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mjdlight's avatar

Jayapal's comments are a good reminder to those of us on the Left to always keep Aristotle's warning that a virtue in excess becomes a vice. in mind Identifying with the oppressed and advocating for them is not a vice. But excusing, whataboutisming, and other refusals to acknowledge and condemn the oppressed when they engage in acts of pure evil is unambiguously wrong. I'm heartened to see the examples Charlie shared of progressives who get that.

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Eva Seifert's avatar

And tell that to "progressives" who think Biden is a stodgy fool who can't/won't do what they want, and go out and vote for Trump. True progressives work with the world they have and try to gain support. They don't whine and take their toys away when others don't feel like they do.

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TomD's avatar

Unfortunately, whining and threatening to take the toys is an eventuality with identity politics.

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Eva Seifert's avatar

Sadly. And it might take down the country.

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SandyG's avatar

Well said. More evidence they are not adults.

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R Mercer's avatar

Yes, but butthurt people DO that... and being butthurt often outweighs being progressive or whatever else would tend to make you vote Biden.

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Helen's avatar

I have always considered myself a progressive but think I will go back to calling myself a liberal. I don't want to be associated with people who hate Jews and refuse to condemn Hamas as a violent terrorist organization.

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rlritt's avatar

I'm with you.

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Dec 4, 2023
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Eva Seifert's avatar

It isn't just the "progressives" who say that. I see it in some of the comments here. They want an ideal candidate who does what they want. Compromise is a dirty word, working with others they don't like is what they don't want to do. The current GOP is a living example. But there are a few Ds who are just as whiny and blind.

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JF's avatar

Expecting (demanding) a candidate who perfectly reflects one’s own ideology is, to me, the natural consequence of our National Narcissism. A destructive trait delivered to us by social media, but obviously lying dormant, but fully formed, waiting to be released.

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Dec 4, 2023
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SandyG's avatar

This reminds me of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader's presidential campaign in 2000 that clearly cost the election for Al Gore. His line was there was no difference between Gore and Bush. They were Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Given how Bush got us into the Iraq War with questionable intelligence, one was clearly more evil than the other.

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JMFK's avatar

If I remember correctly, Hilary lost to Trump in 2016 by fewer votes than were cast for Jill Stein.

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Citizen60's avatar

In 2 critical states, Jill won enough votes to elect Trump. Which is what Putin—who hosted her at his table during the election—wanted. Bernie did the rest

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rlritt's avatar

Really!? Because she was the Socialist Candidate? I bet he did it to help Trump. Birds of a feather and all that.

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SandyG's avatar

Yes, IMO Green Party candidate Stein was a spoiler. I have seen reporting on Stein's connections with Russia, but I have also seen analysis from "Reason Magazine" that questions whether all of her votes would have gone to HRC.

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rlritt's avatar

Jill Stein was a spoiler and gave us Trump. Just like Ross Perot took votes from Bush SR in Texas. I don't think Clinton was wonderful, but in comparison to Trump, she would have been much less harmful. I bet Republicans gave Jill Stein money in WI.

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Dec 4, 2023
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rlritt's avatar

Again, I bet Republicans bank rolled her.

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knowltok's avatar

Another great example for Ranked Choice Voting. I'd love to have a system where we could express our disapproval of various candidates without functionally supporting the one we like least.

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SandyG's avatar

Amen, brother!

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JF's avatar

It makes so much sense! That’s why we will never have it!

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knowltok's avatar

Who knows, maybe it will start to catch on. Maine and Alaska have it now.

People need to keep promoting it, especially in a non-partisan way. It MIGHT result in less extremes in office, but it WILL result in better representation.

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JF's avatar

I like your optimism. My cynicism is a newly acquired trait. What happened?

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Eva Seifert's avatar

Watching and listening to people who used to be sane succumb to madness.

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E2's avatar

A ranked system would be an improvement over plurality elections, but the best system IMO is not ranked but scored. That is, you can express your degree of (dis)approval of each candidate independently, not only in a position relative to the others.

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rlritt's avatar

Exactly. If a candidate says he is going to completely change everything to suit you, he's lying.

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Dec 4, 2023
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JF's avatar

There’s something wrong with primaries in general, of both parties, when election after election we are faced with two unpopular options in the general election.

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Eva Seifert's avatar

The only good thing about the last D primary is that Biden won.

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JF's avatar

Yes, indeed, thanks to James Clyburn. The contest between Hillary Clinton and Trump is a better example of two unpopular “winners”, although I think Clinton’s unpopularity was an invention of the media. Even the NYT was brutal on Hillary; I think it was their attempt at being unbiased. What a paradox.

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rlritt's avatar

It's only because we know them so well. The people not nominated were no better, but they don't get the scrutiny the people running for President get. There are no perfect candidates because there are no perfect people. Which is why we have a VP, Congress, Senate and 50 governors as well all the state politicians.

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SandyG's avatar

Hmm, interesting. I do think Gore was beatable. Like John Kerry in '04 and HRC in '16, who were also beaten, Gore was not a great candidate.

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rlritt's avatar

I liked him. He was smart. Bush younger was a moron.

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John Kendrick's avatar

I agree - John McCain in 2000, if nominated would have beaten Al Gore in the General Election and John McCain would NOT have been fooled by the neocons that led this country into that Iraq War.

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Dick Lanier's avatar

I don’t know if you are right about McCain and Gore, but it’s certainly a reasonable take. And I think that you are right that McCain would not have gotten us into Iraq. My only quibble with your comment is that the neocons “fooled” Bush into invading Iraq. That makes it almost seem that he was some hapless bystander. In my opinion, Bush didn’t need much “fooling”. From everything I have read, Bush (43) was obsessed with Iraq almost from day one and was just looking for some excuse to take Sadaam out. He wanted to be fooled.

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Rolyac's avatar

Dick...I think Bush (43) was trying to one up his Daddy's good sense to not take out Sadamm. He always felt inferior to Bush (41).

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Dick Lanier's avatar

I wonder if you aren't right about that. I remember reading some commentary in the Woodward books about Bush's (43) reelection and how the overriding sentiment when he won was that he had achieved something that his father hadn't.

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John Kendrick's avatar

I did not mean to let George W. off easily. I DO believe that between Gore, McCain and Bush, W. Bush was uniquely UNQUALIFIED to understand or appreciate the threat from Al Qaeda – he had NO FOREIGN policy experience and the “experts” he depended upon had experience that was out-of-date. Wolfowitz NOT knowing about the danger from Osama Bin Laden was very telling.

More directly to your point, I think that George W. Bush was NOT a very intellectually able man, and seemed to be consumed at times with an almost hyper-testosterone affect. Whatever it was, he seemed very uncurious about the drivel that Ahmad Chowdry, Dick Cheney, Don Rumseld and Paul Wolfowitz fed him in regards to the “hazards” of Saddam’s Iraq. He and his administration seemed totally unprepared and unaware that by invading Iraq, they were eliminating a powerful foe of Iran, and that they seemed to have been caught completely unaware by the looting of Iraqi government buildings and the likely results of their asinine decisions to disband the Iraqi Army and to ban any past member of the Baath Party from future Iraq governments. The colossal blunder to invade was compounded by the stupidity with which the initial occupation was handled and the region is less stable from those criminally stupid and foolish decisions made during 2002 and 2003.

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Dick Lanier's avatar

Well said. I have thought long and hard about how it was that Bush (43) was such a complete disaster as President (and I challenge anyone to argue otherwise). And I finally decided it was because he was simply in over his head. That and his new-found religiosity made him think that as long as his motives were pure, somehow God would make everything turn out all right. Although there were many awful things that Bush (43) did, everything else pales in comparison to the Iraq War. And the counterarguments you mention were only some of the reasons it was so stupid. Besides "eliminating a powerful foe of Iran" (as you put it), there was also the idea that

"we would be greeted as liberators" as if once Sadaam was gone we could simply head home (and don't forget that "democracy would flourish). When I heard that, it sounded like they were comparing it to the Allies liberation of Paris. And, sure enough, Cheney was quoted as saying just that. The idea that they couldn't see the difference between liberating France (which had a functioning "home-grown" civil government for years before the Nazis) and "liberating" Iraq (which not only didn't have a functioning "home-grown" civil government then but had never had one at any time in the past) totally escaped me. P.S. I assume you are referring to Ahmad Chalabi, not Ahmand Chowdry

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rlritt's avatar

What's really annoying is I knew the Iraq war wasl senseless and stupid, but when I said that out loud, I was threatened with violence. Now it seems like everyone knew it was a fiasco. Where were you back then?

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John Kendrick's avatar

Around, but probably not loud enough.

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rlritt's avatar

Why are Democrats evil? Because they compromise? Isn't that the definition of representative government. Not everyone gets everything they want.

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Aggman's avatar

I hope liberals come to their senses next year. Do they vote for a decent guy who is old but smart, progressive (though not a flaming pro-Hamas leftist,) cares about the country and democracy or do you throw it all away and take a chance that the world's most demented twisted, sociopathic narcissist gets his hand on the reins of power again?

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Dec 4, 2023
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rlritt's avatar

But I was listening to a Podcast and they were saying that the anti Israel pro Hamas protest is a lot smaller than the media makes it out to be.

And by the way, why would liberals support a anti women, pro authoritarian country like Palestine? All the Muslim countries are anti Democratic, anti women and religious fundamentalists. Why would any liberal support them? I think its media propaganda. Most of the US media is all in for Trump. We have to think more critically when digesting "news" today.

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Mike Lew's avatar

That thinking led to the GOP gerrymanders after "progressives" stayed home on 2010.

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JF's avatar

And the huge Black voter turnout for Obama in ‘08, stayed home in 2010. That’s a consistent problem.

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Dec 4, 2023
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JF's avatar

In less than 12 months we will learn just how far down the whiny baby non-voters (and voters!) will drag us.

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rlritt's avatar

And not only that, he says he is banning moslem immigration and outing Muslim Americans. Where is the outrage to that statement? Or do they just tell themselves that Trump wouldn't do that. Don't be stupid, of course he will.

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Sko Hayes's avatar

I just don't understand that kind of waffling coming from a so-called progressive.

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JF's avatar

I am suspecting there are a lot of lefties who adopt a position just to stick a finger in the eye of the “establishment”, similar to MAGAs. A version of the “horseshoe” effect that’s based on psychology, not political position. I’m willing to believe Jayapal could be antisemitic, but she could also be devoted to contrarian extremism itself.

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Sko Hayes's avatar

She votes with the Biden agenda 98% of the time.

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JF's avatar

And that’s a good thing. But her extremist positions could be hurting the bigger agenda long term if it turns voters off to Democrats - and I think that’s very likely.

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SandyG's avatar

I think her contrarian extremism is her ticket to glory.

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JF's avatar

I’ve seen it so much in my personal life over the years, and now it’s rampant in public life too. Our “attention economy” demands it.

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SandyG's avatar

Agree!

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rlritt's avatar

It's mostly propaganda. The anti Israel contigent is very small and not really liberal.

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Sko Hayes's avatar

It's the horseshoe effect, eventually they get so far left, they become far right.

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Dec 4, 2023
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Bill Pennell's avatar

Jayapal represents a strain of leftwing politics that sees nearly everything through the prism of color. Because, in their eyes, Israelis are whiter than Palestinians the latter are victims by definition.

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SandyG's avatar

Yep. Jews are white because they are powerful, so they can't be the victim. And anything white is bad.

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Cheerio's avatar

Really? There are a lot of Jewish people of color.

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SandyG's avatar

But none of them are in leadership in Israel. Same with the US - any Jews who are visible and powerful are not POC.

Just a quick note on power and the Left. This is the prism through which they view social structures. I got this from Fukuyama's "Liberalism and Its Discontents": The critique of the liberalsim of The Enlightenment that spawned the Declaration of Indepence and the Constitution came from from French philosophers in the 1960s. (I was in college then and although I never read them, they were well-known among the anti-war literati on campus I hung around with.) This point of view came to be known as critical theory and it spawned Critical Race Theory in the 1970s.

The critique is that the domination of the powerful over the oppressed was embedded in liberalism. Any who advocated liberal values such as equality, individual rights, private property, were unconsciously suppressing marginalized groups.

So, for the progressive Left, power is bad. That's the bottom line. It just happens to be held by straight, white, males. Here's the syllogism: Straight, white, male, liberal democracy power is bad --> Israel holds power --> Israel is white.

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Dec 4, 2023
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SandyG's avatar

Yes. I learned about these Jews who had lived in Palestine for over a century in a terrific documentary I watched recently, "How Britain Started the Arab-Israeli Conflict" (https://youtu.be/ZXfuqUhzESg?si=hHImzStT1W1hPaI8). Even the Jews in Israel were divided. The right-wing extremist who assasinated Rabin was a Mizrahi Jew. He had been rejected by the Ashkenazi parents of a girl he was dating because he was Mizrahi.

Quick story: I was in Ireland a few summers ago. We went to Derry in Northern Ireland, the scene of much of the violence during "the troubles". In that conflict, both sides were white, and being Irish (like me), about as white as you can get! The schools in Derry were segregated then. They have just started to be integrated.

I asked our guide, having experienced the color line in the US, how did you know the difference between Catholics and Protestants? It was by where you went to school.

I'm sure the progressives know little about either of those situations because it's not convenient to their "straight/white/male is bad" agenda.

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JF's avatar

Humans have a tendency to slice and dice our identities ever finer. Even with something as mundane as dress codes in private schools, kids find a way to distinguish in-group versus out-group, via something as irrelevant as shoelaces.

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SandyG's avatar

Well said, GG!

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Dec 6, 2023
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JF's avatar

Sadly, I don’t hear very many stories of kind-hearted nuns.

I grew up of modest means too, and I remember a lot of the microscopic ways in which that was obvious, even without being ratted out. Luckily we both survived!

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Dec 6, 2023
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BriDub's avatar

We are unsophisticated in our racism and descrimination. Folks who grew up with a knowledge of caste systems will be able to teach us new ways to hate and separate. :/

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RIOldFolksHome's avatar

Just like her colleague from Michigan.

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BriDub's avatar

I don't mind Tlaib being compromised since she has ties to the area. That said, your friends are supposed to help you keep it together when you are emotionally compromised a la Chris Pine Star Trek.

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Richard Kane's avatar

Can’t we condemn the killing of innocent Palestinian women and children and the brutal rape and sexual assault of the Israeli hostages? Why does it sink to whataboutism? The subject of the interview was the brutality against the women hostages. The guest tried to change the subject. Good for Dana Bash for not letting it slide!

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Dec 4, 2023
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Bill Pennell's avatar

Given the makeup of her district, that’s unlikely.

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rlritt's avatar

I think she is in an ethnic neighborhood where most if her constituents are Muslim.

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