Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Trump supporters get their wish, Pence is suspended. https://t.co/X63gJPKbJi
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) October 28, 2023
C.R.E.A.M…
Pence might not have qualified for the next GOP debate. https://t.co/jOkgwoNvtU
— David Karol (@DKarol) October 28, 2023
Trigger warning: Snark to keep from sobbing:
Late Late Saturday Night Open Thread: Too Soon?…Post + Comments (55)
So apparently Mike Pence has seen a sign from God or read a poll or ran out of money or some combination of all three and has decided to drop out of the race:
Former Vice President Mike Pence, who spent four years dutifully serving President Donald J. Trump but refused to carry out Mr. Trump’s demand that he block the 2020 election results, ended his presidential bid on Saturday, with a final appeal for his party to return to conservative principles and resist the “siren song of populism.”
Whatthefuckever. Later.
I mean there are so many reasons to hate that fucking guy that’s it is too hard to list, but one thing that infuriates me about him is he could just fuck off somewhere for the rest of his life carefree and in peace. I have no idea what his net worth is, but I do not as a former Vice President, he gets 240k per year for life. That’s a lot of money for Indiana. Not to mention some group of jackasses will always fly him wherever to give a speech and get paid 50k.
Do you know what I would do to have an opportunity like that? If my boss came to me and said “heya we need you to permanently fuck off out of here but we’re gonna pay you 235k a year no questions” there are like maybe a dozen people who would ever hear from me again and that number would drop to an even ten when my parents die. And they don’t even mean like that- totally out of public site. They mean they don’t want him in this one specific job. And he can’t take the fucking hint.
Until now.
And while I am bitching, you know what really pisses me off and there’s no fucking reason for it? Deli meats and cheeses being thrown in plastic reusable bags and then having them tape the price tag in such a way that you invariably rip the side of the bag trying to open it, completely destroying the idea of a resealable plastic bag. Just use put the meats and cheeses in wax paper covered by butcher paper and be done with it. Stop with the single use plastic when you aren’t even getting one single use out of it.
God damnit.
(Image by NEIVANMADE)
A quick housekeeping note in regard to a point of contention from my earlier post: To clarify, the simple child, as I explained in describing its role in the ritual, is actually a complement. In the recounting of the four sons it is the simple child – the one that knows they need to learn – that begins the actual process of learning, of becoming enlightened on the topic. The wise son (thinks he) already has all the answers and therefore needs to learn nothing. The wicked son is contrary for the sake of contrarianism. The son who is to young to even formulate a question is just that. It is the simple son – the one that knows that he does not know and needs to learn – that allows for the tale of the Exodus and the Passover to properly be recounted and for its true meaning to be learned.
President Zelenskyy made to addresses today. The first was to the implementation of the peace process forum in Malta. The video isbelow, English transcript after the jump. This is a bit different, President Zelenskyy is speaking in English with Ukrainian subtitles.
War for Ukraine Day 612: A Brief Saturday Night UpdatePost + Comments (24)
If you’re writing postcards for Virginia or for Issue 1 in Ohio, please mail them by Tuesday, October 31. (or sooner)
If you want to write for Ohio Issue 1, I have addresses from the Ohio peeps who wrote for us with Voces addresses for the Wisconsin Spring Election! Time to return the favor! Postcards to Voters has Ohio addresses, also.
All the details on options for writing for Ohio Issue 1 and for Virginia – and images of postcards – are always available in the sidebar. To make it extra easy to find, I have copied it just below the postcard image.
Send me a photo of your postcards and I’ll post it in the thread.
This awesome postcard is from BlueGuitarist.
This is our last postcard thread for awhile. Postcard peeps will have to alert me to important campaigns that may be coming up in the next few months.
Open thread.
Staying neutral as none of my teams are in the game, so the image is from a couple of years ago. Good representation of the joy of the game.
Looks to me like last night’s World Series thread got plenty of action, so I’ll put up posts for all 7 games until / unless participation in the threads drops way off.
I loved going to White Sox games with my Dad when I was a kid. And on summer nights when baseball was on, we would take our little portable TV out to the roof, set it on a tray, and plug it in through the window to the house. They are lovely memories, wearing our shorty pajamas on the roof, hanging out with my Dad, after dark, under our little blankies, watching night baseball games.
Totally open thread.
World Series, Game 2: Diamondbacks at Rangers (Open Thread)Post + Comments (45)
Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue has met its end, in a 2,250-degree furnace.
The divisive Confederate monument, the focus of the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017, was secretly melted down and will become a new piece of public art.
More on the process:… pic.twitter.com/XatZUfvku3
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 26, 2023
We’re at the cross-quarter season when the veil between the dead and the living is said to be at its thinnest — a good time to face bad memories and let them go. I’m gonna call this a feel-good story, a little treat for the weekend [unpaywalled gift link]:
SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S. SOUTH — It was a choice to melt down Robert E. Lee. But it would have been a choice to keep him intact, too.
So the statue of the Confederate general that once stood in Charlottesville — the one that prompted the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze.
Six years ago, groups with ties to the Confederacy had sued to stop the monument from being taken down. Torch-bearing white nationalists descended on the Virginia college town to protest its removal, and one man drove his car through a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 35 others.
The statue’s defenders more recently sought to block the city from handing Lee over to Charlottesville’s Black history museum, which proposed a plan to repurpose the metal. In a lawsuit, those plaintiffs suggested the century-old monument should remain intact or be turned into Civil War-style cannons.
But on Saturday the museum went ahead with its plan in secret at this small Southern foundry outside Virginia, in a town and state The Washington Post agreed not to name because of participants’ fears of violence.
Swords Into Plowshares, a project led by the two women, will turn bronze ingots made from molten Lee into a new piece of public artwork to be displayed in Charlottesville. They made arrangements for Lee to be melted down while they started collecting ideas from city residents for that new sculpture.
Given past threats to the project and worries about legal action, Douglas, Schmidt and other organizers who traveled to this foundry in the American South took great pains to keep this part of the process under wraps. Only a few dozen people, including some who had housed or transported the dismembered figure of Lee, were invited to watch alongside them in secret. They announced the feat at a news conference Thursday afternoon in Charlottesville…
Some said the statue was being destroyed. Others called it a restoration. Depending on whom you asked, the bronze was being reclaimed, disrupted, or redeemed to a higher purpose. It was a grim act of justice and a celebration all in one….
End of An Icon (Treason in Defense of Slavery Version)Post + Comments (107)
In Judaism, at the Passover, part of the Seder, the ritual meal, includes recounting the tale of the four sons. Among the four is the simple son. The language here is all sorts of mucked up as it went through multiple languages, most likely Aramaic to Greek and/or Latin to then other European languages, as well as several Hebreo-composite languages (Ladino, Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Romaness) and now, for our purposes, into English. In short the simple son is not developmentally disabled, rather he – look this part of the ritual is over a thousand year’s old, of course it’s going to be a he – wants to learn something, but he does not have enough context to formulate his question in the most basic manner. Yesterday, in a comment, this question was asked:
it’s all so complicated. I just want Balloon Juice to be a place where we can think through the situation and talk through the situation, learn something (at least for people like me), and have a safe place to do all of that.
This is what is meant in the ritual formulation of the simple son. Wanting to learn, not quite sure what to ask.
Fortunately for you all we have two front pagers who are Jewish. One with a penchant for writing large tomes, Dutch master painting, and roasted chicken and the other being me. In this case the penchant for writing large tomes, the brushwork of the Dutch masters, nor the best techniques for roasting a chicken are going to be much use. So you’re stuck with me.
I’ve now read Dave Zirin’s column. I think the intention is noble and the emotion is mostly right, but Zirin also fails to properly contextualize what is going on for non-Jewish Americans. As a result, those outside of the community don’t have the context to really make sense of what he has written. The context is that Jewish Americans support for and relationship with Israel has been going through a prolonged set of generational changes. Usually those start among Jewish Americans that are at least a decade younger than me. I’m a bit older than Cole. The short version is that unlike our parents and grandparents we are not reflexively supportive of Israel even if the attempts were made to raise us to be.
My grandparents helped coordinate logistics and supply for the Haganah via their living room in Denver. My parents were, and in the case of my mother still is, strong supporters of Israel. I remember walking in the house after driving up from Miami where I was doing my masters in comparative religion for the weekend and my dad was sitting on one arm of the sofa crying. He looked up, basically made an anguished sound, and gestured wildly at the TV, which was tuned to CNN and was replaying the breaking news over and over that Rabin had been assassinated. I was sent to Jewish day school, where much of even the secular curriculum was oriented not just around Judaism, but also around Israel. Then, of course, I went to a Jesuit high school and a Methodist university.
What’s missing from Zirin’s piece is the context that what had once been a monolithic support for Israel among Jewish Americans ceased to be over the past twenty to thirty years. Some of that was the result of those of us growing up in my generational cohort and the ones after mine not experiencing much, if any, antisemitism. And, as a result, unlike our parents and grandparents, we didn’t feel Israel needed to exist so we had a safe place to escape to. The US was that safe place. Certainly far more than a state constantly under siege. Some of it was watching as Likud’s prime ministers – specifically Begin, Shamir, and Netanyahu – manipulated American politics for their own advantages. And in the case of Bibi it was for his own personal advantage, while for Begin and Shamir it was their advantage on behalf of Israel. Some of it was also recognizing that what we were raised to understand about Judaism as a theology and doctrine was incompatible with how Israel, a state with a majority of Jewish citizens and led by Jews, was treating the Palestinians. As well as other Jewish and non-Jewish Israelis in some cases. A great deal of the attitudinal changes are a combination of all of these.
When you see Jewish groups leading competing demonstrations what you’re seeing is this conflict within the community. Different parts of the Jewish American communities are focusing on different things. Different parts of our theology, our doctrine, our cultural history, our experiences as Americans. This is why some are demonstrating whole hearted support for Israel in the current crisis while others are demanding an immediate ceasefire as Israel’s response should not be justified by Bibi, as he so often does, as necessary to protect Jews everywhere. Hence the “Not in our name!” chants, posters, and t-shirts.
And that’s the context you all need to unpack what Zirin wrote, but which he did not provide. As to whether Balloon Juice, or any other place, is the right place, let alone a safe place to think through and talk through the situation is something I cannot answer. At one level, this is an internal to Judaism issue. We haven’t thought or talked through it as a community, though now we’re screaming at each other about it in public, and we’d appreciate it if those of you outside looking in leave us be because our own history tells us you’ll just make things worse. Thanks for the best wishes, go find a thread about underwater macrame post card music writing in popular culture while watching the ball game or something and leave us out of it.
That’s obviously unrealistic. Everyone wants to talk about what’s going on, make sense of it. From what Hamas actually did, to how it could happen, to what Israel is going to do versus what Israel is going to do. What does this mean for Jews or Arabs or Muslims? What is the US going to do? Etc, etc, etc. There’s no hiding here, but at least I can provide some context.
The reality here is that the two state solution is dead and has been since at least 2013. With the exception of the brief Bennet-Lapid unity government, Israel has been governed by Bibi led coalitions for around fifteen years. Beginning in early 2014, no one in those coalitions – and the 2014 one was nowhere near as extreme as the current one is – has supported a two state solution. In fact they, including Bibi, have opposed the idea. Similarly, the leadership of the Palestinian Authority had basically given up on the idea by 2014 as well. In the latter’s case they believe that demographic reality will eventually solve the problem for them if there was only a one state solution. Hamas, PIJ, and the other extremist groups have never supported the idea. The problem, of course, is that the US policy is to seek a two state solution. Unfortunately, policy cannot ask of strategy that which policy cannot or will not provide: achievable objectives. What we need is a strategy to either move the Israelis and the Palestinians back into willingness to attempt a two state solution or we need a strategy to achieve a one state solution that does not make things worse than the status quo. We have none of those things now. We had none of them in 2014. And we definitely had none of them when Jared was making things worse.
I would appreciate it if just this once that people don’t argue this point with me in the comments. I’m the person who wrote the strategic and policy assessment on this topic in 2014 for my boss the Commanding General of US Army Europe, his boss the Commanding General of EUCOM/the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (who assigned it as the read of the week to his entire command), the Special Envoy for Middle East Peace, and through those three the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State. it included a robust discussion of needing either a strategy to get the Israelis and Palestinians back to a two state track or develop new policy and strategy for a just, equitable one state solution. As an FYI: I also wrote the historic – as in it recounts the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – introduction for the report and assessment that was produced by US Army Europe for the Departments of Defense and State in support of the 2014 peace process.
No matter what happens as the Israel-Hamas war unfolds, it is not going to get us to a two state solution. Because right now no one on either side wants one.
As for a ceasefire or armistice, calling for one is fine as long as one is realistic and recognizes that it isn’t going to happen as a result of external pressure. The fact that a bare majority of Israelis now want a strategic pause in operations to increase the chances to get the hostages out may lead to that happening, but I wouldn’t put money on it. The only way to prevent what is coming is for the US to assemble an international coalition that includes Arab and Muslim states, put boots on the ground in Gaza, and then both rescue the hostages while dismantling Hamas and bringing its leaders and fighters to justice. NOT GONNA HAPPEN!!!!
Like everyone else, you’ll find Jewish Americans on different sides of every social, political, economic, and religious issue regarding both domestic and international politics. The demonstrations you’re seeing now, that Zirin wrote about, that you all tried to deal with yesterday though you didn’t have the context, is not new. It is just now very visible because of the current Israel-Hamas war. It is, simply, the result of intergenerational changes among Jewish Americans. Changes that have been underway for several decades, but are now very visible.
One final point: some of the “not in my name” protests are enlightened self interest. They are attempts by some Jewish Americans to make it clear to everyone that Jewish does not equal Israel and that Judaism does not equal Israel. Because the fear, and it is a real one, is that this truth is going to continue to be erased. And as it is erased antisemitism and attacks on Jews in the US will increase even more than they have over the past eight years. We are already seeing neo-NAZIs and white supremacists infiltrating the pro-Palestinian activities that have developed over the past three weeks with the intent to turn them fully into antisemitic activities. Not because the neo-NAZIs like Arabs or Muslims, they don’t, but because they think they can use them to get at their preferred target: Jews. We’ve also seen what we so often deride here as the dirtbag left demonstrate that it is not so much pro-Palestinian as it is antisemitic. Jewish Americans were already far more scared than they’d previously been before Hamas attacked Israel on 7 OCT. Now that they’ve seen how non-Jewish Americans have responded, they’re even more scared. And unlike our parents and grandparents, we know that Israel is not a safe place to seek refuge should the worst come to pass here. Scared and feeling trapped is not a good combination. It is not conducive to rational thought or sound decision making.
In my case, regardless of my views regarding Israel, I raised my hand and swore the oath. And while I no longer have any role or serve any purpose in American national security, I have not been released from that oath. Regardless of what happens I will remain what I’ve always been: an American, whose religion is Judaism. I cannot go to Israel because I will not break my oath. Even if it would be the only way to save my life.
Hamas’s attack has been far, far, far more successful than it ever expected. Unfortunately, when it is all said and done, no one is going to win this war. The only question is how far does the collateral damage actually spread.
Next time just ask for the context. It will save us all a lot of discomfort.
Thus endeth the lesson.
I’m going to watch rugby.
Open thread.
ETA at 10:45 PM: I made a slight adjustment in the paragraph that starts with “That’s obviously unrealistic” in order to make the post more coherent.
Yesterday the Simple Child Asked & Today Begins the LessonPost + Comments (141)
