Mike Goodman

Why are you offering me this gentle reminder?

The horror of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza has enabled me to convince many of my Boomer Jewish relatives to be more critical of Israel, and not to reflexively assume pro-Palestine activism is antisemitic.

If Platner becomes the leading anti-Israel voice in the Senate, that work disappears overnight.

what this also means is you can just skip the 2002–2003 politics and go right to the 2006 politics: everything is their fault and no one likes it.

Well this is why I was not talking about Afghanistan.

Right but John Bolton’s previous position was “we should drop a nuke on Tehran.” This is not a comment on his trustworthiness or accuracy just simply a commentary on the change in the words coming out of his mouth.

You yoots are too young to remember how insane the propaganda around Iraq 2 was. The combo of mainstream medias diminished capacity and the admins total lack of competence at *everythjng* really is largely sparing us that experience.

If the admin somehow manages to get out of this without it being a giant lethal mess where a lot of Americans die then they will probably escape blowback. But it seems pretty clear already it’s not gonna, like, make them more popular.

Iran is very bad, from a clusterfuck standpoint clearly less well thought out and with a higher potential for disaster than Iraq.

Also, the response to this Iran war is entirely different than the Iraq war. They didn’t build consent for this, nobody really wants it and it shows.

I have at various points received both responses yes. Never quite from the same person though. At least not yet.

Truly a shocking turn of events.

Add it to the fucking list. bsky.app/profile/bgru...

Oh.

Usually this is sort of why it’s a measure twice cut once situation when it comes to bombing the current leadership of a place to smithereens.

That said, it’s not that uncommon in the diplomatic corps to know somebody who’s died in service (we certainly do). And the general belief among diplomats is nobody back home gives a shit tbh.

Benghazi was specifically an American ambassador getting killed.

I think that’s fairly open to interpretation tbh. Don’t fault you for reading that but don’t necessarily see it myself.

Many civil/mil position do! My wife has a mandatory retirement age.

Just increasingly unpleasant to be publicly Jewish on any social media really. Sucks all around.

It’s low priority for a lot of people. There just aren’t a lot of jews. If their moral and political commitments demand vigilantly rejecting antisemitism they will. If not, they won’t.

Platner apparently has extended family that is Jewish.

I see my correcting my grammar didn’t make you more willing didn’t actually appear to matter to you.

Yeah but I think OP is right here that this vetting is not going to move the needle against Platner.

No but I do think these news stories are getting written because Dem operatives are finding this stuff and feeding it to reporters in the hopes of changing Dems minds (and failing that it not being a surprise in the general)

Ok.

Is “Israel calling up 70,000 reserves means 70,000 fewer Jews living in New York City” a truthful statement about Israel?

I mean there are plenty of white voters who do not really view racism as disqualifying but in the Dem caucus there are a lot more black folks than Jewish folks so it self corrects a lot more gracefully. I imagine in a different state Platner’s racismish Reddit posts are an actual big hurdle.

I do think whether this is good for Iranians is an open and complicated question (I am not optimist at all) but yeah whether it is or not absolutely doesn’t factor in to most Americans thinking, including Platner.

I’m sure to some degree they are politically motivated oppo dumps. But, also, like it is legitimately valuable for me to know these things as somebody related to Maine Dem primary voters!

So following up on this, is the statement above antisemitic or not?

Yeah. I mean it is an accurate representation of the political facts on the ground which forgets/ignores the first order impact of this on actual Jews that have to experience it.

Right I think Jews have gotten the message loud and clear that this cohort of voters do not care about antisemitism. They, like Platner, view somebody’s attitudes towards Jews as incidental as long as there are other things about a candidate they like.

Listen id grit my teeth and vote for Newsom in a general and I’d do the same for Platner if pressed but for fucks sake this guy sucks.