“As I’ve traveled around, speaking about my book on how extremists hijacked the Republican Party,” says WashPost pundit Max Boot. “I have been hearing from Democrats who are worried that the same thing is happening to their party. They have good cause for concern.”
Well, that’s true, and much—but certainly not all—of what Max has to say is pretty goshdarn salubrious, to my way of thinking, but let’s not forget that Marvelous Max can get a little looney himself, advocating a three hundred year war in Afghanistan, or however long it takes for us to knock some sense into those Afghanis' heads. It must be something about the altitude that makes them so contrary.
Yes, newly famous “bad ass” Democrats like Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, used to functioning in an atmosphere where the more “passionate” and uncompromising/unrealistic you are, the cooler you are, are (maybe) learning that we do things a little differently down here in split the difference, cover your ass, don’t take it personally D.C. Whether ambition will triumph over vanity or vice versa remains to be seen. But the Democrats need new blood worse than a junkie needs a fix, and youth must be served. Sure, it’s smart not to listen to Ilhan and Alexandria when they’re talkin’ trash. But the same goes for Mad Max as well.
Afterwords
Paul Waldman, in an impressive piece, “The real reason for the controversy over Ilhan Omar’s tweets”, which I commend the Washington Post for printing, points out that Omar is clumsily (and often unattractively) raising issues that Congress doesn’t want to talk about, and should be talking about:
There are things we might ask if we actually had such a debate [about what U.S. policy towards Israel should be], about whether the Israeli government should be punished for its aggressive settlement policy, whether it actually needs the billions of dollars in military aid we send them each year, or even what the U.S. gets out of this alliance in a post-Cold War world.
There are good reasons for believing that Omar’s thinking about Israel is cranky and conspiratorial, but there are also good reasons for believing that U.S. policy in the Middle East should not be, as it has so often been, an unholy kow-towing to the perceived interests of the ruling elites of two very different states (Saudi Arabia and Israel), whose values and interests are often very different from our own, a policy whose underlying assumptions, as Waldman points out, are rarely if ever questioned, or even acknowledged, in Congress.1 If Omar and Ocasio-Cortez have the wrong answers (and they usually do) they (sometimes) have the right questions.
I’ve sneered at Max, aka “Old Blood and Thunder (and jodhpurs)”, on a number of previous occasions.
1. In the early stages of the second Iraqi war, George W. Bush welcomed criticism of the war, with two exceptions: "You can't say it was about oil, and you can't say it was about Israel. Because it was about oil, and it was about Israel.
