• supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
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    1 day ago

    Lol Mayo Pete is hilariously unsuited to this moment yet establishment dems think he is perfect.

    Take, for example, Pete Buttigieg. In a recent interview with Pod Save America, the usually eloquent Buttigieg was asked a series of straightforward questions. Would he support restricting aid to Israel? Would he recognize the State of Palestine, as other G7 countries have done recently? Would Israel’s behavior finally be a factor in how we treat the country? Instead of having a ready answer, Buttigieg delivered vague platitudes about moral conscience and needing to support Israel’s security. In particular, Buttigieg told Favreau, “I think that we, as Israel’s strongest ally and friend, you put your arm around your friend when there’s something like this going on, and talk about what we’re prepared to do together.” It was an odd choice, to say the least, to call an apartheid state a friend and talk of genocide as somethig akin to self-harm.

    Get lost Pete and take Gavin Newsom with you.

    California Governor Gavin Newsom, for his part, fared even worse when podcaster Van Latham asked him about AIPAC in a recent interview, responding by short-circuiting and saying the question was “interesting” a full seven times.

    The thing that infuriates me the most is the smugness of these people to act surprised, as if this WASN’T a decades old dam that just broke that we all knew would break. Adapt or get the fuck out of the way, stop acting like the flood waters hurtling at you are something your wealthy friends can magically make go away and then being genuinely shocked when you are consumed by a rush of public backlash.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Buttigieg told Favreau, “I think that we, as Israel’s strongest ally and friend, you put your arm around your friend when there’s something like this going on, and talk about what we’re prepared to do together.” It was an odd choice, to say the least, to call an apartheid state a friend and talk of genocide as somethig akin to self-harm.

      This is standard American foreign policy, whether we’re defending Pinochet in Chile or Park in Korea or Milei in Argentina or Marcos in the Philippines or Modi in India.

      There’s no limit to the atrocities you can commit, so long as you operate as a forward base for the American military.

      Adapt or get the fuck out of the way, stop acting like the flood waters hurtling at you are something your wealthy friends can magically make go away and then being genuinely shocked when you are consumed by a rush of public backlash.

      Public backlash comes and goes. But the oligarchy endures. Better for American liberals to stay friendly with Israel until they can sweep this genocide under the rug and refocus angry American voters on China or Iran or Mexico again.

      • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz
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        1 day ago

        Public backlash comes and goes. But the oligarchy endures. Better for American liberals to stay friendly with Israel until they can sweep this genocide under the rug and refocus angry American voters on China or Iran or Mexico again.

        I understand your cynicism, but this is just Not Going To Happen. The US electorate is still pissed about the Iraq War and if anything the Palestinian Genocide has cemented in the minds of people here that they cannot trust politicians who will not openly speak about the Palestinian Genocide as a Genocide. No, this is not an issue people in the US are going to budge on or soften on, rather it is the opposite, the Palestinian Genocide has become a litmus test for whether a candidate serves their constituents or whether a candidate is an unserious corporate shill.

        • Frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          1 day ago

          Just to elaborate, even Republicans are pissed about the Iraq War. They pretend it was all the Democrats fault for voting for it in Congress (which they did), or that the Tea Party sweapt away all the RINOs who were responsible (which it did not). In any case, it’s hard to find anyone in 2025 who still thinks Iraq 2003 was a good idea.

          Which is also kinda funny considering the outcome in Iraq has been objectively better than Afghanistan. You could argue that America ultimately accomplished its strategic goals in Iraq but not Afghanistan.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          The US electorate is still pissed about the Iraq War

          The joke is that you had Dems defending the war all through the '00s and even the '10s. It got so bad that Republicans were able to outflank them by mouthing even the most menial anti-war rhetoric.

          if anything the Palestinian Genocide has cemented in the minds of people here that they cannot trust politicians who will not openly speak about the Palestinian Genocide as a Genocide

          You have a cohort of Americans who are genuinely horrified at our participation in a genocide. But they’ve been systematically marginalized, stripped of their political autonomy, and silenced in public and private media. Meanwhile, you have a very wealthy, very influential, and very fascist corporate oligarchs with both a material interest (harvesting natural resources through slave labor) and an ideological interest (rebuilding the temple in Jerusalem because it’ll bring about a magical utopia) in waging these wars.

          They’re buying up major media outlets, orchestrating police raids on protest groups, and monopolizing every elected office through a buyout of the party system.

          No, this is not an issue people in the US are going to budge on or soften on

          We spent 23 years in Afghanistan. And the primary reason we withdrew wasn’t domestic opposition to the occupation. It was our soured relationship with Pakistan, which provided the primary inroad to resupply our main base in Kabul. At the same time, we were escalating conflicts in Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen, which had stretched our - extensive but not unlimited - resources to their limit.

          And since we left, the US media has bombarded the public with “The Taliban is eating babies!” scare stories in an effort to poison the notion of a future retreat from a primarily Muslim country. US voters don’t need to budge. Nobody currently in contention for office appears interested in ratcheting back the national security state. Nobody is talking about “Defund ICE” anymore, much less defunding the police. The anti-war marches of the '00s/'10s are fully extinguished. Even the Gaza Genocide protests are just shooting galleries for Canary Mission and other reactionary groups, looking to get people arrested, fired, or deported.

          Palestine is just one more horror story in a multi-generational bloodbath. Americans continue to be the sheep arguing over which wolf to invite to dinner.