Cool that people making a principled stand to engage with a political party to encourage a change in policy are at fault for the leaders of that political party refusing to change policy, despite being told at multiple levels, for a multitude of reasons, including electorally, why that policy was bad.

Liberals hate democracy. Expecting to engage with a political party to affect change? Ew, just tick the box with a D next to it regardless of what they do or say. Don’t you know trying to engage with a party that doesn’t listen to its base or membership might lead to bad PR and might hurt them in an election? How could you be so inconsiderate? Your role is just to sit down and do nothing and accept whatever they say is true on MSNBC.

So Harris said the same thing as Biden said… while Biden and Harris were complicit in genocide. And this changes anything about the post… How exactly?

Did Harris say no bombs? Did Harris draw red lines? Did Harris to concede any of the demands in the post you are trying to strawman?

Are you lost?

talk is cheap and actions speak louder than words and the biden administration only talked.

The White House routinely makes mutually exclusive statements about its desire to “end the war,” while saying Hamas could “have no role in postwar Gaza.” Yet no mainstream reporter, editor, or opinion writer bothers to reconcile this contradiction. This calculated vagueness is central to why Israel is permitted to continue bombing and killing at will for an indefinite amount of time. How can US officials simultaneously push for an “immediate, lasting ceasefire” while, at the same time, saying the other warring party must be completely defeated before they can support a lasting ceasefire?

This isn’t a call for a ceasefire—it’s a call for, in Netanyahu’s phrasing, “total victory.” The pairing of these two mutually exclusive phrases can only mean one thing: In common usage from the White House and its friendly media, “pushing for a ceasefire” means “continuing to bomb and besiege Gaza while reiterating terms of surrender.”

One linguistic trick that permitted this contradiction to go unchallenged is the sleight-of-hand in what the White House means by “ceasefire.” In some contexts, it means the term as it has been used by the Israelis, namely by Netanyahu: a temporary pause in fighting to facilitate hostage exchanges, followed by a continuation of the military campaign whose goal, ostensibly, is to “eliminate Hamas.” But this is explicitly not an effort to “end the war” as Netanyahu made clear repeatedly throughout the conflict.

The White House’s demand to “end the war,” increasingly popular since the summer of 2024, is just a reiteration of surrender terms. The State Department banned its staff from even using the word “ceasefire” for the first few months of the conflict. But in late February 2024, on the eve of a Michigan primary that was embarrassing then-candidate Biden, the White House, as we noted in The Nation at the time, pivoted to embracing the term. But the Biden administration changed its definition to mean (1) hostage negotiations, but with a firm commitment to continue the “war” once Israeli hostages were freed, and (2) a reiteration of surrender demands, sometimes using both definitions simultaneously.

The concepts of “ceasefire” and “push to the end the war” became, like the “peace process,” a ill-defined, open-ended process for process’s sake that US officials could point to in order to frame themselves not as participants in an brutal, largely one-sided siege and bombing campaign but a third party desperately trying—but perpetually failing—to achieve “peace.”

How the US Media Helped the Biden Administration Distance Itself From the Horrors of Gaza | White House–curated stories of performative outrage and feigned helplessness provided cover for an administration arming death on an industrial scale.

Several attendees at the November meeting — officials who help lead the State Department’s efforts to promote racial equity, religious freedom and other high-minded principles of democracy — said the United States’ international credibility had been severely damaged by Biden’s unstinting support of Israel. If there was ever a time to hold Israel accountable, one ambassador at the meeting told Tom Sullivan, the State Department’s counselor and a senior policy adviser to Blinken, it was now.

But the decision had already been made. Sullivan said the deadline would likely pass without action and Biden would continue sending shipments of bombs uninterrupted, according to two people who were in the meeting.

Those in the room deflated. “Don’t our law, policy and morals demand it?” an attendee told me later, reflecting on the decision to once again capitulate. “What is the rationale of this approach? There is no explanation they can articulate.”

Soon after, when the 30-day deadline was up, Blinken made it official and said that Israelis had begun implementing most of the steps he had laid out in his letter — all thanks to the pressure the U.S. had applied.

That choice was immediately called into question. On Nov. 14, a U.N. committee said that Israel’s methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, was “consistent with genocide.” Amnesty International went further and concluded a genocide was underway. The International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations. (The U.S. and Israeli governments have rejected the genocide determination as well as the warrants.)

A Year of Empty Threats and a “Smokescreen” Policy: How the State Department Let Israel Get Away With Horrors in Gaza

Absolutely wild the apologia for Democrats doing genocide you guys will do to avoid holding Democratic politicians and campaigners to account for their own decisions on policy and how they campaign.

That is what the right wants you to do. Find anyone to blame but them.

There was a huge propaganda campaign started specifically to get the centrists and undecideds to stay home.

Every election is going to be a repeat of this. Facebook, TV, YouTube, anyone who can push content is going to forever say both sides are bad. And people will listen to them no matter how educated they are because propaganda works.

Watch for it because they’ll probably do it again: A conflict that America is only peripherally responsible for and cannot stop, being pushed as the number one issue in the next elections.

The people who say Kamala ignored their issue? You vote down ticket for democrats and push those people to support your issue. This in turn pressures the president to support your issue.

The democrats definitely will not help. They’ll produce 6 unlikeable candidates and say, “well… These are the only people who could possibly be our president. Also the primary is pointless because of superdelegates and split voting so we’ll just go ahead and pick this one before 50% of the nation has even voted.”

Shit… Sorry, I can’t stay on topic because I’m impossibly cynical at this point. I’m still voting democrat because I refuse to sit out or actively support fascism, but I’m heartbroken over the situation we’re in.