Tattered Ears On Pussy Hats

It's getting so internally divisive in the Big Tent that the Democratic National Committee has taken the draconian step of removing its official support for this weekend's Women's March.

The movement is so riven that in New York City, there will be two competing marches 50 blocks apart. One of these "grassroots" efforts, reports the New York Times, is being led by a former Goldman Sachs executive with no prior organizing experience and who is being accused by disability advocates of refusing to accommodate them. Therefore, disabled women will hold their own rally on Saturday.

According to the HuffPo, the DNC is no longer listed among the national movement's corporate sponsors, ostensibly because some of the march's organizers have refused to distance themselves from Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam founder who has long been accused of anti-Semitism. As a result, other corporate party-affiliated entities, such as EMILY's List, have also pulled their support.

But true to wishy-washy form,

A spokeswoman for the DNC declined to comment on the timing in a statement to The Daily Beast, but said women were at the "core of our Democratic Party."
"The DNC stands in solidarity with all those fighting for women's rights and holding the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers across the country accountable.... Women are on the front lines of fighting back against this administration." 

Until the Farrakhan controversy erupted, it had always been perfectly O.K. for the corporate Democrats to "fight back" against Trump-style xenophobia while keeping perfectly mum about their own. 

To wit: the original march organizers were horrified that the Watergate Hotel had allowed Russians to rent rooms there. The group's stated solidarity across gender, class,ethnic and racial lines always had its limits, even at the very beginning of #Resistance, Inc.

As Women's March leader Mariam Ehari wrote in Together We Rise, a 2017 memoir of the initial march, whose proceeds allegedly were donated to groups promoting human rights and global understanding:

I kept running into Trump supporters and many Russians in the hotel and thought, Is this real?

The Russians must have formed a caravan or something, sneaking across the border of the luxury hotel with their Cyrillic alphabets and their tupperware containers of Strogonoff. It must have been a real ethnic nightmare for the women's march leaders, who were nothing if not early pioneers of the #Russiagate propaganda franchise... in the Watergate, no less! Notice how Russians and Trump supporters magically become pretty much the same thing in that one little sentence?

As organizer Tamika Mallory - currently under fire for claiming that Jewish people bear "a collective special responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people" - lamented two years ago in Together We Rise, there was "so much hate coming at us from so many different directions. Being in the hotel with Trump supporters wasn't easy... It was almost like we were in a bubble."

Bingo. The vaunted solidarity and inclusiveness of this Democratic Party offshoot was always something of a fraud, right from the get-go. It was just another iteration of the "Us Vs Them" paranoia sold to the masses by the oligarchic ruling class in control of both establishment political parties. 

 But so long as the phobia was aimed at the right wrong people for the first couple of years of the Pussy Hat Resistance, nobody cared.

The only true solidarity among the organizers appears to be their mutual hatred of Donald Trump and sorrow over Hillary Clinton's defeat. It turns out that pure hatred and fear, absent any accompanying cohesive agenda for radical reform and social justice, is simply not sustainable.

Even after they'd hired more than 50 off-duty FBI agents to guard them against the the Deplorables and the Russkies, the original March organizers still didn't feel completely safe, according to the account in Together We Rise. If only they'd known that the FBI would soon be starting its own renegade national security investigation of Trump, they might have felt a whole lot better. 

And if you're wondering where Hillary Clinton stands amidst all this divisive angst, rest assured. She's offering you - and a friend - the very slim chance to spend some quality time with her. 

And you don't even have to march or otherwise exert yourself beyond giving her your credit card number! It sounds absolutely confabulous:

Pinch yourself, pack your favorite pantsuit and pick a friend, because you’re off to NYC to join Hillary Clinton for an evening you’ll never forget. Hillary’s inviting you to share in one of her favorite pastimes: seeing a Broadway show! And the fun won’t stop at curtain call. You’ll also join Hillary for a glass of chardonnay (or whatever you want!) for the chance to get to know her on a personal level. Maybe you’ll talk about the show, life, or your family. Maybe you’ll have a really nuanced conversation about economic policy. Maybe you’ll just use the opportunity to say, “thank you.” It’s up to you! But we hear Hillary’s an incredible listener. Flights and hotel included.

Who Needs Pink Pussy Hats or Even Pink Elephants? I Got Me a Blue Man!