Fetterman Sits Out Debate Over Israel
April 28: Biden’s decency … Israel warrants warrants … Fetterman + Cruz + Johnson … Biden’s brother …
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Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) was sitting on a bench. People tried to speak with him.
Now, I don’t usually focus on isolated incidents like this. I prefer to aim at systemic issues. But then I saw this Fetterman video — and I should caveat that I know nothing about it and can’t vouch for its authenticity, whether it’s AI or whether it’s real but was shot in 1874. No clue. But also no indication as of yet that it’s fake. And Fetterman has been one of the most obstreperous champions of Israel’s war in Gaza. And this engage struck me as illustrating something systemic. And important. So…
In the video, Fetterman fends off peace activists by talking. Deploying continued face-flappery, Fetterman does something interesting, and pretty common: He tries to shut down the conversation by stipulating that he disagrees with them. “I’m pro-Israel,” he says. Agree to disagree, yo. End of story move on dot org.
But that’s not how representative democracy, or life, is supposed to work. It’s not enough to state your opinion. It’s not sufficient to agree to disagree. If your opinion directs power, you should be able not merely to defend that position, but engage in substantive digging into it. If you are an elected official, we are entitled to probe how you reach your positions, not just agree to disagree with you. What reasoning supports your position? How do you account for counter-position X or Y or Ω?
Fetterman won’t do it. He filibusters. He literally speaks over people who say he represents them. He says it’s because he knows where they stand — and maybe he does! But, again, as an elected official he has a moral obligation to submit for rigorous examination the reasoning and values on which his own positions are grounded.
Ironically, that’s what former Attorney General Bill Barr did on Sunday, to his credit. And the process demonstrated exactly the value I’m advertising for it: It illuminated his position, to his discredit. It also shocked the conscience and filled the metaphorical pants of democracy.
Barr on Friday defended his support for D4FRFP1 Donald Trump, and addressed repeated followup questions substantively, revealing his reasoning. Trump, Barr said, might threaten to execute a White House leaker, but “I doubt he would have.”
CNN’s Kaitlan Collins got him to unpack his reasoning:
Barr: The thing that I worry about President Trump is not that he's going to become an autocrat and do those kinds of things.
Collins: Why not?
Barr: Because I don't think he would.
Collins: But--
Barr: At the end of the day.
Collins: What's the basis for that, that understanding that you have?
Barr: Well.
Collins: Is it just your own hunch?
Barr: That's my feeling, having worked for him and seen him in action. I don't think he would actually go and kill political rivals and things like that.
It was a laudable line of questioning, to repeat childlike (because they ask good questions!) “Why?” “Why?” “Why?” And Barr might have benefited if Collins had pursued it: What about seeing Trump in action makes you think he wouldn’t execute the leaker? Maybe it’s because Barr saw Trump multiple times pull back from (more) extremist positions.
And Collins could have pursued it even more: Did Trump pull himself back? Or did others? If it was others pulling Trump back, what happens if he’s surrounded by people who won’t?
If you say we all need to get behind Pres. Joe Biden in order to stop Trump — and that “get behind” entails not criticizing — you’re espousing the same ideology Trump does: “We all need to get behind our leader to stop the other leader.”
But we can’t stop authoritarianism by practicing it. Criticizing Biden is supporting democracy. The chance to scrutinize and kick the tires on the jalopy of presidential reasoning (or senatorial reasoning) is our right. Adversarial positions towards both parties is the only course of action that demonstrates true faith in democracy.
Which brings me to Saturday night’s White House Correspondents Orgy. SNL’s Colin Jost got a lot of online oxygen for saying his grandfather voted for Biden because Biden is a decent man.
And even if you want to excuse Biden’s continued support of Israel as a decent man’s attempt to preserve enough influence to sway Israel away from wholesale slaughter, there’s still the many many reports that Biden in private screams at and bullies people. Maybe it’s not useful or mature to taxonomize our politicians by perceived decency?
Inconvenient screaming aside, Jost discussed Biden’s ostensible decency in a clip that the Biden campaign Tweeted out the way comedians who challenge power would be so ashamed of they’d say they miss Louis C.K. just to distract from it. Decency, Jost said, “is why we’re all here tonight. Decency is how we’re able to be here tonight.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) referred to Jost’s “powerful words” and said “Decency is what democracy is built on.” Now, I know you don’t subscribe to a newsletter called The Fucking News to have platitudes applauded, so allow me to yuck the yums of the White House Correspondents Association, SNL, and everyone who yas queened that clip. And, yes, I will be using outdated slang to do so.
The founding fathers’ vision for America was not, “Let’s build this fragile experiment in representational democracy, and as long as everyone in the country stays decent, then the future of America and democracy itself should be on fleek.”
In fact, the founding fathers’ vision for America was the opposite of what Klobuchar and Jost say it was. If the premise were decency, you wouldn’t need states or federal branches of government.
We have checks and balances because the premise of America is that politicians will act not out of decency but out of self-interest. So the founders ensured that self-interest — including political success with the electorate — would motivate politicians to check abuses of power by other politicians. Out of self-interest. Biden acts differently in public than when he privately terrifies fellow humans who work for him because self-interest makes him act decent in public.
When Pres. George Washington declined entreaties to become king, that was an instance where the founders’ theory failed us: Self-interest should have motivated enough presidential wannabes to stop a new American monarchy. And it might have, had Washington’s decency (and/or exhaustion) not gotten there first.
Jost is right in that decency is how we got here. But that’s only true in a bad way. Decency may have got us here, but “here” turns out to be the edge of democratic cliff.
Decency is what got us Pres. Gerald Ford’s pardon of crime lord Richard Nixon. Decency is what time and again has justified falling to check power the way the founders intended.
And Klobuchar is part of the handful of Democrats who hold that the project of democracy succeeds on the back not just of decency, but of unity. For years, she has been one of the few Democrats still actively engaged with the right-wing Republicans who gave us the annual National Prayer Breakfast. And the National Day of Prayer, coming up on Thursday.
The premise for this national prayer bullshit is that prayer magically creates unity. I’m not denigrating prayer qua prayer, I’m denigrating the bullshit of official governmental recognition of prayer (prayer all alone by itself is also bullshit, but I’m not denigrating it as such except okay yeah now I am; if you accept the science on vaccines, don’t tell me you reject the science on prayer).
The people who beat cops to the ground to invade the U.S. Capitol were praying to hang Vice President Mike Pence.
Dems say yeah, but at least our prayer isn’t Christian nationalist. Well, it is when you slap National on your prayer breakfasts and prayer days. And your prayer is Christian nationalist when your stated goal is unity through prayer. Why? Because unity is supposed to come from the many, the pluribus, if you will.
“Unity” is one of those shibboleths of small-d democrats: We should all aspire to unity. But saying that prayer is the path to unity tells me that your unum doesn’t include the pluribus who don’t pray. Or don’t pray to a monotheistic god or don’t pray to an intercessory god.
And, again, the pursuit of unity was not the founders’ intention. Their whole point was that, if you pour the pluribus in all its messy, sticky, gooey, glory into the machinery of democracy, the result is unity. The pluribus doesn’t go away, it remains, and it fights and is indecent and selfish. And if we have an educated populace (ay, there’s the rub) then everyone in the system will be motivated to act as if they’re not selfish. Because an educated populace will reward you. No unity or decency required.
In fact, pursuing decency or unity will turn your democracy broth to shit right in the tureen. Just as hydrogen bonding to water makes sugar sticky, pursuing unity with your fellow politicians will gum up the works and lead to less unity and less decency.
As I’ve noted ad nauseam, that’s what we saw when the prayer people got the run of the place in Guatemala. The prayer movement led to less unity. Less decency.
Unity gave us the Iraq War. Decency gave us American torture. The Department of Homeland [sic] Security. Space fucking Force.
We would have more unity today, and more people acting with decency, if our Democratic politicians for the last few decades had rejected both and fought tooth and nail against Republican encroachments on liberty, instead of collaborating on them in the name of decency.
Here’s What Unity Looks Like
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) agrees with Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) who agrees with Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) that the International Criminal Court (ICC) should stop taking international criminals to court.
Remember back on April 19 TFN flagged the news that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is afraid that the ICC will issue a warrant for his arrest for the murder of the non-Hamas protion of the 34,000 people killed in Gaza so far? Well, it took Johnson a week to get the news, but on Friday Johnson said about the warrants, “The ICC should stand down on this immediately.” He then said some stupid things.
To wit, Johnson said “Israel has the right to defend itself,” which no one is disputing, just like my right to defend myself against Johnson’s straw-man arguments doesn’t give me the right to murder thousands of other straw men, straw women, straw children, straw doctors, straw journalists, and other straw humans.
Johnson also said, “Note to the ICC: the real criminals are with Hamas and in Iran.” The ICC said last year it would work with Israel to investigate and prosecute Hamas. As for Iran, U.S. intelligence — to which Johnson has access because it’s on the internet — said early on that Iran didn’t know about Oct. 7 until, well, Oct. 7. And if Johnson thinks Iran should be prosecuted for its general support of Hamas, then Johnson might also wanna get himself a good international criminal lawyer.
The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported last night that Israeli officials believe ICC warrants are coming this week for Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzl Halevi.
And yesterday, Fetterman retweeted Johnson’s call for the ICC to go soft on international crime, adding, notably, an appeal to the presumed moral authority of unity:
“Our politics diverge on many issues, but intersect on this.
“This is a just war against Hamas—terrorists who designed and instigated the 10/7 massacre.
“The ICC shreds what credibility it has if it prosecutes Israel but ignores Hamas.”
Cruz responded: “Absolutely right.”
There you have it! What good is unity if not to exempt powerful national leaders from the norms of international law after killing tens of thousands of people?
In fact, according to multiple reports, the warrants are for crimes allegedly committed by both sides. And some crimes allegedly occurred before the “just war,” which isn’t just war, it’s a massacre and the demolition of entire cities.
Protests Continue Due to Continuance of Things Being Protested
Pres. Joe Biden on Sunday urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a phone call not to expand Israel’s invasion of Gaza into the city of Rafah, where one million Palestinian refugees fled because Israel told them it was safe. Netanyahu is expected to comply with Biden’s request out of decency and unity and yeah no Netanyahu says he’s going in to Rafah.
Much like the Israeli ground offensive, college protests here in the U.S. continued to spread over the weekend. A lot of protesters are Jewish and man how moving is it to see them stand up (and/or sit-in) like this? The protests have been almost entirely peaceful, with isolated accounts of violence and antisemitism proving to be a frothy mix of yeah okay that’s bad and yeah no that’s bullshit. Either way, of course, they have no bearing on the arguments the protesters are advancing.
Bigotry on the other side, meanwhile, continues to justify the Israeli violence that’s being mostly peacefully protested. The AP counted 250 arrests this weekend at various campuses, including Arizona State University, Washington University, and Indiana University at Bloomington.
It’s worth noting that a lot of the charges ended up getting dropped, largely for reasons of being bullshit. Take the 57 protesters arrested at the University of Texas at Austin. Police charged all 57 of them with criminal trespass. Prosecutors then dropped the charges against all 57 of them because police lacked probable cause which is weird because probable cause-having is literally their job.
Some colleges are now canceling graduation ceremonies, which is a truly shitty thing to do to the college class that lost its high-school graduations to COVID. Also shitty: Blaming it on protesters. If you’re running a major university, maybe you oughtta be capable of planning an alternative graduation ceremony site. In fact, your predecessors should’ve already planned backups. After all, they faced protests, too. Or did you skip your own school’s history classes?
Biden’s Brother Allegedly Raised Funds with Qatari Officials
Jim Biden allegedly partnered with Qatari government officials to raise capital (that’s classy rich-people talk for filthy lucre) for business ventures in the United States, according to his former business partner.
Politico found testimony to that effect in the court records of a Kentucky bankruptcy case, which is the kind of thing we should applaud Politico for journalisming, even as we recoil in horror from the fact that an entire Kentucky’s worth of local journalists can’t find this kind of thing anymore. Anyhoo, Biden was paid to arrange a loan from a company run by Qatari officials to a hospital chain.
Now, if you’re sucking in breath to expel your time-honed diatribe that starts with “What about Jared Kushner and the Saudi…” well, you’re right! But that doesn’t mean Biden’s off the hook, it means he’s on it and we should consider all of it sleazy and should question everyone about it and pursue legislative or regulatory mechanisms of either preventing it and/or ensuring we don’t have to rely on the fading industry of mainstream journalism to reveal it.
And definitely don’t shame people for reporting on or raising the issue of gross Biden family shit in the name of democracy or unity or decency.
TCB
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Go get ‘em, kids…!
D4FRFP = Disgraced, quadicted, fraudster, rapist, former President.
Remember Bill Barr is affiliated with Opus Dei the Christian extremist group. Leonard Leo and other Opus Dei members are pushing Project 2025 to install a Christian dictator. Follow the connections with this map.
https://thedemlabs.org/2024/04/29/william-barr-leonard-leo-opus-dei-push-project-2025/
The stakes are so frickin’ high. None of what you rightly wrote in criticism of Biden will matter (or may even be possible to remark upon, depending on how badly things go) with respect to Trump and his cohort of goons if he manages to get back into the White House, which it looks like he is likely to do, what with all the right-wing election cheating already ongoing.
I’m no fan of Biden at all, and believe that much of what’s presently bad can be laid directly on his doorstep. Even so, I’m cognizant that what Trump and MAGA offers is far, far worse.
If that makes me obsessed with unity, well then, so be it.
(By the way, the USA should have 25 or 30 years ago stopped supporting apartheid Israel. It’s correct to call out Biden for his recent actions vis-a-vis Gaza, but let’s not forget Biden’s deep-throated support for Israel is in accord with long-standing US policy, underwritten in large part by a Zionist lobby allied with a millennialist Evangelical Christian end-times agenda.)