Thursday, November 30, 2023
Elon Musk Uses a Crude Insult to Slam Advertisers for Pulling Back From X - The New York Times
‘She got so mad at me’: book on the ‘Squad’ details AOC-Pelosi clashes
‘She got so mad at me’: book on the ‘Squad’ details AOC-Pelosi clashes
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tells Ryan Grim life in Congress ‘completely transformed’ after Democratic leader stepped down
“In a call to congratulate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on her momentous 2018primary win over Joe Crowley, a Democratic grandee from New York, Nancy Pelosi told the young socialist from the Bronx: “We already have too many old white men here in Congress.”
The quip from the then Democratic minority leader, who went on to be House speaker until January this year, seemed to indicate strong affinity for the younger woman.
But according to a new book, The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution, about the rise of young leftwing representatives of colour, most of them women, things did not work out so well.
The book by Ryan Grim, a reporter for the Intercept, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.
Now widely known as AOC, Ocasio-Cortez rose from obscurity to win her election at the age of just 28. Her defeat of Crowley, then 56 and thought to have designs on Pelosi’s job, made waves in Washington – Donald Trump reportedly compared AOC to Eva Perón – and around the world.
But though Pelosi may have been grateful to see Crowley removed, relations with the woman who beat him would never run smooth.
Their first “live meeting”, Grim says, came in July 2018 at a restaurant in San Francisco, which Pelosi represents. Then 76, Pelosi had been in Congress since 1987, Democratic House leader since 2003 and speaker from 2007 to 2011.
The older woman “spoke for nearly the entire lunch, dishing out her trademark looping, run-on sentences to her bewildered companions.
“‘She just keeps talking; it’s a fascinating thing,’ Saikat Chakrabarti, then AOC’s chief of staff, recalls. ‘We were eating, and she just talked the entire time without even taking a break. And I wasn’t sure exactly what she was saying, but I was like, ‘Huh, OK.’
“Getting Pelosi’s unfiltered thoughts was both eye-opening and disturbing,” Grim writes. “Ocasio-Cortez, who had made the slogan ‘Abolish Ice’ [US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] central to her challenge to Crowley, was particularly perplexed to hear Pelosi say that the phrase had been injected into American political discourse by the Russians and that Democrats needed to quash it.
“AOC wondered, ‘This is how the leader of the party thinks?’
“The next time Pelosi came to New York, she tried to connect … but AOC’s staff slow-walked things long enough to dodge the meeting and … ducked efforts to schedule calls.”
In November 2018, before taking her House seat, AOC joined a sit-in at Pelosi’s Capitol Hill office staged by the Sunrise Movement, a youth-oriented climate group.
Grim, who was there, writes that Drew Hammill, Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff, “complained that they were protesting the wrong person, that Pelosi wanted all the same things”. AOC agreed, saying she wanted to create “momentum”. Grim calls the sit-in “AOC’s first great triumph … launch[ing] her as a power player”. Chakrabarti said Pelosi “wasn’t super hostile” in a meeting that followed.
Grim also reports how progressives then supported Pelosi for speaker, in the face of a centrist challenge marshaled by Josh Gottheimer, a short-tempered ex-Clinton aide from New Jersey. As speaker, though, Pelosi made sure to limit the power of AOC and another progressive woman of colour, Pramila Jayapal of Washington state.
“Pramila has a megaphone and actually knows how to make noise,” Alex Lawson, executive director of Social Security Works, told Grim. “That’s what [Pelosi] was worried about with AOC … that these are two people who are clearly going to … advance lefty stuff, and that’s what pissed her off so much.”
Grim reports episodes in which Pelosi and progressives worked together – and many moments of tension.
Pelosi often expressed frustration, in 2019 telling the New York Times that AOC and her fellow Squad members “have their public whatever and their Twitter world. But they didn’t have any following. They’re four people, and that’s how many votes they got.”
In the same fight over immigration policy, Pelosi offered a lecture about how Congress works, saying: “Some of you are here to make a beautiful paté, but we’re making sausage most of the time.”
Eventually, Pelosi and AOC met in private. According to one Pelosi biographer, the speaker “blew up”. Pelosi told reporters the meeting “cleared the air”.
Frustration clearly remained. In one instance, Grim reports that in 2021, AOC “confronted” Pelosi at a caucus meeting, as progressives resisted a push to pass a major infrastructure bill without assurances about a social spending package including measures to combat the climate crisis.
In another, reporting a rare call between the two women, Grim says AOC told Pelosi “that even though she had beaten Joe Crowley, who relied on [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] vendors and consultants, nobody had reached out to hear how she had done it.
“I told her DCCC campaign vendors sucked,” AOC said, “and that it was strange that after I beat Crowley not a single person bothered to ask how I beat him … and how I think we should pay attention and ask questions when that happens, to spot weaknesses. She got so mad at me.”
Throughout his book, Grim cites texts from AOC. One focuses on the age gap between her and Pelosi: “The amount of times she told me that stupid ‘I have protest signs older than you in my basement’ shit. Like yeah but mine don’t collect dust.”
Another text, from spring this year, finds AOC considering life after Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries of New York having succeeded her as Democratic minority leader.
“I thought things would get worse,” AOC says. “I thought a lot of my misery was due to leadership more broadly having a thing against me. But … my life has completely transformed. It’s crazy. And it’s that that made me realise it was kind of just [Pelosi] the whole time.”
Now, AOC adds, “senior members talk to me, [committee] chairs are nice to me, people want to work together. I’m shocked. I couldn’t even get floor time before.“
An Electorate in Revolt Threatens Biden’s Chances
An Electorate in Revolt Threatens Biden’s Chances
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning.
“I know all the warnings and caveats about polls taken a year before an election. But much of the recent polling on the 2024 election is still frightening and disconcerting.
We shouldn’t be here. We have a president who, on the whole, has had a successful first term and has capably performed the principal function for which he was elected: to return the country to normalcy and prevent more damage being done to it by his predecessor.
That president, Joe Biden, will almost certainly be running again against Donald Trump, a former president facing a mound of legal troubles born of his own deceptions and anti-democratic impulses.
So the choice next year should be clear, but the electorate keeps telling anyone listening that it’s not. The results of a New York Times/Siena College poll released this month showed Biden trailing Trump in five of six important battleground states. A recent NBC News national poll found that Trump was narrowly ahead of Biden. Pretty clearly, voters aren’t satisfied with their choices, but they’re also not rewarding Biden or punishing Trump in the ways that one might expect.
Rather, multiple things appear to be at play at the same time.
Some voters exalt in a revisionist history in which destroyers are viewed as disrupters, in which our own past anxieties are downplayed.
In the view of many of these voters, even with his evident faults, Trump “isn’t so bad” and what he did in office is increasingly remembered as positive, including shaking up the Washington establishment and the political status quo. For those losing faith in government in general, this may be attractive — the nightmarish Trump days somehow converted into halcyon ones.
In that same scenario, some seem to be experiencing a false sense of invincibility, the kind that you might experience after surviving a car wreck, in which you come to see your escape from the worst as proof that the danger was less potent than it once seemed, and that you’re more resilient than you might have thought.
But the threat Trump poses hasn’t diminished. It has increased. He’s more openabout his plans to alter the country and our form of government if he is returned to the White House. And yet, some Americans simply aren’t registering that threat as having the potential to harm in the way that it obviously can.
It seems, in their minds, that if the country survived one Trump term, it can survive another. And that all the Chicken Littles claiming that the sky is falling, or could fall, are addicted to worry and prone to hyperbole.
There are also people who’ve bought into the narrative that Biden is too old for a second term. And while I think the age issue is overblown, it clearly has settled in among many voters and will be very hard to shake.
And then there are those who just don’t feel the positive impacts of the Biden presidency, whether it’s on the economy or on foreign policy. This isn’t because the administration hasn’t had successes, but because individual citizens sometimes don’t recognize the source of those successes or experience them in ways that they can immediately feel.
This has been, among other things, a massive failure of messaging. It’s not enough to inundate voters by repeating, over and over, lists of bills passed, steps taken and amounts allocated or spent. Campaigning by spreadsheet is mind-numbing. How do people feel? What do they feel? That has to be the basis of any successful electoral appeal.
But the Biden team hasn’t taken that tack. Instead, it engages in disastrous branding like “Bidenomics,” trying and failing to convince people that they should feel better than they do because some of the top-line economic indicators are positive, even when the bottom line, for many households — the cost of groceries, how far a paycheck stretches, whether buying a house is possible — is still precarious, and efforts to numb that feeling with numbers can come off as callous and aloof.
In presidential races, the successful candidates are generally those aligned with the electorate at that moment. That was Biden in 2020, but it is not at all clear that it will be him in 2024 — not so much because he has changed, but because the appetite of many voters has.
Yes, a year is an eternity in politics and Biden has time to turn things around and adjust his messaging. But it’s still something of an outrage that we’re even in a position where we have to gamble on Biden’s ability to pull himself up and out of a significant hole. It is certainly an outrage that the survival of our democracy may depend on it.
It doesn’t matter if I or anyone else believes that Biden deserves of a second term — Americans keep signaling that they aren’t sold on one. And at some point, we all have to listen more than we lecture. We have to understand that Biden’s insistence on seeking a second term — rather than making way for someone from the next generation of Democratic leaders — comes at high risk, and that what’s at stake is greater than the aspirations of any individual candidate.
At the moment, the electorate is drifting away from its safest option. It is courting the country’s demise. Maybe something or someone will be able to jolt voters out of this self-destructive impulse. We have to hope so. The price of that not happening is far too steep.
Charles M. Blow joined The Times in 1994 and became an Opinion columnist in 2008. He is also a television commentator and writes often about politics, social justice and vulnerable communities. @CharlesMBlow • Facebook“
Kissinger’s Legacy Still Ripples Through Vietnam and Cambodia
Kissinger’s Legacy Still Ripples Through Vietnam and Cambodia
“His decision to authorize the bombing of Cambodia, efforts to extricate the U.S. from the Vietnam War and role in the rapprochement with China continue to be felt in Southeast Asia.
Henry A. Kissinger’s decision to authorize the secret carpet bombing of Cambodia, his efforts to negotiate the American exit from the Vietnam War and his role in the U.S. rapprochement with China have rippled through Southeast Asia in the decades since.
Mr. Kissinger, who died on Wednesday, shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the peace accords that ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. But some critics accused him of needlessly prolonging the war when a framework for peace had been available years earlier.
The fighting between North Vietnam and U.S.-backed South Vietnam did not end until the North’s victory in 1975. Some observers have said that was the inevitable result of a cynical American policy intended to create space — “a decent interval,” as Mr. Kissinger put it — between the American withdrawal from the country in 1973 and the fall of Saigon two years later.
The bombing of Cambodia in 1969 and 1970, which Mr. Kissinger authorized in the hope that it would root out pro-Communist Vietcong forces operating from bases across Vietnam’s western border, also fueled years of debate about whether the United States had violated international law by expanding the conflict into an ostensibly neutral nation.
Mr. Kissinger defended his wartime decisions for years afterward.
“America should not torture itself on the view that it could have had a settlement earlier if their presidents had been more willing,” Mr. Kissinger said during a 2016event at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. “They could not have had a settlement, except for selling out and withdrawing unconditionally, which nobody would have supported.”
As for the bombing campaign, he wrote in his memoirs that it was a decision North Vietnam’s actions had forced upon President Richard M. Nixon’s administration.
Within Vietnam, Mr. Kissinger’s role in the war was contentious well before the fighting ended. In 1973, Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese negotiator who was jointly awarded the Nobel with Mr. Kissinger, rejected the award, saying that the U.S.-backed South had continued “acts of war” even after the agreement, and that he would be able to accept the prize only after peace had been established there. (He died in 1990, never having accepted the prize.)
Many Vietnamese also resent the role that Mr. Kissinger played in establishing diplomatic relations between the United States and China, Vietnam’s powerful northern neighbor and former imperial occupier.
The normalization of U.S.-China ties in 1979 elevated China’s international standing and paved the way for its rise, said Duong Quoc Chinh, 46, a Vietnamese architect and political commentator in Hanoi, the capital. “Now people dislike him primarily because they see him as the person responsible for China’s prosperity.”
In postwar Cambodia, Prime Minister Hun Sen, who spent nearly four decades in power before transferring the premiership to his son this year, long argued that Mr. Kissinger and other former American officials should be charged with war crimes for their role in the bombing campaign.
Senior officials in Cambodia, a country still littered with unexploded ordnance, have long seen Mr. Kissinger as a “bête noire,” said Sophal Ear, an expert on Cambodia’s political economy and a professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University. Even in recent years, he said, when diplomatic tensions flared with the United States, Cambodian officials would sometimes bring up the wartime bombing campaign in an effort to corner their American interlocutors.
Many analysts have said that the U.S. bombing of Cambodia led in part to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, which oversaw horrors that killed nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population in the late 1970s.
But Mr. Sophal Ear, who escaped the Khmer Rouge as a child, added that Mr. Kissinger was slowly fading from memory in a country where the median age is now only about 27. “I surmise that they cannot blame someone whose name they do not know,” he said.
The Vietnamese Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr. Kissinger’s legacy. Pen Bona, a spokesman for the Cambodian government, declined to comment.
“He was a U.S. secretary of state, so he did everything for the U.S.’s interest and liberal ideology,” Sok Eysan, a spokesman for the governing Cambodian People’s Party, said of Mr. Kissinger. “We couldn’t completely blame him since he followed the U.S. foreign policy.”
During his long premiership, Mr. Hun Sen’s backsliding on democracy caused friction with the United States, which frequently called on his government to respect human rights and restore fair elections. At the same time, Mr. Hun Sen brought Cambodia closer to China, calling it his country’s “most trustworthy friend.”
Vietnam, by contrast, has sought to offset a historically close but complicated relationship with China by pursuing warmer ties with the United States, its former enemy. Though a one-party state, Vietnam has found common ground with Washington in concerns over China’s mounting ambitions in Southeast Asia.
When President Barack Obama visited in Hanoi in 2016, he said the United States would rescind a decades-old ban on sales of lethal military equipment to Vietnam. And during President Biden’s visit to Hanoi in September, Vietnam’s Communist Party leadership raised relations with the United States to the highest in Vietnam’s diplomatic hierarchy, putting them on par to those it has with Russia and China.
Chau Doan, Sun Narin and Sui-Lee Wee contributed reporting.“
Kissinger’s Legacy Still Ripples Through Vietnam and Cambodia
Kissinger’s Legacy Still Ripples Through Vietnam and Cambodia
“His decision to authorize the bombing of Cambodia, efforts to extricate the U.S. from the Vietnam War and role in the rapprochement with China continue to be felt in Southeast Asia.
Henry A. Kissinger’s decision to authorize the secret carpet bombing of Cambodia, his efforts to negotiate the American exit from the Vietnam War and his role in the U.S. rapprochement with China have rippled through Southeast Asia in the decades since.
Mr. Kissinger, who died on Wednesday, shared the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the peace accords that ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. But some critics accused him of needlessly prolonging the war when a framework for peace had been available years earlier.
The fighting between North Vietnam and U.S.-backed South Vietnam did not end until the North’s victory in 1975. Some observers have said that was the inevitable result of a cynical American policy intended to create space — “a decent interval,” as Mr. Kissinger put it — between the American withdrawal from the country in 1973 and the fall of Saigon two years later.
The bombing of Cambodia in 1969 and 1970, which Mr. Kissinger authorized in the hope that it would root out pro-Communist Vietcong forces operating from bases across Vietnam’s western border, also fueled years of debate about whether the United States had violated international law by expanding the conflict into an ostensibly neutral nation.
Mr. Kissinger defended his wartime decisions for years afterward.
“America should not torture itself on the view that it could have had a settlement earlier if their presidents had been more willing,” Mr. Kissinger said during a 2016event at the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas. “They could not have had a settlement, except for selling out and withdrawing unconditionally, which nobody would have supported.”
As for the bombing campaign, he wrote in his memoirs that it was a decision North Vietnam’s actions had forced upon President Richard M. Nixon’s administration.
Within Vietnam, Mr. Kissinger’s role in the war was contentious well before the fighting ended. In 1973, Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese negotiator who was jointly awarded the Nobel with Mr. Kissinger, rejected the award, saying that the U.S.-backed South had continued “acts of war” even after the agreement, and that he would be able to accept the prize only after peace had been established there. (He died in 1990, never having accepted the prize.)
Many Vietnamese also resent the role that Mr. Kissinger played in establishing diplomatic relations between the United States and China, Vietnam’s powerful northern neighbor and former imperial occupier.
The normalization of U.S.-China ties in 1979 elevated China’s international standing and paved the way for its rise, said Duong Quoc Chinh, 46, a Vietnamese architect and political commentator in Hanoi, the capital. “Now people dislike him primarily because they see him as the person responsible for China’s prosperity.”
In postwar Cambodia, Prime Minister Hun Sen, who spent nearly four decades in power before transferring the premiership to his son this year, long argued that Mr. Kissinger and other former American officials should be charged with war crimes for their role in the bombing campaign.
Senior officials in Cambodia, a country still littered with unexploded ordnance, have long seen Mr. Kissinger as a “bête noire,” said Sophal Ear, an expert on Cambodia’s political economy and a professor at the Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University. Even in recent years, he said, when diplomatic tensions flared with the United States, Cambodian officials would sometimes bring up the wartime bombing campaign in an effort to corner their American interlocutors.
Many analysts have said that the U.S. bombing of Cambodia led in part to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, which oversaw horrors that killed nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population in the late 1970s.
But Mr. Sophal Ear, who escaped the Khmer Rouge as a child, added that Mr. Kissinger was slowly fading from memory in a country where the median age is now only about 27. “I surmise that they cannot blame someone whose name they do not know,” he said.
The Vietnamese Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr. Kissinger’s legacy. Pen Bona, a spokesman for the Cambodian government, declined to comment.
“He was a U.S. secretary of state, so he did everything for the U.S.’s interest and liberal ideology,” Sok Eysan, a spokesman for the governing Cambodian People’s Party, said of Mr. Kissinger. “We couldn’t completely blame him since he followed the U.S. foreign policy.”
During his long premiership, Mr. Hun Sen’s backsliding on democracy caused friction with the United States, which frequently called on his government to respect human rights and restore fair elections. At the same time, Mr. Hun Sen brought Cambodia closer to China, calling it his country’s “most trustworthy friend.”
Vietnam, by contrast, has sought to offset a historically close but complicated relationship with China by pursuing warmer ties with the United States, its former enemy. Though a one-party state, Vietnam has found common ground with Washington in concerns over China’s mounting ambitions in Southeast Asia.
When President Barack Obama visited in Hanoi in 2016, he said the United States would rescind a decades-old ban on sales of lethal military equipment to Vietnam. And during President Biden’s visit to Hanoi in September, Vietnam’s Communist Party leadership raised relations with the United States to the highest in Vietnam’s diplomatic hierarchy, putting them on par to those it has with Russia and China.
Chau Doan, Sun Narin and Sui-Lee Wee contributed reporting.“
Tuesday, November 28, 2023
Media gave much less play to Trump’s ‘vermin’ comment than Clinton remark
Media gave much less play to Trump’s ‘vermin’ comment than Clinton remark
“Main networks gave 18 times more coverage to 2016 ‘deplorables’ remark; while top papers give it 29 times more, Media Matters finds
Major US news outlets devoted significantly less time and space to covering Donald Trump’s description of his enemies as “vermin” this month than they did in a similar period in 2016 to Hillary Clinton’s reference to Trump’s supporters as “deplorables”, a new study has found.
Findings by the progressive watchdog Media Matters included 18 times more coverage of Clinton’s remark than Trump’s by the “Big Three” broadcast networks (NBC, ABC and CBS) in the first week after the remark was made; and print reports among the top five circulating newspapers (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today) in which mention of Clinton’s remark outnumbered Trump’s 29-1 in the same period.
“Coverage decisions like these … shape the political landscape during presidential election cycles,” wrote Matt Gertz, a Media Matters senior fellow.
Media Matters describes itself as “a web-based, not-for-profit … progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analysing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the US media”.
It has recently made headlines by highlighting far-right content on X, prompting advertisers to withdraw, an effort now the subject of a lawsuit from Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the platform formerly known as Twitter.
Clinton’s “deplorables” remark was a famous feature of the 2016 presidential election, which she lost to Trump.
In September that year, the Democrat told a New York audience: “To be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”
Trump lost to Joe Biden four years later but is the clear frontrunner to be the Republican nominee again in 2024, dominating polling despite facing 91 criminal charges and assorted civil threats.
Earlier this month, in New Hampshire, he told supporters he would “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections”.
Biden joined pundits and historians in pointing out how authoritarian leaders have called opponents “vermin”, Adolf Hitler prominently among them.
Acknowledging such comparisons and warnings, Gertz wrote: “The former president … added that those forces want ‘to destroy America and to destroy the American dream’ and that ‘the threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave than the threat from within’.
“By contrast, the right weaponised Clinton’s relatively mundane ‘basket of deplorables’ comment … [though] she went on to stress that attendees shouldn’t write off all of his backers because they also include ‘people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change’, adding: ‘Those are people we have to understand and empathise with as well.’”
The new Media Matters research, Gertz said, illustrated how major news outlets responded to “weaponisation” of Clinton’s remark, “rewarding the right for its disingenuous act, showering Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ remark with coverage.
“By contrast, the same outlets largely ignored Trump’s description of his political enemies as ‘vermin’, continuing a pattern of relatively muted coverage of Trump’s abhorrent and incoherent commentary.”
According to the research, ABC, CBS and NBC spent 54 minutes on the “deplorables” remark in the first week after it was uttered (making 1,662 mentions of it) but only three minutes (through 191 mentions) on the “vermin” remark in the same period.
The only print article in the five main papers to consider the “vermin” remark was published by the Washington Post. In 2016, it ran nine print articles on the “deplorables” comment in the first week after it was made, Media Matters said.
Gertz said: “When experts are sounding the alarm about the similarities between a likely US presidential nominee’s rhetoric and that of genocidaires, it warrants much more significant attention from journalists at leading news outlets.”