After a week of efforts to equate the controversial remarks of two particular members of Congress, I pushed back a bit at New York:
It looks like House Republicans are going to deal with outrage over their perennial problem child Marjorie Taylor Greene by finding a Democrat to punish. That would be Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, according to Politico’s Huddle:
“’I think that Ilan should receive the same type of punishment as Marjorie because if it’s good for one, it is good for another,’ Rep. Maria Salazar (R-Fla.), who voted to remove Greene from her committees, told me. ‘Anti-semitism is the same thing as anti-semitism. It’s just that Nancy is afraid …'”
There are others who want to push for Omar’s removal as well as those looking to censure her over her war crimes remarks — and a few Dems may join them.
The idea of equating Omar’s complaints about unequal treatment of countries in investigating military misconduct with Greene’s comparisons of mask and vaccine requirements to the Holocaust is deeply satisfying to a lot of people. Republicans can continue their now-ancient habit of waving away extremism in their ranks by claiming it’s more prevalent on the other side of the aisle. Nervous centrist Democrats can document their nervous centrism by firing thunderbolts left and right. And most of all, accusing both parties of harboring those prone to “false equivalence” appeals to the false equivalence many Beltway media folks want to draw between Democrats and Republicans, who are engaged in the mutually assured destruction of partisan polarization.
There’s only one problem: Treating what MTG and Omar have said as equal expressions of false equivalence actually is false, as any honest evaluation of their words quickly shows. Greene bluntly compared COVID-19 precautions to the Holocaust, analogized vaccine documentation mandates to the Nazi practice of making Jews wear yellow stars, and, for good measure, said Democrats are like Nazis because they are “socialists.” Omar said this in the midst of a virtual exchange with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken over investigations of the brief but intense war between Israel and Hamas:
“’We must have the same level of accountability and justice for all victims of crimes against humanity,’ she wrote. “We have seen unthinkable atrocities committed by the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban.’”
Her point wasn’t to say the U.S., Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan, and the Taliban were equally culpable in their commission of atrocities, but that all should be equally subject to international investigation. I suppose there are superpatriots who would dispute the idea that America has ever committed “unthinkable atrocities,” though the victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks, and of countless genocidal assaults on Native Americans, among many examples, suggest otherwise. But in any event, when challenged by Republicans and Democrats alike to make it clear she was not imputing equivalent culpability to these various nations and coalitions of fighters, Omar complied instantly:
“U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar said Thursday that she was ‘in no way equating terrorist organizations with democratic countries with well-established judicial systems … ‘
“’To be clear: the conversation was about accountability for specific incidents regarding [International Criminal Court] cases, not a moral comparison between Hamas and the Taliban and the U.S. and Israel.’”
MTG, meanwhile, kept doubling down on her comparisons of public-health measures with the slaughter of many millions by Nazi Germany, and finally, after more than three weeks and a tour of the Holocaust Museum, she issued an apology that betrayed little understanding of the full scope of the Holocaust, and then refused to apologize for the Democrat-Nazi analogy.
Looking more broadly at the two women and their records of controversial utterances, Ilhan made an unfortunate and erroneous reference to “the Benjamins,” in a gratuitous comment about support for Israel in the United States, for which she “unequivocally” apologized:
“Anti-semitism is real and I am grateful for Jewish allies and colleagues who are educating me on the painful history of anti-semitic tropes. My intention is never to offend my constituents or Jewish Americans as a whole. We have to always be able to step back and think through criticism, just as I expect people to hear me when others attack my identity. This is why I unequivocally apologize.”
Greene lost her committee assignments earlier this year after media focus on an almost incredible blizzard of incendiary statements she made on social media before coming to Congress (barely anyone even noticed her practice of brandishing an AR-15 when discussing her enemies in campaign ads). In February, she apologized for claiming that school shootings were fake and for promoting QAnon conspiracy theories. She never apologized for happily contemplating violence against congressional Democrats (including, very specifically, Ilhan Omar) and the Speaker of the House, or for her unusually aggressive support of Trump’s electoral big lie and the effort in January to overturn the presidential election results, or for her own subscription to very weird anti-Semitic claims.
If you cannot discern a qualitative difference between Omar’s “outrages” and Greene’s, and between the speed and coherence of their clarifications and apologies, it may be time for some remedial work in logic and rhetoric. These two members of Congress aren’t alike at all, and as much as I sometimes disagree with Ilhan Omar, treating her as a left-wing MTG is lazy and just plain wrong.
I agree with the above comments. They are pragmatic and realistic given the current political landscape.
I think the party can moderate some of its views and more importantly, its image, on abortion, guns, and gay marriage while still maintiaining New Deal principles, such as fiscal conservatism,social security and coherent internationalism. Also, we need to distance ourselves from the Hollywood set. It only confirms suspicions that Dems are a bunch of hedonists out to destroy family values. Again, these are image issues, but frankly, image is what sells politics to most voters.
Some call it Republican lite, I call it winning for a change.
Agreed Gabby.
And what I find particularly galling is that even many of the left’s otherwise fairly eloquent theorists and pundits are extremely quick to criticize the Democrats if they diverge even in the slightest way from the New Deal orthodoxy.
Thomas Frank’s book on cultural conservatism makes many good points (particularly about the conservatives’ persecutorial paranoia), but he seems, quite honestly, to be committing the same fallacy he accuses the Kansas Republicans of committing in reverse: he refuses to consider that any person might honestly decide that economics matters less to him than other issues. In Mr Frank’s perfect world, all the rich are Republicans, and all the poor are Democrats.
But this ignores a very basic fact: that it is possible to see the world in terms other than your own advancement. By his logic, I should be a Republican. After all, I’m from a well-to-do neighborhood and would benefit (in the short term anyway) from Bush’s tax cuts. But I’m not a Republican, because to be a Republican I would have to ignore the fact that what’s good for me is actually bad for the rest of the country. While the conservatives’ state of “perpetual victimhood” indeed makes no sense, he refuses to admit that a rational choice may in fact be taking place, albeit in a very strange, prejudicial way.
He also has also been seduced by the far-left myth that the DLC is the Republican Fifth Column in the Democratic party. He seems to blame the DLC for the decline of unions, rather than noting the increasing dissapearance of manufacturing jobs, where unions were most common. He claims the DLC hungers only for the vast soft money in the pockets of the social moderates, despite the fact that McCain-Feingold outlawed this practice even as he wrote the book. He also claims, strangely, that Democrats have backed deregulation and privatization, but offers no examples to prove this assertion. I for one cannot think of a single instance in which Republican deregulation or privatization plans found many friends on the other side of the aisle. Al Gore, if I remember correctly, called the Republican Social Security privatization racket “much too risky.” Hardly the words of a “pawn of business.” Frank also seems content to ignore the failed Clinton health care proposals of 1994, and the Kerry health care proposals of 2004, whose focus on egalitarian access runs strongly counter to the typical corporate line of social Darwinism.
Labor unions were, and still are, an extremely useful engine for progressive change, but to blame their decline on the DLC is simply silly. More likely, it was the oft-repeated right-wing myth of their ties to the Mafia and their corruption that convinced some workers to abandon the unions that had given them so much. The task for the future will be to introduce unions to the service sector, where the vast majority of the working poor are now employed. If this is done, a resurgent labor movement could perhaps wrest some of those blue-collar conservatives from their cultural fears.
I find it rather dissapointing. A brilliant dissection of the far-right’s victimhood fantasies coupled with an inability to see the Democrats as anything but the “union party.” His willfull blindness to the disappearance of manufacturing jobs (coupled with Republican whisper campaigns about unions’ alleged corruption) allows him to blame the “right-wing” DLC for unions’ decline.
The Democrats never left the unions, the union workers just got fired or laid off (manufacturing jobs declined every year after 1960), and the labor movement never really tried to court the new working poor (service workers). That’s changing, thank goodness, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let him say that my party abandoned unions. It’s just not true.
Unfortunately, in the age of television, the cult of personality rules. Anyone who is interesting and good on TV has a shot at being president, provided they have the credentials to be president.
I firmly believe that we do not need to change our policies. We do need to change marketing firms, and we need a new spokesman.
Would Joe Biden have won this race? I don’t know, but I know that if a yellow dog Democrat like me could barely stand to listen to Kerry speak, how terrible must he have been to the middle?
We need the left, we’ve always needed the left, but many of us have been the left. And you know why they call it LEFT? Because you always get LEFT at election time.
Liberals ultimately reject democracy in favor of the elitism which Hannity and Limbaugh allege. That elitism is evident when libs implore that we go left instead of right.
The party has had a Kamakazi wing for decades. That is what we call them. Kamakazi liberals. Always going out in a blaze of moralistic glory.
I’m with Gabby on this one.
Now I grant that I am fairly young (this was my first presidential election), but frankly I think it’s safe to say that purist ultra-liberalism is not a winner in this country. If we stuck to such dogma, we would run the risk of becoming merely mirrors of the Republicans, who blindly trumpet tax cuts and repeal of government aid, even when there is evidence that the tax cuts do nothing constructive, and when the government programs they want to cut are effective.
We should not be about dogma, but rather about what works to get the things we want. The older welfare systems weren’t actually fixing poverty, so we reformed them. The various groups that declare the Democrats aren’t doing enough for them should stop and think: are their interests necessarily those of the whole nation? We should strive for the national interest. My parents, for example, actually would get their taxes raised by the Kerry plan, but voted for him anyway becasue it would be better for the country.
As I’ve mentioned earlier, we need to tweak the message, and that’s all. Ideologically, I think we’re right where we should be. It should be mentioned, also, that with the exception of his anti-war rhetoric Howard Dean was a pragmatic centrist. Just look at his Vermont record. I don’t know how the myth of him as “McGovern II” got started (probably by a right-winger) but it makes no sense.
I don’t recall who it was that said it, but it might have been LBJ.
“To be a politician you have to be able to count.”
It’s a simple thought, and always true. If you don’t have the votes for something, you don’t have the votes for it.
LBJ understood that elections could be stolen, and he also understood that elections could be won, and he did some of both.
To all the young bucks of the party who think the DLC way is selling out, I would remind you that those of us who back the DLC learned our lessons in 1972 and 1984, when we thought we knew better, too. We created the DLC for that reason, because we realized the party had won 1976 by default, meaning in 1984 we really hadn’t won the presidency in 20 years.
We did 1988 your way, and it got us Dukakis.
We did 1992 our way, and it got us Clinton.
Your choice is not DLC or the liberal wing. It is DLC or RNC.
Better wise up and smell the Senate losses.
And don’t talk to me about bona fides. I was a McGovern delegate, and I campaigned with Fritz Mondale. For 20 years now we have fought this battle in the party, and the more the left demands of the party, the further it sinks.
It makes it more depressing in that there is no one to blame like Nader in 2000. We threw everything we had at this and we still lost, and lost solidly.
If this keeps democrats together well I hope thats a good thing because that will mean that the DLC and such types will actually be listening to the new blood once in a while.
I read the article.
So we adopt a right wing Democrat of our own, in order to win. I think this needs to be about presenting the values that Kerry and other traditional, New Deal type Democrats expound rather than putting our tails between our legs and crawling right.
Again…instead of flailing around begging for help from the right of this party, hammer, hammer hammer at the difference between the Republicans and us, as we go through this insane Bush II administration.
If we cannot make our point as Bush takes down the economy, Social Security, the environment, the criminal justice system–not to mention presides over what is turning into an ongoing guerrilla war in Iraq, we are not worth acquiring the office. The point is to embrace the core values of our party, not turn to Republican light, and look at the South as our only hope.