing platform, MPower Change. You supported Alexandria. This is a remarkable moment.

LINDA SARSOUR: I mean, in light of such horrible news yesterday with the travel ban and the Muslim ban, Alexandria is the hope that we’ve been waiting for. She is a young woman of color. She’s Puerto Rican. She’s a Socialist, just like me. We are both card-carrying DSA members. And she’s pro-Palestine, and she’s unapologetic. And the movement right now is elated, because this is what you’re going to see, Amy, in this election season. It’s a new day, a new generation. And Alexandria is what represents us and our values.

. . . [Ocasio-Cortez] was outraised almost 10 to one. And it’s not about money. It’s about the grassroots organizing. It’s about building power on the ground. It’s about getting voters who have been ignored and marginalized to the polls. And that’s exactly what Alexandria did. She’s charismatic. She’s young. And she was also very progressive, unapologetically progressive—tuition-free college, Medicare for all, pro-Palestine, even in the recent Great Return March putting her voice out there while she was campaigning, not afraid of any opposition that was going to come her way. And that’s the new kind of folks that are going to win. So, no Democrat is going to hold their seat for too long. And a lot of Alexandrias are coming this 2018 and 2020.

You can read about the “Great return march” in Wikipedia. It is, in short a call for the “right of return” that would destroy Israel as a state:

On 30 March 2018, a six-week campaign composed of a series of protests was launched at the Gaza Strip, near the Gaza-Israel border. Called by Palestinian organizers the “Great March of Return” (Arabic: “مسیرة العودة الكبري”‎), the protests demand that Palestinian refugees and their descendants be allowed to return to the land they were displaced from in what is now Israel.

With a friend like Linda Sarsour, and an endorsement from same, Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t need enemies! You know what “Pro-Palestine” is code for, too.  But of course it pays, electoral-wise, to be friendlier to Muslims than to Jews, for Democrats, especially those on the extreme Left, see Jews as oppressors and Muslims as the oppressed.

Finally, there’s this, in which Ocasio-Cortez touts Ilhan Omar, a Somali woman in the Minnesota state legislature.

https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/1028123094857261057

The tweet on the right?

https://twitter.com/IlhanMN/status/269488770066313216

Another:

Just keep it up, Democrats—a party once friendly to the Jews, now siding with regressive elements of Islam. You want four more years of Trump in 2020? Just keep cozying up to people like Sarsour and Ilhan Omar.

 

h/t: Grania