Quokk.auRecord number of Democrats join failed bid to block weapons sales to Israel
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PhilipTheBucket
www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/31/record-number-…
I can't help but feel we're in the "I have suddenly agreed this is bad now because it's a guy I don't like doing it" phase of politics.
I mean, sure, I like that resistance to the genocide is growing, but that's not enduring. The matter of the fact is there were a lot of people who were fine with this shit back when Joe did it, and who will likely pretend it suddenly stopped if a blue president makes office in the future. This is political convenience.
I mean you're not wrong. Every single person in American politics, with a handful of scattered exceptions, has been in favor of Israel's genocide for decades.
It's not because it was Joe doing it, though. They're just fine with pretty much all of it, pretty much all of them. But yes, they (along with a bunch of European governments) are all of a sudden pretending they discovered it's a big huge problem and they're extremely concerned, when the starvation has been going on for months and the broader genocide project for a lot longer than that. The newspapers are confused about it (or pretending to be, on purpose), and have just now worked themselves around now that it's fully undeniable, but these guys have intelligence agencies and they're not naive, I can't believe that they are equally ignorant about it.
And yes, they'll go back to not caring in the slightest once it slips out of the news cycle in a might-hurt-me-in-the-election type of way again.
I think in many ways it’s a matter of poltical survival and optics. Many politicians were terrified that it would be political suicide to say anything negative, to give any notion that they weren’t “supporting an alley”. They were targeted directly by propaganda campaigns to convince them that what was going on was good and that the public and media were on board. Convinced that important media outlets could dogpile and demolish their public support if they did anything to go against the consensus.
But the propaganda campaign has failed to convince significant segments of the public, and media pushing it is actually hurting its credibility and viewership. Finally politicians are realizing that the threat of political destruction over the issue is largely non-existent and that there is actual public good will to be earned.
Yeah.
For one thing, public opinion really is changing, and just like for the Iraq War or the attitude towards police in the country, the people who are behind the curve are totally lost as to how things are shifting, and just assume they're in the majority as they've always been. You don't know what you don't know.
One of the absolutely predictable failure modes of propaganda-driven empires is that the stuff that gets generated to get printed in the papers to fool the proles, winds up getting read by the leaders, and fools them too. I don't get how people are accusing the Democrats of losing votes on purpose in the election because they love Israel. I think they (almost all of them, certainly the DNC segment) are absolutely convinced that it's a tiny scattered handful of people who are "antisemitic" or whatever, and most people support what they're doing, and so of course they're going to stand behind our wonderful ally Israel, although they're upset about civilian casualties during the war as anybody would be.
Well, yes. But that was rather my point. It's not specific to Biden—the idea is that they're all fine with it so long as their personal political capital benefits from agreeing with it, which it did, so long as a Democrat was in the White House. It's two-faced. We agree on this.
I mention Joe specifically because he was in office when this particular era of the genocide started, and so there was a lot of people (not just politicians, either) who were perfectly comfortable backing his support of human rights violations for over a year. Does it need him to happen? No. But he was there, and he made things worse, so he is who gets called out.
On an optimistic note, however: I don't remember specifically what article it was, but I do distinctly remember support for Israel has been dropping slowly over the last couple years, even before Trump started taking shits on everything. So not all the change in sentiment is temporary, thankfully.
My point is, I don't think there are very many people at all who were fine when it was Joe doing it. I think there are people outraged and horrified that it's happening in the first place, whoever's in offce, and I think there are people who think it's "antisemitism" and just some crazy protestors, and I don't think there are too many people who are conditionally in one camp or another.
Like who are you thinking of, that's suddenly speaking out against it when they were silent about it before? Who can you point to (a public figure or a person on Lemmy)?
probably afraid of thier re-election potential and not angering thier donors: AIPAC and those in the defense MIC,
That has been the republican playbook since atleast Obama.
Hell, remember Biden's immigration crackdown bill?
Biden tried to fix a lot of the problems with our immigration system, and when he couldn't get it through congress, he offered some cruelty to the Republicans as a gesture of compromise. His bill still would have massively reduced the level of suffering. A lot of the things Trump has been shutting down were things he initiated (a streamlined app for requesting asylum, instead of crossing the border illegally and then showing up and turning yourself in being the officially recommended system, for example).
Why was that all presented to the public as "being tough on immigration just like Trump is"? I have no idea, although I suspect that severely mentally challenged campaign consultants who the Democrats should have fired into the sun were involved. But the reality was different, and the left as it often does is entirely happy just to pretend everything the blue man did was bad, just because we don't like what's happening and don't want to understand details.
trying to fix problems with immigration with a "streamlined app" is some Buttigieg-brained neoliberal nonsense...
Seeking asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border? You’d better speak English or Spanish
The dangers of CBP One, the app to request asylum at the US-Mexico border
Amnesty International has a report about it:
when you're calling it a "streamlined app" and Amnesty International has a 71-page report about the technical problems it has and that the requirement to use it violates international law, maybe you shouldn't be talking about how other people "don’t want to understand details"
yeah, it's a real mystery...
Biden sending 1,500 troops for Mexico border migrant surge
and then Biden claimed the Border Patrol endorsed him in the debate he had with Trump.
and Kamala Harris, as well:
Kamala Harris' tough-on-migration pitch at the border points to a shifting national mood
Biden and Harris were almost literally doing the "HIRE 👏 MORE 👏 WOMEN 👏 GUARDS 👏" meme but with ICE agents.
Here, just read this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_policy_of_the_Joe_Biden_administration
Should he have just abolished ICE instead? Probably. Did he make things worse on purpose? Fuck no, he made them better. Is it some bad-faith bullshit that people keep attacking him pretending that he did? Yes it is, Cap, yes it is.
my comment linked 6 different sources - contemporaneous news articles, from reputable outlets, and a 71-page report from Amnesty International about that "streamlined app" you think is so great.
and in response you tell me I should read a Wikipedia article. (which I'd already read, btw, while looking up actual sources for my original comment)
so again, tell me more about how the problem is other people not wanting to understand details.
we're 6 months in to Trump's 2nd term, and somehow you're still a "probably" about abolishing ICE?
what would it take to get you to "yes"?
what would it take to get you to "yes, the next Democratic president needs to abolish ICE, no excuses"?
how many concentration camps would ICE need to build to convince you? apparently the first one in Florida wasn't enough.
their stated goal is 3000 arrests per day. how many days of that would it take to convince you?
how many students getting jailed for writing an op-ed would it take to convince you?
yeah, this is the problem in a nutshell
Trump and the right-wing want to make things worse for immigrants, on purpose. we can at least agree on that.
but then you're setting the bar for Democrats so low that it's basically meaningless.
if a Democrat makes things worse, but does so unintentionally...is criticizing them for that just off the table?
if a Democrat tries to make things better, and ends up with a mixed record where some things get better and others get worse...are we allowed to talk about the things that got worse?
CBP One is fucking terrible. sending troops to the border was fucking terrible. Title 42 was fucking terrible. quoting from that Wikipedia page you assumed I hadn't read:
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the ACLU all opposed the Biden administration on that. were they wrong? was Biden justified, because he was just a smol bean whomst had good intentions?
or maybe we shouldn't blame Biden for the actions of the Biden administration, because he had so many other things on his plate that he probably didn't even really know or understand what was going on. maybe it was some staffer or Cabinet official who's really to blame, and Biden just rubber-stamped the decision?
My point is, it's easy to spin up a big narrative by picking individual points.
Biden said, "Hey, this is horrifying, people are coming into the country trying for asylum and then being treated like criminals, if they get picked up before they can turn themselves in / if they fuck up the process / because they technically broke the law anyway because that's what the process told them to do." And so, he created a formal way for them to communicate with CBP before needing to enter the country or find someone physically.
Is that process perfect? Absolutely not. Does that mean that extensive nitpicking about privacy issues and whatnot about that process suddenly represents a really good argument about why it was horrifying for him to create the app? Is it relevant at all, honestly? No, it is not.
You can just always use this stuff as a way to attack any Democratic politician at any time. If Biden had made the whole signature effort of his campaign to reform immigration and get rid of all the horrifying inhumanity he inherited from his predecessor, then you would be giving him shit for failing to act on climate change or working people's issues. Instead, he did the opposite: Went to bat in a huge way on those two things, and got some small but significant gains, and so we're here talking about Gaza and immigration and everything he fucked up.
Honestly, I just don't really want to go point-for-point back and forth through dueling essays. That's why I just linked the Wikipedia page. Anyone reading this can go read the page, and then compare the picture it paints to the picture you just painted, and see why you're spinning up some kind of determined effort to make him look bad on this issue.
If you want to complain about stuff he did wrong, sure! Let's rap. If you want to spin it up into backwards-land and cherry pick some things to make it look like that's all that happened, he fucked a bunch of stuff up on purpose, all these human rights organizations hate Biden overall instead of on those individual decisions, then I'm going to offer you the change to take a step back, read the article for the actual complete picture, instead of getting in this towering link-stuffed waste of time slap fight with you.
I think there is a serious disconnect where biden/haris’s government campaigned on “we’re going to stop the bad things that trump is doing” which to the base read as “we’re going to restructure the system” but they meant “we’re going to mitigate the harms of the system but fundamentally leave it intact (because we lack the political capital to actually solve the issue)”.
Haris walked out on stage and said “look what a good job we’re doing” and everyone was pissed because the problem was manifestly not solved. Partially because “the immigration crisis” is not really a single political issues, it’s two political issues that get lumped together in polling. One group of voters have been petrified by stories of “violent foreign gangs” and another is worried about a system harming some of the most vulnerable people.
They shouldn’t have campaigned on it, they should have tried to redirect the focus of the campaign on to something else, and they should have been clear about the messaging on it. It was a colossal fuck up to lean in to it as core issue of the campaign because neither side of the issue cared about how well the existing system was being run. both sides hated the existing system, one side wanted a new system that wasn’t cruel, and one side just didn’t want immigrants at all.
Honestly, as far as campaign fuckups, I feel like you and I are completely in agreement. Like I said I think the DNC should basically fire its consultants into the sun at this point, instead of giving them millions of dollars in exchange for all these dogshit strategies and lost elections. I was talking more about the reality.
Here are the Democrat Senators who support & enable a genocidal apartheid state by providing billions of American taxpayer dollars, when every Israeli citizen enjoys full-ride healthcare and a social safety net, as millions of American taxpayers sink into enshittified poverty.
Source: https://bird.makeup/users/kenklippenstein/statuses/1950746760818651325
Note: Gallego (Arizona), Kelly (Arizona) and Slotkin (Michigan) missed the vote.
Of particular note