Politicians are not your friend. Feinstein is not your friend. They work for you. You do not need to defend them with the zeal you would a close friend. They are not attached to you in that way. Partisan tribalism can mask bad behavior by letting people of your party escape criticism because people have a tendency to…

This is terrifying. I don’t have words. How could you scar a child like this. 

It wasn’t harmless you racist shitstain. Go troll somewhere else.

Someone is dead in a hate crime you sick fuck. Go back to 4chan you shitheel. 

All of that sounds like the kind of filth you can easily find on Facebook or Twitter in far-right circles, filth that clearly violates the ToS but is rarely moderated likely because those rabid racists drive a bunch of clicks.

On one hand I agree with what you say, but on the other hand the Munich conference has been very much an influence-peddling elite hangout for years, it’s not a purely diplomatic event (hence why Biden is there). In theory, if it wasn’t Trump and his spawn, sending people closely linked to the president to network and…

This was all hilarious. The Munich conference is one of those schmaltzy elite events and this breaks the usual decorum for that sort of crowd which makes it even funnier. In the diplomatic world this is the equivalent of slapping them in the face. 

I want this to matter, but the Supreme Court completely discarded merit-based analysis of his racist Muslim ban. Instead they just bowed to a bad faith appeal to national security.

Calling out the system doesn’t achieve a damn thing. It’s emotionally satisfying at best. You work in a broken and unfair system because the alternative is to do nothing. It’s shitty and it’s cynical and it’s the goddamned reality.

As I said in a reply that a troll eventually dismissed, ignoring an unfair reality doesn’t solve a damn thing. It is a double standard and it isn’t fair and that doesn’t matter because she has to navigate the world as it is, and that means being better about wording so she’s not open to bad faith attacks. Precision…

I was familiar with the latter, though not the former. I’m just not interested in being trolled. I’ve put a lot of real study into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Islamophobia, academic level stuff not just news articles, and I’m just not that interested in playing purity tests because my position is more nuanced…

This may expose my cynicism, but for a politician I’d argue that is “be smarter”.

Schumer has atrocious views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Pelosi is very much a calculating politician. Given her remarks after the apology, my guess is she decided the way to move past it the quickest was to take the position she did. She’s thrown cold water on the demands from conservatives to strip her…

She mirrored an anti-Semitic trope. Better wording takes away the line of attack she was targeted with. She’s a politician now, and you must be precise for these reasons. She’s also new, so I’m not particularly concerned about it so far. If she was some mediocre white Republican she wouldn’t be under a microscope. But…

Good. Her tweet was badly worded and she should know better, because there’s a heap of bad faith bigots obsessed with her. Look at how many media articles falsely claim she said something about “Jewish money” when she never did. Islamophobia is both socially acceptable and widely dispersed in the pundit class.

Early debates tend not to be very compelling television regardless, so I’m not terribly concerned by any of this. The big field will start winnowing down naturally before becoming something large but more manageable.

I think the Saudis have the influence, when combined with Trump and his cronies, to stop this. It’s unfortunate, but a lot of the far-right wing of the Republicans will buy the “we need to stop Iran” line, even if it’s horseshit in this case, or will simply line up with Trump because that’s their reflex now. A few…

Republicans have done worse, and the media didn’t spend the better part of two days in a frenzy over it. McCarthy, the racist shitheel who started this by harassing her, openly used an ad suggesting Jews would “buy the election” in the midterms. 

Well she never said Jews. That’s a key point. Everyone has interpreted “AIPAC” as “=Jews” but the irony is AIPAC has spent years saying otherwise. Still, her wording was stupid, but the media has willfully distorted her actual offense by suggesting she said something about Jews when she never did. 

Her tweets were bad. They were imprecise, and there’s a mountain of bigoted assholes trying to destroy her with bad faith accusations. She walked into it. The truth is she doesn’t seem very well informed on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not in the granular detail level, and that’s made it easy for her to get…