Trump isn’t happy with the compromise plan being served up by the Congressional Conference Committee to Avoid A Second Pointless Shutdown. That’s certainly a good sign. Whenever Trump is unhappy about something, an angel gets her wings. Still, the Trump administration is always about fifty things in any given day, some retreads from previous cycles, some new bullshit, invariably something to get under nearly anyone’s skin. The things I probably found most irritating this week (and that’s always a hot contest) were Trump’s Texas adventure, the big speech at El Paso, and his sloppily calling for Rep. Ilhan Omar to resign. The former of these items was infuriating for obvious reasons; the latter more because it was dog-piling on criticisms of the Congresswoman from a broad swath of people, including many in the Democratic party.
Omar is the perfect target for Trump. She’s a woman, a person of color, an immigrant from Somalia, and a Muslim who, like many Somali women, wears a headscarf. The orange-faced jackass has attacked all of those things separately on many occasions – by attacking Omar, he gets more bang for the buck. Would that he were the only one so eager to jump on her over an anti-AIPAC tweet. Democratic leadership really showed their ass this week, following up on their shameful support of Trump’s Venezuela policy from the previous week. A really poor performance. Still, Trump and Kevin McCarthy both get extra credit for crying antisemitism when their own track records on bigotry are unambiguously offensive. Both McCarthy and Trump made George Soros the bête noir of the mid-term campaign last year. Not subtle.
I don’t know that I would attribute fanatical support of Israeli government policy solely to receiving money from AIPAC, but Omar is right to call the lobbying group out, as they take an extreme right position on just about every aspect of Israel’s various domestic and foreign policy actions. Moreover, politicians from both major parties regularly try to out-do one another in their speeches before AIPAC conferences, trying to establish which of them does a better imitation of Netanyahu or someone further to the right flank of Likud. The problem is more with the politicians than the lobby, and their cravenness on this issue occurs in the context of an American foreign policy that is in lock-step with the Israeli government, regardless of what they do. That’s just bad policy, no matter what government we’re talking about.
Glad to see Omar give Elliott Abrams a pain in the ass. Somebody sorely needs to.
luv u,
jp
Abrams was an essential player in Reagan’s war on Central American peasantry throughout the 1980s. He worked to cover up the hideous El Mozote massacre in El Salvador at the end of 1981, then went on to flak for that murderous government for the balance of his tenure. He defended the mass murderer Rios Montt in Guatemala during that period under the banner of anti-communism – a position he has proudly owned up to ever since, even though the former Guatemalan dictator was posthumously convicted of genocide in his home country (and the United States was called out by the court for supporting him). He was convicted as part of the Iran-Contra prosecution, then pardoned by pappy Bush so that he could soldier on into junior’s administration and make a mess of our policy toward Haiti, Israel Palestine, and everything else he could get his greasy hands on.