In the third installment of her summer series "Confessions of the Designated Nancy Pelosi Whisperer," New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd abandons channeling Madam Speaker's now-backfired attacks on the Squad of four progressive congresswomen of color, and unsheathes her worthy literary claws on the Vast Twittering Left.
The hook for this week's attack was a tweet by NBC News personality Howard Fineman, who boasted about his attendance at one of Dowd's apparently famous Georgetown parties. He affixed a photo of Dowd greeting honored guest Nancy Pelosi and her date for the evening, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Outrage then ensued from all across the political spectrum. Poor Howard Fineman was forced to delete his tweet, in utter shock that his "benign big shot brag" had elicited such "vicious" reactions from the hoi polloi. In the olden days, he implied, people would have been more duly awed by the doings of the high and mighty. The twitter taunts thus only gained in intensity. He and his hostess Maureen Dowd both interpret these negative reactions as pure class envy rather than as legitimate criticism of the cozy, incestuous relationship between government officials and the journalists who are supposed to be holding them to account.
As I mentioned above, it is no longer feasible for Dowd to directly attack the Squad, given that the first two installments of the Pelosi Whisperer franchise had only served to raise their public profiles and elevate their progressive agendas - and worst of all, had provided the perfect opening for Donald Trump to launch his own vicious triangulated racist attacks on them. Poor Maureen was temporarily reduced to dishing out sloppy seconds, such as a statement she retweeted from media mogul David Israel calling the four women "the Squad of Vuvuzelas."
Vuvuzelas are the extremely loud, even deafening, monotonal horns invented and used by the Zulus of southern Africa to summon distant community members, and are now widely used at soccer games and other sporting events. Given the ethnicities of the Squad and the fact that one of them, Ilhan Omar, is a refugee from Somalia, it's an interesting choice of metaphor.
But back to Maureen Dowd's latest column, in which she expresses wonder that her vivid description of Speaker of the People's House Pelosi wearing $995 pumps, munching on bonbons, and relaxing at her Napa Valley vineyard evoked such sour grapes of wrath from people:
After I interviewed Nancy Pelosi a few weeks ago, The HuffPost huffed that we were Dreaded Elites because we were eating chocolates and — horror of horrors — the speaker had on some good pumps.
Then this week, lefty Twitter erected a digital guillotine because I had a book party for my friend Carl Hulse, The Times’s authority on Capitol Hill for decades, attended by family, journalists, Hill denizens and a smattering of lawmakers, including Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and Susan Collins.
I, the daughter of a D.C. cop, and Carl, the son of an Illinois plumber, were hilariously painted as decadent aristocrats reveling like Marie Antoinette when we should have been knitting like Madame Defarge.
Yo, proletariat: If the Democratic Party is going to be against chocolate, high heels, parties and fun, you’ve lost me. And I’ve got some bad news for you about 2020.
The actual bad news is that Dowd has erected a straw man. This version is comprised of the latest group-think narrative trope that progressives are a monolithic bloc whose constant harping on impeachment rather than on Party Unity will only serve to give us another term of Trump.
They eviscerate their natural allies for not being pure enough while placing all their hopes in a color-inside-the-lines lifelong Republican prosecutor appointed by Ronald Reagan.
The politics of purism makes people stupid. And nasty.
Dowd carefully names no names within her horde of stupid puritans. Nor does she mention that the loudest voices for impeachment have not been those of ordinary people, more of whom are leaning toward some form of socialism to solve our problems, but rather the corporate class of journalists on MSNBC and CNN and her own colleagues at the Times. But since the much-ballyhooed testimony of Robert Mueller turned out to be such a dud, scapegoats must be devised by these discredited corporate journalists so fixated on #Russiagate, and they must be devised in a hurry. The corporatists of the incestuous media-political complex are not our natural allies. In fact, they're the exact opposite.
Hippie-punching and voter shaming are the standard tactics of last resort for these amoral establishment fools, and Dowd is only too happy to join the fray and deflect the blame. When Trump wins another term due to the lack of a populist agenda from the centrist Democrat whom they hope to undemocratically nominate, they will then refrain from blaming themselves and as usual, blame people with no power and no money.
My published comment on Dowd's column:
The tweet by pundit Howard Fineman bragging about canoodling at Dowd's digs with the very same officials that journalists are supposed to afflict was what roused the ire of both left and right. It had nothing to do with "progressives'" disappointment over Mueller's overhyped (by corporate journalists like Fineman) performance.
This may come as a shock to the Beltway Bubble, but opinions on impeachment vary among progressives. Some are for, some against. But I suppose it's easier for Maureen to call them nasty purists than it is for her to address such core progressive policy proposals as single payer health care or to write about epidemic student debt, the growing climate catastrophe, the unaffordability of housing, the caging of refugees, and the fact that Flint, Michigan still has no clean water.
Nobody out here in Lower Slobovia cares about your Georgetown shindigs or your angst about peevish purists who do not show proper deference to the Knowledge Class and its insulated meritocrats.. Most of us are too worried about paying the bills and what kind of future our children and grandchildren face in a country where representative democracy has devolved into winner take all predatory capitalism.
But keep writing columns like this one, because the more you scold the have-nothings the less they will heed your infinite wisdom, and the more they will spare themselves the tedium of reading the next self-pitying installment.
True to form, House Democratic leaders quickly abandoned their initial clarion call to censure Donald Trump for his continuing series of vile xenophobic attacks on the Squad of four progressive female members. They instead introduced a motion merely to "condemn" his language while failing to condemn either his continued caging of immigrants at the border or his actual and threatened deportation sweeps. (Update: the condemnation passed, largely across party lines, on Tuesday evening.)
The Democratic leadership's condemnation of Trump's racist demagoguery is not to be confused with any opposition to the Status Quo. The whole purpose of their grandstanding resolution is to unify the Party, not to protect refugees from man-made climate change and regime change.
And just so everybody is perfectly and absolutely clear about their limited intent, the resolution condemning his language gratuitously doubles right down on the longstanding "colorblind" racist trope which distinguishes the Able-Bodied Deserving Immigrant from the Weak Undeserving Immigrant.
As reported by the New York Times,
Among other things, the resolution declares that the House “believes that immigrants and their descendants have made America stronger,” that “those who take the oath of citizenship are every bit as American as those whose families have lived in the United States for many generations,” and that the House “is committed to keeping America open to those lawfully seeking refuge and asylum from violence and oppression, and those who are willing to work hard to live the American Dream, no matter their race, ethnicity, faith, or country of origin.”
There is not one word about those fleeing because record drought and heat have destroyed the subsistence farming they depend on to literally survive. There is not one word about changing the law to include impending starvation as a legitimate reason to seek asylum. Only those who are willing to wait in line for years and then work hard for low wages will be welcomed. Humanitarianism is not part of the equation. Political power is.
The Democrats' resolution all about restoring the tone, the civility, the cosmetic diversity, the jolly bipartisanship and intraparty comity among the members of Congress, most of whom have achieved fabulous wealth, or at least achieved the promise of future fabulous revolving-door wealth. The Times approvingly quotes the Resolution's co-sponsor, New Jersey Democrat and former Obama State Department official Tom Malinowski:
“Let’s focus on these comments that the vast majority of Americans recognize to be divisive and racist, that the vast majority of my Republican colleagues, in their hearts, recognize to be divisive and racist.
“We need to move forward with something that can be unifying, and right now, what we can unite around is that what the president said was wrong, un-American, and dangerous.”
Focus on his words, not his xenophobic deeds, in which the Democrats have been all too shamefully complicit.
The nihilistic Republicans, meanwhile, are seeking to shift their own conversation away from addressing Trump's racist rhetoric to caterwauling about the "socialist" danger posed by the squad of progressive women who are the targets of his wrath: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
Trump's hurling of anti-racist invective (if you call me a racist that makes you a racist) right back at his critics is nothing new under the ultra-right sun, of course. His defense of Israel while leveling charges of anti-Semitism against, in particular, Somali refugee Ilhan Omar, is simply the transmutation of the Far Right's own historical anti-Semitism into increasingly mainstream Islamophobia. The Muslim refugees of America's wars, and now the Latino refugees from US-sponsored regime change military coups and climate catastrophe are essentially stateless people. And since the historically stateless Jews are now largely assimilated into American and European life, the Muslims and Latinos are simply the new Jews - or the latest convenient scapegoats.
The growing fascism of Donald Trump's Republican party and the neoliberalism of the Democrats are actually closely aligned. Presidential contender Hillary Clinton, for one, recently and bizarrely blamed immigrants themselves for the rise of right-wing populism in Europe and the United States. In a friendly series of November interviews covered by Guardian diplomatic editor Patrick Wintour, Clinton said:
“I think Europe needs to get a handle on migration because that is what lit the flame...
“I admire the very generous and compassionate approaches that were taken particularly by leaders like Angela Merkel, but I think it is fair to say Europe has done its part, and must send a very clear message – ‘we are not going to be able to continue provide refuge and support’ – because if we don’t deal with the migration issue it will continue to roil the body politic.”
It's a somewhat nicer nativistic way than Trump's of telling people to stay in, or go back to, their own countries even if it kills them. She doesn't acknowledge her own role in the growing global humanitarian catastrophes, particularly her dominant role in destroying Libya, whence countless migrants have fled, many of them losing their lives in desperate attempts to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.
But she was only too happy to Tweet this week against Trump's racist attacks on the Squad, and to join with Nancy Pelosi in glibly advising immigrant families to simply not answer their doors when Border Patrol and ICE agents drop by their neighborhoods in one of those deportation sweeps. The focus of her ire is every bit as conveniently narrow as that of her party. It's not the anti-immigrant policies that have been ramped up with a vengeance, with increasing border militarization and imprisonments and mass deportations. It's the anti-immigrant Trumpian rhetoric attached to these cruel policies that evokes her virtue-signaling wrath. The fake anger is carefully transmuted into the platitudinous anti-Trump statements that her party regularly dreams up as a means to mask its own complicity.
The mask is getting mighty thin and mighty transparent.
The ultimate goal of border walls is not only to "make America white again," but to protect the rich world from the poor world, to protect plutocrats from the victims of capitalistic violence, who must be exiled and their humanity diminished so that the rich can assuage their own guilt as well as protect their hoarded wealth. Just as the Squad is the latest convenient scapegoat for Trump and the Republicans, Trump and the Republicans are convenient scapegoats of their Democratic de facto collaborators.
The never-ending scandals and Tweets and outbursts of outrage in high places is the fuel that feeds the spectacle.
