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Item one: The difference between Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ilhan Omar

Marjorie Taylor Greene this week sat in on her first committee hearing since 2021, and naturally, she said something trolly that caused a big stir. Republicans voted to disband a subcommittee that had jurisdiction over civil rights and criminal justice issues. Texas Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett bemoaned this development, invoking the murder of Tyre Nichols.

Greene responded by noting that while Nichols’s death was indeed “tragic” (it’s so moving when they do that, isn’t it?), what was really an outrage was that the officers who killed Nichols were charged but that no one was charged in the death of Capitol insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt. She said: “I believe that there are many people that came into the Capitol on January 6 whose civil rights and liberties are being violated, heavily, and this committee will—I hope Mr. Chairman—look into those civil rights abuses.”

It’s pretty hard to see the equivalence. Babbitt was part of an insurrectionist mob launching an assault on our republic’s most venerated building in an attempt to force a coup against the government of the United States. She was also, incidentally, administered aid by an emergency response team of the Capitol Police—the very outfit she was engaged in assaulting. This is more than we can say of the Memphis Police Department.

But this is the false equivalence game the right constantly plays. You can Rashomon anything to death, I suppose, but just for the record, a comparison between Babbitt and Nichols might be fair if he were … well, you know, engaging in the same behavior that Babbitt was. He clearly was not. He was no threat to the cops. This is obvious to any non–wingnut human.

So it goes with these people. The next day, the Republicans voted to remove Ilhan Omar from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, in retaliation for what Democrats had done two years ago to Greene and Arizona’s Paul Gosar.

Members are removed from committees under Article XXIII of House rules, which states: “A Member, Delegate, Resident Commissioner, officer, or employee of the House shall behave at all times in a manner that shall reflect creditably on the House.” Clearly, this is pretty elastic, and there are probably a thousand louche old dirtbags who should have been removed from their committees over the years and were not. But that said, do their transgressions really compare?

Paul Gosar tweeted a cartoon advocating the assassination of a fellow House member (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez). It showed an anime depiction of him chopping her head off. As AOC noted in a fiery floor speech Thursday, she didn’t receive one apology from a single Republican member about it.

Greene did a whole laundry list of weird and indefensible things. She trafficked regularly in racism and antisemitism and conspiracy theories like denying that a plane hit the World Trade Center on 9/11 or seeing the Parkland school shooting as a “false flag” operation. She liked tweets calling for the execution of “deep state” agents and seemed to endorse a theory that Hillary Clinton was videotaped murdering a child in a Satanic ritual and ordering a hit on a police officer to cover it up. Remember—11 Republicans voted with the Democrats to boot Greene. It was that bad.

Omar sent one tweet. I wouldn’t deny that it was antisemitic. It was terribly wrong. But she did apologize, which neither Gosar nor Greene has done (in any kind of way you could call remotely sincere). It’s worth remembering here too that Omar represents a district with a sizeable Jewish population in suburban Minneapolis, a place with no shortage of Jewish state legislators and others in a position to challenge her in a Democratic primary. This has never happened (although she has faced strong primary challenges, especially one last year that she barely defeated).

I think we all know Omar’s other “errors,” beyond that tweet. She’s a critic of American foreign policy. Peter Beinart addressed all that eloquently in the Times the other day. And she annoys some Republicans by just standing there and being who she is.

I would be remiss not to mention what happened to Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell too. They were removed from the House Intelligence Committee. That happened basically because they were both too effective at debunking Republican bullshit about the deep state. This is like something out of East Germany. Have the state-run media (which Fox News essentially is, in spirit) create a narrative of lies and reversals of reality, then declare that Person A and Person B stand in contravention of the new “reality.”

In sum, history will remember this as the week the House of Representatives of the 118th Congress finally got down to work, and it immediately got busy disgracing itself and this country.

Item two: It’s not 2004 anymore

Donald Trump made it clear this week what kind of campaign he’s going to run. He’s making attacks on transgender people, especially teens, the centerpiece of his race.

I won’t dwell here on how disgusting this is; I’ll assume you probably agree with me on that. The thing I want to say is: Don’t give up hope, fellow liberal. Don’t assume this will work. I suspect that, if Trump makes it to a general election (and there’s still a decent chance he will), this tactic will not work.

Democrats and liberals who go back to 2004 still point to what George W. Bush and Karl Rove did that year. They put referenda banning gay marriage on 11 state ballots, mostly key presidential states like Ohio. Voters passed all 11 bans. Ever since, Democrats have been spooked by this, and their first reflex is that because it worked in 2004, it will work in 2024 and forever.

Don’t be so sure. Yes, there are a lot of haters in this country. But most people aren’t. Most swing voters aren’t. Americans have complicated views on gender identity, and they’re not all progressive, but they’re not uniformly reactionary. Most people want to be reasonably tolerant, at the very least in a live-and-let-live kind of way.

Now: Most people have within them both generous instincts and fearful ones. How they vote depends on which instinct has been more successfully activated. Trump will activate their fearful instinct. Biden (or whoever) will be called upon, at some crucial moment in October, to activate their generous instincts. It may come during a debate. Whenever it comes, Biden and his people need to be alert to the moment, recognize it when it comes, and seize it. Biden, for an octogenarian, has surprisingly tolerant and informed views on these matters. If he just speaks from his heart and urges tolerance and respect and compassion, trans-hatred won’t win in the ballot box.

The one thing Democrats cannot do is what their centrist pollsters used to tell them to do 20 years ago: either (a) ignore the issue and change the subject or (b) say, Hey we’re troubled by all this too, but we also blah blah blah. That may have worked then (although that’s actually debatable). But it does not work now. This is a different country, with young people who think differently about these matters and want to hear Democrats stand up for people. Democrats can do that in a way that speaks to, and does not alienate, voters in the middle.

Item three: Putin goes lower

Can you believe what Vladimir Putin said Thursday? It was the anniversary of the Soviet victory in the Battle of Stalingrad—arguably the single greatest scene of hell on earth created by humankind, caused, of course, by Hitler and Nazi Germany and Operation Barbarossa (well, there are three competitors that come to mind, and all happened in the same time and the same place—the Holocaust, the Holodomor, and the horrors of what happened in Leningrad).

Anyway, Putin actually said: “It’s unbelievable but true. We are again being threatened by German Leopard tanks.” Well, um, yes, technically. There is however the small difference that the Soviet Union was invaded and was fighting for its existence (our opinions of that existence are another matter), whereas Putin started the war that will bring the Leopard tanks into action. Also, Germany is sending for 14 tanks, as opposed to the eleventy-jillion German tanks that raced into the USSR in 1941–42 (actually, around 3,000).

Oh—Putin also made some veiled threats about nuclear war. I guess 14 tanks will give him no choice in the matter.

This week’s quiz: Wasn’t he the one who … ? Testing your knowledge of bad and obscure presidents and the events that occurred during their tenures.

You didn’t think I’d finish this quiz without a Trump reference, did you? Feedback to [email protected].

—Michael Tomasky, editor

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