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.
As I was looking through the detailed National Election Pool exit poll data, I came across the following question:
OPINION OF BUSH ADMINISTRATION:
Category %Total Kerry Bush Nader
Angry 23 96 3 1
Dissatisfied 26 82 16 1
Satisfied 26 11 89 0
Enthusiastic 22 2 98 0
In other words, a 49-48 plurality of voters was either angry or dissatisfied with the Bush administration.
I think this settles the question of whether the election was a “mandate” for Bush’s policies.
Yep JC, I agree with you and it is distressing. The only ray of hope I see is if they go too far right that the public opinion poll will shift against them. For this to happen we need to get the idealogues to stop harping on this election, take a balanced look at what is going on in Congress, and report it to the people though a mechanism that the common man can appreciate (sans rhetoric).
The fact that Bush won despite a below 50% approval rating and the decline of one important demographic, the female vote, should be a clue about what happened in this election.
The attacks on 9/11 and subsequent wars have put the fear in the electorate. That situation can’t help but favor the incumbent. Details about pre-9/11 negligence, inept management of an unneccesary war aside, I believe the public is possessed with fear. The incredibly negative campaign against John Kerry raised just enough doubt to allow a Bush win.
For those two reasons, I think the demographics gathered in this campaign are of no real value.
Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg has come up with some rather amazing data in his post-election survey that is directly relevant to the ‘mandate’ business:
“There was not a shift to the right. This was a tolerant, outward-looking, change-oriented electorate that elected George Bush. The country was not looking for a conservative president or a conservative regime, though that is what it has achieved.”
“What you’ll see in this data is that there was a large majority of the electorate and particularly pivotal portions of the electorate that were not looking for an election that was going to be settled on issues of security and safety, but were looking for an election that was about their lives and about economic issues and about health care. But in the end they did not think that they were given that choice in this election. And many of those voters held back until the end, and what we see in the end is many rural voters, many older blue collar voters and seniors who moved sharply toward the president on moral issues. The were clearly not going to vote that way until they did not get the choice that would have made it possible.”
“By 52 to 41 percent the voters who ended up voting for George Bush said the country was on the wrong track. They said what they were looking for was a candidate that was going to talk about things central to their lives–the economy and health care– as opposed to safety. In my view, this debate did not get joined in a central enough way, to keep the cultural issues from becoming dominant and moving these voters at the end.”
There *might* be one reason to doubt that Bush will *succeed* in his mission to force a radical agenda down our throats. Fillibuster. The 55 Dems plus a couple of the blue state moderate Republicans might be all we need to stop SS privatization, tax “simplification” and right wing judges. But we have to be able to make sure all our Senators can hold up under the pressure. Surely that’s *possible* if Bush goes too far too fast.
I’m not particularly hopeful:-(
Keith
The Democrats need to retake the senate now! Here’s how…
The background:
Several events in the past few days have shown that the most
radical members of the senate are planning to move aggressively
on their agenda, especially with regard to judicial appointments
and tax cuts.
For example, Arlen Spector is now in trouble for stating that the
senate may not be willing to confirm anti-abortion Supreme Court
judges. This was not a threat, just an observation, but the radicals
are already planning a punishment.
On the other side the senators from NY, CT and NJ are thinking of
dropping out in favor of becoming governors in 2006. They think
they might be more effective, since there is very little they can
do in the senate.
Several moderate Republicans have expressed concern about the
size of the deficit and the balance of trade. The radicals,
however, are threatening to give anyone who is independent the
“Daschle” treatment.
The solution:
The Democrats need to make an appeal to the moderate Republicans
to leave their party and join the Democrats. In addition to
Spector, good candidates are Chafee, Snowe, Voinovich and Collins.
For this to work the Democrats need to find six Republicans that
will all switch together. This will give the Democrats a majority
in the senate and enable them to negotiate the coming legislation
and nominations from an equal position of strength.
This is not as far-fetched as it may seem, several of these
senators are unlikely to run again (Spector has just be
re-elected, for example) and thus don’t have to fear the
lack of election support. With the Democrats in the majority
they also won’t have to worry about retaliation from the
Republicans for support of local projects.
As an incentive, the Democrats should offer these members new
powers such as committee chairmanships and other perks. If
the Republican senators have a problem with declaring themselves
as Democrats (such as what happened with Jeffords) they could
instead create a non-party structure to affiliate these new
allies with. Some name suggestions: “The alliance of responsible
legislators”, “The non-partisan alliance”, “The fiscal moderates
caucus”, etc. This group will caucus with the Democrats and vote
as a block for committee assignments and for those issues on
which they have overall agreement. The Republican members would
still be free to vote with their prior party when they feel they
have to for political or local reasons.
By sweetening the offer enough the Republican moderates will come
as a winners both in terms of their power in the senate and with
their voters back home. They can point to their newfound powers
as a way to promote the interests of their state. While in the
present alignment they are barely tolerated.
The Democrats need to stop despairing and get to work!
I may be incorrect, but while the article is definitely true, and I agree completely that the idea there is a “mandate” is absurd, there is also the practical political reality – and it seems to me this political reality is that the Frist, Hastert, Delay, and the White House, ARE going to be able to push pretty much anything they want through the Congress. Just as a matter of power politics, this seems to be the case, irregardless of whether the public lines up with the goals.
If there are reasons to doubt my above assertion, I would be MOST pleased…