Co-Schmucks of the Week: Kamala and Jeffries Are Killing the Coconut Vibes for Benjamin Netanyahu
Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Well that half week of party unity was nice while it lasted. Time to go back to the context of all in which we live and what came before us, which still includes the decrepit Democratic Party. Just because they finally did the most obvious thing in the world does not mean this party has transformed overnight, and all it took was a genocidal maniac backed by a Democratic administration speaking to Congress to prove how little some things have changed. The instinct to throw one of their most passionate groups of voters under the bus still permeates throughout the party, as the Democratic Minority Leader in the House demonstrated in response to some protesters at Union Station spray painting graffiti on a Christopher Columbus monument and burning a few American flags.
Jeffries says it is “inaccurate” to say the protesters outside Union Station are Democrats: “These are individuals who have been aggressively protesting members of the House Democratic Caucus.”
— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) July 25, 2024
OK then! Good to know that anyone who protests their congressperson is not a Democrat (unless their congressperson is a Republican, then they are a certified Democracy Defender™). Let’s keep this quote in mind when people like Hakeem Jeffries are scolding supposed non-Democrats for not wanting to vote for Democrats in November. Lest you think this was just one powerful member of the House going rogue, here is the new Democratic presidential nominee’s “full statement on the protests in Washington D.C. yesterday” calling the protesters “unpatriotic” and implying they are antisemitic and that they “associate with Hamas” (because someone spray painted “Hamas is coming” on to the statue).
Read my full statement on the protests in Washington, D.C. yesterday. pic.twitter.com/zJpZvdQDt9
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) July 25, 2024
What “violence” is she talking about? Even Fox News didn’t invent that fiction in their writeup of what happened. It’s one thing to issue a statement condemning burning the American flag or defiling a monument (of another genocidal maniac). I think a lot of lefties understand that there are games you have to play in an election year that do not align with our politics, and the Democrats backed themselves into a political corner by inviting a man perpetuating a genocide to take control of the news cycle. What makes these statements so odious is going the extra mile to say that protesters are not Democrats or “unpatriotic” or to use the acceptable kind of antisemitism so many in power are leaning on in an attempt to show solidarity with the object of the protest, Benjamin Netanyahu.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, who the entire party hung out to dry this week, including her progressive allies, also protested Netanyahu’s speech yesterday. Is she not a Democrat too? Where’s the line?
This over-the-top response to a relative handful of protesters among thousands reflects the inherent cowardice in the party and its basic instinct to back down from its stated principles in the face of a fight brought to its doorstep, plus the idiotic assumption that they can throw the left under the bus like this then come back asking for our vote in November saying “no we just meant those people at Union Station, not everyone who sympathizes with their cause!” What Harris and Jeffries are doing right now is acting out this famed tweet below, earning them this week’s co-Schmuck of the Week, Splinter‘s new subscriber-only column that will remain free through the week of the Democratic National Convention.
A liberal is someone who opposes every war except the current war and supports all civil rights movements except the one that’s going on right now. https://t.co/cLD9SjJDlc
— slicin’ up eyeballs (@eyeballslicer) November 24, 2023
Why couldn’t Kamala Harris say something relatively anodyne like “I do not condone defiling monuments or burning the American flag or associating with terrorist organizations, but this was just one small group out of many people who showed up to peacefully protest, and the anger felt by all these protesters is real, which I share, and that is why I did not attend the Israeli Prime Minister’s speech to Congress. Protest is part of a proud American tradition, but lawlessness is not. We can use our anger in a more productive and less destructive manner than the protesters at Union Station did.”
The Democratic Party treats every single media controversy of the day like it plays out in some siloed bubble, and the harebrained notion that still exists even after Hillary took it to its extreme that they can tell us to go to hell today and pretend we’re friends tomorrow can only be believed by someone with acute cable news-induced brain damage.
Are we trying to live in the context of all in which we live and what came before us or not? Why do you think those protesters were there yesterday? Does anyone in Democratic leadership have anything to say about that or are we just pretending they materialized out of nowhere because they supposedly love Hamas so much?
Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, widely reported as one of the favorites in the race to be Harris’s VP along with Arizona Senator Mark Kelly, likened his state’s pro-Palestine protesters to the KKK. I wrote a semi-retraction on Kelly today, who bent the knee to labor yesterday and made me assume that put him in the driver’s seat, but that happened just before he enthusiastically clapped for a man perpetuating a genocide and said, “for all we know Iran is funding the anti-Israel protests.”
Is there any other way to interpret the statements from two of the most powerful Democrats and the two reported VP front-runners other than that the pro-Palestine movement is not welcome in the party unless we ask them nicely to stop the genocide?
Sorry Kamala, you don’t get to skip Netanyahu’s speech and then call protesters antisemitic and pretend like you’re taking some principled stance on either side of this crisis. Everyone can see you twisting in the wind here. There is no equivocating on the subject of genocide, either you support it or oppose it, and anything in between is de facto support.
The train on the tracks now barreling towards the Dems is glaringly obvious, and the question now is whether this party will learn from its mistakes of the past and the successes of Joe Biden’s campaign that made a genuine effort to incorporate lefty policy priorities into their platform. Biden’s brand of retail and transactional politics is very different from the detached technocratic brand of neoliberal Democratic politics that defined the Clinton and Obama administrations, and people shouldn’t assume that just because Biden’s hand-picked successor is taking control of the campaign that it will keep the same dynamic, or that she will alter his depraved and feckless policies on Gaza. The left can either be incorporated into the party like in 2020, or we can fight about it like in 2016. It’s the party’s decision now.
Combined with these aggressive statements that isolate the pro-Palestine left from the Democratic Party, a selection of Kelly or Shapiro for Vice President would send a message to the left that ameliorating the suffering in Gaza is not a high priority for a future Harris administration. Given that there’s very little data indicating the VP choice actually matters, the most important thing is to pick one who will piss off the least amount of people in the party. Kelly and Shapiro both have made themselves enemies of labor, and have slandered the pro-Palestine movement to such an extreme degree that there is no coming back from it. These are sure-fire ways to start a shooting war with the left over our most important issue in Gaza, and if either of them do wind up being the pick, then the message to lefties is loud and clear: like Jeffries said, we’re not Democrats.