Dear Weekend Jolter,
This week brought a shrill new round of media alarm bells alerting American democracy to the influence of Jewish money — sorry, that of “pro-Israel interests” — in our elections after another AIPAC-backed candidate toppled another member of the progressive “Squad.”
There are two ways to view Cori Bush’s primary defeat to prosecutor Wesley Bell in Missouri. One is to accept that AIPAC is an all-powerful force that can swing elections any way it chooses if it invests heavily enough — to believe that the money itself defeated Cori Bush. The other is to acknowledge that, yes, the millions help, but the fallen incumbent bears most of the blame for having rendered herself aloof and unelectable.
The evidence, consisting of Bush’s own record and remarks, overwhelmingly supports the second.
As NR’s editorial recounts, the congresswoman has been committed to radical causes and exhibitionism since before she assumed office. Jeff Blehar notes how dealing with constituents, in time, took a back seat to raising her Washington profile. More recently, her hard-line pronouncements on the Gaza war helped to further alienate her from parts of her party and district. Bush sought to portray the criticism she faced as misplaced anger over her call for a Mideast cease-fire. But her hostility toward Israel, and permissiveness toward Hamas, went well beyond that. Let’s review:
• In the immediate aftermath of October 7, Bush called on Israel not to respond militarily to that historic slaughter of its citizens.
• That same month, she accused Israel of waging an “ethnic cleansing campaign.” Bell entered the race shortly afterward, citing her stance on Israel and other issues.
• Bush was one of ten members of Congress to oppose a resolution supporting Israel after the attacks, and one of two Democrats to oppose a resolution barring October 7 perpetrators and participants from entering the U.S.
• And in the run-up to this week’s primary, Bush declined to call Hamas “terrorists,” instead likening them to American protesters against police violence. “We were called terrorists during Ferguson,” she said. “Have they hurt people? Absolutely. Has the Israeli military hurt people? Absolutely.”
The rest of her comments to the New York Times evinced either genuine or contrived ignorance about an organization that makes no attempt to hide its true nature.
“Would they qualify to me as a terrorist organization? Yes. But do I know that? Absolutely not,” Ms. Bush said. “I have no communication with them. All I know is that we were considered terrorists, we were considered Black identity extremists and all we were doing was trying to get peace. I’m not trying to compare us, but that taught me to be careful about labeling if I don’t know.”
Emphasizing the shared struggle of one’s constituents and Hamas is a losing message, in almost any district. Yet it was a consistent theme for Representative Bush, as NR’s editorial notes: “All this and more catalyzed the primary challenge that ended up convincing enough of her constituents to give her the boot.”
The congresswoman, predictably, is among those who accuse AIPAC of trying to “buy” the seat and “trick” voters. Her concession speech, if you could call it that, included not-at-all-veiled warnings to those who had crossed her. “AIPAC, I’m coming to tear your kingdom down,” she bellowed. Noah Rothman writes,
It cannot be that Bell was willed into this race as a result of sincere grassroots enthusiasm for challenging Bush. It must be that an exotic group of outsiders deployed ill-gotten gains in a mesmeric campaign of subterfuge.
That false narrative is the same one advanced to try to avert and later explain fellow Squadster Jamaal Bowman’s primary loss in New York in June. But as our Horse Race newsletter noted at the time, Bowman spent that race catering to a sliver of his district while antagonizing the part that’s home to a large Jewish population, which then gravitated to his primary rival who offered more mainstream views on Israel and more. As Jeff catalogued, Bowman had denied Hamas atrocities, complained that Jews in his district lived in close proximity to one another, and went on a profanity-laced tirade against AIPAC that didn’t exactly telegraph “stable genius” to your median voter. “Jamaal Bowman was destroyed . . . not because of outside Jewish money but rather because he angered his own voters, many of whom are Jewish,” Jeff wrote way back when.
Jamaal Bowman defeated Jamaal Bowman. Cori Bush defeated Cori Bush. And voters have not actually been hypnotized by the Israel lobby.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
On the veep pick: With Walz Pick, Kamala Harris Leans In — to the Left
On the controversy over his service — and what the record shows: Tim Walz’s Military Service Deserves Scrutiny
On the plea-deal breakdown: The 9/11 Terrorists Should Have Been Brought to Justice Long Ago
On the crash: Market Crash Shouldn’t Create Policy Panic
ARTICLES
Dan McLaughlin: Tim Walz Made It Legal to Coerce Women into Abortions
Ryan Mills: When the Twin Cities Burned, Tim Walz Dithered
Audrey Fahlberg: Kamala Harris Introduces Running Mate Tim Walz as Middle American Everyman at Ticket’s First Rally
Dominic Pino: How Tim Walz Spent Your Money
Noah Rothman: Kamala Harris’s First Big Mistake
Noah Rothman: Trump’s Attacks on Brian Kemp Can Only Hurt Republicans
Rich Lowry: The Teleprompter Campaign
Philip Klein: The Coddling of Kamala Is Taking Left-Wing Bias to a New Stratosphere
Brittany Bernstein: Trump Agrees to September Debate with Harris, Challenges Rival to Two More
Neil Gorsuch & Janie Nitze: How Covid-19 Restrictions Created Winners and Losers
Zach Kessel: ChatGPT Is a Standard-Issue Left-Winger
Zach Kessel: Jamie Raskin Calls Socialist Venezuelan Dictator Maduro ‘Right-Wing,’ Earns Ridicule
Jeffrey Blehar: RFK Jr.’s Bear-Skinner Blues
Michael Mukasey: An Undeserved Reprieve for Peter Strzok and Lisa Page
Haley Strack: Abortions in the U.S. Have Increased Since Roe v. Wade Was Overturned
Haley Strack: Anti-Israel Radicals Vandalize AIPAC Headquarters in Washington
Wilfred Reilly: The Rise of the Completely Wrong ‘Expert’
James Rosen: Watergate Is the Scandal That Never Ends
CAPITAL MATTERS
John R. Lott Jr. fact-checks Pete Buttigieg: The Truth about the Crime Explosion
Terry Virts explains what’s at stake in Ukraine, in terms of what’s in the ground: Russia’s Great Energy Heist
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Too much gore makes for a shallow director’s cut, writes Armond White: Zack Snyder’s Head-Bashing Finale
Brian Allen, on some rough news at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia: Art Schools Get Dinged by the School of Hard Knocks
WE’VE GOT A FEVER AND THE ONLY PRESCRIPTION IS MORE EXCERPTS
There’s plenty to peruse on the site from this week’s coverage on Kamala Harris’s Tim Walz pick. If you’re catching up, I’d recommend starting with Ryan Mills’s piece on the Minnesota governor’s handling of the 2020 riots:
It was 6:29 p.m. on the last Wednesday in May 2020, when Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey phoned Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Riots had erupted the day before over the police killing of George Floyd, and the city was overwhelmed.
Frey pleaded with Walz to call in the National Guard.
Less than three hours later, the city made a written request to Walz’s office for 600 guardsmen to help quell the chaos that was engulfing the Twin Cities.
Rioters were burning buildings. They were shooting at police officers and attacking them with Molotov cocktails, fireworks, bricks, and bottles filled with cement. At least three people died during the riots.
Faced with one of the most serious public emergencies in Minnesota history, Walz froze.
“He did not say yes,” Frey said of his request to Walz. “He said he would consider it.”
The far-left governor did not agree to call in the Guard until late the next day, according to a blistering postmortem, the Review of Lawlessness and Government Responses to Minnesota’s 2020 Riots, released in October 2020 by the Minnesota senate.
Instead of sending in the 600 guardsmen that Minneapolis had requested, Walz sent in only 100 late that Thursday. The Guard wasn’t fully mobilized until Saturday, four days after the first building burned, according to the senate review.
Four years after those riots caused over $500 million in property damage in Minnesota, Kamala Harris on Tuesday selected the 60-year-old Walz to be her running mate in a November faceoff with former president Donald Trump. For many, the 2020 riots, which began in Minnesota but expanded across much of the country, was their first exposure to Walz, a former teacher and congressman, who apparently projects Midwest dad vibes.
By most accounts, it was not a good first impression.
For days, Walz expected the riots to die down organically, a mistake he eventually owned up to. “I will take responsibility for underestimating the wanton destruction and the sheer size of this crowd,” a frustrated Walz acknowledged days after the rioting began.
He falsely suggested at one point that the overwhelming majority of the violence, as much as 80 percent, was being committed by outsiders — anarchists, white supremacists, even drug cartels — who’d descended on the city to sew chaos. It wasn’t true.
Rich Lowry notices that the Democrats’ 2020 basement campaign has simply been updated:
Kamala Harris isn’t in the cellar of the Naval Observatory campaigning via Zoom calls à la Joe Biden in 2020.
No, she’s speaking to adoring crowds fired up by pop stars. She’s identifying herself with powerful (if somewhat esoteric) cultural trends. She’s clapping back against Donald Trump with panache.
Indeed, in one of the great political transformations of our time, she’s gone from a sub-par vice president to the second coming of Barack Obama in the space of about two weeks.
Except Obama was a genuine political talent who was glib enough to handle almost anything. He wasn’t an intellectual but was a writer with intellectual interests — in another life, he could have been a staffer at the New Yorker instead of president of the United States (would that it had been so).
The people most aware that Kamala isn’t truly a new version of Obama are the people around her, who clearly fear putting her in any setting where she isn’t reading from a script.
Biden’s basement campaign in 2020 kept him from having to go out and build a crowd, but he did interviews.
Kamala’s teleprompter campaign in 2024 is meant to limit her exposure to keep her from inadvertently bursting the media bubble that’s been created around her.
In that, her campaign may resemble the pre-debate Biden approach this year more than his limited stumping in 2020.
Let us pause to reflect on RFK Jr.’s dead-bear video, perhaps the craziest campaign-season video to emerge from a candidate since maybe this one. Jeff Blehar walks us through the grizzly details:
How in God’s name did a dead black bear cub — which the subsequent autopsy showed had been hit by a car — find its way to Central Park in downtown Manhattan? Yes, bears can be found throughout upstate New York, but it’s hard to imagine a lone bear cub crossing not only Westchester County but also the Bronx in order to meet an unlikely end in the leafy center of Manhattan Island. . . .
So how on earth did it get there? And why was it framed to look as though the bear cub had been hit by a bike rather than a car? Can you even kill a bear cub by hitting it with a bicycle? One imagines you’re more likely to destroy your bicycle instead — right before mama bear investigates, finds you stranded without functioning wheels, and nature takes its grim and just revenge on you for being a cyclist.
We can all share a sense of relief that one of America’s great unsolved mysteries has now been cracked: It was Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of all people, who put that dead bear there. Ten years ago. Buckle up and settle in for a weird tale, folks — a true New York story — because we’re going to take our time savoring the wonderful insanity of this one. (And if you don’t want to read it from me then you can always listen to RFK Jr. tell the story himself to Roseanne Barr, in an attempt to get ahead of a New Yorker piece on the matter.) . . .
We begin, as all stories that end with a bear corpse in midtown Manhattan must, with falconry. Apparently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — son of the slain New York senator and U.S. attorney general, currently running as an independent for president — avidly enjoys falconry and likes to partake of the activity with friends. It’s definitely the sort of upper-class pursuit I never got a merit badge in back during my Webelos days, but I suppose that if you come from Kennedy money, it beats depositing campaign staffers underwater as a hobby.
So he was on his way to Goshen, a village about 60 miles northwest of Manhattan, to meet his friends and get a-hawking, when the woman in front of him, driving a van, struck and killed a little bear cub (six months old, 44 lbs.). Some people might have driven on from such a sad scene without stopping. But not our man Bobby, who apparently is not one to ever let good food go to waste. No, Kennedy instead pulled over to take a look at the animal. He determined that this wasn’t just any old run-of-the-mill road-killed bear cub: This was a fine specimen of freshly road-killed bear cub. Kennedy says now that his first thought was to take it, skin it, and eat it, and who can argue with a man who displayed such alarmingly fluent knowledge of New York’s roadkill laws in his little chat with Roseanne: “You can do that in New York State, you can get a bear tag, for a roadkill bear.” (News you can use the next time you happen to be vacationing upstate.)
So there is Kennedy, his backseat literally loaded for bear, but with a day of falconing still ahead. Yes, the sport is so darn enticing that RFK was content to let the bear corpse stew in his car for the next several hours. And he was enjoying himself so much that he just didn’t know how to stop falconing. By his own account, on the way back to the city he wanted to make a detour to his home in Westchester County to store his fresh haul, but “we went late, we were catching a lot of game and the people really loved it, so we stayed late.”
Even so, why didn’t he stop off? Because, as much as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. likes his roadkill meat, he’s not going to trade it for dinner plans at Peter Luger in Brooklyn, one of New York City’s most expensive and insufferably overrated steak houses. So into the city he drove, leaving his bear carcass in the car as he went to enjoy meat of more reputable pedigree. And wouldn’t you know it? A man as sociable as RFK also tends to be a busy man as well, so even as he let the delightful dinner with friends run late, he also realized that, whoopsy doodle, he also had a plane to catch that night. (Don’t you just hate it when you let something like that slip your mind until the last second?)
It was at this point when RFK decided that maybe he ought to do something about the rotting bear cub stowed in his vehicle.
Shout-Outs
Susan Crabtree, at RealClearPolitics: Former Secret Service Chief Wanted To Destroy Cocaine Evidence
Mary Margaret Olohan, at the Daily Signal: Kamala Harris Sent Agents to Raid Pro-Life Journalist’s Home After She Met With Planned Parenthood, Emails Show
Matthew Petti, at Reason: Guernica’s Recovery From Ruin
CODA
As a courtesy, I typically don’t use this space for bone-crushing metal. But, because French band Gojira thrillingly played — I would argue headlined — the Olympics Opening Ceremony, it’s an excuse to make an exception. The group is enjoying a well-deserved boost in listeners, perhaps future fans, and that afore-linked song is the one that originally hooked me.
If that’s not your cup of tea, how about a palate cleanser? Maybe the Police. Maybe Lesley Gore.
But if that is your cup of tea, well, there are seven studio albums where that came from.
Have a great weekend.