So, the other day I’m doomscrolling the news from Gaza, and I stumbled over this 8 year-old Truthout article that somebody dug up and tweeted. The callousness of Washington foreign-policy think tanks — and the Israeli general public — is perversely spectacular:

Israeli hardliners joke about the periodic need to decimate each new generation of Palestinian militants as “mowing the grass,” a process underway again in new bombardments of Gaza. This ugly metaphor has also penetrated the think-tank world of Official Washington, as ex-CIA analyst Elizabeth Murray learned.

In early 2010, one of Washington DC’s most prestigious think tanks was holding a seminar on the Middle East which included a discussion of Israel’s December 2008-January 2009 assault on Gaza which killed about 1,300 Palestinians. When the death toll was mentioned, one expert on the panel smiled enigmatically and intoned: “It’s unfortunate, but every once in a while you have to mow the lawn.”

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With all the critical issues facing this country – the escalation of police violence; the continued highway robbery of the People by the likes of Amazon; the lack of hurricane relief for Puerto Rico; the lack of clean water in Flint, Michigan; the children dying in cages at the border – the first act of the US Senate this year was to introduce legislation that criminalized involvement with the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement working to end the Israeli occupation and apartheid state in Palestine.

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Welp… I’ve finally nailed it down. Between Ocasio-Cortez waffling on Palestine, Andrew Gillum flip-flopping on Medicare For All, all the ex-CIA types running as Democrats and all the doorknobs screaming “vote Blue, no matter who”, I think I’ve finally figured out what the Blue Wave is going to be: the Democratic Party choking to death on its own vomit.

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A little over a month ago, Democratic Party “rising star” (spit) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted “this is a massacre”, referring to the Israeli slaughter of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza. Needless to say, as soon as the establishment pushed back, she immediately started waffling her ass off and folded faster than Superman on laundry day, saying that she posted that tweet “as an activist” and not a Congressmember. However, now that she’s a member of Congress, she’s apparently willing to “learn and evolve” — which, as someone who grew up in Washington DC, I understand to mean “flip-flop”, or “do an Obama” as we say these days.

Granted, the focus of her activism was on economic issues, but still — if you’re going to run for Congress, you also need to keep up on lots of other issues as well, such as the 70 years of brutal occupation of Palestine and the Gaza Strip by Israel, and the ongoing mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza.

What especially galled the hell out of me is that initially, Ocasio belted out the straight, raw truth — but when the pushback hit, her first instinct was to backpedal rather than show some backbone and stand her ground in solidarity with the people of Gaza against Israeli barbarity. All the walking back, backpedaling and explaining she can possibly do now will do her no good because, as the saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

At least we found out early.

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