Deeply grateful for this read amid a storm of smug reactions to further genocide. While I did hold my nose and vote for Harris, I have absolutely no ire for anyone who couldn't bring themselves to do it. I'm saving my anger for Harris herself and the DNC, who chose to ignore EXTREMELY CLEAR polling that even the smallest kind of pushback against the genocide in Palestine would have been overwhelmingly popular.
These people are so horse-race-politics-brained that they can't wrap their minds around the concept that BOTH CHOICES WERE BAD. Anyone who gave a shit about Gaza had zero good choices in this election (unless Cornel West had some peace plan that I ignored because I can't be bothered with Cornel West). Blaming people with zero good choices for picking one of the bad choices is some kind of idiocy.
I can't imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth that will commence when these fools finally understand that a two-party system doesn't automatically mean that one party is a "good" choice. The tears will render entire farming towns in Nebraska useless.
"Blaming people with zero good choices for picking one of the bad choices is some kind of idiocy."
Some people very studiously picked none of those bad choices! Some of them, like me, still held their noses and picked the slightly (*slightly*) less bad choice! And this is the shit we get after that slightly less bad choice lost the election in historical faction???
This development simply underscores the fact that this is a 1-party nation. The Globetrotters can’t play their game if the Generals don’t agree to lose.
These people need to provide some reason why they think Harris/the Democrats wouldn't have endorsed this "plan" by Netanyahu. At least 1 Dem Senator (Fetterman) has already signed off on it and the Biden/Harris approach to Gaza was "whatever Netanyahu wants"
Acknowledging recency bias for having just finished Shogun, but we really need to forcibly introduce seppuku as a political practice. These cretins have no shame, dignity, or morals in life, we should give them the chance to grasp for them on the way out.
I agree with this, but I’d amend to say Joe Biden and Kamala Harris with the support of BOTH the democratic and Republican parties committed genocide. The suggestion that this wasn’t also absolutely a bipartisan effort always rubs me incorrectly. And it is also reflected in how we talk about the election choices. America has a long history of imperial violence. Anyone who paid taxes here in the past 4 years contributed. No one is innocent of “supporting genocide” when we zoom out. I don’t know what’s right to say, but I am personally completely disgusted that anyone voted for Trump to take away our rights when he had always planned to do this. Two genocides don’t make a right, it would seem.
I'm bagging most of what you're raking. I have nothing but condescending things to say/think about Trump voters. It was a bipartisan genocide and even us cogs in the machine have blood on our hands.
But when I zoom out, the culpability of tax payers and folks suckered into voting for a conman seems trifling compared to the failures of the Democratic party. Our media is broken, flooded with grifters + misinformation. Ppl don't always have the time in the day or the education to sort the lies from the truth. The Democrats call Trump an existential threat, but they don't treat him like one. They laugh with him at public events, welcome him home when he returns to the White House. They didn't even wait for all the votes to be counted before conceding defeat or call for a recount. They felt it was important to demonstrate peaceful transition of power, but if the incoming president is an existential threat to democracy, is that really what we want?
As someone who has always voted blue, it's the Democrats who let me down. Trump's campaign was just a louder version of his first one, exploiting the same weaknesses in the media and the Democratic party. None of it was surprising, but they ignored the demands of the moment in favor of running the campaign they wanted to run. They alienated voters by palling around with Liz Cheney and conceding to the right's narrative on the border, leaving demographics vulnerable to Trump's lies. It's all so frustrating + stupid. I like Harris/Walz. It would have been an improvement over Biden and obviously better than what we have now.
They had a real shot after Biden dropped out, going into the convention. We wouldn't be in this situation if they'd stuck with the weird line, left Liz Cheney at home, let Rep Romman give her speech at the convention and maybe not sent Bill Clinton and RItchie Torres to Michigan. Just a ridiculous campaign. I hate Trump/Musk and all the idiots, bigots and ghouls who are having a good time with what's happening, but it's the Democrats who got us here, not the voters who were not convinced by their message.
(BTW: Big fan of your work. Disagreeing with you even a little fills me with fear, but I had to follow my heart).
We don't need to zoom out, though. In the end it didn't matter who supported his decisions, Biden had legal authority to stop arms shipments to Israel, and instead chose to expedite them. Other politicians supporting him doesn't absolve him, and bringing taxpayer contribution into the conversation is losing the trees for the forest when those taxes are compulsory and we don't directly choose how that money is spent. Maybe none of us are "innocent", but some of us are more guilty than others, and Biden- who had direct power to end our involvement and instead accelerated it- is certainly the guiltiest.
Sure, but Biden wasn’t on the ballot, and this refusal to engage with JD as culpable now proves this isn’t about who is actually responsible. And calling everyone genocide supporters when they had the same shit options to choose between really isn’t helping a soul in Palestine.
The US and Israel literally just got done trying to do the thing Trump says he wants to have another go at. Liberals who are only now discovering their deep concern for the Palestinians of Gaza are proving the point of those of us who were saying all along that they’d be up in arms about these 15 months of genocide if Trump were the public face of it.
What's wild is that some of these people, who never showed any interest in the fate of Gaza between October 2023 and January 2025, are somehow under the impression that aid just got cut off to Gaza, when the reality is that the aid spigots only just got turned on. Israel and the US are now letting in more aid in a day than they had been allowing in in entire months. It's still totally inadequate, and we need to be fighting like hell to make sure that they get the construction materials and heavy equipment they need in order to rebuild, but it's easily a 1000 % increase over 8 October 2023 - 19 January 2025. The Netzarim Corridor has been dismantled. Nothing remains of the US-Israeli pledge that no-one would be allowed to return to northern Gaza. The US and Israel humiliatingly had to agree to a deal that they'd both rejected in December 2023. The reality on the ground in Gaza is at best quite inconsistent with an intention to resume the genocide immediately.
Man, the cynicism of these evil freaks is just too much. If the "free press is a pillar of democracy" then taking one look at these ghouls tells you all you need to know about why the American political system is so completely fucked
There was a time where I thought it might be possible for Israelis and Palestinians to coexist despite the terrorist dictatorship running the Gaza Strip. I had read news stories suggesting that the Palestinian population was getting fed up with Hamas’s rule over them in the months before 10/7. But once that atrocity happened, any empathy I may have had for Palestinians evaporated once they showed their true colors. I’m not talking about Hamas; I’m talking about the Palestinians who followed Hamas “breaking out of that so-called open-air prison” to terrorize, murder and rape innocent Israelis.
(And before you say “but the Hannibal Directive”, that operation is only used by IDF soldiers to target other IDF soldiers, NOT Israeli civilians, in a worst-case scenario event. You’ve been duped by self-hating Jews who care more about their ideology than their own people.)
It’s not surprising how thoroughly indoctrinated the Palestinians are; if you recall from about 17 years ago, Hamas produced a children’s show called “Tomorrow’s Pioneers”, that one that featured an actor wearing a costume ripping off Mickey Mouse who indoctrinated Palestinian children about the supposed “virtues” of martyrdom and jihad against the so-called “Zionist entity”. Is it any wonder that the children watching this indoctrination of Jew hatred grew up to join Hamas so they could brag to their families over Telegram that they killed their first Jew? They’ve been groomed into this since they were children; look no further than that infamous photo of the 10/7 mastermind Sinwar holding up a little boy wearing a little Hamas terrorist uniform and holding an automatic rifle.
I could go on and on with so many other examples, but the point here is this: I was a longtime liberal democrat for about 18 years. I voted for Obama twice, and I was nauseated by the prospect of Trump running for president the first time around. I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the choice we had with Biden, but I figured he couldn’t be any worse than Trump, so I held my nose and voted for Biden.
Jesus Fucking Christ, was I wrong about that in just about every way possible. And once I saw the party I was a part of thoroughly betray the Jews in the most vile ways possible, there was no turning back.
I voted for Trump because I viewed him as the lesser of two evils.
I’m sorry it’s come to this point, but frankly, I couldn’t care less if you have utter contempt for me. This is the consequence of your own arrogance and hubris against those of us who needed compassion and support at our darkest hour. We Jews are not doormats you can continuously step over and expect for us to submit; we will defend ourselves to the teeth because our lives depend upon it. And if it means the denazification of the Gaza Strip, then so be it.
You are a despicable person with a contemptible heart. Entire families are being killed and you call it “denazification”. May God have mercy on your soul.
The prime piece of stupidity in this issue was the knee-jerk assumption that Kamala Harris was entirely on board with Joe Biden's Gaza policies. This is a replay of the stupid mistake anti-Vietnam war activists (and I was one of them, although I wasn't in Chicago) made in 1968 when they protested Hubert Humphrey's nomination. Humphrey, we later learned, had been opposed to sending troops to Vietnam all along and had advised Johnson to end the war, but he couldn't say so because Vice Presidents do not undermine a President's policies in public. And particularly when there were delicate peace negotiations going on, anything Humphrey might have said might have destroyed the chance that a cease fire could be reached. Kamala Harris was in exactly the same position. She did make it clear that she supported a two-state solution, and she supported Biden's cease fire proposal, which is the one that went into effect as soon as Netanyahu decided Trump could take credit for it. To those paying attention it was obvious Trump was Netanyahu's boy. In Humphrey's case, very shortly before the 1968 election he did put out a statement in opposition to the war, but people didn't believe him. So we got Nixon, who (we learned later) had sabotaged the peace talks and whose "secret plan" was to escalate the war. Most of the dead whose names are listed on the Vietnam Memorial in DC died on Nixon's watch. And I have a brother buried in Arlington who was in Vietnam on Nixon's watch, so excuse me if a get little heated on the subject. So now Trump is in power, is following the dictator playbook and destroying our country through an illegal seizing of all federal functions. But according to you, this is not a big deal and we're not supposed to be angry about it. I would speak more plainly about what I think of your post above, but it would require too many vulgarities. Bye.
If the Vice President refuses to “undermine the President’s policies in public”, how on earth is anyone supposed to believe them when they say they don’t support them? What compels the Vice President to not chastise the policy of the President?
Voting for an American president is always a losing battle and the most one can hope for is a slightly better version of the status quo. The vote is a practical tool, it’s not something sacred. The idea that voters who abstained are not partially responsible for Trump’s election is just not true. They are in so far as they had an option for a slightly less shitty reality. It sucks that trolls are trolling but they’re not wrong are they?
Deeply grateful for this read amid a storm of smug reactions to further genocide. While I did hold my nose and vote for Harris, I have absolutely no ire for anyone who couldn't bring themselves to do it. I'm saving my anger for Harris herself and the DNC, who chose to ignore EXTREMELY CLEAR polling that even the smallest kind of pushback against the genocide in Palestine would have been overwhelmingly popular.
All of this and thank you for saying it.
These people are so horse-race-politics-brained that they can't wrap their minds around the concept that BOTH CHOICES WERE BAD. Anyone who gave a shit about Gaza had zero good choices in this election (unless Cornel West had some peace plan that I ignored because I can't be bothered with Cornel West). Blaming people with zero good choices for picking one of the bad choices is some kind of idiocy.
I can't imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth that will commence when these fools finally understand that a two-party system doesn't automatically mean that one party is a "good" choice. The tears will render entire farming towns in Nebraska useless.
"Blaming people with zero good choices for picking one of the bad choices is some kind of idiocy."
Some people very studiously picked none of those bad choices! Some of them, like me, still held their noses and picked the slightly (*slightly*) less bad choice! And this is the shit we get after that slightly less bad choice lost the election in historical faction???
Fuck outta here.
This development simply underscores the fact that this is a 1-party nation. The Globetrotters can’t play their game if the Generals don’t agree to lose.
These people need to provide some reason why they think Harris/the Democrats wouldn't have endorsed this "plan" by Netanyahu. At least 1 Dem Senator (Fetterman) has already signed off on it and the Biden/Harris approach to Gaza was "whatever Netanyahu wants"
yes! what Trump is announcing has been Netanyahu's goal all along. Libs are just mad that someone is saying it out loud.
Acknowledging recency bias for having just finished Shogun, but we really need to forcibly introduce seppuku as a political practice. These cretins have no shame, dignity, or morals in life, we should give them the chance to grasp for them on the way out.
I agree with this, but I’d amend to say Joe Biden and Kamala Harris with the support of BOTH the democratic and Republican parties committed genocide. The suggestion that this wasn’t also absolutely a bipartisan effort always rubs me incorrectly. And it is also reflected in how we talk about the election choices. America has a long history of imperial violence. Anyone who paid taxes here in the past 4 years contributed. No one is innocent of “supporting genocide” when we zoom out. I don’t know what’s right to say, but I am personally completely disgusted that anyone voted for Trump to take away our rights when he had always planned to do this. Two genocides don’t make a right, it would seem.
I'm bagging most of what you're raking. I have nothing but condescending things to say/think about Trump voters. It was a bipartisan genocide and even us cogs in the machine have blood on our hands.
But when I zoom out, the culpability of tax payers and folks suckered into voting for a conman seems trifling compared to the failures of the Democratic party. Our media is broken, flooded with grifters + misinformation. Ppl don't always have the time in the day or the education to sort the lies from the truth. The Democrats call Trump an existential threat, but they don't treat him like one. They laugh with him at public events, welcome him home when he returns to the White House. They didn't even wait for all the votes to be counted before conceding defeat or call for a recount. They felt it was important to demonstrate peaceful transition of power, but if the incoming president is an existential threat to democracy, is that really what we want?
As someone who has always voted blue, it's the Democrats who let me down. Trump's campaign was just a louder version of his first one, exploiting the same weaknesses in the media and the Democratic party. None of it was surprising, but they ignored the demands of the moment in favor of running the campaign they wanted to run. They alienated voters by palling around with Liz Cheney and conceding to the right's narrative on the border, leaving demographics vulnerable to Trump's lies. It's all so frustrating + stupid. I like Harris/Walz. It would have been an improvement over Biden and obviously better than what we have now.
They had a real shot after Biden dropped out, going into the convention. We wouldn't be in this situation if they'd stuck with the weird line, left Liz Cheney at home, let Rep Romman give her speech at the convention and maybe not sent Bill Clinton and RItchie Torres to Michigan. Just a ridiculous campaign. I hate Trump/Musk and all the idiots, bigots and ghouls who are having a good time with what's happening, but it's the Democrats who got us here, not the voters who were not convinced by their message.
(BTW: Big fan of your work. Disagreeing with you even a little fills me with fear, but I had to follow my heart).
We don't need to zoom out, though. In the end it didn't matter who supported his decisions, Biden had legal authority to stop arms shipments to Israel, and instead chose to expedite them. Other politicians supporting him doesn't absolve him, and bringing taxpayer contribution into the conversation is losing the trees for the forest when those taxes are compulsory and we don't directly choose how that money is spent. Maybe none of us are "innocent", but some of us are more guilty than others, and Biden- who had direct power to end our involvement and instead accelerated it- is certainly the guiltiest.
Sure, but Biden wasn’t on the ballot, and this refusal to engage with JD as culpable now proves this isn’t about who is actually responsible. And calling everyone genocide supporters when they had the same shit options to choose between really isn’t helping a soul in Palestine.
A good reminder why I unsubscribed from Puck et al.
Why do you think they would take the "honorable way out" after affirming they "have no shame, dignity, or morals in life"?
The US and Israel literally just got done trying to do the thing Trump says he wants to have another go at. Liberals who are only now discovering their deep concern for the Palestinians of Gaza are proving the point of those of us who were saying all along that they’d be up in arms about these 15 months of genocide if Trump were the public face of it.
What's wild is that some of these people, who never showed any interest in the fate of Gaza between October 2023 and January 2025, are somehow under the impression that aid just got cut off to Gaza, when the reality is that the aid spigots only just got turned on. Israel and the US are now letting in more aid in a day than they had been allowing in in entire months. It's still totally inadequate, and we need to be fighting like hell to make sure that they get the construction materials and heavy equipment they need in order to rebuild, but it's easily a 1000 % increase over 8 October 2023 - 19 January 2025. The Netzarim Corridor has been dismantled. Nothing remains of the US-Israeli pledge that no-one would be allowed to return to northern Gaza. The US and Israel humiliatingly had to agree to a deal that they'd both rejected in December 2023. The reality on the ground in Gaza is at best quite inconsistent with an intention to resume the genocide immediately.
Man, the cynicism of these evil freaks is just too much. If the "free press is a pillar of democracy" then taking one look at these ghouls tells you all you need to know about why the American political system is so completely fucked
Can you give the source for the idea that 30% of 2020 Biden voters not voting in 2024 because of Gaza?
it's linked in the piece but here: https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/biden-voters-passed-kamala-harris-because-gaza-new-poll-shows
Just read it. Reads like a laundry list of unforced errors.
This is a great example of how the blob guides future missions of coercion. “We lost because [insert what we want you to do].”
Otherwise, the study suggests that an astonishing number of registered Democrats support Hamas—and the hell it’s brought upon Palestinians.
The same inverse prompting is messages to Republicans. “They’re going to lose because…”
Maybe people think that criminals don’t get immunity just because they’re “brown.”
Maybe that’s it?
There was a time where I thought it might be possible for Israelis and Palestinians to coexist despite the terrorist dictatorship running the Gaza Strip. I had read news stories suggesting that the Palestinian population was getting fed up with Hamas’s rule over them in the months before 10/7. But once that atrocity happened, any empathy I may have had for Palestinians evaporated once they showed their true colors. I’m not talking about Hamas; I’m talking about the Palestinians who followed Hamas “breaking out of that so-called open-air prison” to terrorize, murder and rape innocent Israelis.
(And before you say “but the Hannibal Directive”, that operation is only used by IDF soldiers to target other IDF soldiers, NOT Israeli civilians, in a worst-case scenario event. You’ve been duped by self-hating Jews who care more about their ideology than their own people.)
It’s not surprising how thoroughly indoctrinated the Palestinians are; if you recall from about 17 years ago, Hamas produced a children’s show called “Tomorrow’s Pioneers”, that one that featured an actor wearing a costume ripping off Mickey Mouse who indoctrinated Palestinian children about the supposed “virtues” of martyrdom and jihad against the so-called “Zionist entity”. Is it any wonder that the children watching this indoctrination of Jew hatred grew up to join Hamas so they could brag to their families over Telegram that they killed their first Jew? They’ve been groomed into this since they were children; look no further than that infamous photo of the 10/7 mastermind Sinwar holding up a little boy wearing a little Hamas terrorist uniform and holding an automatic rifle.
I could go on and on with so many other examples, but the point here is this: I was a longtime liberal democrat for about 18 years. I voted for Obama twice, and I was nauseated by the prospect of Trump running for president the first time around. I wasn’t too enthusiastic about the choice we had with Biden, but I figured he couldn’t be any worse than Trump, so I held my nose and voted for Biden.
Jesus Fucking Christ, was I wrong about that in just about every way possible. And once I saw the party I was a part of thoroughly betray the Jews in the most vile ways possible, there was no turning back.
I voted for Trump because I viewed him as the lesser of two evils.
I’m sorry it’s come to this point, but frankly, I couldn’t care less if you have utter contempt for me. This is the consequence of your own arrogance and hubris against those of us who needed compassion and support at our darkest hour. We Jews are not doormats you can continuously step over and expect for us to submit; we will defend ourselves to the teeth because our lives depend upon it. And if it means the denazification of the Gaza Strip, then so be it.
You are a despicable person with a contemptible heart. Entire families are being killed and you call it “denazification”. May God have mercy on your soul.
thank you for a well reasoned explanation
The prime piece of stupidity in this issue was the knee-jerk assumption that Kamala Harris was entirely on board with Joe Biden's Gaza policies. This is a replay of the stupid mistake anti-Vietnam war activists (and I was one of them, although I wasn't in Chicago) made in 1968 when they protested Hubert Humphrey's nomination. Humphrey, we later learned, had been opposed to sending troops to Vietnam all along and had advised Johnson to end the war, but he couldn't say so because Vice Presidents do not undermine a President's policies in public. And particularly when there were delicate peace negotiations going on, anything Humphrey might have said might have destroyed the chance that a cease fire could be reached. Kamala Harris was in exactly the same position. She did make it clear that she supported a two-state solution, and she supported Biden's cease fire proposal, which is the one that went into effect as soon as Netanyahu decided Trump could take credit for it. To those paying attention it was obvious Trump was Netanyahu's boy. In Humphrey's case, very shortly before the 1968 election he did put out a statement in opposition to the war, but people didn't believe him. So we got Nixon, who (we learned later) had sabotaged the peace talks and whose "secret plan" was to escalate the war. Most of the dead whose names are listed on the Vietnam Memorial in DC died on Nixon's watch. And I have a brother buried in Arlington who was in Vietnam on Nixon's watch, so excuse me if a get little heated on the subject. So now Trump is in power, is following the dictator playbook and destroying our country through an illegal seizing of all federal functions. But according to you, this is not a big deal and we're not supposed to be angry about it. I would speak more plainly about what I think of your post above, but it would require too many vulgarities. Bye.
If the Vice President refuses to “undermine the President’s policies in public”, how on earth is anyone supposed to believe them when they say they don’t support them? What compels the Vice President to not chastise the policy of the President?
Voting for an American president is always a losing battle and the most one can hope for is a slightly better version of the status quo. The vote is a practical tool, it’s not something sacred. The idea that voters who abstained are not partially responsible for Trump’s election is just not true. They are in so far as they had an option for a slightly less shitty reality. It sucks that trolls are trolling but they’re not wrong are they?