Here are 10 things liberal Democrats are totally fine with, and don’t find “unsettling” at all (the word “unsettling” comes from coverage of the Platner campaign in Maine, if “coverage” is the word I want, by the New York Times, which I’ll look at later today in Water Cooler).
1. Genocide. Joe Biden shovelled bombs and weaponry to Israel’s משוגע war criminals as fast as he possibly could. No Democrat has even been held accountable for “genocide” (Foreign Policy). Democrats are still taking AIPAC money.
2. Oligarchs. Of course, oligarchs fund both parties. But the party of “Our Democracy” has “our oligarchs.” “[O]ligarchy is great when they’re our oligarchs. Oligarchy is evil when they’re not.”1
3. Nazis. I’m so old I remember when Ukraine’s Azov brigade were Nazis (Times of Israel). But that was before the Azovs were “warmly greeted” on Capitol Hill by Democrats and Republicans alike, and the Biden decided to “transfer” weapons to them after all.2
4. Spooks. WSWS has been tracking “CIA Democrats” for some time (2018; 2024). One prominent spook is former CIA agent Abigail Spanberger, now Democrat governor of Virginia. A second is Elissa Slotkin, Democrat Senator from Michigan. Both are mentioned as Presidential candidates. Maybe I’ve read too much LeCarré, but I find the concept of “leaving” the dubious. How we ever know who leaves a covert agency that’s practiced at the arts of deception?
5. Gerontocracy. Robert Kuttner argues that “the Democrats’ problem is not age. It’s corporate and centrist Democrats of all ages.” Fair point, but age beomes a problem when seniority trumps all other considerations. Jeet Heer responds: “An inordinately large number of party leaders are so old and infirm they are at death’s door,”MR SUBLIMINAL That is, incapable of unlikely to be giving their full attention to governance and quotes political analyst Lakshya Jain: “Three of the 215 House Democrats have died this year, all from states that Trump won (TX/AZ) or have a Republican Governor (TX/VA). Six House Democrats have died since April 2024. The last eight House members to die in office have been Democrats, going back to 2022…. 11 of the 14 House members over 80 are Democrats.” And Platner’s vanquished opponent, Janet Mills, at 79, would have been the oldest freshman senator ever. At the very least, the Democrats weren’t reading the room.
6. Systematically Concealing a President’s Cognitive Impairment. A bill of particulars: “‘He’d only have to show proof of life once in a while’: Joe Biden’s advisors hid his decline – and the media didn’t dig hard enough” (The Conversation). “Tapper and Thompson write that Biden was protected by an insular group, including his wife, his son and a group of longtime aides nicknamed the “Politburo,” a reference to the leadership committee of a communist party” (CNN). “Tapper and Thompson’s book also says that Biden did not recognise George Clooney at a star-studded California campaign fundraiser last June hosted by the Hollywood star. ‘Thank you for being here,’ Biden told Clooney at the event, apparently unaware he was speaking to the Academy Award winner. ‘You know George,’ an aide reportedly told Biden, as he was struggled to work out Clooney’s identity” (BBC).
7. Allowing a Cognitively Impaired President to Appoint His Putative Successor. Here’s the tweet:
My fellow Democrats, I have decided not to accept the nomination and to focus all my energies on my duties as President for the remainder of my term. My very first decision as the party nominee in 2020 was to pick Kamala Harris as my Vice President. And it’s been the best… pic.twitter.com/x8DnvuImJV
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) July 21, 2024
And that’s how it went down, despite veteran loyalists like James Carville calling for some sort of small-d democratic process.
8. Steve Israel. Steve Israel, a player in this year’s fresh, new dark money network, identifed by Lever News, is a horrible human being. Old-school blogger Howie Klein at Down with Tyranny was been writing about Israel for years (Google results, FWIW.3). Best lead (2014):
I’m not saying Long Island Congressman Steve Israel is involved in the Mafia, the way Staten Island Congressman Michael “Mikey Suits” Grimm is. Israel, not exactly a brain surgeon, is far more subtle than Grimm will ever be— which doesn’t take much.
And yet here Israel is, a decade later, still worming his way closer to the trough.
9. #MeToo Workplace Abuse by Respected Party Elders. Bill Clinton. My man, when you’re President, and your intern brings you a pizza, you don’t have a “sexual encounter” with her, even if it is the night Newt Gingrich shut down the government. That’s what the feminists used to call a “power imbalance”, and that’s A Bad Thing (and it is in fact a bad thing, unless our side does it, of course). It’s also A Worse Thing than anything Platner has been accused of, and if Bill Clinton can be forgiven, then Platner can too.
10. Having Nothing to Say to the Working Class. I turn to Thomas Frank, working up to Listen, Liberal!, the book that got him blackballed by the famously tolerant and diverse Democrat establishment:
Sitting there in gilded Manhattan, I thought of all the abandoned factories and postindustrial desolation in the surrounding regions, and I mused on how, in such places, the Democratic establishment was receding into terminal insignificance. It had virtually nothing to say to the people who inhabit that land of waste and futility.
But for the faithful liberals at the Clinton Foundation gathering in New York, none of that mattered. The party’s deficit in relevance to average citizens was more than made up for by its massive surplus in moral virtue. Here, inside the theater, the big foundations and the great fashion magazines were staging a pageant of goodness unquestionable, and the liberal class was swimming happily in its home element.
They knew which things were necessary to make up a liberal movement, and all of the ingredients were present: well-meaniqng billionaires, grant makers and grant recipients, Hollywood stars who talked about social media, female entrepreneurs from the Third World, and, of course, an audience of hundreds, who clapped and cheered enthusiastically every time one of their well-graduated leaders wandered across the stage. The performance of liberalism was so realistic one could almost believe it lived.
Debbie Dingell sums up the Democrat apparatchik take on Graham Platner: “I’m not going to defend someone with that kind of history.” What kind of history is that, Debbie? Current Democrat history includes:
- Genocide
- Oligarchs
- Nazis
- Spooks
- Gerontocracy
- Systematically Concealing A President’s Cognitive Impairment
- Allowing a Cognitively Impaired President To Appoint His Putative Successor
- Steve Israel
- #MeToo-style Workplace Abuse by a Respected Party Elder
- and Having Nothing to Say to the Working Class
Sirota has it right:
In sum: If you are part of this political-media elite, you are probably desperately promoting the idea that politicians’ “character” is defined by their manners, civility, family life, and anything else that has no material impact on voters. You cannot allow politicians’ “character” to be defined by something new: their willingness to fight4 against you, your fellow elites, and the oligarchs who many voters believe are ruining their lives and destroying the world.
Patient readers, I will do a media critique of the Platner “coverage” in the next Water Cooler.
NOTES
1 Luke Goldstein and Katya Schwenk of The Lever do a great job here exposing a new dark money network in the Democrat Party designed to sluice billionaire money to electeds or wannabe elected who old-school blogger Atrios would label, correctly, as centrist dipshits. This should not be surprising, since the Democrat Party is in essence a money sluice that begins and ends with oligarchs, as Rivera’s draft autopsy shows MR SUBLIMINAL Which is why everybody who is anybody hates it. (If you want to know how long the grift has been going on, Rivera shows that the consulting firm GMMB was a top channel for the moneyflow in 2024. Howie Klein has GMMB running a structurally similar grift. Back in 2010
2 Hilariously, Zelensky clarified the matter once and for all by attending a ceremony where the remains of Andriy Melnyk were reinterred (!!). Melnyk was one of the leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which collaborated with Nazi Germany and took part in the Holocaust (more here). As long as they’re our Nazis, eh? Of course, Zelensky could always redeem himself by apologizing.
3 Google search just got even stupider, at least for me. A search for “Steve Israel” at Down with Tyranny restricted to 2010-01-01 – 2013-01-10 yields no results, even though there evidently are. When searching Blogger, which Google owns!
4 Although I have to admit that I’m conditioned by years of hearing Democrats say that they are “fighting for” this or that to be allergic to the very word “fight.” If we want to be material, ask the most important question in American politics.